Do not harass the quacks!

Christopher Maloney, N.D.*, is rightfully complaining about the fact that he has received rude email, and also implies that he may have received harassing phone calls. He’s a sensitive soul, apparently — hundreds of email messages is nothing, I get that much every few hours — but if you are sending nothing but vituperation and anger his way, knock it off.

I repeat, STOP IT.

No phone calls. Email should be arguments, not stab-someone-in-the-eyes loudness. You don’t have to compromise on content, just don’t be stupid. If you are intruding on someone’s personal life, you are in the wrong, plain and simple.

Making the internet a place where the foolishness of kooks is easily spotted, though, is perfectly legitimate. Carry on.

*N.D. is short for “Noisy Duck,” by the way.

Christopher Maloney: still a quack

That quack, Christopher Maloney, has written to me now…with a nice little edge of hysteria and paranoia.

Let the witch trials begin! Michael Hawkins and Rev. Myers presiding

Dear “Reverend” PZ Meyers,

How fitting that, three hundred years later, the witch trials continue. If you recall, it was the herbalists that were burned then as well. Your flock has spoken to me, Reverend Meyers, with the shrieking common to all fundamentalist cults. I believe if you check you will find that fundamentalism involves a closed mind while doing science requires an open mind. It also involves a thing they call research.

Do you do basic research into a person’s claims before posting? Did you perhaps go to medline and type the words “elderberry” and “H1N1”? Did you even bother to read my original editorial that cites Cochrane database and CDC raw data? If you had done basic research or contacted me directly you would perhaps not have posted lies in your blog.

u can call me an idiot and a quack, but when you repeat the “fact” that I am not a doctor and not qualified, that is a written lie or libel. I am a doctor under Maine state law and meet the qualifications of that title.

In terms of poor maligned elderberry, the medline citation is “The H1N1 inhibition activities of the elderberry flavonoids compare favorably to the known anti-influenza activities of Oseltamivir (Tamiflu; 0.32 microM) and Amantadine (27 microM). (Phytochemistry. 2009 Jul;70(10):1255-61) While this is a test tube study only, please keep in mind that we had no vaccine and were at the peak of the pandemic here in Maine. I never suggested elderberry as a vaccination but as a possible home treatment for sick children.

Michael Hawkins is an undergraduate at UMA who replied to my editorial. His rambling editorial was not based on science or research, but his need to publicize himself. After failing to get an editorial published against God he decided I was, flatteringly, next on the list. All of the research and medline citations for my editorial are available under swine flu on my website, and were there for Mr. Hawkins to simply see. But, despite the reality that I practice evidence-based medicine, neither you nor Mr. Hawkins have ever bothered to read my site.

Mr. Hawkins managed to get his own website suspended by arguing with his server about what constitutes libel and blames me. I have never directly contacted WordPress about him and I have never replied to either his hate posts or his email attacks on me personally. In doing my own research, I found that another individual is in the process of filing a lawsuit against Mr. Hawkins and requested that the individual write to Mr. Hawkins directly. It was this other individual in South Carolina, and not me, that helped Mr. Hawkins get himself kicked off. Since Mr. Hawkins has received that email today, I believe that your case against me as an enemy of free speech should be re-examined.

It terms of his accusations against me that you have posted on your blog, I have taken the time to answer them at length and with scientific citations on my website: www.maloneymedical.com. I am also in the process of creating a more tolerable Youtube video for your flock.

Thank you, Reverend Myers, for burning me without trial. It’s nice to know some things never change.

Christopher Maloney, N.D.

Whoa…these danged evil witches. You burn them and burn them, and they still manage to crawl up out of the ashes and find a computer keyboard. Amazing powers of recuperation, those witches.

As for this witch’s bogus claims about elderberry and garlic, see Steve Novella’s article on the subject. You simply do not leap from a tentative basic research finding to making therapeutic recommendations. Unless you’re a quack, of course. Quacks do that all the time.

