Denialism Blog

Author: denialism_bv2x6a

  • Speaking out against quacks

    In light of recent discussions in this corner of teh intertubes, I’ve been thinking about anti-quackery writing. To what extent does our debunking actually feed the ducks?

    Many of us don’t link to crank sites—that makes sense, since click-throughs probably put money in their pockets.

    But speaking out works. Most people don’t know medicine. It’s a profession that takes years to learn. People count on information from experts, and most doctors are too busy working to put together slick ads for their services (that plus the whole ethics thing). That leaves the field wide-open to any idiot who wants to take your money.

    The world is filled with people who believe, or are at risk of believing, in “other ways of knowing“, eschewing science for cult medicine. There are as many types of cult medicine as there are hucksters—there is only one kind of science-based medicine, and science is really the only appropriate way to approach healing. Science, of course, does not exclude compassion and empathy. The doctor-patient relationship is critical to applying science to medicine.

    But quacks are crooks, plain and simple. The HIV denialists, anti-vaccine wackos, and homeopaths want you to join their cults and give them your money.

    Many people are looking for good information on health. They may be easily sucked in by crooks, but we can get them back. That doesn’t mean we have to go easy on the like of Joe Mercola and Gary Null. We need to call them out for being the immoral, unethical, evil swindlers that they are.

  • In bizarre religions ritual, cult members murder their child

    Hat-tip to PZ for shining some light onto local idiocy. The basic story is an old one—family kills kid by refusing medical care for a curable condition. In this case, it’s a child with type I diabetes. This hits close to home for two reasons: I’m an internist, and my nephew is a type I diabetic, diagnosed at four years of age.

    In the case above, an innocent child was killed by ignorance. Perhaps there is a preacher somewhere behind this murder. I’d like to know. The parents prayed for their ailing daughter, but “apparently didn’t have enough faith.” The child died of diabetic ketoacidosis—her death was likely slow and painful. No one would have confused her state for a minor problem.

    I can’t tell you anything about the state of mind of these parents. I’m sure they loved their child. But whether they were delusional, or belonged to some Christian cult, they murdered their child just as sure as if they’d put a gun to her head.

    There is no ethical principle that can be used to justify this behavior. Parental autonomy just isn’t important enough to justify murder.

    Once upon a time, kids became diabetics, and either starved to death or died of ketoacidosis. Then insulin was discovered. People used it and lived. And people still believed in God. What is so different about this couple’s God, that It demanded a child’s life?

    Nothing.

    God did not come to their house, sit down for dinner, and tell them not to treat their child. God did not send a registered letter, or leave their name in the Bible with instructions to stay away from doctors. These are all human beliefs and human actions, and as such, are subject to human laws.

  • Science—the only way to view reality

    Science is the investigation of reality. Reality is, by definition, everything. It is all we can see, all we can measure. It is, for all practical purposes, a god; it is omnipresent, omnipotent. The only tool that successfully measures and describes reality is science (including mathematics).

    So why the desire to placate theologians and theocrats in scientific discussions? What can religion offer the exploration of reality?

    The only thing it has to offer is a potentially consistent moral code; and that isn’t unique to religion. Religion can offer beauty, song, art, poetry, fellowship, but it cannot offer insight into physical reality. Those who say it can are either deceiving themselves, or deceiving others.

    That isn’t to say religion is inherently at odds with science. Human beings are very capable of simultaneously holding mutually contradictory thoughts—it is indeed possible to be a religious scientist, but not if the carefully constructed wall between these magisteria falls. As soon as religious thought starts to influence scientific investigation (outside, perhaps, the realm of ethics), science is destroyed.

    There is no way to “deal” with Creationism and other cults; there is no way to make the message of science more palatable to them. They don’t buy it. Telling them that six days could mean 3 billion years or that God isn’t susceptible to empiric investigation is lying to them and lying to ourselves. Anything humans can conceive of is open to scientific investigation, including God. Nothing is “outside science”. Some Creationists are susceptible to deprogramming—and that is the “wedge” for rational people to exploit.

    Sure, we should be polite to people of (almost) all beliefs. Politeness does not include allowing them to destroy our school cirricula, compromise science, or change our secular Constitution.

    God will not educate our children, cure disease, or fuel our society. It’s all up to us, and making nice with those who vehemently believe otherwise will only slow progress.

    Scientists shouldn’t look to God for answers; God should look to science for answers.

  • Cult medicine vs. professional medicine

    So-called alternative medicine beliefs are an interesting and perhaps inevitable phenomenon. They make use of uniquely human qualities such as our intelligence, our pattern-recognition abilities, and our tendency to over-estimate how well we understand things. Most “science”, including medicine, relies on similar human qualities, but modern science has made some improvements. Medicine used to be based on observation mixed with superstition and other non-evidence based ways of understanding the world. Many of these systems were internally consistent, but ultimately failed to accurately describe the real world.

