Friday Woo
oracknows | May 25, 2007One of the banes of a physician's existence is not so much keeping up with changes in how medicine is practiced, studying new treatments, and following the medical literature. After all, that comes with the territory; it's part of the job. Failure to keep up is to become increasingly ineffective and even to risk malpractice lawsuits. No, what's a major bane is to document that you've kept up. In other words, it's to get enough continuing medical education (CME) credits to be able to renew your medical license. In my state, I have to get 100 CME credits in two years in order to renew my…
oracknows | May 18, 2007I want to apologize to Abel Pharmboy in advance on this one. This is the second time in less than three months that I've invaded his territory to a certain extent in Your Friday Dose of Woo, specifically his The Friday Fermentable feature. Last time around, I couldn't believe it when I encountered some serious farm woo particularly common in wineries known as biodynamics, which involved burying various animal parts (among other things) on the farm in order to promote its life force. Who said that the best woo is found only in medicine?
Certainly not me. At least, not anymore.
This time around…
oracknows | May 11, 2007Remember the SCIO? It was featured in Your Friday Dose of Woo two weeks ago. It's an amazingly woo-ey piece of woo that was just perfect for my little weekly feature.
Unfortunately, not everyone appreciates my having a little fun with it. For example, one of the woomeisters responsible for the SCIO has appeared on my blog to complain and defend Professor William Nelson, the luminary of woo who's had a hand in not one, but two pieces of woo featured in YFDoW. This woomeister, who signed his comments "Dr. D," is displeased and showed up in the comments to tell me so:
ill Nelson hasn't yet won…
oracknows | May 11, 2007I really love Life Technologyâ¢. I really do. Heck, I could spend the next several weeks mining it for topics for Your Friday Dose of Woo. The stuff there's so over-the-top that I find it hard to believe that these guys are serious. I mean, really, look at some of their products, a couple of which I've featured on YFDoW before; specifically the Ultra Advanced Psychotronic Money Magnet Professional Version 1.0⢠(a.k.a. The Ultimate in Financial Abundance Engineering Technologyâ¢) and the Tesla Purple Energy Shieldâ¢, two pieces of such amazingly tasty woo that it's pretty hard to top them.…
oracknows | May 4, 2007Everybody (well, mostly everybody) learns in science and physics class the Three Laws of Thermodynamics:
Energy cannot be created or destroyed, meaning that the increase in the internal energy of a thermodynamic system is equal to the amount of heat energy added to the system minus the work done by the system on the surroundings.
The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium.
As temperature approaches absolute zero, the entropy of a system approaches a constant.
These three laws pretty much describe the…
oracknows | April 27, 2007I've said it once before, but this week's woo compels me to say it again: I happen to love gadgets.
I've been a bit of a technogeek since very early on in my life, with a lot of the things that go along with it, including a major interest in science fiction, awkwardness around the opposite sex, When at their best, gadgets can do things that need to be done and, if well designed, can do them with panache, making drudgery almost fun Then of course, there's the almost Dilbert-like joy males into technogeekery have in one-upping each other, almost like the surgeons I described yesterday one-…
oracknows | April 20, 2007
Pity poor Nikola Tesla.
A sure sign of the most potent woo is when the woo-meister responsible claims to base it on the work of a great scientists, particularly a great scientist who's been dead well over 60 years.
Like Nikola Tesla.
The deader the scientist is and the longer he or she's been dead, the more sure the woo-meister can be that only the few actual scientists who pay attention to woo and bother to refute will have the necessary background knowledge to refute it. Moreover, the longer ago the scientist lived, the less chance of any pesky relatives caring enough to tell the woo-…
oracknows | April 13, 2007
Believe it or not, it's been almost nine months since, almost on a whim, I first started this little indulgence of mine known as Your Friday Dose of Woo, with some truly fine woo known as quantum homeopathy. Before you know it, we'll be celebrating a full year of woo. (Yes, I know that woo is eternal, and my little project represents a mere grain of sand on all the beaches of, for instance, California. If I'm going to be overwhelmed with woo and unreason, though, I might as well have a few laughs along the way.)
One thing I've noticed over these months is that there are definitely recurring…
oracknows | April 6, 2007This one didn't seem big enough to deserve the full Your Friday Dose of Woo treatment, but I certainly don't want to let this additional bit of religious woo go by unnoticed:
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA - March 27, 2007. Regardless of creed, ethnicity, age or culture, throughout history people have steadfastly believed in the power of prayer. Now a team of scientists and over a million people around the world will put this belief to the test. From May 15th through May 29th the "Breakthrough Celebration: Compassion to Action" will be the largest interfaith global meditation and prayer for peace…
oracknows | April 6, 2007In perusing my Folder of Woo, which is becoming every more crammed with potential targets begging for the tender mercies of Orac in their very own Your Friday Dose of Woo installments, I was wondering which one to pick. After all, it's an embarrassment of riches (if you can call it "riches") in there, with so much woo and so little time. I needed something different after last week's installment, which, sadly, appeared to have grossed some people out. I don't know why it might have grossed more people out than previous posts on colon cleanses and liver flushes, but for some reason it did. But…
oracknows | March 30, 2007It is with some trepidation that I approach the latest target of Your Friday Dose of Woo.
