Denialism Blog

Month: April 2008

  • Cult of Scientology update

    There are a few news items worth mentioning.

    The daughter of a Norwegian politician     killed herself after taking a “personality test” at a Scientology cult office near her dormitory. Given the cult’s history, I can see why folks would like to draw a causal connection here, but there aren’t many details in the news reports. I hardly seems likely that one encounter with the cult would be enough to drive someone to suicide—it is more likely that she was already depressed, and was unlucky enough to seek help in the wrong place.

    A not-so-well-known TV actor who used to be a cult member is speaking out against the “church” in a new video. He isn’t the most articulate spokesperson for sanity, but the video is pretty damning. It contains a lot of Scientology jargon, and comes off as the testimony of someone who has recently escaped, is pissed off, and wants everyone to know. There’s more from (erp!) Fox.

    The taxpayers of Boston were nearly duped into paying for a Scientology cult school. The school’s grant application specifically states that the curriculum will be based on the methods of Applied Scholastics, an arm of the cult that claims:

    Based on L. Ron Hubbard’s extensive technology, Applied Scholastics™ programs enable individuals to handle the literacy and education of the children and people in their communities.

    Aside from Establishment Clause problems, this is NUTS! It takes 15 seconds on google to find the Scientology connection here. The folks on the school board (or whomever is responsible) either didn’t know, or worse, did know.

    Then, of course, there is the whole “Anonymous” thing—I bet that pisses them off.

    Scientology is one scary cult, and they hate it when you call them out. In fact, they enjoy trying to intimidate those who speak out. All the more reason to do it, folks.

  • Syphilis!

    Southeast Michigan’s Genesee county is experiencing an outbreak of syphilis. The largest city in the county is Flint, made (in)famous in Michael Moore’s film Roger and Me.

    Syphilis is a nasty sexually transmitted disease with an interesting history. It may have originated in the New World. It was the subject of the infamous “Tuskegee Experiment”. It has enough different symptoms that it is sometimes called “the great imitator”.

    In 2007 there were 15 reported cases in the county; so far in 2008, there are 33. According to the county health department:

    Certain risk behaviors that increase the likelihood of contracting syphilis have been associated with this outbreak. These include having unprotected sex with multiple partners and participating in the exchange of sex for drugs or money. Transmission of syphilis is also being seen among men who have sex with men in Genesee County.

    About 13% of the county’s population is below the poverty line, and in Flint the number is over 26 percent. This is not a coincidence.

    As Michigan’s economy has continued to circle the drain, educational and health care systems have be strained and broken. Without access to information, jobs, and hope, STDs flourish.

    I received the notification in an email with the presumption that the outbreak is headed my way. As Michigan continues to suffer, we’ll see what walks in the door here. I’ll let you know.

  • Mike Adams – Hysterical Luddite of the Natural Food Movement

    Sometimes I just can’t get too angry about some particularly insane rant from a denialist. In this case, HIV/AIDS denialist, scientific medicine denialist and all-around crank Mike Adams rants about the prospect of food sterilization by irradiation:

    Let’s be blunt about this: The corporations running this country (which also run the U.S. government) want the U.S. food supply to be dead. They don’t want foods to be used as medicines, and they sure don’t want the natural medicines found in foods competing with their own patented pharmaceutical medicines (that just happen to earn them a whole lot more money than any food ever did).
    …
    The FDA, for its part, has for many decades conducted its natural medicine censorship campaign, whose only purpose is to deny the People access to accurate information about the healing properties of natural medicines found in foods and herbs.
    …
    I believe we must keep our food supply fresh and alive. (Sounds kinda obvious, huh?) And if there’s a little extra bacteria on the spinach, it’s nothing that a healthy body can’t handle anyway. Take some probiotics and avoid antibiotics, and you’ll be just fine. E. Coli is really only a threat to the health of individuals who have had their immune systems (or intestinal flora) destroyed by pharmaceuticals in the first place. There’s nothing wrong with some living organisms in your milk, on your almonds or on your spinach. Wash your food, get plenty of sunlight and avoid using antibiotics.