The plot thickens. Maloney denies getting Hawkins’ site shut down, which may be true. However, at the very least, Maloney was used as a pretext to shut down the blog. WordPress sent Hawkins email demanding changes to his posts, specifically this one:

Hi,
You wrote:
“I cannot overstate this fact: Naturopaths are not doctors and they are not
qualified. They cherry-pick evidence, often lie and misrepresent facts.
Recently, a local naturopathic “doctor,” Christopher Maloney, wrote a letter
in which he committed himself to that third possibility”
“Maloney is NOT a doctor! He has NO qualifications which earn him that title.”
We were sent:
Dr Maloney is a licensed Maine State Doctor, license number ND240. He is
recognized under Maine state law: Title 32: PROFESSIONS AND OCCUPATIONS
Chapter 113-B: COMPLEMENTARY HEALTH CARE PROVIDERS HEADING: PL 1995, C. 671,
§13 (NEW) Subchapter 3: NATUROPATHIC MEDICINE LICENSING REQUIREMENTS AND
SCOPE OF PRACTICE HEADING: PL 1995, C. 671, ¶13.
Please edit your statements to include his qualifications or delete your statements.
Thank you.
–
Mark

Note the comment from Mark at WordPress, “We were sent”. Someone targeted Hawkins, and sent a demand to WordPress to shut him down. This is someone in communication with Maloney, because Maloney just sent me this email:

Dear Prof. Myers,

The following is an excerpt from an email I received from the fellow in South Carolina. I will not reveal his name because I would not wish your unrighteous wrath on a dog, much less a fellow human being. But he has sent this message directly to Mr. Hawkins, who I am sure will be glad to redirect you.

Please call off your flock.

“This is what I wrote to him.

Michael Hawkins,

You may blame me for having your blog pulled. WorldPress had to remove your blog because otherwise it would have faced a hefty lawsuit, given the nature of the defamation campaign you had launched against me, and having positioned your blog link second place on Google search. …”

Now I’m wondering…who is the cowardly quack in South Carolina who used Maloney’s name to get a blog pulled?

I’m also wondering why WordPress would yank the blog on the word of a third party who has no standing in this specific argument at all?

Christopher Maloney is a quack

Maloney is a naturopath in the state of Maine, where quacks like him get to call themselves “doctors”. These so-called “doctors” get to make recommendations like this, in which he disparages standard flu vaccines and suggests these useless prescriptions:

Parents waiting for vaccinations can provide their children with black elderberry, which blocks the H1N1 virus. A single garlic capsule daily cuts in half the incidence and the severity of a flu episode for children.

There’s another way you can tell he’s a quack. When a student, Michael Hawkins, dared to criticize him, pointing out that “Naturopathic medicine is pure bull” and stating that naturopaths are underqualified and do not deserve the title of “doctor,” Maloney took action to silence him. After all, we can’t have people questioning quacks — that just makes them look even more ridiculous, which could lead to a loss of business.

So Maloney complained to WordPress, where Hawkins blog was located, and got them to shut it down. This does not speak well of craven WordPress; if you’re using WordPress hosting, you might want to reconsider it and move elsewhere. You know, to someplace that respects reality.

Now not only is Maloney a quack, but he’s a stupid quack. Shutting down blogs that criticize him? That never, ever works. In fact, it tends to backfire rather severely — because now a much bigger blog is going to spread the word that Christopher Maloney is a quack. I’m also going to ask all of you out there who reads this to echo the message: Christopher Maloney is a quack. Won’t that be fun? Poke the net, and the net pushes back.

Share the message. Let the whole world know that Christopher Maloney is a cowardly quack.

He’s also tasteless. This is possibly the ugliest youtube video ever.

Shenanigans on Desiree Jennings!

Desiree Jennings was a young woman with some peculiar symptoms: after getting a seasonal flu shot, she was diagnosed with dystonia. Her speech was slurred, she couldn’t walk without going into painful-looking spams…except that she was fine when she walked backwards or ran. It was very odd, and the blame was being placed on vaccinations.

Now, though, she’s been caught by a camera crew, walking normally, driving, and just generally looking perfectly fine. Her only remaining symptom seems to be that she is afflicted* with an Australian accent. She claims to have been treated by some quack with needles and electrodes and vitamin supplements.

I call shenanigans.

I am going to stop taking vitamins for a while, though, just in case they might make me talk funny, mate.

*I’m going to be pilloried in the comments for that choice of word, aren’t I?

Criticism deferred, but building. And no, my name is not Fermat.

