Denialism Blog

Denialism Blog

  • More stupid from the Huffington Post

    In a new apologia for Jenny McCarthy and the mercury militia, Alison Levy, writing for HuffPo, wonders what all the fuss is about.

    When I watch Jenny McCarthy on CNN or when I read the blogs (and comments) on autism, I keep wondering: What is this debate about? Yes, the parents of autistic kids are more “emotional” than the aloof doctors before them. But why are they met with anger, rather than compassion? If their concerns are heard, how does that harm other citizens? As a health journalist, and recent newcomer to this issue, I’m trying to understand the passion on the “pro-vaccination” side.

    She wonders what the debate is about? After all that reading? How dense is she?

    The underlying fear and anger towards these parents suggests that it’s somehow heretical to question any proffering of scientific “proof” even when it squares off with experience–in this case, parents’ tragic and oft repeated experience of watching hundreds of thousands of children immediately deteriorate upon vaccination.

    There are several logical fallacies here…
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  • More from a local "alternatician"

    I recently posted an article on a particular “holistic” doctor’s take on salt–the bottom line is the bottom line; more expensive is better. You’d think I’d call it a day.

    However, if someone is going to advertise widely, he’s leaving himself open for criticism. How can one family physician have so many answers? He sells books and DVDs purporting to cure and treat a remarkable number of diseases from arthritis to thyroid disorders to fibromyalgia. These works are not available for free, so I can’t evaluate their validity. They may contain harmful advice, helpful advice, or none at all. The hype, though, is pretty remarkable.

    For example, he sells a book called “Overcoming Thyroid Disorders”. This book:

    provides information on safe and effective natural therapies to help the body heal itself. Dr. Brownstein provides over 30 actual case studies of his success in treating thyroid disorders.

    I’m not sure what the big deal is. Medical science has been successfully treating thyroid disease for decades. It’s offering a service that, well, isn’t really needed. I’m also not so sure what is so exciting about offering “30 actual case studies” except that the rest of the sentence says “of his success in treating” these problems. He seems to be saying that, at least in 30 of his patients, he’s done a decent job treating thyroid disease.

    My God! I hope so! Treating thyroid disease is basic to the practice of primary care medicine, and when it gets too complicated, endocrinologists can help out. I have also successfully treated dozens (more, really) of people with thyroid disease. I don’t brag about it because it’s part of my job (and I’m not selling anything).

    People have every right to write books, sell them, and profit from them. People should just be aware of what they are buying.

    Richard Dawkins said, ” If you are in possession of this revolutionary secret of science, why not prove it and be hailed as the new Newton? Of course, we know the answer. You can’t do it. You are a fake.” This was meant to make the point that those who offer up miracles are usually unable to deliver. If this guy knows so may remarkable things about medicine that no one else does, why isn’t he more widely known? Why hasn’t he published his results in peer-reviewed journals? I doubt he’s “a fake”. But what makes him think he has a special insight that the rest of the medical community missed out on?

    The answer is probably that his books bring comfort and control to people dealing with frustrating health problems. A person buys a book like this because they feel bad, and they want to feel better. Some books on health contain useful advice, some don’t. Perhaps the advertised tomes give good advice…I don’t know. But hyping a problem (the difficulty of treating thyroid disorders) and selling a solution (the book) seems a little icky too me. It just doesn’t seem to mesh well with my duty to help those in need with proven techniques, without selling them something they probably don’t need. Perhaps I’m being too critical. If I have a patient with simple hypothyroidism, I do an evaluation, and I can often treat them with a medication that costs pennies a day. I rely on the medical literature and my relationship with the patient to make a treatment plan. I don’t rely on charisma (I just don’t have that much) and I don’t rely on extravagant promises (seems too much like lying).

    Well, to each his own.

  • More madness from PETA

    My earlier post on People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) was perhaps not clear enough.

    PETA is not for “the ethical treatment of animals”. They are for treating animals as if they were furry humans. In fact, they are for treating animals better than we treat humans. This is a dangerous philosophy.

    To equate human rights with animal rights is to diminish the value of human beings. First, which animals do we apply these rights to? The cute ones? Bunnies? Drosophilia?

    And in their battle for equal rights for all animals, humans included, do they work for the rights of people?

    One sick post on their website (to which I will not link) has a “Final Four” of scientists who work with animals. This page posts the locations and photos of the researchers, with inflammatory language, such as “remov[es] cats’ eyes while they’re still alive”, but of course doesn’t mention the goals or accomplishments of the research.

