Ebola virus disease
oracknows | September 18, 2014
This one will be much shorter than usual, mainly because I was out late last night for a dinner function at which I was on a panel of breast cancer experts. I must admit, even after having been an attending surgeon for 15 years, it never ceases to make me feel a bit weird to be presented as a “breast cancer expert”—or an expert at anything, for that matter. It’s rather like how I sometimes feel a bit weird that skeptic groups still invite me to give talks. Ten years ago, I sucked at public speaking. Now I’m apparently good enough that people want to hear me. Go figure.
In any event, I hate…
oracknows | September 5, 2014
Before I got sidetracked with a certain topic that’s consumed the blog, another topic that had popped up (albeit nowhere near as frequently) was the latest Ebola virus disease outbreak in Africa, the largest in history thus far. Indeed, as horrific as this outbreak is and as terrible a disease as Ebola is, with close to a 60% mortality even with the best treatment, it did produce one amusing bit of clownishness, and that’s that it revealed that there really is something too quacky even for Mike Adams of NaturalNews.com to tolerate.
I’m referring to an incident four weeks ago where a truly…
oracknows | August 18, 2014
I hadn’t expected to write about this topic again so soon, but then I didn’t expect a major newspaper to have written such a boneheaded editorial about it. In a way, I hate to write this post, because USA TODAY did great things once. There, Liz Szabo wrote the single best science-based report on cancer quack Stanislaw Burzynski. Still, even usually reliable news outlets make mistakes, and in this case the editorial board of USA TODAY made a huge one when it published an editorial entitled FDA vs. right to try: Our view. Seriously, if there’s a case to be made for right-to-try laws, this…
oracknows | August 11, 2014
Over the last decade that I’ve been at this blogging thing, I’ve come across some incredibly irresponsible quackery, but what I saw about a week and a half ago took the cake. I’m referring to practitioners of The One Quackery To Rule Them All, homeopathy, demonstrating a sense delusion that was as massive as the concentration of a 30C homeopathic dilution is small when they proposed that homeopathy could be used ot treat Ebola virus disease. There are not enough facepalms face palmy enough to express the disgust at the utter ridiculousness and irresponsibility of even suggesting that magic…