Homeopathy
oracknows | November 3, 2014
You know how I sometimes lament that I’ve been writing too much about the hijinx of the antivaccine movement, its crimes against reason, science, and medicine? It’s become a bit of a trope around here at times, to the point where, when I bring it up, I tell myself I shouldn’t be repeating myself so often. Then I do it anyway because, heck, this is blogging and it’s impossible to blog for a decade without repeating one’s self. Besides, if I’m to start navel-gazing here in a blog sense, a successful blog actually needs certain repeating tropes, as long as they’re relatively entertaining or…
oracknows | October 29, 2014
If there is one thing that the ongoing Ebola outbreak in Africa has revealed to the world, it’s the full extent of quackery that is out there and advertised as being able to treat deadly diseases such as Ebola. The deadlier the disease, the more quackery is out there, amplified by the scariness of the disease. And, make no mistake about it, Ebola is scary. No, it’s not scary here in the U.S., where the odds of the average person catching the disease, particularly if he’s not a health care worker who’s directly cared for a patient with Ebola, is vanishingly tiny. If you happen to live in…
oracknows | October 21, 2014
Supporters of science-based medicine and keeping pseudoscience out of medicine have a few years to prepare for an onslaught of crappy studies “proving” the value of “integrative” oncology. No doubt at this point you’re wondering just what the heck Orac is talking about. I will tell you. It involves an institution we’ve encountered before and a naturopath we’ve met before, specifically the Ottawa Integrative Cancer Centre and Dugald Seely, ND (translation: Not a Doctor), FABNO (translation: Not an Oncologist). Somehow, Dugald Seely and his brother Andrew have somehow scored some sweet,…
oracknows | October 10, 2014Well, Naturopathic Medicine Week 2014 (or, as I like to refer to it, Quackery Week) is fast drawing to a close; so I figured I’d end it with one last post. Since several of you liked my post a couple of days ago Sh*t naturopaths say and agreed with me when I suggested at the end that I ought to make this a recurring feature on the old blog here. So, how better to finish off Naturopathic Medicine Week 2014 than with another installment of Sh*t naturopaths say. In fact, I might even have to make it a tag. After all, I’m sure naturopaths will continue to provide me with quackery to deconstruct,…
oracknows | October 8, 2014
I mentioned yesterday that this week is Naturopathic Medicine Week 2014, or, as I like to call it, Quackery Week. At the time, I wasn’t sure when or if I was going to do another post about the quackery that is naturopathy this week. I was going to play it by ear and see what came up. Then, one of my commenters mentioned this subreddit, Read what naturopaths say to one another. Conclusion: manipulative, poorly trained, and a threat to public health. Now, I’m not a big fan of Reddit, largely because I can’t figure out how to find things easily, and I hate the sheer ugly and user hostile…
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 14, 2014
In a past life, before I became so specialized, I was a general surgeon. Like all surgical oncologists and even breast surgeons, before I became a specialist, I had to do a general surgery residency. In addition to the usual cancer problems a general surgeon faces, the two most common being breast and colon cancer, I learned to deal with the most common non-cancer problems that general surgeons deal with, such as gallbladder problems, hernias, bowel obstructions, and the like. Unfortunately, those problems include anorectal problems (not my favorite!) including hemorrhoids.
Basically,…
oracknows | August 20, 2014
I’ll partially apologize here. The reason is that I said I’d be back to business dishing out the Insolence as usual, be it in the form of my usual 2,000 word gems, or slightly shorter, or a lot longer. However, fate intervened. First, there were new developments in the Frank Arguello threat machine. Go back to this post for updates. More importantly, a really cool thing finally happened. Steve Novella and a person regular readers of this blog know and love managed to do something that we need to do more of: Get the viewpoint of science-based medicine published in high impact biomedical…
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…
oracknows | August 1, 2014
Homeopathy is quackery. There, I’ve fulfilled my normal requirement to start out all posts that I write having to do with homeopathy with a simple, declarative, and, most of all, true statement about what homeopathy is. I also like to mention briefly homeopathy’s two major “laws.” The first is the Law of Similars, a totally pseudoscientific “law” without basis in science that proclaims that the way to treat a symptom is to use a substance that causes that symptom in healthy people. The second “law,” of course, is the Law of Infinitesimals, which further states that the more you dilute a…
oracknows | July 14, 2014After having returned from TAM, I was pumped up by how much interest was shown in the case of Stanislaw Burzynski. More importantly, I was heartened to learn while I was there that the Texas Medical Board had submitted an amended complaint against him containing 202 pages worth of charges. Sure, the descriptions of the violations Burzynski committed in the care of seven patients cited got a bit repetitive, but that’s Burzynski. His MO has been consistent for 37 years, the only change being that in 1997 he decided to use and abuse the clinical trial process as a means to an end, that end being…
oracknows | July 3, 2014This is a post about homeopathic quackery. But I repeat myself.
