medicine
oracknows | November 13, 2016John Weeks has long been an activist for alternative medicine—excuse me, “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) or, as it’s more commonly referred to these days, “integrative medicine.” Despite his having zero background in scientific research or the design and execution of experiments and clinical trials, for some bizarre reason in May he was appointed editor of the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine (JACM). It didn’t take him long at all to use his new post to launch a nasty broadside against CAM critics in general (such as yours truly) and those who criticized a…
oracknows | November 11, 2016If you’re a skeptic dedicated to promoting science and reason, these are scary times. My country, the United States of America, just unexpectedly elected a racist, misogynistic, conspiracy-mongering, scientific ignoramus (who, by the way, is rabidly antivaccine) as its next President thanks to the political relic known as the Electoral College. In actuality, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by close to 350,000 votes at the last tally I checked this morning, but now, as in 2000, thanks to the Electoral College, the candidate with the most popular votes is not President-Elect. Hillary…
oracknows | November 10, 2016Well, I’m back.
Yes, late last night, I re-entered returned home from vacation in Mexico before our new President-Elect has a chance to build his wall. I was so exhausted that I had no time to write anything and remain so. At least I wasn’t stupid enough to go back to work today and instead took the whole week off. Like most of you, I’m still processing he cluster—oh, wait, no major profanity here—that was the US election, whose results definitely put a damper on the trip home.
In particular, I fear for what the new administration will do to science in this country, and might write about that…
oracknows | November 9, 2016Yesterday, I wrote about alternative medicine clinics in Germany that offer a combination of alternative cancer cures plus experimental therapeutics administered improperly outside the auspices of a clinical trial. In particular, I discussed two cases. The first was British actress Leah Bracknell, who is raising money to go to one of these alternative cancer clinics to treat her stage IV lung cancer. the second was a British woman named Pauline Gahan, who was diagnosed with metastatic stomach cancer and has thus far spent £300,000 for a combination of vitamin infusions, “detox,” and Keytruda…
oracknows | November 8, 2016A couple of months ago, I discussed patient deaths at an alternative medicine clinic in Europe, where a naturopath named Klaus Ross had been administering an experimental cancer drug (3-bromopyruvate, or 3-BP) to patients outside the auspices of a clinical trial. 3-BP is a drug that targets the Warburg effect, a characteristic of cancer cells first reported in the 1920s by Otto Warburg in which the cancer cell changes its metabolism to shut off oxidative phosphorylation (the part of glucose metabolism requiring oxygen that produces the most energy) to rely almost exclusively on glycolysis and…
oracknows | November 6, 2016Orac is currently hiding from the Federation in an undisclosed location (somewhere warm and out of the country, the better to avoid election news after having cast an absentee ballot), where he is charging his Tarial cells, the better to return fully recharged and ready to dive back into the massive piles of woo awaiting him when he returns. Since it’s only a brief respite, I had been planning on either reposting material from Orac’s other known hideout on the web, the better not to let this blog lie fallow and lack for Insolence, Respectful and not-so-Respectful, as indicated depending upon…
oracknows | November 4, 2016That I’m not a fan of the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH, formerly known as the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, or NCCAM) should come as no surprise to anyone. Basically, from its very inception as the Office of Alternative Medicine in the early 1990s to its growth to large center with a yearly budget of $120+ million, NCCIH has served one purpose: The promotion and attempted legitimization of quackery and magical thinking in medicine, the better to “integrate” pseudoscientific medicine with science-based medicine. Certainly, the…
oracknows | November 3, 2016Way, way back in the day, before I took an interest in pseudoscientific medical claims, I knew who Deepak Chopra was. Back then, though, like most doctors, I didn’t pay much attention to him and didn’t know much about him other than that he was some sort of alternative medicine guru, a physician who had embraced Ayurvedic medicine and blathered about “quantum” consciousness. It didn’t take long once I embraced skepticism to run face-first into the utter woo that s Deepak Chopra’s message, in part thanks to other skeptical bloggers introducing me to his woo. Indeed, back in the early days of…
oracknows | November 1, 2016As I write this, the 2016 Election is lurching painfully to its conclusion, with about a week to go. In my entire adult life, dating back to when I first reached the age where I started paying attention to politics in the late 1970s, I cannot remember a more bizarre or painful election, nor can I remember an election in which one possible outcome actually terrifies me. I’m referring to the possibility of Donald Trump becoming our next President. I’ve made no secret of my contempt for his xenophobia, his blatant sexism and misogyny, his change from using racist dog whistles to racist bullhorns…
oracknows | October 31, 2016As hard as it is to believe, it’s been nearly two years since the infamous Disneyland measles outbreak, which occurred after the holidays in 2014. It was an outbreak whose spread was facilitated by unvaccinated children and that had far-reaching implications. For one thing, in its wake, California passed SB 277, a law eliminating nonmedical exemptions to school vaccine mandates. Opposition to the bill was fierce, and opposition to the law remains fierce, among motley coalition of antivaccine nuts, the vaccine averse, and conservative-leaning anti-government types, with rhetoric routinely…
