Denialism Blog

Denialism Blog

  • Medscape reversal—Gardasil is great again

    Last week, Orac reported on Medscape’s execrable article regarding Gardasil. As a reminder, the article spouted every antivaccination lie imaginable. The link subsequently disappeared, although a poll later appeared that parroted the article’s misinformation.

    Well, today Medscape has a new Gardasil article. It’s definitely an improvement, but still has some problems…
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  • Swag-a-licious

    OK, here’s the deal. Seed Media Group, the folks who run this joint, want to give you free stuff. They are taking a reader survey and to encourage you to participate, they are giving away a bunch of cool Apple stuff. The good news is, you guys have been a bunch of losers and haven’t been doing the survey, so those who’ve entered so far have a better chance of winning something. I’d do it myself, but the damned Overlords won’t let me.

    So go and enter, and if you win, let me know how much you like your free iPod, iPhone, or whatever.

  • Galileo, Semmelweis, and YOU!

    To wear the mantle of Galileo, it is not enough to be persecuted: you must also be right.
    –Robert Park

    I used to spend a lot of time on the websites of Joe Mercola and Gary Null, the most influential medical cranks of the internets (to call them “quacks” would imply that they are real doctors, but bad ones—I will no longer dignify them with the title of “quack”). I’ve kept away from them for a while in the interest of preserving my sanity. Unfortunately, Orac reminded me this week of the level searingly stupid and dangerous idiocy presented by these woo-meisters.
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  • Privacy Cagematch—DHS vs. HHS

    OK, this post gets a big IANAL stamped across it. I don’t know the legal ins and outs here (and I’m not sure if anyone does), but the new announcement by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) regarding laptop computers puts physicians and other health care providers in a bit of a spot.

    HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) is the law that governs the privacy of your medical information. It is very, very detailed, and requires quite a bit from your doctor. You’ve signed a form at the office of every provider you’ve visited that notifies you of your privacy rights. I cannot discuss your care in a hospital elevator. I can’t send you an email regarding your health without making it very clear that any information in the email cannot be considered secure. I cannot disclose your health information to anyone else except under very specific and limited circumstances. HIPAA has radically changed the way we do things with health information (sometimes for the better, sometimes not).

    Moving on to Homeland Security—DHS agents may, for any reason or none at all, seize my laptop and demand any security or encryption codes. My laptop not infrequently contains information covered by HIPAA (known as PHI, or Protected Health Information). Because of that, my laptop is secured via HIPAA-compliant security measures. Under the new DHS guidelines, I can be required to hand over my laptop and help officers access the information without any suspicion of wrong-doing. We have a little problem here…
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  • To NY City

    This is meetup weekend for the sciencebloggers and remember, we’re planning to hang out with readers at 2:00 pm on Saturday, August 9, at Social (795 8th Ave).

    Drop by, say hello, and meet the scibs!

  • Is Obama THE ONE?

    Is Obama the Antichrist? No, according to Tim LaHaye, co-author of the Left Behind series, who told the Journal that:

    “The antichrist isn’t going to be an American, so it can’t possibly be Obama. The Bible makes it clear he will be from an obscure place, like Romania,” the 82-year-old author said.

    Phew! Maybe it’s George Soros, then? He’s from Hungary. Here’s a list of Romanian candidates.

  • The Arrogance of Power—The Corrupt Mayor of Motown

    I usually don’t stray into strictly political issues, but today’s action by the Mayor of Detroit has me fuming. I’ve been avoiding blogging on this topic, but Kwame Kilpatrick always has a new criminal exploit fueled by his overwhelming arrogance. His latest idiocy will land him in jail for the night. Here’s the basic story.

    Kilpatrick is a bright and imposing young man (elected at 31) who had an unlimited political future. Detroit has a long history of producing brilliant African American political leaders, and Kilpatrick comes out of this tradition. His mother is Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick is chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, and his father was also deeply involved in local politics. He is a law school graduate, a former college athlete, and a former state representative. His youth and charisma have allowed him to communicate to both young and old citizens of Detroit and his constituents have been reluctant to turn against him. The mayor is deeply involved in a scandal that has resulted in felony charges and left the already struggling city effectively leaderless. By all accounts Kilpatrick is a very smart guy; how did he get himself into this mess?
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  • Diagnosis–what is the value?

