Month: May 2010

Nine differences between “us and them,” nine straw men burning

I’ll start this post by admitting right up front: I blatantly stole the idea for the title of this post from Mark Crislip’s most excellently infamous post Nine questions, nine answers. Why? Because I really liked that post and felt like it. Also, there seems to be something about the number nine among anti-vaccine zealots: Nine “questions.” Nine circles of hell. Nine...

/ May 31, 2010

Brief Note: The Chiropractic Subluxation is Dead

The General Chiropractic Council, a UK-wide statutory body with regulatory powers, has just published a new position statement on the chiropractic subluxation complex: The chiropractic vertebral subluxation complex is an historical concept but it remains a theoretical model. It is not supported by any clinical research evidence that would allow claims to be made that it is the cause of disease or...

/ May 29, 2010

Andrew Wakefield Fights Back

Dr. Andrew Wakefield was almost single-handedly responsible for frightening the public about a possible association between autism and the MMR vaccine. His alarmist recommendations directly led to lower vaccination rates and a resurgence of measles to endemic levels in the UK. The MMR/autism interpretation of his 1998 article in The Lancet was retracted by 10 of his 12 co-authors. The article itself...

/ May 28, 2010

Lying Liars and their Lying Lies

Carlyle said “a lie cannot live.” It shows that he did not know how to tell them. — Mark Twain There is an infamous hoax from last century called The Protocols of the (Learned) Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic text purporting to describe a plan to achieve global domination by the Jewish people. Despite the fact that the Protocols is a work...

/ May 27, 2010

Fields, Alternative Medicine, and Physics

In 1996 the American Physical Society, responding to a request from the National Research Council, was asked to examine the potential health hazards of power lines. One of the concerns was that electromagnetic background fields of 2 milligauss might cause cancer (for comparison the earth’s magnetic field is 500 milligauss and fields generated by human physiological processes are hundreds of thousands of...

/ May 27, 2010

Stand up for science-based medicine against anti-vaccine fear mongering in Chicago today

As I’ve pointed out numerous times this week, anti-vaccine loons, led Generation Rescue and a “health freedom” group, have organized an anti-vaccine rally in Grant Park in Chicago from 3 PM to 5 PM CDT. Andrew Wakefield himself will be the keynote speaker, and there will even be some very bad music promoting the anti-vaccine message. The rally, with its wonderfully Orwellian...

/ May 26, 2010

Is Organic Food More Healthful?

In 1952 Martin Gardner, who just passed away this week at the age of 95, wrote about organic farming in his book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. He characterized it as a food fad without scientific justification. Now, 58 years later, the science has not changed much at all. A recent review of the literature of the last 50...

/ May 26, 2010

Red Meat: Is It Hazardous to Health?

Red meat consumption has been linked to diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and several types of cancer (breast, colorectal, stomach, bladder, prostate, and lymphoma). There are plausible mechanisms: meat is a source of carcinogens, iron that may increase oxidative damage, and saturated fat. But correlation and plausibility are not enough to establish causation. Is red meat really dangerous? If so, how great is the...

/ May 25, 2010

Autism One: The yearly antivaccine autism “biomed” quackfest begins

In the world of the anti-vaccine underground, there is one time of the year that looms large. Over the last few years, this time has generally come right around the end of May, usually coinciding with the Memorial Day weekend and the unofficial beginning of the summer vacation season here in the U.S. I’m referring, of course, to Autism One, which blights...

/ May 24, 2010

The story of Andrew Wakefield in pictures

I’ve blogged a lot about anti-vaccine hero Andrew Wakefield over the years. The story has become long and convoluted, and to tell it takes a lot of verbiage, even by my standards (or those of Kimball Atwood). However, I’ve found a good resource that tells the tale of Andrew Wakefield and his misdeeds in a highly accessible form: The question at the...

/ May 22, 2010