Now on ScienceBlogs: The 'Plastiki' Expedition
"A statement of fact cannot be insolent." The miscellaneous ramblings of a surgeon/scientist on medicine, quackery, science, pseudoscience, history, and pseudohistory (and anything else that interests him)
Orac is the nom de blog of a (not so) humble pseudonymous surgeon/scientist with an ego just big enough to delude himself that someone, somewhere might actually give a rodent's posterior about his miscellaneous verbal meanderings, but just barely small enough to admit to himself that few will. (Continued here, along with a DISCLAIMER that you should read before reading any medical discussions here.)
Orac's old Blog is archived at Archived Insolence.
March 13, 2010
Category: Announcements • Blog carnivals • Skepticism/critical thinking • Skeptics' Circle
My apologies to Romeo Vitelli, but somehow two weeks ago it totally slipped my mind to announce his 131st Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle, which is a fine addition to the Skeptics' Circle canon. Read. Enjoy.
Posted by Orac at 10:00 AM • 2 Comments
March 12, 2010
Category: Alternative medicine • Antivaccination lunacy • Autism • Medicine • Politics • Quackery
My first big splash in the blogosphere will have occurred five years ago in June, when I first discovered the utter wingnuttery that is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. It was then that I wrote a little bit of that not-so-Respectful Insolence that you've come to know and love entitled Salon.com flushes its credibility down the toilet, a perfect description of an article by RFK, Jr. published in Salon.com and simultaneously in Rolling Stone entitled Deadly Immunity. As I look back, I realize that, as widely linked to and discussed as it was at the time, that post, arguably more than any other, was the one that established me as one of the go-to bloggers when it came to vaccines. Of course, it may also have been the gloriously Orac-ian verbiage I employed. As longtime readers may (or may not) recall, at the time, I referred to RFK's article as the "biggest, steamingest, drippiest turd I've ever seen it [Salon.com] publish, an article so mindnumbingly one-sided and uncritical that in my eyes it utterly destroys nearly all credibility Salon.com has had as a source of reliable news and comment." Nothing in the five years since then has changed my assessment of RFK, Jr.'s investigative prowess. Indeed, if anything, he's gotten worse, such as the time he tried to out-crank CBS News' resident antivaccine propagandist Sharyl Attkisson (who has been in bed with someone at Age of Autism to coordinate counterattacks on its enemies) or the time he teamed up with David Kirby and Generation Rescue to cube the stupidity.
That was over a year ago, and since then RFK, Jr. has been fairly quiet, at least on the vaccine front. Maybe it had something to do with his being ignored by the then-new Obama administration when his supporters lobbied very hard to get him appointed to head the EPA. Or maybe it was embarrassment at having so successfully cubed the stupid. Who knows?
Whatever the reason for his year-long disappearance from the anti-vaccine fray, it would appear that he's been pulled out of storage, dusted off, and sent once again to tilt at mercury windmills. It feels like 2005 all over again. That's because RFK, Jr. has laid yet another one of his steamy, drippy, corn-textured turds on the blogosphere as only he can in the one place where such a stench of bad arguments and pseudoscience can go completely unnoticed among all the other turds that routinely drip from it. That's right, RFK, Jr. has reappeared on that bastion of anti-vaccine pseudoscience, The Huffington Post, and the title of his latest turd is Central Figure in CDC Vaccine Cover-Up Absconds With $2M. In what appears to be an obviously coordinated attack, Generation Rescue's anti-vaccine crank blog Age of Autism is promoting RFK, Jr.'s article and adding a few of its own with titles such as Poul Thorsen's Mutating Resume by the not-so-dynamic duo of fact-challenged anti-vaccine propagandists Mark "Not a Doctor, Not a Scientist" Blaxill and Dan "Why can't I find those autistic Amish?" Olmsted and NBC 11 Atlanta Reports: Vaccine Researcher Flees with $2M, featuring this news report:
Posted by Orac at 8:05 AM • 142 Comments
March 11, 2010
Category: Alternative medicine • Antivaccination lunacy • Autism • Medicine • Skepticism/critical thinking
These days, I'm having a love-hate relationship with Elsevier. On the one hand, there are lots of reasons to hate Elsevier. For example, Elsevier took payments from Merck, Sharp & Dohme in order to publish in essence a fake journal designed to promote its products, and then got caught doing it again. On the other hand, Elsevier owns both The Lancet and NeuroToxicology. The former recently retracted Andrew Wakefield's original 1998 Lancet paper that launched the latest iteration of the anti-vaccine movement in the U.K., as well as a thousand quacks, to be followed by the latter, which withdrew Andrew Wakefield's unethical and poorly designed monkey study of the hepatitis B vaccine. These decisions go a long way--although not all the way by a long shot--towards balancing the harm that Elsevier has done over the years.
