DAY 416Well Andy woke me at 6.00 with a cup of tea I think everyone was waiting with anticipation to see if I would actually get up now I do get up early if I have to so Andy just encourages me by telling me he will buy me breakfast once we are on the road which makes it slightly more tempting for me. I am up and soon ready to go I donrsquot even think I finished drinking my tea Wandering
Torres Del Paine
From Puerto Natales we made our preparations to enter Chile's principal national park Torres Del Paine with the intentions of trekking the 'W' which should take us five days to complete. After taking note of various recommendations we decided to enter the park via the river system. Setting off early the next morning we board a tourist boat on the Rio Serrano and sail through the nearby narr
El Calafate and Glacier Perito Moreno
Our next Austral stop is the small town of El Calafate. Perched on the bank of Argentina's largest lake Lago Argentino it is the gateway town to the Los Glaciares National Park and also doesn't provide a bad sunset either The main draw for visiting this area is the magnificent Perito Moreno Glacier. Not being tired of glaciers we yet again dug deep and forked out more pesos. Our visit ena
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In our life very few time came that we got more enjoyment and one of them days are Paris Days. When we visited to Paris then found more entertainment myself. I am from Bath NY. In our office group guys were going to Paris so I was with them to this wonderful tour or life changing tour for me. I learnt about life adventure after returned to Paris city. In this Group were 10 guys involve. Our Gro
El Chalten the Fitz Roy Massif
El Chalten is Argentina's newest town est 1985 Built exclusively as a gateway for Argentina's hiking center the Fitz Roy Massif. Situated in Nacional Park Los Glaciers.Trekking here was an easy change to trails of Chile's Torres Del Paine. The trails were well marked and maintained. All streams and rivers had sterdy bridge cover and there were even steps formed into some of the mud slopes.
Waiting on a blog
Hello to everyoneJust a very quick note. Have some blogs saved but have been very busy drinking cocktails and hanging around in the pool. Seriously just got internet now. Have many many stories to tell. Just waiting on a free moment. Hope you all understand.Btw. Mark is fine... He is drinking so his little experiance at the Dentist is very much behind him. Zoe is also great. Biggest problem
Halloween
My center planned a big party for Halloween. It was part real Western Halloween party the parts we foreign teachers planned and part weird Chinese party everything else. Everyone arrived dressed or partially dressed in costumes. We had a quite effective haunted hallway that people had to walk through and traditional Halloween party games like bobbing for apples passing apples with your neck
Various photos
Various photos Christmas Ceuta and Chellah
Mr. Squeakers
November was an ordinary partyless month. I thought maybe my center would have a Thanksgiving party but alas there was none. I made a nontraditional Thanksgiving dinner for my friends and I spaghetti and garlic bread and we had that the Saturday after Thanksgiving. It was very tasty. The only thing of note for November was the discovery and rescue of a very beautiful kitten. One day as Kim and
The Best Article Directory You Can Find
First and foremost let me say that being a part of an article directory as a member who uploads articles for free lets you be part of a central database where a buyer can access all your work and on top of that a good article directory also serves as a buffet for good high paying web magazines and newsletters. And if you are selling a product or offering a service then you can also promote
Huayna Potosi 6088m
Oh the things Braeden gets me to do First it was spending a day on a mountain bike after 18 years of not riding. Then it was hiking the Inca Trail for 4 days with no previous hiking experience. And now the big one climbing a mountain 6088m above sea level when I have never climbed anything before in my life. How he gets me to do it I have no idea but it was crazyWe went through the company
Goodbye Hoboken NJ hello Norwell MA
We packed up the condo and said goodbye on December 18. Movers left with our boxes that evening as I understand it everything is now loaded into a 20' container and on a boat somewhere between here and Melbourne Australia.We checked into the Doubletree Hotel in Jersey City on Friday evening spent a fun day in NYC with Cate on that Saturday. Saw Pinkalicious the Musical based on her favorite
bienvenido chile
After 4 lift offs and 4 landings my bike and me are in the region of aysen chili. A quick transfer from Balmaceda to Coihaigue with the bike well secured on the roof and I can make my first km. The weather is still cloudy but dry. According to the locals of Puerto Montt december was only rain. Maybe thats good fortune what already did come down is rain gone bye. I met Cesar in the airplane and it
Medan Sumatra Indonesia 291209
HiWe have been completely out of contact in Bukit Luwang here in Sumatra but we've had an amazing timeWe arrived late on Xmas eve and just got the first room we could. Then on Xmas day we went and found a better place where the toilet didn't stink so much that we couldn't bare it and then had Xmas dinner at a nice place on the river to be fair most of the town is on the river but it sounds good
Wish You Happy New Year
January 1 marks the end of a period of remembrance of a passing year especially on Good and Bad which usually starts right after Christmas Breaks. To make new year resolutions. Common topics include politics natural disasters music and the arts and the listing of significant individuals who died during the past year. People welcome in the new year on the night before this is called occasion
Crossing the Border..
