Denialism Blog

Month: December 2008

  • Chuck E. Choke 'em!

    If you’re looking for some fun, family fighting, the place to go is Chuck E. Cheese’s. Who knew? The Journal reports:

    In Brookfield, Wis., no restaurant has triggered more calls to the police department since last year than Chuck E. Cheese’s.

    Officers have been called to break up 12 fights, some of them physical, at the child-oriented pizza parlor since January 2007. The biggest melee broke out in April, when an uninvited adult disrupted a child’s birthday party. Seven officers arrived and found as many as 40 people knocking over chairs and yelling in front of the restaurant’s music stage, where a robotic singing chicken and the chain’s namesake mouse perform.

    Bring on the science!

    The environment also brings out what security experts call the “mama-bear instinct.” A Chuck E. Cheese’s can take on some of the dynamics of the animal kingdom, where beasts rush to protect their young when they sense a threat.

    Stepping in when a parent perceives that a child is being threatened “is part of protective parenting,” says Frank Farley, a psychologist at Temple University and former president of the American Psychological Association. “It is part of the species — all species, in fact — in the animal kingdom,” he says. “We do it all of the time.”

    Of course they blame the alcohol. But how else does one tolerate Chuck E. Cheese’s, and don’t we all love that delicious wine on tap?

    …CEC also took alcohol off the menu at a Chuck E. Cheese’s in Flint, Mich., in February, a month after police responded to a fight there involving as many as 80 people.

  • Terrorism denialism

    I was reading two articles on disparate subjects and found them oddly linked in my mind. The first former terrorist Bill Ayers’ explanation of why he didn’t respond when Obama was smeared by association and the second P. Michael Conn and James V. Parker writing for the WaPo about the escalation in recent years of animal rights terrorism.

    What struck me about both these articles is the interesting divide between how terrorists justify their behaviors and diminish their objectives of striking fear into their opponents, and the reality of what the subjects of such acts perceive. Conn and Parker are quite right to use the label “terrorist”, as even though the ALF has been unsuccessful in actually killing someone so far, they’ve come close, demonstrated carelessness for human life, and ultimately are using acts of violence to intimidate others into changing their behavior.

    Now frequently AR terrorism been downplayed in discussions on this blog as property damage, or mere economic assaults on research science. As an example of this mentality, listen to Ayers downplay the Weather Undergrounds violent activity:
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  • Why am I here again?

    Perhaps because I don’t blog anonymously, or maybe for other reasons, I don’t write that much about my personal life. That kind of writing can be self-important, insipid, and boring. But it can also have real power. A number of the anonymous bloggers here describe the intersection of the scientific life and family life with powerful relevance. Still, that’s not my talent, and I don’t do it much. One of my med school classmates, when I showed him one of my first pieces, said, “that’s good, Pal, but how do you feel?” That has always stuck with me (thanks, S!), and it’s in that spirit, and not the spirit of kvetching, that I’d like you to know that doctors are human. Yeah, I know, no surprise there, but still, sometimes patients forget it, and more important, sometimes doctors forget it. Besides, since no one reads the blogs on Sunday, it’s a good day for self-reflection.

    I come from a family of very smart people. Very smart—sometimes I feel like the village idiot (but in the best possible way). They are intellectually active professionals, all have advanced degrees, and many of them are musicians as well. Along with smarts, my family has been endowed with some unusual medical problems, so even the non-medical folks have used their formidable intellects to learn a little medicine. These are not “google scholars”—these are the real thing.

    So when my family challenges me about my skepticism, I have to take it seriously, not just because they’re my family and I love them, but because unlike some of the vacuous trolls that haunt this site, they’re very smart and well-informed.

    I have a number of good friends and family members with cancer. Is my hypertrophied skeptical sense depriving me of sharing with them “other ways of healing”? My sister, who is pretty good at reminding me that I don’t actually know everything, challenged me pretty rigorously on my medical skepticism. Of course, my wife and cousin had to help her out. These aren’t garden-variety challenges to my beliefs. A random blog troll can bring up the same canards and fallacies over and over, but when the people you love use good reasoning and good knowledge to call you out, you gotta take it a little more seriously. When the people you love have nasty diseases, it’s got that much more gravitas. Those of us who devote our intellectual resources to science-based medicine are often accused of lacking compassion, a charge I try very hard to avoid, not because it’s false (and it is), but because compassion is the great immeasurable, the ars longa in the vita brevis. Without compassion, science-based medicine might as well hand over the keys to the reiki shamans, the homeopaths, and other smiling quacks, because no matter how right you are, a doctor who lacks compassion can’t be an effective healer.

