reiki
oracknows | January 2, 2017Well, it's 2017. In a mere 17 days, unreality will become reality, as the most unlikely and terrifying President in my lifetime is sworn in. Consequently, as I was thinking about what I'd like to write about for my first post of the new year, only one thing came to mind. Only one thing that I routinely apply my Insolence, both Respectful and Not-So-Respectful, to achieves the level of unreality that our politics entered in November and will amplify in a little more than two weeks.
Yes, it's time for a reiki post.
OK, I admit it. A reader sent me a hilarious article about the mechanism of…
oracknows | August 25, 2016I’ve mentioned on quite a few occasions that there’s a quote attributed to philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer that is much beloved of cranks:
All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
I also like to point out that Schopenhauer probably never said this and just how silly the thought behind this quote is when you think about it. Unfortunately, as I was perusing Twitter yesterday, I couldn’t help but think of this quote, but not in the way quacks and cranks usually intend. Rather, I was thinking of…
oracknows | June 27, 2016I’ve been writing about this topic so long—ever since the very beginning of this blog—that it seems as though I’ve always been doing it even though this blog has been in existence only 11 years and I didn’t really come to appreciate the problem until after I had started this blog. No, I’m not referring to the antivaccine movement, which is another longstanding concern of mine. This time, I’m referring to what I like to refer to as “quackademic medicine,” defined as the infiltration of unscientific and pseudoscientific medicine into medical academia. Indeed, there was a time when I tried to…
oracknows | June 3, 2016After over 11 years at this blogging thing, I periodically start to fear that I’m becoming jaded. In particular, after following the infiltration of quackery in the form of “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), now more commonly known as “integrative medicine,” because it integrates CAM with evidence-based medicine. Of course, in reality, what “integrative medicine” really does is to integrate prescientific, pseudoscientific, and antiscientific quackery with real medicine, and that’s what I mean. I thought I had seen it all in academic medical centers and medical schools: the faith…
oracknows | December 15, 2015Even though I've taken on the 'nym of a fictional computer in a 35-year-old British science fiction series whose key traits were an arrogant and condescending manner and the ability to tap into every computer of the galactic federation any time he wanted to, in reality I am just one person. That means, try as I might, I can't keep up with everything that might interest me enough to blog, much less blog it all. What that means is that occasionally something catches my attention, even though it's three months old. So it was with this article in—of all places—Elle magazine. It's about a favorite…
oracknows | December 9, 2015Et tu, Scientific American?
A few of you seem to know what will catch my attention and push my buttons, because over the past couple of days a few of you sent me an article published in Scientific America by an internal medicine resident named Allison Bond entitled Sometimes It's Okay to Give Patients a Treatment with No Proved Medical Benefits. Yes, a title like that is akin to waving the proverbial cape in front of a bull. Of course, I doubt that Bond herself came up with that title; editors usually come up with such titles. Still, the title is a fairly accurate summation of what is being…
oracknows | October 15, 2015Oh, no, Nature. Not you. Not again.
It wasn't enough that you were busted shilling for traditional Chinese medicine with a big, glossy advertising supplement a few years ago. I thought you had learned your lesson after that, as you didn't do it again. Maybe I was wrong. Granted, your offense this time is not quite as bad as accepting cash from Saishunkan Pharmaceutical Co., ltd. and the Kitasato University Oriental Medicine Research Center to put together what was in essence pure propaganda for quackery, but, on the other hand, I do have to be worried that you might be thinking of backsliding…
oracknows | July 31, 2015I frequently discuss a disturbing phenomenon known as "quackademic medicine." Basically, quackademic medicine is a phenomenon that has taken hold over the last two decades in medical academia in which once ostensibly science-based medical schools and academic medical centers embrace quackery. This embrace was once called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) but among quackademics the preferred term is now "integrative medicine." Of course, when looked at objectively, integrative medicine is far more a brand than a specialty. Specifically, it's a combination of rebranding some…
oracknows | July 16, 2015I frequently call homeopathy The One Quackery to Rule Them All, but there are times when I am not so sure that that's the case. You see, there is...another. I'm referring, of course, to what is referred to as "energy medicine." What energy medicine modalities have in common is that they postulate that there is some sort "energy field" around humans that can be manipulated for therapeutic intent or that somehow practitioners can channel "healing energy" from elsewhere. For example, as I've discussed many times before, reiki is based on the concept that reiki masters can channel this…
oracknows | November 11, 2014
Sigh.