    In an earlier post, I wrote about the epistemology (or perhaps ontology—we never really did settle it) of disease. Defining what is disease is sometimes obvious, sometimes not. If you have HIV, you have HIV—a test is positive or negative, treatments are known. If you have high blood pressure, it’s a little trickier. How do we know that 140 mmHg is “hypertension” and that 139 is not? Does it even matter? An essay in this week’s Annals of Internal Medicine says “yes”.
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  • Gardasil idiocy

    Orac had a nice takedown of an idiotic piece on Medscape about the Gardasil vaccine. As he reported, the link to the bad article is now dead, perhaps as a result of blograge. Now, on the front page of Medscape is a poll—a poll regarding physician prescribing habits given the “news” about Gardasil:

    Serious neurologic, thromboembolic, and autoimmune complications have been reported in a small number of patients who received Merck’s HPV vaccine, prompting a recent joint advisory by the FDA and CDC. But the agencies emphasize that the vaccine is safe. How will this news change your use of the HPV vaccine?

    This poll question, along with being just silly, asks a question that begs the question—it assumes that the statement as written is true. Of course, it is not. Lies abound regarding the vaccine.

    Look, it’s reasonable to argue about whether HPV vaccines should be mandated, but arguing about the basic science is silly. Several HPV strains cause cancer. These cancers are serious health problems. The vaccine protects against the strains that cause the vast majority of these cancers. The vaccine is safe, and so far, in the post-marketing period, there have been far fewer reports of side-effects than most other vaccines.

    These are the facts. A policy debate standing on these facts is useful. All the rest is superstition.

  • Tangled Bank #111

    Welcome to Tangled Bank #111! Today’s entries are presented without comment, but with poetry, a truly remarkable natural, albeit human, phenomenon, or to quote Love and Rockets:

      You can’t go against nature
      Because when you do
      Go against nature
      It’s part of nature too.
      In the umbra, the tunnel,
      when the mind went wombtomb,
      then it was real thought and real living, living thought.
      Everything is spoilt by use:
      Where’s the cheek that doth not fade,
      Too much gazed at? Where’s the maid
      Whose lip mature is ever new?
      Where’s the eye, however, blue,
      Doth not weary? Where’s the face
      One would meet in every place?
      The island dreams under the dawn
      And great boughs drop tranquillity;
      A parrot sways upon a tree,
      Raging at his own image in the enamelled sea.
      He loves us not,
      He wants the natural touch. For the poor wren,
      The most diminutive of birds, will fight,
      Her young ones in the nest, against the owl.
      I count those feathered balls of soot
      The moor-hen guides upon the stream,
      To silence the envy in my thought;
      And turn towards my chamber, caught
      In the cold snows of a dream.
      His spear, to equal which the tallest pine
      Hewn on Norwegian hills to be the mast
      Of some great ammiral were but a wand,
      He walk’d with to support uneasy steps
      Over the burning marle.
      Oh! what a tangled web we weave
      When first we practice to deceive!
      No, the heart that has truly lov’d never forgets,
      But as truly loves on to the close;
      As the sunflower turns on her god when he sets
      The same look which she turn’d when he rose.
      As man, as beast, as an ephemeral fly begets, Godhead
      begets Godhead,
      For things below are copies, the Great Smaragdine Tablet said.
      Yet all must copy copies, all increase their kind….
      Galway is a blackguard place,
      To Cork I give my curse,
      Tralee is bad enough,
      But Limerick is worse.
      Which is worst I cannot tell,
      They’re everyone so filthy,
      But of the towns which I have seen
      Worst luck to Clonakilty.
      All space, all time,
      (The stars, the terrible perturbations of the suns,
      Swelling, collapsing, ending, serving their longer, shorter use,)
      Fill’d with eidolons only.
      The noiseless myriads
      The infinite oceans where the rivers empty,
      The separate countless free identities, like eyesight
      The true realities, eidolons.
      Not this the world,
      Nor these the universes, they the universes,
      Purport and end, ever the permanent life of life,
      Eidolons, eidolons.
      And God said, Let the waters generate,
      Reptile with spawn abundant, living soul:
      And let fowl fly above the earth, with wings
      Displayed on the open firmament of heaven
      And God created the great whales, and each
      Soul living, each that crept, which plenteously
      The waters generated by their kinds,
      And every bird of wing after his kind;
      And saw that it was good, and blessed them, saying
      Be fruitful, multiply, and in the seas
      And lakes and running streams the waters fill;
      And let the fowl be multiplied on the earth.
      Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the flower of the pleasure which concealed it. Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed.
      It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

    For information on editions past and future, and for information on hosting, please visit The Tangled Bank.