    The human body is NOT a sterile environment. To try to make our food supply sterile is insane, and anyone who supports the irradiation of the food supply is, in my opinion, supporting a policy of genocide against the American people. To destroy the vitality of the food supply is a criminal act of such immense evil that it stands alongside the worst crimes ever committed against humanity.

    You see, it’s not enough for them to poison our water (fluoride), poison our children (vaccines) and lie to us about the sun (skin cancer scare stories). Now they want to destroy our foods… and thereby take away any natural medicine options that might actually keep people healthy and free. Remember: A diseased population is an enslaved population.

    Now go eat your Big Mac, drink your Pepsi and don’t ask too many questions.

    Wow, talk about some paranoia, conspiracism, denialism, and crankery all rolled into one! I mean we’ve got fluoride paranoia, anti-vaccination denialism, germ theory denialism, skin cancer denialism (a new one!), combined with a completely inane fear about irradiation of food.

    I’ll just mention one thing that has elluded our hysterical little health ranger. Irradiation does not “kill” your food. In fact, if a cell is living a “lethal” dose of radiation doesn’t necessarily make the cell keel over and die. All it does is cause enough DNA damage so that cells can no longer reproduce. The bacteria are still there, which is different than sterilization by washing or autoclaving, they’re just incapable of reproduction, and guess what? Strawberries aren’t particularly mitotically active after they’ve grown and ripened. I have cells in my lab called feeder cells – fibroblasts irradiated so they can no longer divide – that are used to maintain embryonic stem cells in a pluripotent state that stay alive for weeks in culture. Irradiation of humans, for instance, is only lethal when cells that are susceptible to irradiation, like GI and marrow cells, are killed. Maybe too subtle a point for Adams, but I digress.

    This is such a wonderful rant and I can’t get angry over it because it just demonstrates how completely insane this particular denialist is. He doesn’t understand electromagnetic radiation and even has a piece up from a colleague on the the evils of microwaving (read cooking your food). The microwave is an evil Nazi invention that is responsible for everything from obesity to erectile dysfunction! Food irradiation is the greatest crime ever committed in history! The government wants to kill us all using clean cooked food!

    It’s denialism that comes pre-debunked, I love it.
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  • Expelled makes me sick, or it would if I were allowed to see it

    If you haven’t been keeping up, let me give you a quick heads up about this whole Expelled brouhaha.

    A bunch of lying Creationist cultists decided to make a film whining about how oppressed Creationist “scientists” are. Ben Stein got involved somehow. They hoodwinked a bunch of real scientists into talking to them. They excluded any scientists who were religious but accept evolution. They hyped the film to evangelicals, but barred reviewer, journalists, or the scientists who are in the film from seeing it. They expropriated copyrighted material. They lied a lot.

    But really, the part that bothers me the most is that they are trying to link evolutionary biology with the Holocaust, which is bad enough, but they don’t even believe it. It is strictly a scare-tactic. If they believed it, then perhaps they would be less anti-semitic.

    If you want to see the details and haven’t been keeping up, just use Expelled as a search term at ScienceBlogs, but start here.

  • National poetry month

    It’s all the buzz around here, so it’s my turn to share some interesting verse with you. Death and dying is a common topic of discussion with my patients and colleagues.

    Some of these are well-known to all, some of them aren’t, but I enjoy all of them.
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  • Read intelligently because the next crank you read may be your last

    A reader of ours ran into a questionable book ad, and being a good citizen, sent it on to me. I glanced at it, and it seemed to be the usual silly book purporting to cure all that ails, but on deeper inspection, it was much uglier.

