Denialism Blog

Month: January 2009

  • Dr. Egnor: taking medicocrity to a whole new level

    I hate to do this to you but I have to fisk a fisking. You see, Dr. Michael Egnor, the creationist neurosurgeon, was a bit miffed about my takedown of a particularly idiotic post of his.

    For those of you who left your program at the gate, Egnor is a (apparently competent) neurosurgeon in New York. He’s known on the internets for having joined up with the creationist cult pseudoscientific organization, the Discovery Institute. Just as DI has little to say of relevance to the history of life on Earth, Egnor has little of relevance to say about medical science, as far as I can tell.

    The thing is, his skills as a neurosurgeon are likely to be unaffected by his religious beliefs. Not so his critical thinking skills. As I explored in the aforementioned piece, Egnor has bought into the garbage spewed forth by some of the worst quacks on the Continent. While I happen to think his religious beliefs are somewhere between cute and silly, I find his medical beliefs (and that is what they are—beliefs) execrable. And so, I jotted down some of my thoughts about the ways in which his thinking is muddled.

    His response to my response? More logical fallacies. More smoke and mirrors.

    I would have loved to see him try to defend his ideas on facts. You know, things you can measure, or at least conceive of measuring. Maybe a plea from him to look beyond whatever narrow worldview I hold, to look at a big picture that I’m missing.

    But no, he goes straight for one of my favorites, the non sequitur. Let me explain.
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  • Open letter to the protesters at the corner

    (note: i didn’t go out except to the hospital, and had to rely on what my upset friends and family reported)

    Dear Protesters,

    As someone who loves our American democracy, I value your right to protest. I would even fight to protect it. Still, I wish you would exercise some common decency.

    Today, when you came to my neighborhood, obstructing the busiest intersection, you caused a great deal of fear and confusion. While I understand that many of you are probably upset about the war in Gaza-Israel, there is no Israeli consulate here. There is no significant Israeli population at all in fact. There are, however, thousands of Jewish families, whose homes and synagogues are immediately adjacent to your protest. When you claim to be against Israel and not Jews, your protestations seem disingenuous, given your choice to terrorize our—Jewish, not Israeli—neighborhood.

    You will no doubt object to the loaded term “terrorize” but it is hard to see it otherwise. When my baby sitter, who escaped Azerbaijan with her family to come to America, sees “Death to Jews, Death to Israel”, she is scared. When my patient who survived the Holocaust is driving to Havdalah services at the synagogue sees swastikas in front of her supermarket, she is scared. When my daughter asks, “what is that?” what would you have me tell her?

    “They are mad about a war, honey.”

    “Where, Daddy?”

    “In another country, honey.”

    “Do they hate Jews, Daddy?”

    “I don’t know, honey.”

    When Arab Islamic terrorists attack America, I do not come to your neighborhood to blame you. When Gaza launches rockets into southern Israel, I do not come to you on behalf of my cousins there. I know that you are not Hamas. You are not terror. You are my neighbor. We are Americans. Our values, our desires are the same.

    Or so I thought.

    Now I don’t know.

    Please, if you wish to make a statement, do so, but don’t Balkanize our community. Don’t bring foreign conflicts to my corner. Protest in front of the Israeli consulate to ask for a halt to the invasion, the bombing. Protest in front of the Egyptian consulate to ask them to open their borders to Palestinian refugees. Write to Hamas and its supporters asking it to renounce terror, and recognize its neighbors’ (not just Israel, but Fatah as well) right to exist.

    But don’t come to my corner, my deli, my temple. I can’t help you. And now I don’t like you.

    And that saddens me.

  • ScienceOnline09—let's get moving!

    ScienceOnline09 is rapidly approaching, and I’m very excited about my “geek-cation”.

    I’ll be co-moderating a session on anonymity with Abel from TerraSig, and I’ll be leading a session on Blogging 101 at which you can actually start a real blog. w00t!

    I’m also hoping to talk some people into joining me for a podcast, preferably one that involves the participants drinking.

    If you’re coming to the conference, visit the links above to discuss the sessions. If you’re not coming but want to feel like you’re there, were going to be doing lots of live blogging.