    Do you think their propaganda is harmless? Here’s some comments from the site:

    they should have to suffer just like those animals had to do for their unright (sic) and cruel experiments.

    Someone should put steel rods in their heads

    I say they experiment on them, how about that:)

    So, I guess we need to be nice to non-human animals, but it’s open season on humans.

    I’d venture a guess that most people feel we should be nice to animals. There are exceptions of course, but in general, people are against undue cruelty to animals. PETA argues than any harm to animals is “undue”.

    The problem with this stance is that it devalues human lives. For example, a recent news item from Europe previews an ad campaign by PETA. They will run ads during the war crimes trial of former Liberian president Charles Taylor.

    I’m really not sure how to state this any more clearly—the slaughtering of human beings is not morally the same as the slaughtering of animals.

    Those who believe that it is create a dangerous devaluation of human life.

  • Salt your way to health

    As it turns out, in my own neck of the woods there is a small woo-factory. I came upon it when I saw an internet add extolling the virtues of salt, as long as it’s expensive salt. The author of the article turns out to be a doctor in my very metropolitan area. There is so much woo here that it may take a few posts to get through it all.

    The article is called “Salt Your Way to Health” and is featured on the website for a company that just happens to sell, well, fancy salt. There is a bit of a cage match going on with my internal writer and internal scientist. To properly deconstruct and critique this article would create an unreadably long post. So please indulge me with a little patience as I toe the lines of readability and de-wooification.

    Salt and Hypertension

    Before firing up the de-wooificator, I’m going to have to tell you a little bit about salt and hypertension. Sodium chloride (salt) is essential to human life. Salt is the primary extracellular electrolyte in the body, and we can’t live without it. Common American table salt also contains trace amounts of added iodine to prevent goiters. That being said, consuming too much salt has health consequences. First, in people with congestive heart failure, too much can make it difficult to breath, and even kill.

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  • Bill Maher is a crank

    I must admit I have a love-hate relationship with Bill Maher. He is a funny guy, he is good at mocking some of the more ludicrous aspects of politics, and he has been an effective critic of this administration and some of its more egregious policies.

    However, I’ve also long held the position that both liberals and conservatives alike must own up to their own extremists. Liberals must own up to the fact that they don’t have a universally-solid grasp on scientific truth, and just like the right wingers, we have people and movements within the left wing that are cranky and denialist. I would say left wing crankery includes animal rights extremism, altie/new age woo, and anti-technology Luddites.

    Bill Maher is one of these cranks (he scores 3/3), and if the liberals want to represent themselves as truly pro-science we must make a concerted effort to reject the unscientific beliefs of these crackpots. We must call out Bill Maher on his BS (we have before as has Orac), and call him a crank for his unscientific, and frankly insane beliefs about medicine, disease, “toxins” and health.

    As PAL has already pointed out and I wholeheartedly agree, Bill Maher made an outrageous statement Friday night on his show Real Time. In an interview with Arlen Specter, who’s life was saved by medical science, he said:

    Because President Bush actually brings up a good point, because you can’t catch cancer, but people in this country treat it like you can. What you do is you hatch cancer by human behavior. Most cancer, there is of course some genetic cancer, but most of it is by behavior…

    But doesn’t that tell you something about our system, why do you have so much faith in Western medicine when they get it so wrong, when the third-leading cause of death in this country the health care system itself. Isn’t the paradigm wrong?

    Where to begin with such a pair of despicable statements? For one, this is a classic crank attack on medicine, using the IOM report, as PAL mentioned, to attack medicine ironically in the midst of one of its attempts to be self-correcting. The misunderstanding that anti-medicine cranks are exploiting in this report are that the overwhelming majority of “mistakes” in that report were things like failure to rescue (failing to recognize when a patient starts circling the drain) and hospital acquired problems like decubitus ulcers and nosocomial infection. What does that mean? That means the failure of medicine that the IOM is being critical of reflect failures to save the lives of people that are critically, critically ill. These are failures in saving people from death. These are mistakes in a population that are actively dying (failure to rescue), or so sick that they are unable to even move under their own power (decubitus ulcer), or immune compromised enough that they can’t defend against infections (nosocomial infections). These mistakes are a problem, and I don’t seek to diminish the importance of finding ways to avoid them. The IOM report represents the efforts of medicine to correct preventable failures in medical care that are very serious, and we’ve spent the last decade trying to resolve (we will likely spend many more). For example the recent War Games video I posted was an example of attempts to train medstudents and interns how to recognize and deal with rescue situations more quickly and effectively.

