She no longer eyes him like a pisces when he is weak

Posted on January 14, 2011 by Michael

Ten points if you can guess what the title to this post is referencing before reading on.

I’ve been seeing a disconcerting amount of astrology bullshit on my Facebook feed today. I guess some arbitrary assholes decided to arbitrarily change things up.

Astronomers have restored the original Babylonian zodiac by recalculating the dates that correspond with each sign to accommodate millennia of subtle shifts in the Earth’s axis. Prepare to have your minds blown, all you people with easily blowable minds.

Here is the zodiac as the ancient Babylonians intended it—with the dates corresponding to the times of the year that the sun is actually in each constellation’s “house”—according to the Minnesota Planetarium Society’s Parke Kunkle:

Capricorn: Jan. 20-Feb. 16.
Aquarius: Feb. 16-March 11.
Pisces: March 11-April 18.
Aries: April 18-May 13.
Taurus: May 13-June 21.
Gemini: June 21-July 20.
Cancer: July 20-Aug. 10.
Leo: Aug. 10-Sept. 16.
Virgo: Sept. 16-Oct. 30.
Libra: Oct. 30-Nov. 23.
Scorpio: Nov. 23-29.
Ophiuchus:* Nov. 29-Dec. 17.
Sagittarius: Dec. 17-Jan. 20.

* Discarded by the Babylonians because they wanted 12 signs per year.

This explains why my post of Bill Nye explaining the arbitrariness of astrology has been getting a few more hits than usual.

I find this all so depressing. No, not that my made-up, bullshit sign has changed (actually, it hasn’t). No, what I find depressing is that after all the efforts of Carl Sagan, we still hold a prominent place for astrology in our society. It undermines science. Knock it off.

Besides that, the changing of all this arbitrary bullshit really puts an asterisk on a pretty great song.


(Did you get the 10 points?)

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Study: Alternative medicine sometimes causes death

Posted on December 25, 2010 by Michael

It has been documented again and again where alternative medical treatments have killed people. Rather than respond appropriately (and logically!), the usual woo-man answer is to point out all the deaths that occur as a result of real medicine. This, of course, does nothing to answer the initial concern, and even it was a logically valid point in the given context, it is easily countered by pointing out:

  • Mistakes cause many deaths. This does not count against the efficacy of real medicine.
  • People don’t die at an average age of 45 anymore in large part because of modern medicine. You can say “thank you” anytime.
  • People aren’t dying from an intrinsic property of modern medicine.

The reason I make this point is to get it out of the way so I can make this point: Alternative medicine sometimes kills children.

Australian researchers monitored reports from pediatricians in Australia from 2001 to 2003 looking for suspected side effects from alternative medicines like herbal treatments, vitamin supplements or naturopathic pills. They found 39 reports of side effects including four deaths.

The study was published online Thursday in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood, a specialist publication of the medical journal BMJ.

Unlike conventional medicines, whose side effects are tracked by national surveillance systems, there are no such systems in place for alternative therapies.

One thing the study didn’t say was that much of the harm from alternative (not real) medicine comes from the non-use of real medicine. When people get sick and decide to use unproven treatments rather than actually have something positive done for their health, they often risk becoming sicker. One medical school professor not involved in the study makes the same point:

“Perhaps the most serious harm occurs when effective therapies are replaced by ineffective alternative therapies,” he said. “In that situation, even an intrinsically harmless medicine, like a homeopathic medicine, can be life-threatening,” [Edzard] Ernst said.

It is difficult to know how many deaths come from replacing real medicine with alternative treatments. We know close to a dozen deaths occur every year as a result of faith healing. But that’s for children. I suspect the number would be higher for adults because older individuals are going to tend to have more underlying conditions than any child. And when we expand our horizon to consider general harm or being sick for longer, I believe the numbers would go up even further.

Alissa Lim of the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne and colleagues wrote that all four deaths they identified were caused by a decision to use alternative therapies instead of conventional medicines.

They described one case of a 10-month-old baby who had severe septic shock after being given naturopathic medicines and was assigned to a special diet to treat eczema. In another case, an infant who suffered multiple seizures and a heart attack died after being given alternative therapies — which the parents had chosen due to their concerns about the side effects of regular medicines.

Ernst said people should recognize the limitations of alternative medicines and that practitioners should be careful not to oversell their benefits.

I think I have a better recommendation than Ernst: Let’s just outlaw it all and start saving the health and lives of people.

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Maloney to Myers: Cease and desist

Posted on December 7, 2010 by Michael

I only have a moment since I am co-hosting trivia at The Liberal Cup in Hallowell tonight, so this post will be brief. It looks like Christopher Maloney has sent PZ Myers a cease and desist notice.

