medicine
oracknows | June 15, 2008John Le Sainte apparently has a rather inflated view of himself. You see, he seems to think that he's the heir to Nostradamus. Ever worth a giggle on a Sunday afternoon (or any other time, for that matter), he seems to think that, channeling Nostradamus in some fashion, he's predicted what will be discovered to be the cause of autism:
I have had over 30 e-mails requesting if I had seen into the future and discovered why Autism is becoming epidemic now. Yes, I have. This is what I know from the visions as guided by my guardian and teacher Nostradamus.
An interesting fact will become known in…
oracknows | June 15, 2008Several people have been sending me either links to this paper or even the paper itself:
Young HA, Geier DA, Geier MR. (2008). Thimerosal exposure in infants and neurodevelopmental disorders: An assessment of computerized medical records in the Vaccine Safety Datalink. J Neurol Sci. 2008 May 14 [Epub ahead of print]. (Full text here.)
Some have asked me whether I was planning on deconstructing it, given that the mercury militia has apparently been promoting it as "evidence" that it really, truly, and honestly was the mercury in vaccines after all that caused autism. I did mention it about…
oracknows | June 14, 2008Some of you may have heard of John Scudamore's Whale.to site. I've referred to it in the past as a repository of some of the wildest and most bizarre "alternative" medicine claims out there. However, I will admit that I've only ever scratched the surface of the insanity that is Whale.to.
Kathleen Seidel has dug deeply into the madness.
It goes far beyond what even I had thought. She found parts of the website that I had never known to exist. For example, the complete text of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is there. There's also the complete text of Maniacal World Control Thru The Jesuit…
sb admin | June 13, 2008Tim Russert died suddenly today. I admired his journalism, his ability to press questions that has become so rare. He didn't seem to suffer from the "two-side-ism" that has become so common in today's journalism; he realized that some issues don't have two valid opposing views. But others will eulogize him. I'd like to talk about why he died.
Of course, we don't know very much at this point. What we do know is that it was sudden.
There are a number of reasons for someone to suddenly drop dead, the most common having to do with the cardiovascular system. Pulmonary embolism and massive…
oracknows | June 13, 2008It's that time again.
Round and round the Skeptics' Circle goes, coming rapidly around to arrive yet again in less than a week. This time around, it's set to land on next Thursday, June 19 at Ionian Enchantment. Blog-specific instructions for submitting your pearls of skepticism, science, and critical thinking can be found here, and more general instructions can be found here. So, if you're a blogger who regularly likes to apply reason, skepticism, and critical thinking to dubious claims, get cracking and send Mike your best stuff before Wednesday! And, as always, if you're such a blogger…
oracknows | June 13, 2008
Hard as it is to believe, this little weekly vanity project of mine, this little weekly excursion into the wild and wacky world of woo, is fast approaching two years of existence. Really. I kid you not. This wouldn't really disturb me so much except that I had been rather hoping to do a special anniversary edition of Your Friday Dose of Woo in a couple of weeks, but I really don't have anything suitable. No, it's not that I don't have lots of woo in the infamous Folder of Woo. There's stuff there for the foreseeable future. It's just that I'm like a little kid. When a really, really good…
denialism | June 12, 2008The WSJ brings us news of increasing opposition to laws that would protect faith healing. Or as I call it, negligence. As usual it has required the death of innocents before people will come to grips with common sense.
The recent death from untreated diabetes of an 11-year-old Wisconsin girl has invigorated opposition to obscure laws in many states that let parents rely on prayer, rather than medicine, to heal sick children.
Dale and Leilani Neumann of Weston, Wis., are facing charges of second-degree reckless homicide after their child, Madeline Kara Neumann, died on Easter after slipping…
clock | June 12, 2008Two of my SciBlings have recently covered papers that my readers should find interesting:
Joseph: Bright Light and Melatonin Treatment Improves Dementia:
A study published in JAMA indicates that treatment with bright light alone (1,000 lux), or bright light combined with melatonin, can improve symptoms in patients with dementia. Melatonin alone appeared to have a slight adverse effect.
Chris Chatham : Time Perception: In the Absence of "Time Sensation?":
In their newly in-press TICS article, Ivry and Schlerf review the state of the art in cognitive modeling of time perception - perhaps the…
sb admin | June 12, 2008My little post on naturopathy was more controversial than I had anticipated. Some of the commenters gently (and otherwise) suggested that I should learn more about the subject, so I've been doing a little reading. Here are the basic questions: what is naturopathy, and what might it have to offer that "conventional" medicine lacks?
