Patient Rights Coalition

Somebody dropped off a pamphlet that looked liked a copy of this webpage in the lunch room at work yesterday.

Apparently someone feels that acupuncture actually has some utility and wants it to be covered by provincial health insurance in Ontario.

From the web page:

Acupuncture is one of the best professions for improving health.

Qualified meridian-based acupuncture (commonly referred to as TCM-based acupuncture) can cure over 50% of the ailments or diseases that cannot be cured or controlled from a Western medical viewpoint. It is the best health care profession to prevent or treat early stage cancers, colitis, Crohn’s disease, depression, diabetes (Type I and Type II), IBS, infertility, Lyme disease, lymphoma, Meniere’s disease, migraines, multiple sclerosis, osteoporosis, Rheumatoid arthritis, skin lupus, etc. Age-related conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease can even be helped.

I can't help but want to adjust this a little, based on my frequent visits to wikipedia:

It is the best health care profession to prevent or treat early stage cancers^{[citation needed]}, colitis^{[citation needed]}, Crohn’s disease^{[citation needed]}, depression^{[citation needed]}, diabetes (Type I and Type II)^{[citation needed]}, IBS^{[citation needed]}, infertility^{[citation needed]}, Lyme disease^{[citation needed]}, lymphoma^{[citation needed]}, Meniere’s disease^{[citation needed]}, migraines^{[citation needed]}, multiple sclerosis^{[citation needed]}, osteoporosis^{[citation needed]}, Rheumatoid arthritis^{[citation needed]}, skin lupus^{[citation needed]}, etc.

But that's just me and I'm very cynical.

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Happy News: Homeopathy Doesn't Work

Surprise, surprise.

The U.K. House of Commons has figured it out.

77. There has been enough testing of homeopathy and plenty of evidence showing that it is not efficacious. Competition for research funding is fierce and we cannot see how further research on the efficacy of homeopathy is justified in the face of competing priorities.

Thank you and good night.

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That's A Lot Of Credulity

I mean, wow.

This is a lot like that time I was traveling through Chicago and overheard an American soldier in O'Hare airport tell his compatriot, "We saved their asses in world war II, why ain't they helping us in Iraq!?"

I mean, sure, I knew that this sentiment existed, but it's still a shock to hear it expressed.

But this particular thread is full of ignorant, naive people claiming to have experienced ghosts. Now I know that Huffington Post is a gathering place for all kinds of woo, from the anti-vaccination crowd to homeopaths, but it's still powerfully strange to see so many of these people in one place. It's enough to make me fear for humanity.

There are no ghosts. There's never been any convincing evidence for ghosts. They either turn out to be the result of pranksters (think "crop circles"), the result of dreams or hallucinations (especially the night-time experiences) or outright fraud (the medium who kicks the table). No one has ever presented any evidence that could withstand the light of scientific examination.

I know. The pro-ghost faction are now going to say I'm closed-minded. I'm too skeptical. "Science doesn't know everything" or "Science use to think 'x', you know!" where 'x' is some old belief that has since been corrected. Of course science doesn't know everything, but it is the best technique we have for examining positive claims.

You claim that ghosts exist. You claim that they frequent certain places. So we examine those places for the signs you claim to see. And we find nothing.

Now realize you've been credulous and naive and find something better to do with your time.

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Autism: Science vs. Ignoramuses

According to the Ottawa Citizen, the H1N1 vaccine has "stirred the debate" over the link between autism and vaccines.

Really?

Let's examine this debate. On the one side we have Canada's chief public health officer, Dr. David Butler-Jones:

"The studies have been pretty clear and consistent that vaccination is not the cause of many of the things that have been claimed around the vaccine," he said.

And there's this from Health Canada:

Misconception: Vaccines are linked to chronic diseases such as autism, multiple sclerosis (MS), and Crohn's disease.
The Facts: These are false claims made by anti-vaccine books and Web sites. Recent research using the best scientific methods, and reviews of studies from around the world, provide strong evidence that ...

I could go on and on. The side telling you that vaccines are safe and one of the greatest tools of modern medicine is the side that does scientific research and that has your interests at heart. They're the educated, intelligent, careful people.

On the other side is Jenny McCarthy and her band of technical illiterates. Jenny is mad and has decided, in the face of all evidence, that vaccines made her son autistic. She and others like her have forced the scientific establishment to prove relentlessly something that was already beyond a reasonable doubt: vaccines have no relationship to autism.

But that's not how the Citizen paints it. There are "two sides" to this debate. And the Citizen is going to tell you both of them.