What I find really interesting about this is that the board that oversees Maloney actually said this about him:

The Board cautions you to take care to clearly identify yourself as a “naturopathic doctor” at all times as required pursuant to 32 M.R.S.A. 12521 of the enabling statute which governs your licensure. The unqualified reference to yourself as a “doctor” at points in your website might cause confusion on the part of prospective patients as to the nature of services which you are authorized to perform even though other references therein specify naturopathic services.

Emphasis mine.

Again, I have to unfortunately cut this post short. To date I have not received any letter like the one above.

Update: It struck me today in a discussion about language I was having that the way I am portraying the word “unqualified” could be misinterpreted. The use here is as in qualifier. At times on his website – many times, and still, in fact – Maloney has not used a qualifier like “naturopathic” in front of the word doctor.

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Oversight board: Maloney unqualified to refer to himself as a doctor

Posted on November 18, 2010 by Michael

As I said in my last post about Christopher Maloney, once I received the Board of Complementary Health Care Providers’ letter concerning Maloney’s review, I would post it here. If someone really wants to see an image of the letter, I can get that, but it’s such a pain so I would rather not.

So here it is. All the bold sections are as they appear in the letter.

Re: Complaint Nos. 2010-ACU-6268 and 6442

Letter of Guidance

Dear Mr. Maloney:

At its meeting on October 29, 2010, the Board of Complementary Health Care Providers voted to dismiss the above-referenced complaints filed against your naturopathic doctor license by Daniel S. Johnson and Michael L. Hawkins, respectively, on the ground that any errors alleged do not rise to the level of a violation of the Board’s laws and Rules. However, the Board voted to issue the following letter of guidance pursuant to 10 M.R.S.A 8003 (5-A)(F). Pursuant to that statute, this letter of guidance “is not a formal proceeding and does not constitute an adverse disciplinary action of any form.” The Board voted to place this letter of guidance in the file for a period of 10 years from the date of this letter. This letter may be accessed and considered by the board in any subsequent, relevant disciplinary action commenced against your license within that time frame.

The letter of guidance is as follows:

The Board cautions you to take care to clearly identify yourself as a “naturopathic doctor” at all times as required pursuant to 32 M.R.S.A. 12521 of the enabling statute which governs your licensure. The unqualified reference to yourself as a “doctor” at points in your website might cause confusion on the part of prospective patients as to the nature of services which you are authorized to perform even though other references therein specify naturopathic services.

I want to reiterate that this letter of guidance is not the imposition of discipline. The purpose of this letter is to educate and reinforce your knowledge in these areas in order to avoid a future situation where a failure to heed this guidance might lead to a disciplinary situation.

Sincerely,
Sarah T. Ackerly
Board Chair

I have no idea who Daniel S. Johnson is or anything about the nature of his complaint. And yes, they still have my middle initial wrong.

As everyone who follows FTSOS knows, my complaint focused on Maloney calling himself a doctor. In fact, while in cahoots with another quack, Maloney got my site shut down for 6 days (and then lied about it, citing a WordPress glitch) on the basis that I said he is not a doctor. It looks like the Board agrees with me at least that it would be unfortunate for someone to confuse what he can offer versus what a real doctor offers. So I will say it again – and now without fear of WordPress shutting me down on the basis of pathetic threats:

Christopher Maloney is not a doctor.

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Maloney update

Posted on October 29, 2010 by Michael

Maloney’s review was today. As I said earlier, I was unable to attend – it was observation only anyway – but I did give the relevant people a call to get an idea of what happened. I highly recommend getting your information from me since Maloney will almost certainly lie about.

The complaint was dismissed, but not without a recommending letter. The board is going to issue Maloney a letter advising him to make changes to some of his practices. That’s pretty close to what I asked them to do:

A person with a serious ailment may seek an alternative to, say, the hassle of the overhead associated with many mainstream healthcare providers. Should this person come across Mr. Maloney’s website and see his lack of burdensome overhead, there may be confusion; the person may only be looking for an alternative to overhead, not an alternative to mainstream medicine. Mr. Maloney’s illegal claim to being a doctor without the qualifier “naturopathic” or its derivatives ought to be corrected. I urge the board to enforce the law and demand Mr. Maloney correct his website at the least.

So while the letter will be non-binding, the board does appear to agree with my position. Maloney ought not represent himself in any way that makes him appear to be a real doctor.