No, it's not because the woo is so potent that it has actually struck the fear of You-Know-Who in me (I leave it up to readers to determine whether I was referring to God or Valdemort), although it is indeed potent woo. Nor is it that the woo is boring woo (there's a reason why "power of prayer" kind of woo usually doesn't make it into YFDoW unless there's a really entertaining angle to be targeted). No, it's because this particular woo seems to combine genetics with systems biology (I kid you not),…
oracknows | March 23, 2007It's been another eventful week on the ol' blog, staring out with a post on despereate cancer patients self-experimenting with dichloroacetate, continuing on to do another fisking of the anti-evolution neurosurgeon and discussing real individualization of treatments, provided a little basic cancer biology, and ended up with some of the first straight medblogging that I've done in a long time. And then things finished up with the depressing news that Elizabeth Edwards' breast cancer has recurred in her rib and possibly in her lung. Things have somehow gotten a bit too serious around here, even…
oracknows | March 16, 2007Ah, yes, Washington, DC.
That's where I am right now, deep in the belly of the government beast, attending the meeting of The Society of Surgical Oncology. It's usually a great meeting, except for the distressing tendency of surgeons here to act, well, too much like surgeons. For example, consider when the very first session today, which happened to be about my area of interest breast cancer, started. Was it 8 AM? No. 7 AM? No.
It was 6 AM.
I kid you not. 6 AM in the freakin' morning! The week after the switchover to Daylight Savings Time, yet! There was a time when I used to actually get up…
oracknows | March 9, 2007It's Friday, which means that it's time once again to delve deeply into the world of woo, all for your edification and (I hope) education. Even though I started out with less motivation than usual for tending to the blog, it actually turned out to be yet another rather eventful and surprisingly productive week on the old blog, with topics ranging from plumbing the depths of antivaccination lunacy, to doing some nice straight science blogging about the anticancer drug dichloroacetate (which actually gave me some ideas for my research), to discussing the "individualization" of treatments in…
oracknows | March 2, 2007I didn't get back home until late last night; unfortunately there was no time to do a segment of Your Friday Dose of Woo that was up to my standards. Fortunately, there's something that I've been holding in reserve for just such an occasion that fits right in. Long-timers may remember that, near the very beginning of my blog, I did a post entitled What is an altie? It was basically a Jeff Foxworthy-like listing of "You just might be an altie if..." statements that, I think, had a good point. For those of you not familiar with the term "altie," it was coined about three or four years ago on…
oracknows | February 23, 2007This week's been a lot of doom and gloom here on the ol' blog, hasn't it? I don't know how it happened, but somehow I let blogging about dichloroacetate, the inexpensive small molecule drug that has been widely touted as a "cure for cancer" that "big pharma" (or the FDA, or both, take your pick) is keeping from cancer patients because it's supposedly unpatentable and unprofitable, take over the blog for three whole days. Believe it or not, I really hadn't meant for that to happen. It just sort of took over. Of course, big time Pharma Shill that I supposedly am (with the badge to prove it), no…
oracknows | February 16, 2007Like most people, I like making money. True, it's not the main goal of my life (otherwise I definitely wouldn't be in academics), but, all in all, it's better to be comfortably off than to be poor. And, as I've said before, although I could make more in private practice, I don't do too badly as an academic surgeon. I can afford a decent house, a nice car, computers, and gadgets, and still save for retirement. Of course, key to that is not spending beyond my means, as some at my income level somehow still manage to do, but wouldn't it be nice if you could access forces and powers that would--…
oracknows | February 9, 2007It's my last day in sunny Phoenix, and all I've done thus far is to go to conferences, work on a grant, and do a little blogging, usually late at night because I often have trouble falling asleep in hotel rooms, particularly given that the air conditioning always seems to be such that it's either too cold or too warm. I must be like Goldilocks, at least with respect to hotel heating/cooling systems, because it's always ridiculously hard for me to get it "just right."
In any case, I bet you were probably wondering if I'd pull off this week's Your Friday Dose of Woo. Actually, I wondered myself…
oracknows | February 2, 2007
You know, I really wish I could have made it to The Amazing Meeting this year. It would have been really cool to have a chance to hear in person such skeptical luminaries, such as The Amazing Randi, Penn and Teller (although I do concede that Penn's Libertarianism does occasionally border on credulity for some dubious propositions), and Phil Plait. And who wouldn't want to meet the purveyors of what's become my favorite skeptical podcast, The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, such as Steve Novella and The Skepchick? And, of course, it's been a long time since I've had the opportunity to visit…
oracknows | January 26, 2007
After posting about the Donnie Davies, an alleged "youth minister" in Houston who has garnered a lot of attention throughout the blogosphere for his website in which he provides a hilariously off-base list of "gay bands" to avoid and "safe" bands, I was perusing my Folder of Woo, looking for this week's target, but it was hard. After all, whether Donnie is a big hoax or not, whether his atrocious video saying that "homosexuality is a choice" and that "God hates a fag" is meant to be satire or not, he was going to be hard to top. In fact, I don't think I'll even try. However, Donnie did…