    The book says that it “renders insulin and related medicines unnecessary within four days…”. This is a bit scary, not because this would be a bad thing, but because many diabetics are completely dependent on insulin to live. But, hey, maybe this is a good diet plan for type II diabetics and will at least help them reduce their need for meds. I mean, it could be, right? A quick trip to google disabused me of any thoughts of intellectual generosity.

    The Crank
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    Dr. Gabriel Cousens is the writer who promises to get you off insulin. While I applaud the idea of healing people, his claims are obviously suspicious. I mean, why are the rest of us so ignorant that we are blindly keeping diabetics on all these evil medicines?
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  • Women physicians—a waste of a good education?

    Think about your own experiences—you’re at a party or a restaurant, and someone you’re with says something obviously racist. You cringe, but given the setting, you can’t decide how to react; after a pause, you probably decide to say something. Now imagine you’re at meeting for work, and a senior partner says something racist. You want to say something, and you even know that under some circumstances there are laws behind you, but you don’t want to get branded a trouble maker and risk subtle (or not-so-subtle) discrimination.

    Now imagine you are sitting in the doctors’ lounge, and a senior physician says that sending women to medical school is a bit of a waste. The people sitting around the table make decisions every day about who to accept and reject to medical schools and residency programs, who to hire, who to promote, but hey, it’s just a group of guys having a cup of coffee. How would you react?

    In the early 1960’s, about 5% of medical American medical students were women. Now about half are. Women are first authors on more medical papers than ever, yet fill only about 11% of department chairs, and fill about 15% of full professorship positions.

    What’s behind this?

    There is literature studying the trends in academic and clinical medicine. I’ll point you to the reference below as a starting point, but I’d like to give you a front-line perspective.

    Something I hear every week is that women are likely to take time off for kids, and to work part-time, and that this somehow renders them less valuable. I’m not sure how this reasoning works. After all, doctors treat people of all ages, genders, and ethnicities, and doctors of different backgrounds often have different experiences and skills to bring to the table.

    But I can see how some of these ideas are perpetuated. Slots in medical schools, residencies, and fellowships are quite limited, and it costs much more to create a doctor than tuition could ever cover. Some take a false utilitarian view that because it costs so much to create a doctor, only those who can give back the most in time and money should be trained.

    Residencies are limited in both the number of residents they can take, and in how many hours these residents can work. When one becomes pregnant, it can burden the entire program.

    Well, this is the real world, and in the real world, half of us are women, and women are the ones who bear children. Also, the prime years for physician training are prime child-bearing years. Get used to it. If we think women have at least as much to offer as physicians as men, we better get used to the fact that they have “lady parts” and that this has real effects. Are we to limit the contributions women are allowed to make because a short period of their lives may or may not involve child-bearing?

    In clinical medicine (as opposed to academic medicine), there seem to be many more opportunities to work part-time than in the past. The less you work, the less you get paid, but the pay is still pretty good. But academia is still about productivity, and gaps are not acceptable.

    As a society and a profession, we have to decide to take the role of women seriously. If we demean women’s role in our profession, we may be more likely to demean our female patients and family members.

    Things are getting better, but we still have a long way to go.

    References

    Reshma Jagsi, M.D., D.Phil., Elizabeth A. Guancial, M.D., Cynthia Cooper Worobey, M.D., Lori E. Henault, M.P.H., Yuchiao Chang, Ph.D., Rebecca Starr, M.B.A., M.S.W., Nancy J. Tarbell, M.D., and Elaine M. Hylek, M.D., M.P.H. The “Gender Gap” in Authorship of Academic Medical Literature — A 35-Year Perspective. NEJM 355(3); 281-287. July 20, 2006.

  • Homeopathy Awareness Week?

    Skepchick has apparently discovered that, as of yesterday, this is World Homeopathy Awareness Week. (Yes, starts on a Thursday…they were going to start on Monday, but the succussion took a while.)

    Well, I can get behind a public service like this. My contribution will be a side-to-side comparison of a homeopathic treatment and a real one. Let’s pick a fun disease, say, heart attacks (the website I found offered homeopathic remedies for anthrax, but I think I’ll skip that).