The theory that childhood vaccines are behind an upsurge of autism cases emerged in the 1990s and in recent years has gained high-profile advocates such as Hollywood star Jenny McCarthy

That's not a theory. It's completely unfair to use scientific language to make stupid, illiterate, many-times debunked claims sound scientific. A "theory" in science is an explanation for a body of facts. The anti-vaccination crowd has no facts. There's no correlation between vaccines and autism. There's nothing to explain. Their "theory" is an explanation for something that doesn't exist.

I could as easily have a "theory" on how to keep leprechauns from stealing your vegetables. Until someone finds leprechauns in their garden, it's not a theory.

The Citizen ought to be blisteringly excoriated for this pathetic attempt to stoke a controversy and for its endangerment of the general health of the public.

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Agh! Chemicals!

Oh, no! The Chemicals are Here!

This is the sort of analysis that led Arthur Benjamin to give a TED talk to tell us that mathematical education ought to focus more on statistics than calculus, as statistics is far more useful in everyday life.

First off, you're ignorant if you want to rid your life of "chemicals".

When blood tests showed your body's chemical load was relatively low, did you feel any better?
It wasn't low. There was a presence of chemicals that everybody has but are there acceptable levels? Frankly, I don't think so.

A presence of chemicals, huh? Like hemoglobin? Vitamin C? Vitamin D? Zinc? Calcium? How about water? Was there any dihydrogen monoxide? You know how dangerous that stuff is. It causes asphyxiation and has been used to torture people for centuries.

But it's not just the ignorance of what the word "chemical" means. It's also statements like these:

If I use any shampoo or soap on my daughter, I buy them at the health-food store and the less ingredients, the better.

Really? I believe that Ivory advertises itself and 99.44% pure. No additives. No scents. How would your health-food store match up to that?

Today we have the highest rate of childhood cancer, unprecedented levels of autism and asthma, food allergies, skin allergies – all these sensitivities that are clearly related to environmental conditions. And this idea that past generations lived in surroundings that were chemically toxic and they survived is also quite false. One in three die of cancer.

This is a really long chunk of confusion.

Cancer rates for children are not rising. They've been relatively stable for the last 25 years.

The reason you see high levels of autism is because we've been changing the definition of autism to include more people. In a bygone era, most of these people were just referred to as "retarded" and left at that. As well, there's the term "autism spectrum disorder" which refers to a wide variety of minor social problems. As much as some want to blame the "growth in autism" on vaccines and other nonsense, the biggest cause is our widening definition and better diagnostic methods.

If you want to talk about food allergies, you have to wonder how many children simply died because of peanut allergies in the old days. Now that our infant mortality rate has dropped so severely, there are more people with allergies.

And it was way, way more toxic in the old days. There were no workplace safety rules. People died of cancer from breathing in horrible quality air in all sorts of mines and factories. There was almost no pollution control on cars. Paint was made out of lead (the article mentions this and fails to note the contradiction to her own premise). Buildings were made out of asbestos.

Finally, of course more people are dying of cancer. Everyone has to die of something and once we've fixed everything else, the last few things left are going to become bigger threats. This is the fault of improvements in medicine, not chemicals in the environment.

I read articles like this, these compilations of ignorance, and I have to wonder what people are taking away from it. Am I going to end up with people trying to outlaws vaccines? Enforce circumcisions? Outlaw fluoridated water again?

Yes, there are concerns about certain chemicals. Yes, we have to perform scientific studies to figure out which ones are real problems and which of these claims is nonsense. But articles written by a clearly ignorant person who wants you to read other ignorant things on the web and then "go back to your own spine" for guidance, are worthless.

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Gary Goodyear and (micro)-Evolution

After initially refusing to state that he "believed" in evolution, Mr. Goodyear, Canada's minister for science and technology, has changed his mind. He offers the following quote:

On Tuesday, Mr. Goodyear said twice during the CTV interview that he did believe in evolution.

“We are evolving every year, every decade. That's a fact, whether it is to the intensity of the sun, whether it is to, as a chiropractor, walking on cement versus anything else, whether it is running shoes or high heels, of course we are evolving to our environment. But that's not relevant and that is why I refused to answer the question. The interview was about our science and tech strategy, which is strong.”

First of all, this was on CTV? I thought CTV was averse to "do-overs"?

What Mr. Goodyear is doing here is a typical creationist trick. He's telling us that he can't deny what the creationists call "micro-evolution", the "little" changes within species (or maybe "kinds"). But he won't admit that evolution can create new species and he probably actually believes that there wasn't enough time because the Earth is only about six thousand years old anyway.

On top of that, he's ignorant on the subject of what evolution does say. Let's go over that first bit again. "We are evolving", he says and, as examples, he mentions, "walking on concrete" and "walking in running shoes."