    But Bill Maher makes it sound like doctors are stalking healthy people in the streets and beating them to death with ball-peen hammers. You don’t go into your doctor’s office for a routine visit and acquire a c. difficile infection or MRSA or decubitus ulcers or a “failure to rescue” mistake. We’re talking about very sick people who often wouldn’t be alive in the first place without medical intervention, who doctors, albeit for some preventable reason, are failing to keep alive or inadvertently make worse. That doesn’t stop Maher from making it sound like we’re running people down in the parking lot, and I don’t appreciate the implication that doctors who sacrifice so much time and effort saving lives are heedlessly killing people.

    Further it is exceptionally ignorant for ignoring the incredible net contribution of medicine to extending and improving life. Why do we live longer on average than any generation in human history? Childbirth no longer represents a major threat to a woman’s life. Children don’t die from ordinary illnesses and infections. Major traumas like gunshots, fractures and massive blood loss no longer are an instant death sentence – we often can put people right back together after amazing injuries. How have we managed to cure diseases like polio, or cure Senator Specter’s Hodgkin’s lymphoma? Evidence-based medicine and the applied science of modern medical care is the answer to all those questions. No magic crystal, acupuncturists needle, or diluted tincture has accomplished these feats.

    Bill Maher is a Luddite, who has tried to blame the death of bees on cell phones has engaged in anti-vaccine wingnuttery, routinely complains of mysterious “toxins”, supports animal rights extremists, and generally has a disgusting “blame-the-victim” mentality towards health. Lung cancer may be a largely self-inflicted illness, but the other big cancer killers? Breast cancer? Prostate cancer? Pancreatic and colorectal cancers? Each may have a small environmental component, but most cancers aside from those caused by cigarettes have much more minor contributions from lifestyle and environment. That is not to say these contributions do not exist, but compared to cigarettes the relative risks of misbehavior are astronomically smaller. Most of these cancers have overwhelmingly genetic risk factors and the number one risk factor is almost always family history. Maher’s statement that cancers are “hatched” or that there is only “some” genetic component is typical of his ignorance of medicine, his blame-the-victim mentality towards disease, and is just as despicable as his depiction of medicine as a killer.

    Liberals have to own up to the fact that they have cranks in their midst as well. Bill Maher is the left-wing version of Dinesh D’Souza or Jerry Falwell. His views on science are no more elevated, and when in conflict with his ideology, no less hateful towards science, or the people he disagrees with.

  • PETA: equating civil rights with steak

    People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is an extremist organization. Some might even call it a cult, and a violent one at that.

    Ingrid Newkirk, the president of PETA, is a particularly objectionable fuckwit. Many of my friends are vegetarians for ethical reasons. They object to the treatment of the animals we use for food, and they object to the impact raising food animals has on the environment. It’s a personal choice. But they don’t think that a chicken is the ethical equivalent of a person. My friends just aren’t that stupid.

    Ingrid is not one of my friends. In her message for the anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., she takes stupid to the next level—worse than nauseating, worse than burning, worse than blinding. She equates the assassination of America’s greatest civil rights leader with making omelettes.

    MLK was one of thousands of people who were killed trying to gain equality for African Americans. Thousands more were physically injured, and millions more suffered the burdens of racism, Jim Crow, and segregation.

    As we reflect on the violent killing of a man who stood for peace and equality, it’s a good time to ask ourselves what we are doing — because there’s so much we can do – to help humanity reach those goals.

    We may not be able to stop all the violence in the world, but each of us has the power to end the violence and suffering we’re responsible for every time we sit down to eat, simply by choosing humane vegetarian foods instead of meat, dairy, and eggs. The animals who are killed for our food never have the freedom to do anything natural or enjoyable.

    There are a couple of ways to interpret her idiocy. One is that Blacks are no better or worse than animals, given that both deserve the same rights. I find this abhorrent.

    The other is that all people are no better than animals when it comes to how we treat each other. I find this equally abhorrent.

