Pseudoscience
oracknows | June 2, 2016One common theme that has been revisited time and time again on this blog since its very founding is the problem of how science and medicine are reported. For example, back when I first started blogging, one thing that used to drive me absolutely bonkers was the tendency of the press to include in any story about vaccines an antivaccine activist to “tell the other side” or for “balance” to the story. So in a story on vaccines, on the one side you would have Paul Offit, a bona fide, legitimate vaccine expert, and on the other side you would have J.B. Handley, Jenny McCarthy, Andrew Wakefield,…
oracknows | June 1, 2016With a bill to license naturopaths (HB 4531) wending its way through the Michigan legislature supported by supplement manufacturers, its current status being in consideration by the full House of Representatives, periodically I feel the need to provide ammunition to the bill’s opponents, because we need to protect the patients in the state of Michigan from the naturopathic quackery that would be unleashed if this bill were to be passed into law.
If there is one area that naturopaths have been invading with a vengeance and even gaining enough seeming legitimacy to propose what they risibly…
oracknows | May 27, 2016To say that I, as a cancer surgeon, am not a fan of Ty Bollinger is a massive understatement. He’s not exactly one of my fans, either, but I view the hatred of a man like Bollinger directed at me as a badge of honor. Indeed, if a man like Bollinger didn’t detest me, I would view my efforts as a failure because I view him as a quack whose desperately deceptive film series The Truth About Cancer has been correctly dubbed untruthful about cancer by Harriet Hall and whose message has led cancer patients into rejecting conventional medicine in favor of treating deadly cancers with alternative…
oracknows | May 25, 2016One of the more annoying health crazes going around right now is the gluten-free diet. While it’s a boon to the very small proportion of the population who have real celiac disease and thus truly cannot tolerate gluten, at the same time gluten has become the health demon that is touted as the cause of virtually all health problems, be they major or minor, with the cure—of course!—being the now nearly ubiquitous gluten-free diet. The gluten-free diet has become so popular that restaurants and food manufacturers ignore it at their financial peril. Indeed, restaurants that don’t have some gluten…
oracknows | May 22, 2016Over the years, I’ve taken care of women with locally advanced breast cancer so advanced that it’s eroded through the skin, forming huge, nasty ulcers filled with stinky dead cancer tissue that’s outgrown its blood supply, leaving the patient in chronic pain. If the patient is fortunate, her cancer has not metastasized beyond her axillary lymph nodes (the lymph nodes under her arm), and her life might still be saved by a combination of chemotherapy, radical surgery, and radiation. If the patient is not fortunate, either the cancer has metastasized and she is doomed or hasn’t metastasized yet…
oracknows | May 19, 2016After yesterday’s epic mid-week rant about a man who thinks he knows what skepticism is but clearly doesn’t, it’s time to get back to business. The best way to do that is to go back to an article that came out the other day and that I had meant to blog about but temporarily shelved in favor of yesterday’s rant. It’s a topic that’s very relevant to me right now given that the Michigan legislature is considering a bill (House Bill 4531) that would give naturopaths a broad scope of practice almost the equal of that of primary care physicians, the only difference being that naturopaths wouldn’t…
oracknows | May 18, 2016Contrary to what some of my detractors think, I don’t mind criticism of my viewpoints. After all, if I never encounter criticism, how will I ever improve? On the other hand, there are forms of criticism that are what I would call less than constructive. One form this sort of criticism takes is obsessive repetition of points that have already been addressed and failure to pay attention to how they were addressed. This is the sort of criticism that will eventually provoke an exasperated shrug of the shoulders or even an angry—dare I say Insolent?—retort.
Another way criticism can get on one’s…
oracknows | May 15, 2016It is an unquestioned belief among believers in alternative medicine and even just among many people who do not trust conventional medicine that conventional medicine kills. Not only does exaggerating the number of people who die due to medical complications or errors fit in with the world view of people like Mike Adams and Joe Mercola, but it's good for business. After all, if conventional medicine is as dangerous as claimed, then alternative medicine starts looking better in comparison.
In contrast, real physicians and real medical scientists are very much interested in making medicine…
oracknows | May 13, 2016It’s been a while since I paid attention to the movie, but the publicity among the antivaccine movement for Andrew Wakefield’s and Del Bigtree’s movie VAXXED: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe continues apace. Sadly, I missed my opportunity to see Bigtree himself doing a Q&A for the movie when it rolled through Detroit a a week and a half ago, mainly (1) the evening Del Bigtree and Polly Tommey rolled through my neck of the woods happened to coincide with a day that I had to drive to Saginaw for a 7:30 AM talk (hint: it’s nearly a two hour drive from where I live) and then had to give a talk…
oracknows | April 29, 2016Three days ago, I noted a disturbance in the antivaccine Force.
Last night, I noticed that that disturbance continues.
