Blogs / Bad Astronomy

In the crazy topsy-turvy world of alternative medicine, the forces of reality win some and lose some.

WIN: An alleged quack who allegedly sold herbal cures for cancer has been slapped with a fraud lawsuit. The charges are that this ordained Pentecostal minister preyed on vulnerable terminal cancer patients using religious trappings. Nice.

LOSE: The Natural News altmed website — which promotes all sorts of nonsense, including connecting vaccines and autism — reports that a "health freedom attorney" (heh) has filed a suit against the FDA to halt the distribution of swine flu vaccine. However, their claims of this vaccine being rushed, untested, and so on, are all completely false.

Y’know, if people want to take tinctures and poultices and whatever that does nothing whatsoever instead of real medicine, that’s their right. But when they try to stop others from getting real medicine — medicine that can save many lives — because of their own gross misunderstanding of science, then that becomes a public threat. I hope the judge throws this case out of court, and then fines all those involved for frivolous lawsuits.

Not-so-incidentally, the Natural News website says this suit is being filed on behalf of Gary Null, and a perusal of his website shows him to be antivax as well as an AIDS denialist (someone who doesn’t think HIV causes AIDS)… and I am shocked, shocked, to find out he has his own line of alternative cures. These are the kinds of folks we’re dealing with, and why I get so very upset about all this.

So this really isn’t a "lose" yet, but it’s a lose in the sense that people with such a tenuous grasp of reality attack it with such fervor. They are putting everyone at risk: you, me, everyone. That’s why I am so vocal, and will continue to be.

Oh, my brain! It’s all asplodey!

Dennis Leary is sometimes funny, but he can also be a serious jerk. It’s part of his schtick, but there are times… In a book he wrote, Why We Suck: A Feel-Good Guide to Staying Fat, Loud, Lazy and Stupid, he says that some claims of autism are really just an excuse by “inattentive mothers and competitive dads who want an explanation for why their dumb-ass kids can’t compete academically, so they throw money into the happy laps of shrinks . . . to get back diagnoses that help explain away the deficiencies of their junior morons.”

In a more perfect world…

He says this quotation is being taken grossly out of context. I have not read the book, so I can’t say for sure, though I can see where this might be the case. For example, he might be saying that most cases of autism are real, but only some parents use it as an excuse. Or maybe it’s simply an excrutiatingly poorly-aimed joke. He does say that he talks about autism being a real disorder, and "that I not only support the current rational approaches to the diagnoses and treatment of real autism but have witnessed it firsthand while watching very dear old friends raise a functioning autistic child."

So it sounds like he may be trying making a what he thinks is a legitimate point, though doing so in a very crass and ill-advised manner.

But then the crazy gets, well, crazier. Enter Jenny McCarthy.

She is at the forefront of the loud but grossly wrong antivaccination movement. About Leary, she says…

“Whoo! First of all, let me tell you, the autism community has received probably 10,000 emails [saying] ‘Go kill him!’ ‘Go yell at him,’” McCarthy, 36, told Access Hollywood’s Billy Bush.

“[But] it’s so hard to even get up enough juice in me or energy in me to even try to fight someone that is obviously stupid.”

Wow. Where to start? With the "autism community" threatening him with death? Or her saying someone else’s claims about autism are "stupid"?

I think Leary’s comments were pretty dumb, whether he’s right or not. Stirring up an issue with this much emotion to make a joke is not such a brilliant idea. Of course, he’s not trying to spearhead a movement that creates a huge public health hazard and is literally putting the lives of our children at risk.

Having McCarthy jump on this already exploding dumbosity… well…