Those of you who’ve been readers here for a while have no doubt encountered Dana Ullman. He’s been popping up from time to time as a topic of this blog for many years now, almost to the very beginning, when he began spewing the most unbelievably silly and pseudoscientific defenses of homeopathy. Darwin had his bulldog in the form of a man named Thomas Huxley. Unfortunately, Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy, has his very own pit bull 200 years later in the form of Dana Ullman. That is not a compliment, nor is it meant…
oracknows | June 27, 2014Yesterday’s post was just too depressing to contemplate and even more depressing to write. It was a total downer after seen the awesomeness that was John Oliver gloriously skewering America’s Quack Dr. Mehmet Oz. That’s why I think it would be good to finish this week on an amusing note. Well, it would be amusing if it weren’t for my knowledge that the woman who wrote the post I’m about to “analyze” has an autistic child and is subjecting that child to quackery. Actually, that’s true of pretty much every woman who blogs at the wretched hive of scum and autism biomed quackery where this post…
oracknows | June 20, 2014
It's been three days since America's quack, Dr. Mehmet Oz, had his posterior handed to him by a wily old prosecutor who is now a Senator, Claire McCaskill. The beauty of it is that, not only was Dr. Oz called, in essence, a liar to his face and not only was he called out for his irresponsible and hypercaffeinated promotion of various diet scams on his show, which is seen by millions every day, but he didn't see it coming, and his public spanking as he testified in front of Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Insurance, chaired by Sen. McCaskill, made instant news, with…
oracknows | June 18, 2014One of the benefits of blogging is that it's broadened my horizons. Although the vast majority of what I write about happens in my very own country, the United States, nonetheless I frequently learn about things happening in many other countries, some that I wouldn't necessarily pay a lot of attention to. But when something happens in a country, not matter how far away, that interests me, sometimes it'll interest me enough to write about it. This is particularly true when it's a story about how other countries deal with the pseudoscientific bunch of quackery that comprise most of the…
oracknows | May 8, 2014One of the themes of this blog since the very beginning of this blog is the threat to scientific medicine represented by a phenomenon that I like to call quackademic medicine. Although I did not coin the term, I frequently use the term and have done my best to popularize it among skeptics to describe the infiltration of pseudoscience into academic medicine, be it in the form of fellowships, research and clinical trials studying prescientific magic like homeopathy or "energy medicine," or even the offering of such services under the auspices of an academic medical center, thus putting the…
oracknows | May 5, 2014Dr. David L. Katz is apparently unhappy with me. You remember Dr. Katz, don't you? If you don't, I'll remind you momentarily. If you do, you won't be surprised. Let me explain a bit first how Dr. Katz recently became aware of me again.
A couple of weeks ago, I posted a short (for me) piece about something that disturbed both Steve Novella and myself, namely An herbal medicine clinic at the Cleveland Clinic: Quackademia triumphant Steve had blogged about it as well a couple of days earlier. To my surprise, Maithri Vengala over at The Healthcare Blog noticed the blog post and asked me if I…
oracknows | April 23, 2014I don't recall if I've ever mentioned my connection with the Cleveland Clinic Foundation (CCF). I probably have, but just don't remember it. Longtime readers might recall that I did my general surgery training at Case Western Reserve University at University Hospitals of Cleveland. Indeed, I did my PhD there as well in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics. Up the road less than a mile from UH is the Cleveland Clinic. As it turns out, during my stint in Physiology and Biophysics at CWRU, I happened to do a research rotation in a lab at the CCF, which lasted a few months. OK, so it's not…
oracknows | April 11, 2014When I'm trying to demonstrate the utter implausibility and mystical pseudoscience behind so much of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), which is now more commonly referred to (by its advocates, at least) as "integrative medicine," I like to point to two examples in particular of modalities that are so utterly ridiculous in concept that anyone can understand what I'm talking about. For example, as much as I might deconstruct the nonsense that is acupuncture, discussing how "meridians" don't exist, the "life force" known as qi whose flow acupuncture needles are claimed to redirect…
oracknows | April 3, 2014I appear to have fallen into one of my ruts again. Or maybe it's not a rut. I just feel as though I've been doing too many posts on the antivaccine movement, to the point where I wonder if I'm starting to fall into a rut. In actuality, it doesn't really matter. If I feel as though I'm getting tired of a topic, then that's enough. It's just that the antivaccine movement, even as bottomless a font of stupidity, misinformation, pseudoscience, and quackery as it is, sometimes goes on a tear. When it does that, I have a hard time restraining myself from trying to blog about all of it, as…