The first time around, it was Brian Hooker, a biochemical engineer turned incompetent antivaccine “epidemiologist” completed the circle of clueless conspiracy mongering, who was at the center of the disturbance. His conspira-woo tapped into the Dark Side of the Force by taking a conspiracy theory that the antivaccine movement has been flogging for nearly two years now (as hard as it is to believe, it started in August 2014!), a conspiracy known as the “CDC whistleblower” and…
oracknows | April 26, 2016About a month and a half ago, I became aware of the case of Ezekiel Stephan, a 19-month-old Canadian toddler living in Alberta who in 2012 developed bacterial meningitis. Unfortunately for Ezekiel, his parents, David and Collet Stephan, were believers in alternative medicine. They didn’t take Ezekiel to a real doctor. Instead, they relied on herbal remedies and consulted a naturopath while their child suffered and died. As a result, they were put on trial for failing to provide the necessaries of life for Ezekiel. During the trial, they raised money by appealing to the worst quacks, claiming…
oracknows | April 21, 2016I heard the news yesterday morning.
I was in clinic seeing patients. It was a bit of a slow morning; there was time between patients. So I spent it, as is my wont when clinic is a bit slow, signing charts (OK, signing off on charts in the electronic medical record; I haven’t actually physically signed a chart in a while) and idly checking Facebook and Twitter when finished with that. Then I saw it: Authorities Respond to a Medical Call at Paisley Park, with a comment that Prince was dead. I read the article; it said that someone had been found dead at Prince’s estate in Minneapolis and that…
oracknows | April 18, 2016It sucks to be diagnosed with cancer at any age, but it especially sucks to be young and diagnosed with cancer. The prompt application of science-based cancer treatment is important for anyone with cancer, but it’s especially important for young people with cancer, because they have the most life-years to lose if they dawdle or pursue quackery. That’s why I get particularly perturbed about young people with cancer whose parents choose (or who themselves choose) quackery over science-based medicine, and it’s why I become the most perturbed of all when I learn of stories of children being…
oracknows | April 14, 2016Celebrities who support pseudoscience and quackery are worse than regular, run-of-the-mill believers because they have a much larger soapbox than any of us do. I have a pretty healthy blog traffic for a medical blog, but even I don’t reach more than maybe 10,000 people a day. Even at my not-so-super-secret other blog, we only reach four or five times that in a day on average. Compared to the millions that someone like, for example, Oprah Winfrey used to reach on a daily basis or that someone like Dr. Mehmet Oz reaches on a daily basis today, the reach of the entire science blogosphere is…
oracknows | April 13, 2016Of all the forms of quackery that have been “integrated” into medicine of late, arguably one of the most popular is acupuncture. It’s offered in fertility clinics. It’s offered in hospitals and medical clinics all over the place. The vast majority of academic medical centers that have embraced quackademic medicine offer acupuncture. (Quackademic medicine, for those not familiar with the term we reserve for the study of alternative medicine in academic medical centers that really should recognize it as quackery.) Hell, quite a few that haven’t embraced quackademic medicine offer acupuncture.…
oracknows | April 7, 2016There are a number of aphorisms that one imbibes over many years of medical education, especially in medical school. Some are useful; some are not; but some stick with you for reasons that even you can't figure out. For example, I still remember my first day of medical school over 30 (!) years ago. It started with an introductory session beginning at 8 AM that lasted about an hour, an "orientation," if you will, after which classes began as normal. During this orientation, members of the medical school leadership, such as deans and the chairs of certain major departments, got a chance to…
oracknows | March 31, 2016I wish this post were an April Fools Day joke, but it is not.
Three weeks ago, Skeptical Raptor and I wrote posts describing how a particularly vicious, nasty antivaccine troll named Heather Murray had successfully gamed Facebook reporting algorithms intended to report abuse in order to silence pro-science bloggers. It is, unfortunately, a tactic that I first heard about over two years ago, when antivaccine activists affiliated with what was then called the Australian Vaccination Network (AVN) used the same sort of tactics to target pro-science bloggers and activists associated with a group…
oracknows | March 29, 2016Whenever a story like Robert De Niro's decision to choose an antivaccine film by Andrew Wakefield for screening at his prestigious Tribeca Film Festival followed by his decision to drop the film like the proverbial hot potato upon being shown just how full of misinformation, distortions, and pseudoscience the film is shows up, I not infrequently feel as though the topic takes over the blog. And so it often does. It's been the main topic here for the last week. That's why I thought I'd move on to something else, but then, seeing the reaction of the antivaccine crankosphere yesterday to the…
oracknows | March 23, 2016I wasn't sure if I was going to write about this again so soon, because one post seemed adequate to describe the massive dump that the Tribeca Film Festival just took on reality by announcing the screening of a pseudoscientific antivaccine propaganda film by The One Antivaccine Quack To Rule Them All, Andrew Wakefield. Any skeptic with an interest in medicine and vaccines knows that he's one man most responsible for creating the myth that the MMR vaccine can cause autism. As a result, MMR vaccine uptake plummeted in the UK, and the measles came roaring back. I speculated why this might have…
oracknows | March 18, 2016When I wrote about a systematic review of the medical literature regarding measles and pertussis outbreaks that demonstrated quite convincingly that, for these two diseases at least, the nonmedical exemptions and vaccine refusal endanger everyone, not just the unvaccinated, I was rather disappointed. I was rather disappointed because, although the article had been in press a couple fo days at the time, no antivaccine loon had taken it on with the bad arguments that I mentioned. If there's one thing that seems to escape antivaccinationists, it's that the unvaccinated are at much more risk in…