The account I was given over the phone made it sound like the letter has yet to be drafted, but I can’t be sure. I was not given specifics, so I can’t go into great detail or speak with great certainty (hence “the board does appear to agree…”). (It very much sounds like they will be asking him to change his inappropriate phrasings.) Once I get the letter, I will make a new post. At that point – unless he continues to fabricate history, attack atheists, or dole out plainly false medical information (again, there is no good evidence that black elderberry is effective against H1N1 – don’t believe him!) – I hope to mostly be done with this ridiculous character.

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Maloney review scheduled

Posted on October 21, 2010 by Michael

I made an official complaint against Christopher Maloney some months ago. The jist of what I said was that he was claiming to be a doctor when Maine law is pretty clear about saying he needs to distinguish himself from real doctors (i.e., physicians), utilizing phrases like “naturopathic doctor” or “doctor of naturopathy”. Now, according to a letter I received today, his review has been scheduled.

The complaint filed by Michael L. Hawkins against your license will be reviewed by the Board of Complementary Health Care Providers on October 29, 2010. The meeting is scheduled to begin at 9:00 a.m. at the Department of Professional and Financial Regulation, 76 Northern Avenue, Gardiner, Maine.

(My middle initial still isn’t “L”.)

Unfortunately, I am unable to make the meeting. I would probably see what I could do to swing getting the time off from work if it was allowed that I might participate, but the session is observation only. However, if anyone from the central Maine area is interested in attending the meeting, that would be great; I would love to hear a first-hand account of everything. (On the off chance anyone does plan on attending, it is recommended to call Kelly McLaughlin at 207-624-8621 the day prior to the meeting to verify that the review will take place – from what I understand, these things have a habit of jumping around a bit.)

Also, as promised in an earlier post (see above link), I’m going to post the letter I wrote in response to Maloney’s response to my initial complaint. For the sake of blog aesthetics, see the comment section.

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I can’t believe Maloney is still lying

Posted on October 13, 2010 by Michael

I was searching for PZ Myers YouTube videos but moments ago when I came across this magnificent piece of garbage from Christopher Maloney.

Let’s start from the top:

Maloney did collaborate with Andreas Moritz. Maloney can keep claiming that PZ retracted this or that, but the fact of the matter is this is what PZ actually said:

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:

[Email from WordPress]

…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:

And he goes on to quote an email in which Maloney admits to being in contact with Moritz. There is no doubt that these two acted together to report me to WordPress; does anyone believe Maloney didn’t know what Moritz was doing? does anyone believe Maloney didn’t tell Moritz exactly what to send to WordPress? does anyone believe anything Maloney says?

Next Maloney claims my original letter about him has since been pulled from the Kennebec Journal, as if to suggest the paper saw how dastardly it was and just had to remove it! In fact, the KJ remodeled its website shortly after my letter was published – no letter from that period can be found. As evidence for my point, take a look at my response to a couple letters others wrote in response to what I wrote. Now try to follow the links to those letters back to the KJ’s website. (Let me know how that works out for you, Maloney.)

Maloney then goes on to claim he’s just a poor victim who is being harassed by the big mean mob. In fact, since destroying his web presence for getting my blog shut down with the help of Moritz, all the posts about him have been responses. I’ve often said he can’t make things better, he can only not make them worse. Apparently I was being too subtle: stop trying to promote your quackery and everyone will stop ‘harassing’ you. You, Maloney, make things worse by creating elaborate responses months after the fact – case-in-point, this YouTube video.

Next Maloney, for some bizarre reason, tries to say what atheists oppose: authoritarianism. It’s perplexing because atheism is not a philosophy, not an indicator of how to act (or how one will act), and it isn’t a normative position. Atheism is a position that says, for whatever reason, theism is not worth holding. Even then it is necessary to qualify that this only means it is not worth holding for that particular atheist. Many atheists are pro-theism and see it as a positive in the world; they just reject what they see as being positive as also being true. Of course, many atheists do happen to reject that theism is positive (mostly because arriving at atheism is generally for rational people and it’s only rational to see theism as a propagator of evil) but that does not mean that it is possible to know what positions an atheist holds by virtue of knowing he is an atheist. As usual, Maloney is out of his league.

After some rambling Maloney tries to bumble his way out of being called a quack by saying what he does doesn’t fit into the etymology of the word. Feel free to skip over that part of the video. He’s a quack because he practices a form of medicine for which there is no convincing evidence.

Weird that continued attempts to reestablish himself and promote his quackery have resulted in yet another blog post, huh?

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Oh, Jesus Christ, Moritz

Posted on October 3, 2010 by Michael

I don’t even like posting about this scummy loon anymore. I’m only doing it out of a sense of responsibility.