Oh, no. Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini have written a book and opinion piece in which they try to claim that natural selection is a dying concept, and what do they use to justify that outrageous claim? Evo devo! That’s just nuts, and Mary Midgely compounds the crazy with terrible abuse of developmental biology — she seems to want to turn back the clock to the time of D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, and throw out Jacob and Monod. I really get pissed off when I see people misusing the specialized ideas of evo devo as a replacement for, rather than an addition to, the framework of modern evolutionary theory.

I will be slashing up their nonsense at greater length, but I’m reading this in a hotel room when I should be finishing up my packing and getting my butt to the airport, and furthermore, the weather looks awful at my destination and I fear my transatlantic flight will be even longer and more uncertain than usual. For now, you’ll have to read Jerry Coyne’s brief stab at them and throw your own arguments down in the comments. I will return to this subject when I’m back in frigid blizzardy Minnesota.

UM’s open shame, the Center for Spirituality & Healing

I’m quite proud, under most circumstances, to be affiliated with the University of Minnesota: it’s an excellent university (and the Morris campus is the best within the system, although some of the other campuses argue about that), we’ve got great students, and we are a secular public institution dedicated to giving an affordable education to anyone. However, there is also one thing about the University of Minnesota which causes me great shame, and which I consider a betrayal of reason and evidence.

I am speaking, of course, of the Center for Spirituality & Healing. Center for Bullshit & Quackery is more like it. It’s the cesspit of the university, where all the pseudoscientific fuzzy-headed crap that fails is excreted, polished, gilded, and held on high as a beacon of New Age light to lead the gullible into a sewer of feel-good futility. If I were president of the university (only possible if genies are real), my first act would be to shut down the whole institution and send the dishonest rascals running the show back to their profitable nostrum-peddling, crystal-gazing, finger-waving tea rooms and sideshow tents.

What prompts my crankiness this time is that the CSH is offering a workshop, Homeopathy Acute Care Workshop.

Homeopathy? At my university? In the health sciences building? The stones of that building should writhe in revulsion and vomit forth the participants.

Stones can’t rebel, but the faculty and staff can. One scientist here wrote a short note in response to the organizer of this shameful nonsense.

Homeopathy is a completely bogus therapy. I am astounded that you are presenting this misinformation here at the university.
This is a disgrace, and an insult to the real work being done at the U of M.

And he got a reply!

Dear Michael,
I have taken a few days to sit with your hostile and critical email, as I wanted to give it a fair evaluation time.
I was quite stunned by the vehemence of your note, and must question exactly how much you know about Homeopathy, and where you learned that.

It is my role as faculty advisor for the IHEAL to support the student’s interests, and help them in finding resources and information. As a CHIP committee, IHEAL is a student group for sharing interdisciplinary interests in integrative healthcare–that includes exploring other systems of medicine and other approaches to healing from those they are exposed to in conventional medical education. We encourage all of our students to be explorers. They should investigate unknown areas with curiosity as well as academic rigor. I am proud and impressed by the initiative this year’s IHEAL group in seeking out and organizing the educational opportunities they desired–including Homeopathy. The faculty they have brought in to present on this topic are both top notch practitioners and teachers–bios attached.

I do not know what the basis is of your rigid judgment, but would like to offer the opportunity for there to be increased understanding and awareness, if you are interested. I will not, in this venue, go into trying to explain or justify the practice of homeopathy, but I have attached two documents summarizing some significant research publications that may be useful to you (the brief list, and the complete one.) I also would refer you to the free, on-line book by Dr. Jacob Mirman, MD (graduate of UMN medical school) http://bookonhealing.com/component/content/article/46/137.html
I would also recommend “Homeopathy: Beyond Flat Earth Medicine” an introduction to homeopathy, a primer for both patients and students.

Many physicians and scientists reject Homeopathy without any knowledge, because they say there is no plausible mechanism that can explain HOW it works, regardless of experiences and studies that have shown its impacts. Remember that we don’t know how the majority of biomedical interventions, including drugs, work. Additionally, at one time we didn’t know about germs and didn’t believe that hand-washing had a mechanism of action that could explain how it impacted stopping the spread of disease–so it was fought against for decades. True, science has not yet created the technology to explore homeopathy in a way that can be understood. That doesn’t mean we stop asking the questions.

This may be a long-winded answer to your comment/accusation, but I hope that you find it enlightening.