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  • Carnivalia, blog business, etc.

    Carnival of the Liberals is up at Capitol Annex

    Skeptics’ Circle 101 is up at Ionian Enchantment.

    You may have noticed the Friend Feed widget on the sidebar. I’ve added this as a sort of “mini-blog”, where we can post brief links or stories. I’d say it’s just out of beta at this point, but it seems to be working out. I’ll probably post links and carnivals there from now on.

    You may also have noticed the HONcode badge on the left sidebar. We receive our HONcode certification several weeks ago. We do our best to comply with the HONcode principles, which you can read about on their website. Basically, HON is an international organization to help ensure quality of online medical resources. They do not screen for content as such, but ask sites to adhere to certain principles, and they are generally pretty assertive about the certification process (it’s unclear how good they are about de-certifiying sites that violate the principles).

    Have a great weekend!

  • The Gay Mob Gets God's Goat

    I was tickled today to see a full-page ad running in the Times (Page A13) asking readers to reject the “Mob Veto.” What mob veto? The gay mob veto! The gays are engaging in “violence and intimidation” against the Mormons because of their support for Proposition 8 (California’s gay marriage ban.)

    I never thought I’d live to see a gay mob. Yes, there are many public events in San Francisco with many gay people, but they’re never violent, even when wearing scary biker gear.

    Maybe I take this more seriously if the authors of this advertisement (the Catholic League and other usual suspects) would take out a full page ad against the evangelical mob, groups like the Westboro Baptist Church.

  • tobacco and mental illness

    ResearchBlogging.orgAnyone who works with the mentally ill knows that they smoke more than other people. In fact, people with mental illness (hereafter, MI, not to be confused with myocardial infarction) are about twice as likely to smoke as people without mental illness, with smoking rates of 60-90%. One of my favorite stats is that “44% of the cigarettes smoked in the United States are by individuals with a psychiatric or substance-abuse disorder.” People with MI are also heavier smokers, and may even be better at extracting nicotine from the cigs that they smoke.

    Studies have shown that people with MI can in fact quit, but from a front line perspective, this is really, really tough. In fact, quit rates aren’t all that great for people without the added burden of mental illness, so any barriers to quitting are formidable ones.

    The reasons for high smoking rates in schizophrenics and others with serious mental illness are both socio-psychological and physiologic, with nicotine acting on CNS nicotine receptors and dopamine pathways. Smoking is sometimes viewed as a form of “self-medication”, but it can be difficult to differentiate the symptoms of nicotine withdrawal from symptoms attributable to the pre-existing mental illness.

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  • Smokers—what should we do with them?

    We sometimes treat them like second-class citizens. Or do we? Certainly smokers hate it when we force them out into the cold for a butt. Here in Michigan, we’re thinking about restricting smoking in a lot of public places. There benefits are supposed to accrue to three groups: the smokers themselves, their co-workers who are exposed to second-hand smoke, and the public, who pays more for health care because of smoking.

    I asked a simplistic question once about whether smokers should pay higher insurance premiums, that doesn’t really bring the same benefits to everyone as a more comprehensive approach. Now, outlawing smoking altogether seems foolish—you know, prohibition, black market, etc. But is it unreasonable to limit smoking to, essentially, the someones own private space?

    How do we justify a potential limitation of individual liberties? Smoking is the biggest cause of premature (and preventable) death in the U.S., leading to about half-a-million deaths yearly. Data from 1998 showed smoking was responsible for about 76 billion dollars in health care expenditures, plus productivity loses of about 92 billion dollars per year. Smoking sickens and kills people, and costs are (very crappy) economy a lot of money. For both economic and public health reasons, we must make smoking cessation a paramount societal goal.

    How do we do this?

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  • Where do you get your mercury?

    There is an ongoing discussion amongst our Sciblings regarding our German counterparts at scienceblogs.de. Apparently they have some odd folks as science bloggers over there, including people who think ayurvedic heavy metals are good for you. In the tradition of countering speech with speech, I’m giving you this repost. More to come, I’m sure. –PalMD

    ResearchBlogging.orgThe Infectious Disease Promotion Movement (let by such intellectual luminaries as Jenny McCarthy) may be worried about “toxins” in vaccines, but the real problem may hiding in plain sight.

    Today’s issue of JAMA has an interesting study of Ayurvedic (traditional Indian) medicines. It turns out that many of them contain a significant amount of toxic heavy metals.
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