Why Dont You Blog?

Once more, the Great Tuatatis has guided me to some more erratic websites (I suspect I actually found it as a link on someone else’s blog, but unfortunately I cant remember who to tip my hat to, sorry).

Anyway, however it happened, on the phs1966.com blog, there is a post called “Can we really call evolution science.” It is a short post, so I will copy it here in full:

It seems I am not alone in getting some satisfaction out of seeing McKeith have to admit she is not a doctor.
“Back off, man; I’m a scientist.” also picks up the topic with its “Bless” post.

The post picks up on McKeith saying how she feels “bullied” and she claims ” I’m entitled to use ‘Dr’ because I have a PhD in Holistic Nutrition, which I studied for four years to get.” Now that is funny. Obviously she is joking…

Anyway, the Back off, man; I’m a scientist makes the reasonable comments:

This is a woman who goes on TV and makes “an obese woman cry, in her own back garden, by showing her a tombstone with her own name on it, made out of chocolate”, who said to another “‘Do you want to see your daughter get married and have babies? Because the way things are going you’ll have a heart attack at 40″.

She’s made a career out of making fat people cry, so just let the satisfaction flow.

Well Said that man!

Obviously not. (Surely by definition alone).

Anyway, I was rooting around Technorati Tags for Christianity, and I came across a blog post titled “The Sovereignty of God and Prayer” and obviously took to it like a bull to a red rag. It is short and pretty much what you would expect from a blog taglined “Christian Resources for Young Women” (makes you want to vomit already, doesn’t it). Why do the more devout of the religious fools believers have to be so sexist?

The best bit is the first sentence: (emphasis mine)

So we believe God is sovereign and he predestines and elects those whom He will save.

Kind of makes everything else pointless. At the end there is a link to a post which “answers this” from the Ministry of John Piper (cant let the young Christian Ladies try to work things out themselves now, can we?). Sadly, this post is a complete, unadulterated non-answer.

It is long and rambling. It is full of references to irrelevant sections of the bible and it has the stormy writing style so loved by theists.

This is how it is summarised:

In other words, just as God will see to it that His Word is proclaimed as a means to saving the elect, so He will see to it that all those prayers are prayed which He has promised to respond to. I think Paul’s words in Romans 15:18 would apply equally well to his preaching and his praying ministry: “I will not presume to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through me, resulting in the obedience of the Gentiles.” Even our prayers are a gift from the one who “works in us that which is pleasing in his sight” (Hebrews 13:21). Oh, how grateful we should be that He has chosen us to be employed in this high service! How eager we should be to spend much time in prayer!

Says it all really.

As mentioned in a previous post, Katie is a 14 year old girl who has Hodgkin’s lymphoma and her parents have eschewed proper medical treatment in favour of alternative therapies and prayer. That alone would be bad, but reading through some of the comments on her blog opens a whole new can of worms.

One might imagine that almost all the comments are basically “we are praying for you Katie” and “with God’s help you will get through this” (neatly ignoring the fact God gave her cancer in the first place, God prevented her parents treating her and God is causing the cancer to spread). In this situation, I can actually forgive the people posting because they are just expressing their feelings towards this in the only manner they know how. It is almost nice that all these people are praying for Katie – I will leave the issue about all the other people who are dying because they dont have a blog so no one is praying for them until another post.

The one which got me was this: (some numbers “x” out to reduce the free publicity)

At 11:23 PM, John Noble said…

DO THIS NOW! Go to www.immunopower.com and order Immunopower for Katie. This formula was developed especially for cancer patients by Dr. Patrick Quillin who was VP and Director of Nutrition at the Cancer Treatment Centers of America for ten years. Then CALL the Center for Advanced Medicine (760) xxx-9xx2 and reserve a phone consultation with Dr. Quillin. If you have questions call Noreen Quillin at (760) xxx-5xx3. You may tell her that John and Rod in Houston referred you. We have been following your story since it made the front page here in Houston. As you may already know, cancer is caused by nutritional deficiencies and toxic overloads. That is why it is so important to immediately contact Dr. Quillin so that he can help find and correct the deficiencies and overloads that caused the cancer to occur in the first place. The key is to restore the immune system with an aggressive nutritional program, which combines a specially designed supplement formula with specific anti-cancer whole foods. This approach has had proven results, especially for advanced cancer patients like Katie.

How shocking is that. Still, it is nice to see we now have a cure for cancer and the world’s medical researchers can rest at last. Given it seems so simple, it is strange anyone dies of cancer any more.

Crackpottery should be made illegal.

Now, this is going to be short (ish) but mainly because I am aware that it is a sensitive issue and I am (oddly) loathe to upset people, however it is something which has managed to get my hackles up.

In a nutshell, there is a blog about Katie, a 14 year old girl who is dying of Hodgkin’s Disease. This is a story which has been picked up by various blogs (Orac for instance, but may others). No matter what, this would be a sad story and I am sure most people’s hearts go out to the girl and her family.