Yours in academic rigor,
Karen Lawson
Faculty Advisor, IHEAL

She’s wrong in many things. One is that we reject homeopathy without any knowledge; we certainly do have knowledge of homeopathy and its principles, and that’s the reason it is rejected! There is no mechanism for highly diluted substances to work as they claim, and the principle of treating like with like is simply medieval sympathetic magic. It doesn’t work.

There are no significant studies that show any real effect, either. If there were a consistent pattern of homeopathic remedies doing anything, then we’d be interested; instead, we’ve got lots of studies that show no statistical difference between homeopathic solutions and water. At best, the proponents can cherry-pick all the studies done for ones that are either methodologically weak or that show a chance variation in their favor.

Which always raises a question in my mind: if homeopathy is so difficult to assess using those reductionist techniques of modern science and medicine, how the hell do homeopaths know they work? That’s one of the fundamental principles of science, that you can’t just get by on assertions — you have to be able to explain how you know something, and homeopaths can’t. They just pluck some magical association out of their butt and prescribe it…and then after the fact, they claim that it works for their patients. But if it actually works for their patients, then it would be amenable to clinical trials.

They can’t claim that it works, and simultaneously that it doesn’t work when examined rigorously.

Even when they’re trying to argue that there is evidence for homeopathy, they always seem to begin with a lot of waffling about how science can’t really examine their discipline.

Homeopathy is not a modality or therapy, but an entire system of medicine, with its own paradigm of understanding health and illness. That paradigm directs the process of evaluation and treatment. Therefore, in order to accurately assess the effectiveness of the intervention, researchers need to design studies that are congruent with the way homeopathy is practiced clinically.

This means that the gold-standard, biomedical research model for drug interventions (one disease or symptom, one drug, double-blind, placebo-controlled, prospective trial) is not an ideal research process for homeopathy.

That kind of noise just enrages me. I want to grab that person by the collar and demand, “Well, then, asshole, how do you know your magic pills work?”

I know. They use wishful thinking, instead. In a description of a weak study that showed a small improvement of homeopathic remedies over placebos, they get to write “Homeopaths felt clinically had they been able to prescribe the individually matched remedy to each case, the recovery rate expected would have been as high as 90%”. Well, sure, and if they’d been following my magic procedure of hopping up and down on one foot while taking their pills, I believe the recovery rate would have been 105%, therefore proving the effectiveness of monopedosaltopathy.

The screwball giving the workshop in homeopathy, Jacob Mirman, offers his own case for homeopathy. Again, it opens with superstitious bullshit.

Placebocide!

Oh, no. I’m flying off to the UK tomorrow, and I’ve just learned that all my favoritest, bestest people there are going to kill themselves just 8 hours from now (uh, remember, correlation is not causation…I’m sorta sure it’s not because I’m coming to visit.) What they’re all going to do is go down to their local pharmacy and overdose on those ever-so-potent homeopathic “remedies” they’re selling.

I may be tripping over heaps of corpses on the sidewalks there.

I wonder if there are homeopathic cures for jetlag? Can I pick up 1023 pills to get a molecule or two of something useful?

More laughs from the Shorty Awards

Who would have thought something so trivial would generate so much amusement? I told you all to vote on Twitter for DrRachie, because there was a bunch of quacks in the lead. The kook formerly in the #1 position, the “Health Ranger”, has flamed out hysterically. Now the #2 quack, some guy named Mercola, is showing similar signs of cracking.

Dr. Mercola explained the situation himself in a Facebook post, “An arrogant group of science bloggers that have vilified me for the past few years have started a campaign to have an Australian shill to win a health award on Twitter. This overweight non-physician has arrogantly bashed nearly every alternative therapy and encourages reliance on drugs.”

Perhaps tomorrow I’ll be able to report back that Mercola is now rocking back and forth in a corner, shouting “She’s a fatty fat fat fattie!”. At least he’s following the same trend of blatantly lying about the position of real skeptics and physicians.

Sometimes, I think we break the crazy people

I put out a call for twitter users to vote for DrRachie, a skeptic physician, in a silly little contest for a twitter award — and I pointed out at the time that the top nominees in the health category were crazy anti-vax fruit loops in altie ‘medicine’. Number one at that time (DrRachie leads now) was a fellow who called himself the Health Ranger AKA Mike Adams, a real crank who runs a ridiculous site called Natural Health News — I link to it to encourage you all to browse it and get a good laugh.

Adams seems to have snapped. Or maybe he was this crazy all along.