    If you do not recognize that there is a moral difference between how we treat other humans and how we treat animals, you are missing something fundamental: the world isn’t fair. We were not put on Earth to help other species. We exist in a world of predation. Thankfully, we are most often the predator. Sure, we can choose not to eat animals, but it is not the same as choosing not to eat a person. People are far more intelligent than other animals, and each person is a member of human society. Chickens are not, and will never be, integrated into our society, either physically or morally.

    Anyone who claims that eating animals is the moral equivalent of Jim Crow, lynching, and assassination is not only an idiot, but is a racist idiot, and a dangerous idiot—if animal lives are the equivalent of human lives, then some fucktard out there is going to kill a person to save an animal.

    I don’t think it’s going to far to say that PETA should probably be on a terrorist group watch list, if it isn’t already. People have been hurt, and more surely will be.

  • How to deliver a message

    Bloggers are an odd bunch. Some are “serious journalists”, some glorified editorialists, but most are just folks with access to a computer. This was the genesis of the blogosphere—individuals writing whatever they wanted, not knowing (but hoping) that maybe a few others might read their work.

    As it turns out, there are some excellent writers out there that we might never have read were it not for the internet. But most still maintain an independence of spirit and of thought. Yes, there are “corporate” bloggers out there. For instance, one of the local hospitals has an internal blog by some corporate type. It’s very different from the blogs most of us are used to reading. It’s, um, very positive. And commenting requires entry of an employee ID number. It’s not exactly designed for the free flow of ideas.

    But most of the blogosphere isn’t designed for anything. It’s an emergent phenomenon, fueled by individuality.

    If your purpose as a writer is to influence large numbers of people, blogging probably isn’t your best choice. Op-ed columns, books, almost any medium gets a larger readership.

    And since bloggers are individuals, beholden to no one, they have no duties as such. They can write whatever they wish.

    Rarely, a blogger is read nearly as widely as a journalist, and PZ Myers is one of the few. Dr. Myers is a professor, and teaches at a University. In this capacity, his duties to transmit information are a bit more clear, and he has made it known on many occasions that his classroom is not a bully pulpit for atheism.

    A biologist can use the classroom to teach biology, but as a blogger, he can deliver any message he wishes.

    In my work, I have to frame messages in a certain way. I am communicating to individual patients, and I need to persuade them on the most intimate level that what I am telling them is the course they should follow. If they are futzing around with altie remedies, I can’t be overtly dismissive, or I’ll lose them immediately.

    But in delivering a message to a somewhat larger audience, I use a different tone, one of compassionate snarkiness, for example. I do this not only because it suits me, but because I feel that on some level it is effective.

    Scientists always have a duty to deliver the truth about their fields. The tone in which it is delivered depends greatly upon the medium and the audience. But most of all, it depends on the writer. Most bloggers of science have a fierce attachment to the truth which cannot be compromised for any reason, and if it happens to piss people off, so be it.

    I’m sure that a creationist student in a biology class might be uncomfortable, but since it is a classroom, they must learn the material to succeed. Our readers have no such obligation. Therefore, we have no obligation to kiss anyone’s tukhes.

  • Stupid news story

    There’s no such thing as a slow news day. There’s a war in Iraq, another in Afganistan, a genocide in Sudan, a presidential campaign, and probably some right wing blowhard having fun in a public restroom somewhere.

    So what the hell was the Times thinking with this one? The premise appears to be that blogging is so stressful, it can KILL!!111!one!! In fact the title is “In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop”.

    Let’s examine that story. The premise is that some bloggers work so hard, under such pressure, that they just drop dead. There are many dangerous jobs out there—commercial fishing and coal mining come to mind. Epidemiologists can figure these things out by collecting data. Reporters can read epidemiology reports and tell us all about them.

    Or they can just make this shit up.

    According to the “journalist”:

    They work long hours, often to exhaustion…. [They] are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment…. In the last few months, two among their ranks have died suddenly.

    Further down he qualifies his comment:

    To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.

    Let’s compare this to my residents. They are working 80 hours a week, making life and death decisions every minute, and getting pennies for it. They are exposed to dangerous pathogens. I’ve seen one of my residents die, but my anecdote hardly qualifies as data.

    To add to his very informative story, the writer quotes one blogger as saying, “I haven’t died yet.”

    This is crap journalism. It tells us nothing, and implies a public health problem where none may exist.

    I do a lot of bad writing, but I’m an amateur. I’d still be embarrassed to have written this piece, and as an editor, I’d feel a little silly for letting it through.

    Anyway, I’m not sure how dangerous blogging could be. I do it all the time, and as they say, “I haven’t died yet.”