    The gradual transition of medical science (the use of evidence to evaluate medical practice) has revolutionized medicine. We no longer rely on the glorified shamanism that existed before the mid-20th century.

    This also means that medicine has become a true “profession”; it isn’t something you can just “pick up”, hang out a shingle, and practice from your front room. I’ve taken to calling practices that aren’t evidence-based “cult medicine“.
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  • Herb prevents sudden death–or your money back!

    I gotta admit, this is one of my favorites. I was browsing around the alternative health corners of the web when I came across a lovely site peddling “alternative” remedies. My gaze was immediately drawn to a link for “shock and emergency: rescue remedies”.

    For a physician, shock means something in particular–something very bad. Shock is a medical state wherein multiple organs stop working for a variety of possible reasons, such as severe infection or physical trauma. Patients with shock die quickly without immediate medical attention. So I followed the link to the product page:
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  • Flu woo, immuno-woo, and vaccine woo–all in one!11!


    BPSDB    Once again, I’m migrating more popular posts from the old blog. If this is a repeat for you, sorry. –PalMD
    Wow. I mean, wow. I was googling some flu information, and one of the first hits was so fundamentally wrong about all matters medical that I actually felt ill. The dangerous title is “Building a Child’s Immunity the Natural Way“. It’s wasn’t clear to me what this meant, so I had to read the damned thing. It starts out pretty bad:

    New Jersey’s Public Health Council gave its citizens a Christmas present that will not please the health-conscious, as it became the first state in the nation to require flu shots for preschoolers.

    So, if your “health-conscious”, you are against mandatory vaccination. Hmm…

    Vaccines are dangerous for the health of any individual, but when administered to small children in their important developmental years, they are especially damaging. Medical “experts” have not even determined the correct dosages for small children, who in this regard are not just small adults. When we talk about daycare, we are talking about babies as young as a few months of age. Additionally, not only do vaccines usually contain mercury, but many lack effectiveness and can cause problems with the development of the child’s natural immune system (emphasis mine).

    Look, I’m not going to address all of the anti-vaccination canards present in this piece, other than refer you to other excellent sources. Two things really get me though: lies, and this “immunity” thing.

    Even if the evidence of a relationship between vaccine use and autism is disregarded, there are more debilitating results of vaccine administration to children. Due to the availability of new health information, a growing number of scientists and doctors have realized the problems revealed by recent immunology research and have begun to challenge the foundational tenets of vaccination. Because it seems that vaccines have eradicated many diseases in the last 100 years, many doctors have been reticent to question them. Such claims have mainly been based on epidemic studies rather than on clinical evidence.

    For example, Europe never used the polio vaccines, yet it experienced the same rise and fall of polio cases as did the U.S.

    That, my dear reader, is a lie. OK, if you are being generous, it is just ignorance, but I find it hard to be generous, given a 3 second stop at google will take you over to the World Health Organization and explain its polio eradication campaign in Europe. After a lie like that, it’s hard to believe anything that follows.

    Also, many diseases that were believed to be wiped out have re-appeared under different names. As an example, spinal meningitis and polio have almost the same exact symptoms. There have never been any studies that proved the vaccines actually did cause the eradication of any disease; it has only been assumed by the fact that that the epidemics seemed to have ceased. The CDC uses the concept that a relationship does not prove causality to downplay the autism-thimerosal link, yet ironically, they don’t apply the same standard to the relationship between vaccination usage and the end of an epidemic.

    That isn’t just “moving the goalposts“; that’s digging them up, burning them, and scattering the ashes. We all know epidemiologic studies have their limitations, but it’s pretty clear to the scientific community, beyond a reasonable doubt, that vaccines successfully prevent disease. (By the way, “spinal meningitis” and polio are completely unalike, and, believe it or not, we actually have tests to tell us what organism is causing an infection. Welcome to the early 20th century!)

    All vaccines depress our immune functions. The chemicals in the vaccines depress our immune system; the virus present depresses immune function; and the foreign DNA/RNA from animal tissues depresses immunity. Studies have found that some metabolic functions were significantly reduced after vaccinations were given and did not return to normal for months. Other indicators of immune system depression included reduced lymphocyte viability, neutrophil hyper-segmentation, and a reduced white cell count. So we are trading a small immune depression for immunity to one disease, our only defense against all known disease for a temporary immunity against one disease, usually an innocuous childhood disease. Vaccines have been linked to AIDS and other immunodeficient disorders as well. The trade-off is not at all fair and not worth the risk.

    Wow. This is so damned stupid. And dangerous. First, what does this phrase “immune depression” mean? I don’t know. They do give a hint futher down, throwing around big words like “neutrophil hypersegmentation” but that’s pretty meaningless as an observation, and without references is completely useless. Then the nice scare tactic of vaccines and AIDS. Nice. Really nice. OK, time to explain how vaccines actually work.

    Vaccines and the Immune System

    This is really cool…much cooler than the cultists would like you to believe. It is teh über-kool. And please forgive the over-simplification.