Perhaps the most persistent atrocity unleashed upon science by Elsevier has come in the form of a journal. It's a journal I have written about before called Medical Hypotheses. MH is a journal that describes itself and its requirements thusly:
The purpose of Medical Hypotheses is to publish interesting theoretical papers. The journal will consider radical, speculative and non-mainstream scientific ideas provided they are coherently expressed.Medical Hypotheses is not, however, a journal for publishing workaday reviews of the literature, nor is it a journal for primary data (except when preliminary data is used to lend support to the main hypothesis presented). Many of the articles submitted do not clearly identify the hypothesis and simply read like reviews.
Posted by Orac at 10:00 AM • 118 Comments
Category: Alternative medicine • Antivaccination lunacy • Autism • Medicine
Well, that didn't take long.
Remember when the grande dame of the anti-vaccine movement, Barbara Loe Fisher, decided that she would try to harass, intimidate, and silence Paul Offit through the filing of a frivolous libel suit against Dr. Offit, Amy Wallace (the journalist who interviewed Offit for an excellent article last year), and Condé Nast, the publisher of WIRED, which ran the article? Well, the judge has ruled, and that ruling is...dismissed!
The text of the ruling can be found here.
There are some awesomely awesome passages in this ruling, which is a slapdown that, while not as epic as, for instance, the slapdown that Judge John E. Jones III delivered to creationists in Kitzmiller v. Dover, is nonetheless very satisfying to read--with one exception. The judge in this case makes some truly annoying statements like:
Moreover, in the context of the Wired article, the statement "she lies" lacks the provably false content that is required to support a defamation action.=
So far, so good. Then, not so good:
Posted by Orac at 12:01 AM • 21 Comments
March 10, 2010
Category: Alternative medicine • Antivaccination lunacy • Autism • Medicine • Quackery
Orac knows all. Orac sees all. Orac discovers all.
Anti-vaccine loons, know this and tremble, as Teresa Conrick over at J.B. Handley's--excuse me, Jenny McCarthy's--home for happy anti-vaccine propagandists has:
While googling to find the Tribune article, I instead found Orac's site. Who is Orac? Well, suffice to say that he has some mysterious desire to want autism to be only a genetic disorder. He gets upset if you discuss vaccines or the environment as causative factors. The usual suspects of the neurodiverse world and the assorted anonymous Wackosphere characters were hanging out at his site with their typical sarcasm and "blood-thirsty" DAN! comments. Orac though was beyond his usual histrionic self as his comments were pointed at the exact wording of the lawsuit. He actually had the lawsuit in a pdf file for the taking on his site! Now how, within hours of the Trib posting and to be exact, the Trib article by Patricia Callahan was posted online at 5:19 p.m. CST, March 4, 2010 and Orac had his pdf and blog up at March 5, 2010 3:00 AM. Appears to be quite bizarre and a bit suspicious?What makes this even more concerning is that Dr. Usman herself had not received the lawsuit, all 46 pages to be exact, yet anyone could obtain it from Orac. The question remains how did Orac get it and who gave it to him?
You know, it's really damned inconsiderate to refer to a post and not to link to it. I don't do that even to the loons at Age of Autism, but they do it to me all the time. In any case, Teresa is referring to this post by me from last week. Of course, if AoA knew anything about Orac, they would know that he is the most powerful computer in the Federation. The reason is that Orac is able to communicate with any computer in the galaxy. Couple that with Orac's insatiable thirst for knowledge, and it's child's play for him to discover the Tribune article and the PDF of the actual lawsuit.
Or maybe Orac has spies everywhere, yes, even within the anti-vaccine movement itself. Muhahahahahahahahahaha!
What the real case is, I'm sorry, but I won't be saying. It's too much fun to let Teresa and her commenters keep guessing and, as a result, fearing the omniscience of Orac.
Posted by Orac at 3:00 PM • 79 Comments
Category: Alternative medicine • Antivaccination lunacy • Autism • Medicine • Quackery
Way back on May 25, 2005, I first noticed something about a certain political group blog. It was something unsavory, something vile, something pseudoscientific. It was the fetid stench of quackery, but not just any quackery. It was anti-vaccine quackery, and the blog was Arianna Huffington's Huffington Post, where a mere 16 days after its being unleashed upon an unsuspecting world I characterized the situation as Antivaccination rhetoric running rampant on The Huffington Post. It was the start of a long running series that rapidly resulted in parts 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 in the course of a mere month before I gave up counting. Now you can just search for "Huffington and vaccine" on this blog and pull up dozens of examples of HuffPo's support for the most insane varieties of anti-vaccine nuttery. Dr. Jay Gordon? Check. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.? Check. David Kirby? Check. Bill Maher? Check.
Jim Carrey? Extra double triple check. (Man, the level of burning stupid in that one was beyond anything I had seen before.)
Through it all, I had noticed that there was an anti-vaccine activist missing from the pseudoscientific roll of shame that regularly appeared on HuffPo. As you may have guessed, for some reason, in the three years or so since she became a "mother warrior" anti-vaccine loon, Jenny McCarthy hadn't blogged for HuffPo, even though she's an ideal candidate. She's a celebrity. She's anti-vaccine. Most importantly, her brain consists of two neurons connected by a spirochete. She seemed to be perfect. On the other hand, I speculated that maybe--just maybe--even HuffPo has standards, and, as McCarthy has shown on Twitter, she appears unable to handle stringing even a mere 140 characters together into a coherent thought. Trying to produce a full 1,000-word post with such thin gruel would strain even HuffPo's woo-friendly readership.