That's really ignorant. Walking on high heels won't make our species evolve differently, at least not in the sense he means. I had an elementary school teacher once tell me that pulling on his ear lobes would cause his kids to have longer ear lobes. That's called Lamarckism and it's very painful to hear from a Minister of Science and Technology. The things you do in your life, unless they involve irradiating your genitals, do not affect the genes of your children. Period. There's no "debate" on this and there hasn't been for two centuries.

And what's this nonsense about it being irrelevant? If you told the space exploration people that you thought the earth was flat because the bible said so, wouldn't that be relevant? If you told the automotive sector that you supported the phlogiston hypothesis, would that be irrelevant? If you wanted the chemists to research Alchemy, would that be irrelevant?

Of course it would be relevant. And if you tell the biologists, the astronomers, the geologists and the paleontologists (this list is not exhaustive) that the Minister in charge of scientific research thinks that the Earth is 6000 years old and that evolution didn't happen, of course they're going to freak out.

They're going to freak out because they know an ignoramus is in charge.

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Faith kills quietly too: vaccination

As long as we're on the subject of religion making people do bad things, we may as well hit on the religious right's latest target: the HPV vaccine.

Let's be clear, as we are clear that the invasion of Iraq is about oil, that the attack against the HPV vaccine is not about health. At least it's not about medical health. The reason that right wing outfits like the Canada Family Action Coalition hate the HPV vaccine is because they preach purely abstinence. They don't want you teaching sex education to their children. They don't want you teaching accurate information about condoms and birth control pills - not even to your own kids.

They want abstinence. They want all of humanity to simultaneously deny the instincts that drive our existence. Yes, all 6 billion of us should give up sex unless sanctioned by their church.

To this end, they will circulate false information about the HPV vaccine Gardasil.

Right away you know you have a problem because the author of this site claims that Gardasil contains mercury. It does not. Dr. Shiv Chopra is quoted as making unreferenced claims about other vaccines. Dr. Chopra states that the CDC's statistics are all wrong on the flu but no evidence of this is required in order to the CFAC to quote the doctor.

He also makes the spurious claim that Gardasil "has resulted in more than 3,500 adverse events". This is ridiculous. The data being used only demonstrates that certain events happened after the vaccine was taken. This is meaningless without comparison to a placebo controlled group. If you give a vaccine to tens of thousands of people, some of them are going to have headaches the next day - regardless of the vaccine. You can not assume that the vaccine caused the headaches.

There's also this bit, a red flag for quackology:

More than 4,900 U.S. families have filed lawsuits after their children became autistic within days of getting this shot.

The link between vaccination and autism has been thoroughly debunked. It was a waste of time peddled by numerous quacks intent on soaking the families of autistic children for money. There was never any evidence of any link. All that was ever noted was that the symptoms of autism were discovered by parents at the most common age of vaccination. If you see someone trying to link "mercury in vaccines" with autism, ask that person why the autism rates didn't drop when we stopped using mercury and thimerosal in vaccines.

And when people tell you that devotion to religion makes them happy and does them no harm, show them how religious extremists like these - devoted to unrealistic expectations of human sexual behaviour - are preventing people from being protected from a disease that causes cancer. Religious anti-sexual doctrine is leading these people to cherry-pick the data and misuse statistics in order to promote poor science and ignorance.

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Dog Clones: "I know you"

Is this the state of scientific awareness in our society? A woman had her dog cloned for $50 000 and she makes the following statement to the the newborn pup:

“Yes, I know you! You know me, too!”

Did no one explain this to her? When you make a clone, you are simply making a twin, a nearly identical sibling in genetic terms. The clone (the twin) in no sense has the memories of her former pet. Memory is not copied in to DNA to be spat our later.

I can't believe that this woman spent $50 000 to have her dog cloned and yet she clearly does not have an understanding of what it is she was buying. How can we hope to have an intelligent debate on the merits of cloning in scientific research if people are this ignorant of basic biological principles?

But maybe this explains it better:

“It's a miracle!” Ms. McKinney repeatedly shouted.

Yes. A miracle or, put more simply, magic. She doesn't understand what happened. She understands none of the science behind cloning. She didn't take a moment to comprehend cloning, DNA or any of the straightforward stuff that any layman or laywoman could easily grasp.

Nope, she wanted her dog back. They told her they could get her dog back. She has her dog back. Don't tell her any different, she'll just ignore you as she's ignored everybody else who has tried to tell her different.

I wonder how many people are represented, in terms of scientific illiteracy, by Ms. McKinney.

Updated: Yes, the ignorance is everywhere. This lady was surprised by a rainbow.

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