There is just one small problem with the whole story. Katie’s family have chosen to not head down the “conventional medicine” route for her treatment and instead opted for prayer. Now I know it is not the BMJ or anything but Wikipedia has this to say about the cancer Katie has:

Hodgkin’s lymphoma was one of the first cancers to be rendered curable by combination chemotherapy.

You would hope, that as she is young and was otherwise healthy, early (proper) treatment would have given Katie very good chances with this one. Sadly her family thought otherwise. She was denied accesss to Chemotherapy and instead relied on a combination of crackpottery and prayer. Needless to say, it has not worked. I am going to avoid linking directly to her sites or the blogs made by her family. I am not going to really talk about her or her condition any more. This is about the bad science.

Her father has put together some blogs about her / for her. At the top is this bit of shockingness:

Katie is now 14 years old and was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Disease, a lymphatic cancer when she was 13. This site is a request to pray for her. Call her prayer pager 1-361-333-KATY (5289), enter your ZipCode and # key, to let her know you have prayed for her. Updates of her progress will be posted on the site. The Power of Prayer is Awesome. See beginning story at www.prayforkatie.blogspot.com.

Sadly for Katie, the power of prayer is not awesome. Pretty much every time it has been studied it shows people who are subject to prayer show improvement over those who are not prayed for. People who are prayed for and know about it show less improvement. If your faith does mean you feel praying for Katie will help her, then dont call her “prayer pager” just do it. And if Prayer works, why wont God cure amputees?

It is really sad to see this girls chances have been destroyed because so many people seem to think that “hope” is a better alternative to treatment. It is even sadder to read the comments on Katies blogs and see so many other people seem to rate the value of prayer that you just know there will be other, needless, deaths.

Shame on them. If their God exists, they are going to hell.

Well, sometimes idly surfing blogs can be more disheartening than cheering. While reading about the latest insanity some Intelligent Design idiot has come up with to try and protect their fragile faith is always going to be entertaining, reading about people tricked into believing some alternative quackery therapy is going to save their children is depressing.

I found a post on the Respectful Insolence blog about the madness which surrounds alternative therapies, and while never a happy topic at least most of it was light hearted enough.

After a few paragraphs I came to a few bits which saddened me more than anything else. First this little gem: (emphasis mine)

Prior to the ominous warning above [about the need to pay for regular MRIs to check the progress of cancer], Katie’s family had taken her to an unnamed medical practitioner, her father making the claim that he “really can’t say anything because it could jeopardize her treatment.”

Now this is worrying. If I am sick and I go to see my doctor he will still treat me if I tell people what he is doing. Can you imagine what is going through the mind of a distraught father who is worried that discussing his daughter’s cancer treatment will prevent her getting treated? What sort of treatment makes that demand? It is insane. It is worse than insane, it is fundamental cultist brainwashing.

In any sane country there would be sufficient legal weight to ensure that this practice is stamped out.

Further down we see more of the mental state of the father who has allowed such lunatic quacks to have access to his daughter (I nearly wrote “treat” there but that is the last thing they are doing to her). Again, emphasis is my own:

Indeed, it was the very honesty of Katie’s oncologists about these potential long-term side effects that scared her father into rejecting further conventional therapy and turning to “alternatives.” Anyone want to guess what probably happened next? Although I cannot know personally, my best guess is that the blandishments of alternative practitioners promising to cure Katie’s cancer without the potentially nasty side effects of conventional had their effect. Mr. Wernecke seems to have been pretty distrusting of the “conventional” medical establishment to begin with, and his distrust, coupled with his belief that prayer could help his daughter, likely made him even more receptive than average to such promises of cure with little or no pain.

Two more strikes against the poor father. For what ever reason the father was predisposed against “conventional medicine” and this was pounced upon by the quacks. I am going to go out on a limb here and suggest this predisposition was more than a little influenced by his religious beliefs and upbringing. This would be another tick for Richard Dawkins’ “Why Religion is Evil.”

What a wonderful world.

Well, readers of Saturday’s newspaper (or the website www.badscience.net) may be forgiven for thinking that Ben Goldacre, scourge of the charlatan, has gone soft. (Read the article online)

Taken brutally out of context, and subjected to skim reading, this article look almost like an approval of homeopathic remedies to treat all manner of ailments. The print version is a worse offender (missing the phrase “Bring on the placebos” – at least in my newspaper), but generally speaking about 60% of the people I have shown the article to so far think it was basically saying that “modern medicine has had its chance, now we need to try the homeopathic stuff.”

Shocking.

I hope I am not alone in being dismayed by this. To me, the article read like a sly dig at homeopathy – basically pointing out the fact it does nothing and has no real evidence to support it working – but on re-reading, and after speaking to others it may have been a bit too sly.

From speaking to people who have already bought into the snake oil sales pitch of homeopathy, this article was too close to support for them to see the reality. The only thing I can hope is that 99.9% of badscience’s audience are not that way inclined. (Although from the feedback on mobile phone towers I am not so sure…)