    Unfortunately, this will require a brief tutorial on myocardial infarctions (MIs, heart attatcks). As is usual with my medical posts, this will be a gross oversimplification, but good enough to explain the issue.

    An MI occurs when part of your heart muscle stops receiving enough oxygenated blood. There are a variety of possible ways for this to happen, but most of the time we are talking about a typical acute MI, where a specific artery becomes suddenly occluded. When this happens, a person usually experiences chest pain, and, if the heart attack is serious enough, heart failure, arrhythmias, and death.

    Over the last couple of decades we’ve figured out how to interrupt the natural history of MIs. Clot-dissolving medications or angioplasty can be used to quickly open up an artery, hopefully saving the heart muscle from death. In addition, several medications can be used to help save lives. Beta-blockers, aspirin, angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors and statins have all been proved to help in an acute MI or to prevent further MIs. The literature to support these practices is quite voluminous but just to give you a sampling, see the references below.

    Now let’s examine the homeopath’s guide to heart attacks…
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  • Alternative medicne and the straight line to AIDS denialism

    In order to bring you your daily dose of science, the Great Seed Overlords must pay the bills. Like any other medium, one of the ways this is done is by selling ad space. Internet ad engines generally have some sort of algorithm that choses ads based on the page content, thereby targeting readers’ interests. If you doubt the sophistication of these methods, check your amazon.com suggestions, or your google search page.

    For a skeptical blogger, this can make for some interesting ads. One of mine is for a book called Water: For Health, For Healing, For Life, by F. Batmanghelidj, M.D. I’ve never heard of this guy, so I gave him a click (although I probably should have just googled it to avoid giving him my business—as usual, I’m not providing links to the woo-meister so you’ll just have to google it).

    What I found is an example of how the rejection of science and adoption of woo can lead inexorably toward some pretty nasty denialism.

    The book advertised offers these promises:

    Based on more than twenty years of clinical and scientific research into the role of water in the body, a pioneering physician and the acclaimed author of Your Body’s Many Cries for Water shows how water – yes, water! – can relieve a stunning range of medical conditions. Simply adjusting your fluid and salt intakes can help you treat and prevent dozens of diseases, avoid costly prescription drugs, and enjoy vibrant new health. Discover:

    # The different signals of thirst and chronic dehydration in you body
    # How much water and salt you need each day to stay healthy
    # Why other beverages, including tea, coffee, and sodas, cannot be substituted for water
    # How to naturally lessen, even eliminate, symptoms of asthma and allergies
    # How to help prevent life-threatening conditions such as heart failure, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and cancer
    # How hypertension may be treated naturally, without diuretics or medication
    # Why water is the key to losing weight without dieting
    # How to hydrate your skin to combat premature aging

    This book will save you from medical ignorance and killer chemicals that are used in health problems caused by chronic unintentional dehydration.

    So, the usual woo—lots of promises based on nothing. I’d let it go at that, but I was curious about this Batmanghelidj guy. The first hit I got on google was—surprise!—his website full of wacky pseudoscience. First is the hilarious link to a 20 year old NYT article about his supposed water cure.

    Then comes the denialist literature. Provided “free, as a public service” a bunch of AIDS denialist screeds. Thrown in for good measure was some cholesterol-denialism. His AIDS paper is actually humorous, or would be if it weren’t for, you know, AIDS. He talks quite a bit about semen and “rectal manipulation”. This is from a guy who, unfortunately, spent a lot of time in a Persian prison.

    The point here is that once you abandon science you are open to anything. This may sound like a slippery slope fallacy, but it’s not. Abandoning scientific thought allows you to believe any idea a credulous mind can invent. Sometimes it’s sad, sometimes it’s funny, but more often than not it’s dangerous.

  • Skeptics' Circle #84—read it today!

    The new Skeptics’ Circle is up at Archeoporn. Never miss an episode!