  • The war has begun…

    …and I’m just itchin’ for a fight. The medical “De-lightenment”, that movement to marginalize the role of science in medicine, has just made a strategic error. Like other weak movements, they’ve formed unwise alliances. Orac reports that so-called mainstream altmed folks like Andrew Weil and Deepak Chopra have now made friends with the more obviously wacko altmed gurus, such as Gary Null.

    Perhaps “friends” is pushing it, but these supposedly educated physicians are actually citing HIV-denialist Null as a reliable source for health information. I’m tempted to coin a new internet Law here, perhaps The Chopra Blunder:

      “In an argument regarding medical science, when a person cites Gary Null as a source, the argument is over, they have lost, and anything they say in the future may be safely ignored. And they may be laughed out of the room without guilt.”

    As an educated physician, I have the ability to comb the medical literature with tools such as Ovid or PubMed. Hell, even Google Scholar isn’t half bad. If I have to resort to quoting a charismatic TV health guru with a fake PhD who thinks that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS, perhaps my argument wasn’t that great to start with.

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  • Antidepressants, physical dependence, and semantics

    Antidepressants are a very useful class of medications. With the introduction of the first modern antidepressant, fluoxetine (Prozac) in the U.S. in the late 1980’s, the pharmacologic treatment of depression has undergone a revolution (and an enduring controversy). Older classes of antidepressants were often effective, but came with a host of unpleasant toxicities—MAOIs can lead to potentially fatal interactions with certain other drugs, and even foods, and tricyclic antidepressants, when misused, can lead to fatal overdoses. Prozac, the first of a new class of medications known as SSRIs (later followed by similar classes such as SNRI’s, etc.) appeared quite safe and effective. Side effects were minimal, and overdoses were rarely fatal. But as newer SSRIs were introduced, it became apparent that while treatment with these drugs was quite safe, stopping these drugs was not always pleasant.

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  • Happy New Year! Now who are you again?

    I’ve been spending a lot of time with family and friends lately, something I don’t often get the chance to do. And while I’m not happy about the reason for it, I’m still thankful for all the friends I sometimes forget I have.

    One thing I found out from many of my friends is that if I post a piece on my facebook page, they’ll read it. But they won’t necessarily come here to read my other stuff. Why not?

    The ongoing discussion here in the blogosphere sometimes needs an interruption, a break to remember what it is we do here, if anything. I’m not big on “Top 10” or other similar New Years posts, so for 2009, I’m going to explain to you who the hell I am, what my writing is about, and why you really should read it. Really.

    First of all, blog reading 101. Blogs, a shortening of “weblog”, is an online writing form existing somewhere in the space between self-absorbed adolescent diary and journalism. Blogs themselves have certain conventions that print media don’t. For example, when reading a blog post, and encountering a link, this link often leads to another blog or article that expands on the underlined idea, without having to make a major digression. Blogs can also be read in rss feeds, which is an easy format for glancing through your favorite writers.

    Anyway…

    The Hoofnagle brothers (those handsome lads pictured at the left) started the denialism blog quite a while ago because they saw a pattern. Certain issues in science and the news seemed to attract a certain type of wacko. For example, there is a large and somewhat influential community that denies that HIV causes AIDS. This pissed them off. What the Hoofnagles recognized is that this “denialism” may infect many issues (AIDS, global warming, the Holocaust, evolution, to name a few), but the tactics, the logical errors, remain the same. People who deny the Holocaust happened use the same tactics as those who claim AIDS is something other than HIV infection. Those of us who follow these (very harmful and often hateful) movements have noticed how the people involved use certain tactics over and over to try to show the public how “reasonable” they are.

    The study of denialism roots out these tactics, reveals these patterns, and shows these folks to be what they really are—charlatans, hate-mongers, corporate shills, and sometimes just poor, deluded souls.

    I started writing myself almost two years ago at a blog I called White Coat Underground. I didn’t have a plan so much as to just write about whatever interested me. Apparently my writing interested others as well, because the readership grew.
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