oracknows | October 31, 2016It’s time to get this video clip out again:
Yes, just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in. But who are “they”? I’m referring to the cult that thinks that bleach enemas (and also ingested bleach) will cure children of autism. I was reminded of that cult when ABC News 20/20 aired a special on Miracle Mineral Solution (MMS), the aforementioned bleach miracle cure. It’s the sort of story that we need to see more of, the result of what was reported to be a year-long investigation of Rev. Jim Humble and his church, the inventor and primary promoter of MMS as a cure for autism and just…
oracknows | October 28, 2016Remember the scene in The Blues Brothers where Jake and Elwood are sitting in the Bluesmobile and come across a Nazi rally taking place on a bridge? Jake says with utter disgust, “I hate Illinois Nazis,” before driving over the bridge, forcing the Nazis to flee and jump into the river below. That’s basically the way I feel towards Michigan antivaccine activists. What’s even worse, though, is when out-of-state antivaccine agitators show up to give aid and comfort to our own homegrown antivaccinationists, which is what happened this week. I'd never actually drive a car at a bunch of them to…
oracknows | October 26, 2016Although I did not coin it, I frequently use the term “quackademic medicine” because, unfortunately, there’s a lot of quackademic medicine around. Although regular readers know what the term means, i always feel obligated to briefly explain what quackademic medicine is, for the benefit of any newbie who might happen upon this blog. Basically, it is a term used to describe an increasingly common and alarming phenomenon, the infiltration of rank quackery and pseudoscience into medical academia. You might think it impossible or unbelievable, but it’s anything but. Beginning around a quarter of a…
oracknows | October 25, 2016Here we go again.
Naturopaths crave legitimacy for their brand of pseudoscientific medicine. Basically, they delude themselves into thinking that they are real doctors and can function as primary care providers, despite abundant evidence that they cannot. they One (of several) ways they seek to acquire that legitimacy for naturopathy and themselves is through promoting the passage of laws in states licensing them as health care providers, as they have been repeatedly doing (and, fortunately, thus far failing to achieve) in my home state of Michigan and continuing to attempt in Massachusetts…
oracknows | October 23, 2016A little over a month ago, I wrote about how proponents of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), now more frequently called "integrative medicine," go to great lengths to claim nonpharmacological treatments for, well, just about anything as somehow being CAM or "integrative." The example I used was a systematic review article published by several of the bigwigs at that government font of pseudoscience, the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) about CAM approaches for the management of chronic pain. You can read my whole post for yourself if you want the…
oracknows | October 20, 2016There are many myths that undergird antivaccine beliefs, such as the myth that vaccines cause autism, autoimmune diseases, diabetes, sudden infant death syndrome, and basically anything antivaccinationists like to blame on them. Basically, if you believe antivaccinationists, there’s nothing bad thta vaccines can’t do to children. The flip side of this myth is perhaps the central myth of the antivaccine movement, which is that unvaccinated children are somehow so much healthier than vaccinated children and that fewer vaccines equates to better health. This one pops up time after time after…
oracknows | October 19, 2016Eight months ago, I asked the question: Did chiropractic manipulation of her neck cause Katie May’s stroke? Now, it appears, I know the answer, and the answer is yes:
Katie May, a model who posed for Playboy and gained a massive following on Snapchat, suffered a “catastrophic” stroke in early February and later died after being taken off life-support. Now, TMZ reports reports that a visit to the chiropractor left her with an injury that precipitated the stroke.
TMZ obtained May’s death certificate, which says that she suffered a blunt force injury during a “neck manipulation by [a]…
oracknows | October 19, 2016It’s been a while since I wrote about Stanislaw Burzynski, the Polish ex-pat physician who is not an oncologist but treats cancer patients in his Houston clinic with a mixture of a compound he calls “antineoplastons” (ANPs) and “gene-targeted” therapy. The former are really a mixture of various chemicals he isolated from the blood and urine back in the 1970s, including chemicals like phenylacetic acid (PA) and phenylacetyl glutamine (PAG), that he thought to be endogenous cancer suppressors but has never been able to demonstrate that they are, despite having had four decades to do so.…
oracknows | October 18, 2016Back when advocates of “alternative” medicine were busily trying to legitimize their quackery by first renaming it “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), long before CAM “evolved” into “integrative medicine,” they really believed that if their favorite woo were to be studied scientifically it would be shown to be efficacious. Thus was born the Office of Alternative Medicine in the NIH, which later became the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), which more recently became the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH), thus utterly…
oracknows | October 16, 2016I noticed the other day that I haven’t been visiting the merry band of antivaccine activists and bloggers over at their very own wretched hive of scum and quackery, Age of Autism, nearly as much as I used to. I have mentioned them in passing a couple of times recently, but nothing caught my attention sufficiently to be worth applying a bit of the old Insolence, Respectful or not-so-Respectful. Part of that has been intentional, as I no longer like to give them any more attention than I need to. Part of it was unintentional and more because, quite frankly, AoA has been mighty boring lately. I…