    We need an example: let’s take polio vaccine—you know, the one they never used in Europe when the WHO wiped out polio in Europe. We have two choices, but the one we use the most in N.A. and Europe is the inactivated polio vaccine (IPV). Both of the polio vaccines have advantages and disadvantages, but hey, I only have so much time.

    To make IPV, polio viruses are grown in the lab, then “inactivated” with a chemical. This renders them non-infectious. Then they are injected under the skin, which is where the fun starts…
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  • 4000 means nothing

    It means nothing to those who have lost someone. One is the only number that matters. The one brother my friend lost. The one son my patient lost. The one child a nameless Iraqi mother lost.

    People say they find solace in God. Bullshit. People say they find solace in heroism and valor. Bull-fucking-shit. Those left behind are still devastated. Lives are left unfinished. Valor could have taken place on a street corner or in a factory.

    I’m not going to make friends with this post. I don’t know the answers. I don’t even know if we should be leaving Iraq soon. What I do know is that puppet-masters in Washington committed an unforgivable sin. They didn’t know what they didn’t know, and acted on their arrogant ignorance sending kids to kill and die and break. There was ignorance, there was deception. There will be undeserved forgiveness given by people looking for a way, any way, to gain meaning from loss.

    4000 means nothing. Each 1 means something. The larger the number, the harder it is for someone to understand, a face lost in a crowd. Each person has a name, and whether it’s carved into a tombstone or scribbled onto a waiting list at a VA clinic, someone knows that person, someone is left behind. The ripples spread from each broken body and broken mind.

    I’m forgiving no one, for the dead, the living, the broken, the deserted, for the fact that people will hate me for writing these words.

    Wars break people.

  • What a horrible idea

    This idea is so bad that I might even agree with a Scientologist about it (OK, not really). A company I will not name or link to has developed a home genetic test for bipolar disorder. What could be so horrible about making it easier for people to diagnose diseases?

    Well, first there is a problem of “begging the question”: does the test do what it is purported to do?

    (Test X)™ – tests for two mutations in the GRK3 gene that are associated with bipolar disorder. Patients who have either of these two mutations, are Caucasian, of Northern European ancestry and have a family history of bipolar disorder, are three times more likely to have bipolar disorder.

    Three times more likely than whom?
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  • Wifi Woo Strikes in Sebastopol

    By way of AP and BoingBoing, one can find this post by Dale Daugherty on O’Reilly Radar about the newest attack of the tinfoil-hat-wifi-radiation brigade:

    Our town, Sebastopol, had passed a resolution in November to permit a local Internet provider to provide public wireless access. This week, fourteen people showed up at a City Council meeting to make the claim that wireless caused health problems in general and to them specifically. These emotional pleas made the Council rescind its previous resolution.

    Ah, California! There’s good stuff out there explaining this breed of woo, but these activists still have traction because they’re very good at spreading fear and uncertainty. For instance, what do you do as a county supervisor (perhaps with no education in science since college) and a mob shows up at the meeting with signs that say “Just Say No to Radiation”?

    Or “Money Talks, We Get CANCER.”

    Strongly motivated, vocal, organized minority groups can have a powerful effect on politics. And this is irresponsible for several reasons–this anti-antenna movement has grabbed on to health and safety issues to mask their underlying goal: to make the neighborhoods more beautiful by removing antennae!

    As such, it is great example of how health and safety concerns and the precautionary principle can be used to simply push other political motivations. Cato and AEI could use this post as footnote 1 in any argument against health and safety legislation.

  • Quack Miranda Warning

    “These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.”

    This “Quack Miranda Warning” is on every just about every woo-meister’s website. I see dozens of patients every day, and I never Mirandize them, so whats the deal?

    There are three ways to look at this: the truthful way, the sinister way, and the bat-shit insane way.

  • Truth: Anyone who wants to sell you something that’s a load of crap must use this statement to cover themselves legally.
  • Sinister: Variation of above–someone wants to sell you something that you are supposed to believe is medically useful, but at the same time they tell you in fine print that it is not medically useful. When it doesn’t work, they don’t get sued. I wonder why anyone would buy something with that disclaimer attatched to it? When I treat someone for a medical problem, I pretty much say that I intend to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent a disease. Why would I say otherwise? It would be a lie. Also, who would go to see a doctor that told you that they didn’t intend to diagnose or treat disease. The whole thing is bizarre.
  • Bat-shit insane: The FDA and Big Pharma are in cahoots with the AMA to keep you from learning all the simple ways to treat diseases. They want your money, and they’ll do anything they can to get it from you, including suppressing the knowledge that anyone can learn to heal cancer.

    • I can’t really help the people who believe #3, but people who are willing to suspend their paranoia should read #’s 1 and 2 a few times. Unless you’re being arrested, no one should be reading you your rights. The Quack Miranda Statement is the red flag that should send you running.