Xmas Day was an early start as we had several hours drive to the Nepal border. We crossed at Sounali then styaed in Lumbini that night. Great trip through the countryside but fairly slow as usual its difficult to get up to 40km per hour with the state of the back roads the number of villages to go through every few kilometres and the ever present buffalo goats etc on gthe roads not to me
Darwin to Kununurra through Adelaide River and Victoria River
It never ceases to amaze me when things are timed perfectly. A oneoff introduction to a family from Kununurra at someone elsersquos house mind you led to a phone call offering their house to housesit over December. Not long after this Grady received a phone call from a previous client back in Geelong who needed more work done to their house before Christmas and was willing to fly him back
Phuket Update
Hi EveryoneI got some more photos of Phuket our pad and our carJust sharing
tickets gebucht
holadrio tickets gebucht
The “pharma shill” gambit
Editor’s note: Since I happen to be on vacation (sort of–in reality I plan on spending most of next week holed up in my Sanctum Sanctorum at home writing a grant that’s due in February) and because readership tends to be down during the week between Christmas and New Years’ Day, I thought I’d resurrect something from well over three years ago and revise it to fit this particular blog. In doing so, I hope to provide you with something amusing to read, as well as something to link to time and time again whenever you want to refer to a particular gambit beloved by promoters of quackery and pseudoscience. I present here….The “Pharma Shill” Gambit! Enjoy!
I’ve mentioned before on this blog at least once that I cut my skeptical teeth, so to speak, on Usenet, that vast untamed and largely unmoderated territory full of tens of thousands of discussion newsgroups which used to be a lot more active before the rise of the World Wide Web and then later blogs. These days, few ISPs even offer much in the way of Usenet access; it’s become pretty much irrelevant since Google archived Usenet in the form of Google Groups. My forays into skepticism started out with combatting Holocaust denial on a newsgroup known as alt.revisionism (as good an excuse as any to remind you that nearly all Holocaust “revisionism” isn’t historical revisionism but is actually denial) and then branched out into more general skepticism, particularly about the claims of creationists and, of course, promoters of “alternative” medicine, the latter of which ultimately led me to being the editor of this wild and woolly thing we call the Science-Based Medicine blog. After I began to participate in the debates in the main newsgroup where alternative medicine is discussed, misc.health.alternative, it didn’t take me long to encounter a favorite tactic of promoters of alt-med who were not happy with one who insists on evidence-based medicine and who therefore questions claims that are obviously not based in valid science: The “Pharma Shill” Gambit. This is a technique of ad hominem attack in which a defender of “alternative” medicine, offended by your questioning of, for instance, his/her favorite herb, colon or liver flush technique, zapper, or cancer “cure,” tries to “poison the well” by implying or outright stating you must be in the pay of a pharmaceutical company, hired for nefarious purposes.
Since I entered the blogosphere several years ago under another guise, I’ve only occasionally checked back at my old stomping ground, mainly because blogging is so much less constraining than posting to Usenet, where mostly I used to respond to the posts of others, rather than writing about what I wanted to write about. A while back, though, out of curiosity I checked back and found this interesting little tidbit from a poster calling himself PeterB that demonstrated such a perfect example of the “pharma shill” gambit that I thought it might serve as a perfect example of the sort of thing I’ve had to put up with ever since I started speaking out against quackery:
To : All participants and readers of misc.health.alternative + other health-related newsgroups
Please be aware that many comments and responses posted to this forum are not those of casual posters interested in an honest exchange. A number of individuals with ties to industry are engaging an effort to shape public sentiment about the risks of mainstream medicine while denigrating the benefits and validity of natural medicine. I refer to these individuals broadly as “Pharma Bloggers”(*). Pharma Bloggers on usenet don’t promote a specific company or product, as might be the case with standard “blogging” on a weblog. Most of these people are likely to have an association with a PR campaign whose “blogging” efforts are underwritten by the media and marketing groups of industry. They are not difficult to identify due to specific patterns of behaviour in posting.