  • Presidential candidates and health care—watch them carefully

    Politically, I’m a leftie. That should be no surprise to anyone who knows me. But when it comes to science and medicine, my politics are irrelevant. Given that John McCain has already made some questionable public statements regarding vaccines and autism, this seems like a good time to see what the democrats are saying.

    Over at Hillary’s website, we can examine her positions on health care. She makes special mention of autism. Some of her recommendations sound quite reasonable and good, such as improving access to services for autistic children. But she repeats the questionable though popular idea that there is an “autism epidemic”, something that is far from proved. She makes mention of providing funding for evidence-based treatment, but also gives a shout-out to finding “environmental factors”, which is code for “toxins, mercury, vaccines” and all other kinds of hogwash. Sure, politicians have to appeal to everyone, but in appealing to everyone, it’s possible to appeal to no one strongly. Compromise over how to spend defense or highway money is one thing, but science should be guided by science, not the mercury militia.

    Obama’s statement on autism is far more vague.

    What I find interesting about both candidates’ websites is that they both feature autism prominently. That’s nice—we certainly need to learn more about autism. But why pick that over, say, heart disease, stroke, tobacco abuse, and cancer, which affect the health of far more Americans than autism ever will?

    So what of McCain? His health care info also focuses on economics, which is fine.

    McCain makes a very interesting statement about health education. He invokes personal responsibility, which is a common Republican phrase that happens to be important to health care. He then says:

    Childhood obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure are all on the rise. We must again teach our children about health, nutrition and exercise – vital life information.

    Does anyone see what he left out here? Sexually transmitted diseases are on the rise. What about sex education as part of health education? You can’t teach children about obesity, blood pressure, and diabetes, and then leave out one of the nations biggest health problems—unless you are trying to appease a certain constituency.

    And like the Dems, he has an entire link to autism, something he doesn’t have for heart disease, cancer, or anything else. In his blurb, he also gives lip-service to “environmental factors”.

    The point is not that autism doesn’t deserve funding. It most certainly does, as long as that funding is directed into evidence-based investigation, and not more studies looking at disproven hypotheses such as vaccines and “toxins”. The real point is that all three candidates, when speaking of health care, need to focus on what harms and kills most Americans. The Dems are actively speaking out on access. All three should at least include realistic plans to encourage health care initiatives that make use of evidence and not emotion.

  • Off to work…what micro-organisms will I encounter today?

    I’m off to the walk-in clinic in a little while. If past experience is a useful guide, I will see at least a dozen people with various respiratory viruses causing colds, conjuntivitis, bronchitis, and sinus infections (offending viruses include adenovirus, rhinovirus, and many others). Generally, the folks giving a home to these bugs need grandmotherly advice. Part of my job is to determine which of these patients might have an infection with Group A beta-hemolytic Streptococcus, Bordatella pertussis, Mycoplasma pneumoniea, Steptococcus pneumoniae, influenza, or other potentially bad actors.

    There will probably be a few cases of gastroenteritis, most caused by enteroviruses like echovirus and norovirus, but I have to keep in mind other possibilities like Clostridium difficile, and Salmonella.

    There will certainly be some sexually transmitted infections with organisms such as Neisseria gonnorrheaea, Chlamydia trachomatis, and Trichomonas vaginalis. That’s a fun one.i-9cce71fcd0e7cae0d792aad847f72795-Trichomonas_Giemsa_DPDx.jpgMost of the time, we have to make educated guesses as to which microorganism we’re dealing with, but we can see Trich right away under the microscope.

    Of course some of the friends I meet today might not be “micro”-organisms. Scabies and pubic lice sometimes grace my exam room.

    Often enough, I treat small abscesses. Community-acquired MRSA has become so common that I usually pick an antibiotic to which it is susceptible, rather than the usual MSSA coverage (although, sometimes removing the “good and laudible pus” is enough).

    Occassionally, I will meet a problem that can’t be dealt with in the clinic. Last week a man walked in with leg pain and shortness of breath. He had just returned from an extended car trip. His let was swollen, his lungs clear, and his EKG showed a pattern or right heart strain. We sent him straight to the ER where he was diagnosed with multiple pulmonary emboli and admitted to the hospital.

    And this is part of the fun of primary care medicine. Seening a large variety of problems, sorting out the small problems from the dangerous ones, and passing on that knowledge.