He is outraged at being bumped out of the running — not only did he get outvoted, but many of the votes for him were declared invalid, since many people just got a twitter account and posted one item, his nomination. He’s lashing out with accusations of conspiracy and fraud and cheating and is planning to sue the contest. He has totally lost it over this trivial affair.

Look, guy, it’s an internet award. For tweeting. Take the big picture and recognize that as far as significance goes, it’s like finding an especially large and fluffy bit of belly button lint.

Of course, he is a homeopath. Maybe to him, a twitter award is like an infinitely diluted Nobel Prize, and is especially potent.

I do have to point out a wonderful example of irony that is going into my collection. He accuses everyone who voted for DrRachie of fraud, and claims that we’ve been making false accusations of quackery against him.

It wasn’t really surprising to see the vaccine quacks engaging in their false accusations, of course: Lying and cheating is par for the course for the vaccine and pharmaceutical industries. Their supporters apparently reflect that same lack of ethical behavior. They will apparently do anything to win, even if it means engaging in widespread false accusations and trying to get natural health people removed from the contest altogether.

That’s the background. Now brace yourself: he later posted an article describing what skeptics, that is, you and me, actually believe. He did this by ‘researching’ skeptical web sites, none of which he links to, and none of which he actually provides accurate quotes from, but instead, he invents a list of his interpretations of what they say.

  • Skeptics believe that ALL vaccines are safe and effective (even if they’ve never been tested), that ALL people should be vaccinated, even against their will, and that there is NO LIMIT to the number of vaccines a person can be safely given. So injecting all children with, for example, 900 vaccines all at the same time is believed to be perfectly safe and “good for your health.”

  • Skeptics believe that fluoride chemicals derived from the scrubbers of coal-fired power plants are really good for human health. They’re so good, in fact, that they should be dumped into the water supply so that everyone is forced to drink those chemicals, regardless of their current level of exposure to fluoride from other sources.

  • Skeptics believe that many six-month-old infants need antidepressant drugs. In fact, they believe that people of all ages can be safely given an unlimited number of drugs all at the same time: Antidepressants, cholesterol drugs, blood pressure drugs, diabetes drugs, anti-anxiety drugs, sleeping drugs and more — simultaneously!

  • Skeptics believe that the human body has no ability to defend itself against invading microorganism and that the only things that can save people from viral infections are vaccines.

  • Skeptics believe that pregnancy is a disease and childbirth is a medical crisis. (They are opponents of natural childbirth.)

  • Skeptics do not believe in hypnosis. This is especially hilarious since they are all prime examples of people who are easily hypnotized by mainstream influences.

  • Skeptics believe that there is no such thing as human consciousness. They do not believe in the mind; only in the physical brain. In fact, skeptics believe that they themselves are mindless automatons who have no free will, no soul and no consciousness whatsoever.

  • Skeptics believe that DEAD foods have exactly the same nutritional properties as LIVING foods (hilarious!).

  • Skeptics believe that pesticides on the crops are safe, genetically modified foods are safe, and that any chemical food additive approved by the FDA is also safe. There is no advantage to buying organic food, they claim.

  • Skeptics believe that water has no role in human health other than basic hydration. Water is inert, they say, and the water your toilet is identical to water from a natural spring (assuming the chemical composition is the same, anyway).

  • Skeptics believe that all the phytochemicals and nutrients found in ALL plants are inert, having absolutely no benefit whatsoever for human health. (The ignorance of this intellectual position is breathtaking…)

The only thing breathtaking in that list is the dishonesty. I don’t believe any of that, except that I will admit that I do hold the hilarious position that dead food does have the same nutritional properties of living food — if nothing else, everything I eat is very quickly dead after I’ve ground it to bits between my teeth and dropped it into the acid bath of my stomach. I don’t believe that I extract nutritional value from carrot souls, after all. The rest, though, is looney tunes. Water is inert? A fantastic solvent with complex physicochemical properties is inert? Wow. And at the same time, we think pesticides have no effect on us? I should mention that one of the things I study is teratology and the effect of environmental contaminants on developing embryos…I’m not sure how I rationalized that work if I think common chemicals do nothing.

Mike Adams is certifiably nuts, and worse, he is “lying and cheating,” “engaging in widespread false accusations,” and lacks “ethical behavior.”. At least he doesn’t have to worry that I’ll sue him for being a dingbat.