Andreas Moritz had his Wikipedia page deleted. He was promoting himself and there are no neutral non-blog sources on the scumbag. Pretty simple. But he hates any form of criticism (because he refuses to go get educated on how anything works), so he edits the hell out stuff. He did it with a link I had here. The result? I posted the new link and copied and pasted everything to which I was referring. In other words, he should have learned a very simple lesson about editing. Instead he went and edited his discussion for deletion page. Twice. (I’ve edited out some of the Wiki coding for the sake of clarity here.)

*Absolutely agreed [the page should be deleted]. Andreas Moritz is just some random guy with enough cash to self-publish. He is not notable enough for Wikipedia.–[[User:MHawkins1985|MHawkins1985]] ([[User talk:MHawkins1985|talk]]) 23:20, 15 September 2010 (UTC)

and

*”’Delete”’ for lack of WP:RS. Article makes claims of medical practice/teaching/etc, but GS hits in the actual medical literature seem to mostly come from 2 physicians having the same exact name: one in Germany and one in Austria. I think it’s safe to assume that our particular Andreas Moritz has no actual sources in the literature. His book is touted, but that seems to self-published by an entity called the Ener-Chi Wellness Center. In fact, most of what is found via web search is promotional material that ultimately originates from the subject, e.g. http://andreasmoritz.org/ andreasmoritz.org, http://www.andreasmoritzblog.com/, http://www.andreasmoritzblog.com, http://liverandgallbladderflush.com/, liverandgallbladderflush.com, etc. The highest-ranked Google hit that ”is” independent is http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/02/andreas_moritz_is_a_cancer_qua.php this entry in PZ Myers’ blog Pharyngula that is highly unfavorable, to say the least. To me, it looks like the subject’s highly developed promotional machine effectively obscures any legit, neutral sources that might be out there. I certainly don’t see any. Respectfully, [[User:Agricola44|Agricola44]] ([[User talk:Agricola44|talk]]) 15:39, 16 September 2010 (UTC).

*”’Delete”’ This seems entirely self-promotional [[User:VASterling|VASterling]] ([[User talk:VASterling|talk]]) 16:19, 17 September 2010 (UTC)

–
*”’Delete”’ self-promotional, conflict of interest, no secondary sources. Thanks, [[User:Starblueheather|Starblueheather]] ([[User talk:Starblueheather|talk]]) 00:29, 22 September 2010 (UTC)

–
*”’Delete”’. Fails WP:NOTE. Lack of significant discussion in reliable secondary sources independent of the subject. — ”'[[User:Cirt|Cirt]]”’ ([[User talk:Cirt|talk]]) 00:38, 22 September 2010 (UTC)

Stop trying to promote the harm you cause people, Moritz.

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Andreas Moritz deleted

Posted on September 23, 2010 by Michael

But only from Wikipedia.

I’ve said it again and again to these quacks that just won’t crawl away: they can’t make it better, only not worse. Once rational people of scientific mindsets take notice, quacks don’t tend to do so well. That’s the case with Moritz. If he only thought about it for a moment’s time, he would realize that I didn’t really care about putting him up for deletion (though another user beat me to the punch). I wanted to add some fair criticism, but since he can’t take the truth, he insisted on deleting it over and over. He can do that, but I’m afraid I’m unable to stand by while a stupid, dangerous man tries to build up a deceptive reputation that could cost people their health. I don’t much care if he has a page for whatever, but I want to make sure everyone knows that whatever he creates is going to be filled with lies.

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Andreas Moritz up for deletion

Posted on September 15, 2010 by Michael

No, not from the medical scene, that place where he keeps causing such harm. Just his sock puppet Wikipedia page has been proposed for deletion. And you can help.

Go to the discussion page for deletion and say why his page ought to be taken down.

Moritz, like Christopher Maloney, wants to make himself look legitimate. Unfortunately, creating such an appearance on the web isn’t that difficult. But what this also means is that it’s possible to create an honest web presence that these quacks must face. That has happened with these two particular quacks and they can be considered defeated in that regard. Of course, they’re still harming innocent people with their pseudo-science and lies, and so they remain a significant danger to society.

With that slightly in mind, I’ve been editing Moritz’s page with a short criticism showing his discord with science. I haven’t been going to the significant length required to explain why the guy is a dishonest, thieving, lying, scummy charlatan, however, because I’m not doing much more than having fun. Since his page has already been recommended for deletion (I was attempting to make the recommendation at the same time as the person who actually did it), he will soon have one less platform from which he can tell lies anyway. Right now I’m enjoying making him freak out over the insignificance of temporal Wikipedia edits. That’s why I say I only have his danger “slightly in mind”; this is more about watching him get cranky. He is quite the baby.

Anyway. Let’s make sure this guy’s malarkey is never seen as legitimate. Help delete his scummy, lying page.

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