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56. Mark Sircus: QUACK, QUACK, QUACK

The complexity of cancer, part II: Enter the quacks


Respectful Insolence
The complexity of cancer, part II: Enter the quacks
Posted by Orac on August 25, 2011
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A couple of days ago, I couldn’t resist discussing a recent article in the New York Times about recent discoveries in cancer research. I considered the article to be a mix of the good, the bad, and the ugly. While the article did a pretty good job of describing recent discoveries about how noncoding RNA, the tumor microenvironment, and even microbes are involved in the pathogenesis of cancer, it had an annoying spin that portrayed some of these discoveries as being much shinier and newer than they actually are. At the time, I noted that quacks would certainly use this article as a jumping-off point to attack conventional medicine, and, of course, they did.

My expectation when I first encountered the NYT article was that someone like everyone’s favorite quack and all-around conspiracy theorist Mike Adams or everyone’s favorite entrepreneurial crank Joe Mercola would leap all over the article. To my surprise, neither did. On the other hand, another of my “favorite” crank organizations, namely the International Medical Veritas Association, leapt into the breach where the more famous cranks didn’t. One interesting thing I learned delving into this nonsense is that there are apparently two different “Medical Veritas” organizations. The first one (and the one I’m most familiar with) is Medical Veritas International and publishes the infamous Medical Veritas journal, which is is apparently no longer being published and used to bill itself as the “journal of medical truth.” It was also rabidly anti-vaccine and HIV/AIDS denialist. The second organization is the International Medical Veritas Association. This latter organization is headed up by an acupuncturist Mark Sircus, who writes the IMVA blog.

At this point I can’t help but wonder what this fascination is with “truth” among medical cranks. The fascination is so strong that we have not just one, but apparently two, cranks groups named, in essence, “medical truth.” As I always say, medicine and science are not about “truth.” They are about testing hypotheses, designing models, and developing theories that make useful predictions about how nature behaves. “Truth” is not what scientists are about, but it is apparently what cranks are about. Perhaps that’s why they favor such simplistic answers and cling to them with religious fervor. But I digress.

Sircus, it turns out, fancies himself a cancer expert and penned a lovely little ditty he entitled Cancer Still a Mystery to Medical Science. In many ways, that might be true, but as I’ve pointed out, just because science doesn’t know everything doesn’t mean that you can fill in the gaps with whatever nonsense that catches your fancy, or, as Dara O’Briain puts it, “Science knows it doesn’t know everything; otherwise, it’d stop.” Sircus, in a single article, not only shows the arrogance of ignorance, he reveals a quack technique that I’ve noticed before but have never really seen done so blatantly:

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http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2011/08/25/the-complexity-of-cancer-part-ii-enter-t/

great article.