I guess I was wrong. Yesterday, there appeared on HuffPo a post under Jenny McCarthy's name entitled Who's afraid of the truth about autism? Yes, the stupid continues to burn, except this time it's metastasized to HuffPo, to add to its already existing flame of burning stupid.
Posted by Orac at 3:00 AM • 159 Comments
March 9, 2010
Category: Alternative medicine • Medicine • Quackery
I have a hard time arguing against the proposition that this is the perfect metaphor for homeopathy.
Well, not exactly. The homeopath and homeopathy user are both far too rational in this example.
Posted by Orac at 3:00 PM • 36 Comments
Category: Alternative medicine • Antivaccination lunacy • Autism • Medicine • Politics • Quackery
I haven't written much about this before, at least not in this context, but vaccine scares are nothing new, nor is execrably fear mongering journalism about vaccines. Those of you who read Paul Offit's Autism's False Prophets or Arthur Allen's Vaccine probably know about a particularly egregious example of both that occurred in the early 1980s and concerned the DTP (diptheria-pertussis-tetanus) vaccine. In 1982, the local NBC affiliate in Washington, DC aired a special report entitled DPT: Vaccine Roulette. Indeed, Vaccine Roulette was the prototype of the muck-raking, sensationalistic sort of documentary that we've come to know and hate, showing children who were thought to have suffered brain damage due to the DPT vaccine and making it sound as though this was a common event, when later investigations demonstrated that it was not. Still, the DPT vaccine did produce severe neurological reactions, and the scare over it sparked by DPT: Vaccine Roulette resulted in a rash of lawsuits that endangered the vaccine supply.
As a result, lawsuits proliferated, and there were several large jury awards. Due to the fear that litigation would drive vaccine manufacturers either out of business or into giving up manufacturing vaccines due to liability concerns, Congress was driven to "do something." These fears were not unfounded. All but one DPT manufacturer stopped making it, and the last one threatened to do so. In order to safeguard the vaccine supply in 1986 Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA). This law established a no fault compensation system for children injured by vaccines. To administer the compensation, the NCVIA established a Vaccine Court, administered by the Office of Special Masters in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. Claims against vaccine manufacturers can't be initially filed in state or federal court; they have to go through the Office of Special Masters, where special judges known as Special Masters adjudicate the claims. It is just this court that I blogged so copiously about in 2008 and early 2009 as a result of the Autism Omnibus action, in which the Special Masters of the Vaccine Court instructed representatives for the 5,000 or so children in the action to choose their best cases as "test cases" for the claim that vaccines caused autism. All three test cases lost.
Posted by Orac at 3:00 AM • 55 Comments
March 8, 2010
Category: Alternative medicine • Medicine • Politics • Pseudoscience • Quackery
If there's one law that (most) supporters of science-based medicine detest and would love to see repealed, it's the Dietary Supplement and Health Act of 1994 (DSHEA). The reason is that this law, arguably more than almost anything else, allowed for the proliferation of supplements and claims made for these supplements that aren't based in science. In essence, the DSHEA created a new class of regulated entity called dietary supplements. At the same time, it liberalized the rules for information and claims that the supplement manufacturers can transmit to the public and while at the same time mostly tying the FDA's hands so that it can do almost nothing before supplements are marketed and it has a hard time effectively policing supplement safety after supplements are marketed. As I've pointed out before, the DSHEA in essence allows the use of the Quack Miranda Warning to make health claims for supplements as a "get out of jail free" card. Indeed, fellow ScienceBlogger PalMD has referred to the DSHEA as a travesty of a mockery of a sham.
Suffice it to say that the DSHEA of 1994 is a very bad law indeed. One thing it does is to make a distinction between food and medicine. While on its surface this is a reasonable distinction (after all, it wouldn't make a lot of sense to hold food to the same sorts of standards to which drugs are held), as implemented by the DSHEA this distinction has a pernicious effect in that it allows manufacturers to label all sorts of botanicals, many of which with pharmacological activity, as "supplements," and supplements, being defined as food and not medicine, do not require prior approval by the FDA before marketing.
In other words, when a supplement is marketed it's more or less the honor system. No registration with the FDA is required. After all, supplements are food, not medicine! In effect, the government can't really do anything unless problems are reported after the supplement is marketed. Even worse, the definition of "supplement" has become very broad, as Quackwatch points out:
Posted by Orac at 8:00 AM • 126 Comments
March 6, 2010
Category: Humor • Skepticism/critical thinking
...because of the power of the vagina.
I have a hard time arguing that the hypothesis behind this trial would not be falsified by this test. On the other hand, the link above dates back to 2006. So it would appear that either Jennifer never took the test, or she failed it.
Science marches on.
Posted by Orac at 10:30 AM • 38 Comments
