Now I’ve done several blogs on the Daniel Hauser case, so I’m not going to discuss that here. And I also did one blog on the Lupron scandal, but David Gorski’s “friend” Orac did a number of pieces on it this week that I’d like to draw people’s attention to here, here, and here. The last of these also cites legendy anti-vaccinationist Dan Olmsted, which also reminds me that I don’t think I got around to blogging Jenny McCarthy’s latest hypocrisy. A month or so ago, Jenny “I hate toxins” McCarthy publicly expressed her love of botox, aka botulism, aka Botulinum toxin, aka the most dangerous toxin on the planet (not that there aren’t some real medicinal uses for it, which there are).
But now she publicly expressed her love of bleaching her hair:
“I guess this is what one might call a hypocrite. I talk about staying away from toxins, yet I bleach the hell out of my hair every month. It’s tough to avoid everything that is not good for you. Yes, I have given up a lot so far, but I don’t think I can ever let people see me with my original haircolor. Yuck. My hairdresser had just told me a couple of grays were seen. WHAT?!! Come on. I finally just got rid of my adult acne! Will my armpit hair turn gray one day too?”
And then finally there’s the Madeleine Neumann case. Madeleine was an 11-year-old girl died of diabetic ketoacidosis because her parents chose prayer over real medicine, not unlike the almost inevitable fate of Daniel Hauser. But that was a year ago. The DA chose to prosecute the parents for second-degree reckless homicide, it went to trial, and now this week the parents were found guilty. Of course nothing will bring their daughter back but we can only hope that this ruling will serve as a lesson to other parents who put their own wacky beliefs above hard science. And in doing so, maybe some will be wiser for it and lives will be saved.
Then although this isn’t about quackery, Mark Hoofnagle from the Denialist blog wrote about the propaganda against universal healthcare versus the reality.