Just a week ago, I deconstructed an awful article touting how the mass of prescientific quackery known as traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) as somehow being “validated” by modern science. Specifically, some truly misguided scientists were attempting to use modern systems biology techniques to look for biomarkers associated with TCM diagnoses such as “hot” or “cold” syndromes, specifically with respect to rheumatoid arthritis. The article is an example of just how the false narrative of TCM has taken hold. Although the article acknowledged that there was little evidence to support…
oracknows | September 10, 2014
Regular readers of my not-so-super-secret other blog, where I write under my own name, know that last month Steve Novella and I published a rather nice (if I do say so myself) opinion piece in a peer-reviewed journal about what we called “clinical trials of magic.” In it, we argued that certain alternative medicine modalities are so incredibly implausible from a purely basic science viewpoint, on physics and chemistry considerations alone, that it is a waste of time and resources, not to mention unethical, to do clinical trials testing them. Two of the main examples we used were homeopathy…
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 | 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 13, 2014
Over the last two days, both Mark Crislip and Jann Bellamy wrote great pieces over at Science-Based Medicine about reiki. In particular, Jann Bellamy discussed reiki starting with an example that I've been citing in my talks about the infiltration of quackademic medicine into medical academia for at least four or five years now: The Cleveland Clinic Foundation and its website, which describes reiki thusly:
Reiki is a form of hands-on, natural healing that uses universal life force energy. The term comes from the Japanese words “rei,” which translates into universal, and “ki,” which means…
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 | March 27, 2014Note: I was busy doing something last night that left me no time to compose any fresh Insolence, which will become apparent by this weekend. In the meantime, however, I'm betting quite a few of you haven't seen this before, and those who have might want to discuss it further in a different environment.
Quackademic medicine.
I love that term, because it succinctly describes the infiltration of pseudoscientific medicine into medical academia. As I've said many times, I wish I had been the one to coin the phrase, but I wasn't. To the best of my ability to determine, I first picked it up from Dr…
oracknows | November 11, 2012I'm a scientist, but I'm also a surgeon, which means I've spent quite a bit of time in operating rooms. In the OR, teamwork is critical, and each member of the team should be using science- and evidence-based medicine to inform their judgment regarding what to do. If there's one kind of practitioner in the OR that relies heavily on SBM, it should be the anesthesiologist. Surgery is a combination of science and technical skill, and sometimes deciding what to do in the operating room is more a matter of judgment based on experience than science. For instance, if I encounter bleeding, what I do…
oracknows | July 25, 2012Medical therapies should be based upon science. That is a recurrent theme, indeed, the major theme, of this blog. Based on that simple thesis, I've spent the last decade examining "unconventional" treatments and evaluating the scientific basis (or, much more usually, the lack of a scientific basis) for various treatments. Yes, I've looked at other issues, including general skeptical issues, the occasional political rant, Holocaust denial, and, of course the odd self-indulgent bit of twaddle that every blogger engages in every now and then, but I always come back to the question of the…
oracknows | October 15, 2010Every so often, real life intrudes on blogging, preventing the creation of fresh Insolence, at least Insolence of the quality that you've come to expect. This is one of those times. I happen to be sitting here in Palm Beach, Florida, but I'm not chilling at the beach or pool. Rather, I'm attending "leadership training." Yes, be very, very afraid! In any case, I never saw the point of having these sorts of training seminars at beautiful oceanfront locations if they're going to pack the entire day with, you know, actual training! Worse (for purposes of blogging), I really have to fine tune my…
oracknows | April 13, 2010Believe it or not, there was once a time when Dr. Mehmet Oz didn't bother me that much. At least, for all his flirting with woo, I never quite thought that he had completely gone over to the Dark Side. Although I probably knew deep down that I was fooling myself. Maybe it was because Dr. Oz is a surgeon--and not just a surgeon but a cardiac surgeon. After the enthusiastic embrace of pseudoscience by so many surgeons, and in particular Dr. Michael Egnor's embrace of "intelligent design" creationism and mind-brain dualism, maybe I didn't want to believe that yet another surgeon had fallen for a…