One of the first places I visited was the website for Bastyr University, which is often cited as having the most prestigious naturopathic program. Their website posts a definition of naturopathy (all emphasis mine):
Naturopathic medicine is a distinct profession…
oracknows | June 12, 2008One of the most common aspects of any good conspiracy theory is that "they" know about it but are covering it up, "they" usually being the government. Usually, the "evidence" that "they" know consists third- or fourth-hand unverifiable stories from a "friend of a friend of a friend" who, very conveniently, just so happened to be in just the right place at just the right time to overhear just the right tidbit of information that shows that "they" know all about "it." The exact conspiracy theory is almost irrelevant. Be it alien abductions, the "9/11 Truth" movement, Bigfoot sightings, or…
oracknows | June 12, 2008From my perspective, one thing that's always been true of surgery that has bothered me is that it is prone to dogma. I alluded to this a bit earlier this week, but, although things have definitely changed in the 20 years since I first set foot, nervously and tentatively, on the wards of the Cleveland VA Medical Center for my first ever surgical rotation, some habits of surgeons die hard.
Of course, regardless of the tendency towards dogma, one thing that differentiates evidence- and science-based medicine from pseudoscientific woo is that studies do make a difference. In general and…
terrasig | June 12, 2008I'm even later to the game on this story than my blogging colleague, Orac: ERV, Pharyngula, and denialism blog have each given their takes on the Minnesota's plan to authorize NDs, doctors of naturopathy, to use the title of "Doctor."
For two views on what naturopathy is, here is one from the American Association of Naturopathic Physicians and another from Quackwatch. We link - you decide.
As I read the story, it sounds as though the new legislation allows naturopaths to practice without being prosecuted for practicing medicine without a license. No word yet on whether they can be sued…
oracknows | June 11, 2008Fellow skeptical doc PalMD informs me that apparently a new blogger, who happens to be a law student at NYU, discovered that his school had invited antivaccinationist-apologist supreme, David Kirby, to speak at NYU on June 26. In response, antivaccinationists, including David Kirby himself and antivaccinationist crank extraordinaire Clifford G. Miller himself, the man who apparently invited David Kirby to befoul the fair city of London and even the halls of Parliament with his antivaccinationist nonsense, has appeared. Much hilarity ensues as every antivaccinationist canard known to…
clock | June 11, 2008After two years of raising awareness about living with HIV, Ron Hudson has decided to end the International Carnival of Pozitivities. The very last edition is now up on Black Looks.
oracknows | June 11, 2008I know I'm a bit late to this game, but those of you who read ERV, Denialism Blog, and Pharyngula didn't think that their prior mention of this story about how the State of Minnesota is going to allow naturopaths to claim the title of "doctor" would stop me from jumping right in even if I am a day late (which in the blogosphere might as well be a year), did you?
If you did, you don't know me very well, even after three years of blogging. This sort of thing is the raison d'être of this blog, and just because blogging about an antivaccine rally last week and about Abraham Cherrix yesterday…
oracknows | June 10, 2008I admit it. Sometimes, my better nature notwithstanding, I can't help taking a bit of a morbid interest in celebrity scandals. I don't know if it's a weakness or just normal human nature. Like most "educated" people, I do know I tend to be vaguely embarrassed by falling for an interest in such "low' pursuits. Given that, how can I resist making note of a recent development in the ongoing nastiness between Charlie Sheen and his ex-wife Denise Richards? More oddly, how can it be that I find myself seeing Denise Richards as actually being rational?
It turns out that Charlie Sheen is apparently…
oracknows | June 10, 2008Somehow, with all the blogging about vaccines last week, I totally missed a major update to a story that's been of great interest to me since I first became aware of it. It turns out that Starchild Abraham Cherrix, the teen who two years ago rejected conventional therapy for his lymphoma and sought out the quackery known as Hoxsey therapy, has turned 18:
Abraham Cherrix, the teenager who fought a court battle on the Eastern Shore for the right to choose his own cancer care, turns 18 today, officially freed from reporting his medical condition to the Accomack County court that has required…
sb admin | June 9, 2008I guess it's not just doctors watching this one---an alert reader and a fellow SciBling both picked up on this one. Apparently, in my neighboring state of Minnesota (really, check the map), home to Greg Laden, PZ Myers, and lutefisk, doctor wannabes have legislated themselves into "doctorhood". You see, there is this entity called a "naturopath", or "naturopathic doctor", which is some sort of shaman that likes to think that if you study woo long enough, it becomes science.
OK, OK, I'll settle down, but let's examine this "naturopath" thing. You see, to be a real doctor, you must attend…
oracknows | June 9, 2008After having subjected my readers to all those posts about the antivaccination lunacy that was on display in Washington, D.C. last week, I think it's time for a break from this topic, at least for a while if not longer. In the run-up to the "Green Our Vaccines" rally events on the antivaccinationism front were coming fast and furious, and I felt it was my duty to comment on them. Now, with great relief I can say that the rally is over. How many people actually attended the rally is uncertain. The organizers themselves claim that 8,500 people attended, while more objective estimates from…
oracknows | June 8, 2008Remember how I warned citizens of the U.K. about an impending visit to their fair island by American apologist for antivaccinationist nonsense and his invitation to give a briefing at Parliament?
Apparently, the whole thing was very--shall we say?--underwhelming. The lameness of his excuses, they limp:
I then asked a question (yay!). Kirby had said earlier in the lecture that autism diagnois rates in California haven't reduced following the removal of thimerosal from childhood vaccines in California because of a delay between children being vaccinated in their early years and them being…