2010: FTSOS in review, October to December

Posted on December 31, 2010 by Michael

This is the fourth and final installment in the 2010 review of FTSOS. See the other three here and here and here.

October:
The most important post I think I have ever made was the one about Tyler Clementi. He was the Rutgers student who was outed as gay by his roommate. As a result – and as a result of a bigoted society – he killed himself. His death was an unnecessary tragedy that ought to bring shame to anyone who has ever voted against civil rights for gays or anyone who has ever made one moment of a gay person’s life more difficult directly because that person was gay.

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, so it was disconcerting to read that a few high school refs were being threatened with punishment for trying to support breast cancer research. They wore some pink whistles during football playoff games in order to raise awareness; they were later told they were in violation of some petty dress code and therefore may be facing suspension – including suspension of the pay they had planned to donate to the Susan G. Komen Foundation. After the blogosphere erupted, the organization that oversees refs in that area (Washington state) backed down.

I also went to some length to explain a few basic things about religion that conflict with science. Miracles, directed evolution, intercessory prayer, and the belief that faith is a virtue are all things which science rejects. It simply isn’t possible for someone to hold belief in any of those things and also logically claim he has no conflict with science.

November:
This was the month the board which oversees local quack Christopher Maloney agreed with me that by not referring to himself as a naturopathic doctor, he was creating confusion; people might think of him as a real doctor. Except for when he insists on putting himself in the spotlight or when there is a special occasion (such as this), I consider the issue he created to be done. He lost.

In this month I used the Socratic Method to explain our likely basis for morality. I largely pointed to our common ancestry and the obvious survival benefits that cooperation offers. I also talked about why we ought to act certain ways. We all use ultimately subjective reasoning, and that’s okay: Most of us share a number of values inherent in our nature. We use these values as our common basis for saying what is right or wrong. It’s sort of like a stand-in for objectivity. And we all have it.

I also used Edwin Hubble’s calculations for the age of the Universe to demonstrate a key point about science. One of the most enduring and annoying criticisms of science by people poorly versed in the sciences is that the practice has a history of being wrong. If it has been wrong about so many things in the past, why should anyone believe it now? Except science really doesn’t have the history everyone seems to think it does. The issue is with poor or limited data (such as what Hubble had). The scientific method actually has no limitations in and of itself. The limits come from our own minds.

I also discussed a paper from Nature which a number of creationists butchered. My focus was a particular creationist familiar to FTSOS readers, but a quick search at the time showed that a whole slew of creationists had fundamentally misunderstood the paper. This is understandable since it is unlikely any of them even read the paper (not that they would be able to understand most of it anyway), merely taking their cues from other creationists. In short, the paper was a study of how alleles become fixed in asexual populations versus sexually reproducing populations . In the former, alleles, if they are particularly advantageous, tend to spread through populations rapidly, quickly becoming fixed. But in drosophila, researchers found that for alleles to spread and become important, fixation was not necessarily required. Alleles act in much more complicated systems in sexually reproducing populations than in asexual organisms, so the way their frequency rises or falls is also more complicated.

December:
Since I mentioned FTSOS hitting the arbitrary number of 100,000 hits in an earlier installment of this review, I suppose I will also mention that it hit 200,000 hits in December. There isn’t much more to add to this, though, is there?

In a more significant post, I pointed out that the Catholic Church thinks (probably without realizing it) that Double Effect is wrong. The Church stripped a hospital in Arizona of its affiliation because the hospital made the correct choice to save a woman’s life at the expense of the not-a-human-being fetus she was carrying. This is pretty much the example textbooks give in order to illustrate the very concept of Double Effect.

I also wrote about a local (real) doctor who supports some quackery. Dustin Sulak is from Hallowell, Maine and he has been making a living making out marijuana prescriptions. That’s all fine and dandy (and I’m sure he is being responsible with his power), but he also supports Reiki. That whole ‘field’ is just a bunch of malarkey that has no place in medicine. I find it unfortunate that a perfectly qualified medical professional would lend credence to something so obviously made-up like that.

Finally, I lamented the fact that Republicans were holding up three extremely important bills this month. All three – the repeal of DADT, the New START treaty, and the 9/11 First Responders health care bill – were eventually passed or ratified. The whole hub-bub was a political creation: the Republicans want to embarrass the President, not get anything done. I don’t think the Democrats are by any means wonderful, but at least they tend to be at least half-way pragmatic. And they want 9/11 First Responders to have fucking health care.

So this concludes my review of FTSOS for 2010. Hopefully the next dozen months will be even better.

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Even real doctors can indulge in quackery

Posted on December 13, 2010 by Michael

My local paper recently ran a piece about a doctor, Dustin Sulak, whose practice has exploded since Maine expanding its medical marijuana laws. While the man is a legitimate doctor – and while I support his efforts to responsibly prescribe marijuana to those who need it – I found a couple of parts of the article tremendously disappointing.

On the wall of Sulak’s examination room, next to his diplomas and state license, are framed certificates naming him a Reiki master and a clinical hypnotherapist.

…

An advocate for alternative medicine, Sulak gives his patients advice about healthier lifestyle choices, and many of them leave his office with bottles of supplements sold at the reception desk.

There is no evidence for the efficacy of Reiki and it rests on no scientific grounds in any regard. In fact, a major basis for it is the existence of Chakras. And guess what? They’re made up.

As far as hypnotherapy is concerned, I’m told by a psychology graduate student (who has recently received his master’s degree and is on his way to becoming a doctor) that in order for hypnosis to be practiced with any worth, it is generally necessary that the practitioner be a psychologist. I do not believe Dr. Sulak has those credentials, but I am not certain. At any rate, Dr. Sulak may be effective in his use of this practice. (See clarification here.)

Where the article says he is an advocate for alternative medicine and he recommends healthy lifestyle choices, it makes me rather queasy to see the paper trying to associate the two notions. First, if alternative medicine was medicine, we would just call it medicine. Second, any doctor will recommend healthy lifestyle choices. But it is unclear what that means in this context.

I’m also not a fan whatsoever of his anti-sunscreen position. Sunscreen ought to be used whenever long exposure to the sun is likely. That prevents cancer. End of story.

Also, he says this about cell phones:

I recommend using speaker phone, or a headset that has a plastic tube or a ferrite bead to prevent transmission of radiation into the ear. Please keep your cell phones away from children’s heads and pregnant mothers’ bellies!

For one of my cancer classes I recall the professor asking us to look into the evidence for a cell phone-cancer link and to let him know what we thought, how we felt about potential bans, etc. I had to say, the evidence was exceedingly weak. We have been using cell phones for a couple decades (we all remember Saved by the Bell), and we’ve been using them heavily for the past decade. Well over 4 billion people are on them daily. We have a load of studies. We have give ample opportunity for cancer to rear its tenacious head; no causative link exists. Let’s be done with this unwarranted fascination until there is some positive evidence to examine. Please.

Dr. Sulak also seems skeptical of vaccines, but he is far from explicit, only posting a few videos critical of the reaction to H1N1. The government’s response was generally appropriate (though we did end up throwing away a lot expired vaccines) and I hope to see something similar if we find ourselves on the brink of another potential – and preventable – epidemic. Besides, the anti-vax crowd has already caused enough deaths.

In summary, I’m rather skeptical of parts of Dr. Sulak’s practice, but virtually none of it could be called quackery. Unfortunately, the key word in that sentence is “virtually”. His use of Reiki is out-and-out, pure quackery. The ‘field’ rests on notions of palm healing, the proposition of fictional Chakras, and it has no physical basis. Reiki is not science and it has no place in real medicine.

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