Here are a few points to remember while participating in usenet newsgroups:
- Pharma Bloggers on usenet use intimidation, mockery, and insults to silence those who express belief or interest in natural medicine.
- Pharma Bloggers on usenet attack those who question the effectiveness of mainstream medicine and defend disease-management “healthcare” as the only viable form of medicine.
- Pharma Bloggers on usenet post the majority of their responses simply to bury the comments of others; they also strive obsessively to have the last word.
- Pharma Bloggers on usenet are much faster at posting than casual participants; they almost always respond first to a new thread, question, or observation.
- Pharma Bloggers on usenet use multiple “bloggers” in a swap-&-relay fashion to create an aura of the “consensus view” in an effort to isolate posters who question the value of mainstream medicine. You will see this tactic used more often than any other.
Tip: If you find yourself reading a response that is unusually dramatic in tone, or inexplicably vicious toward other posters, and if that response is a defense of mainstream medicine, you can be sure you have stumbled upon a “Pharma Blogger.” Unfortunately, there are more of these individuals posting to usenet on a daily basis than virtually anyone else, which is why I am posting this alert. If you find it odd that so few people on health-related usenet newsgroups are expressing an interest in natural medicine, it isn’t because they aren’t there, it’s because they have been intimidated into silence. The Pharma Bloggers have over-run the various newsgroups with their industrial brand of dogma, mockery, and ridicule. Many casual posters are simply frightened away. That’s one of the goals of Pharma Blogging.
(*) Pharma Blogger: An individual who uses the Internet to: 1) promote and defend maintstream medicine while denigrating natural medicine approaches; 2) attack others who express a preference for natural medicine, or who question the value of mainstream medicine; and 3) cite a variety of “junk medical science” funded by industry for the purpose of establishing markets for marginally effective, and often dangerous, medical products and devices.
PeterB
See what I had to deal with? First, let me just mention that I realize that astroturf campaigns do exist, but, quite frankly, die-hard defenders of alt-med on Usenet like PeterB tend to be interested in such Internet PR efforts only as a means of smearing those who criticize them for their claims or who have the temerity to ask them to provide scientific studies to back up their assertions. To them, everyone who questions them is probably part of an astroturf campaign. It goes with the conspiracy-mongering proclivities so common among cranks.
This sort of obvious pre-emptive ad hominem attack (again, a.k.a. the logical fallacy of poisoning the well) would be utterly laughable if it were not so common. I sometimes get the impression that PeterB and his compatriots must think that there are hordes of “pharma shills” sitting behind banks of computers (remember the claim “more of these individuals posting to Usenet than anyone else”), waiting to pounce the instant anyone like PeterB starts posting critiques of big pharma or praising herbal “cures.” (Yes, that they seem to think they are worth that sort of effort implies PeterB and others like them do seem to have an inflated view of their own importance.) My usual first response to such gambits tends to be facetious and runs along the lines of asking, “Where do I sign up to become a pharma shill? How do I get me a piece of that action? After all, why should I waste my time seeing patients and working like a dog to do science, publish papers, and write grants and then only having a couple of hours in the evenings to blog, when I could make big bucks ruthlessly mocking online dissent against big pharma full time while sitting back in my pajamas and sipping a big hot mug of coffee? Count me in!” (Expect to see my words posted somewhere out of context to make it seem as though I was being serious about this.)
However, facetiousness usually just infuriates people like PeterB to new heights of “pharma shill” accusations. At that point, it’s time to try to be rational, hard as it may be in the face of such provocation, but I try. First, a lot of this smear tends to be a case of projection, of the pot calling the kettle black. For example, #1, #2, and #3 are more typical of supporters of alt-med than of anyone who questions alt-med claims. Indeed, the denizens of misc.health.alternative who are most pro-alternative medicine tend to react quite defensively to questioning of their assertions. They are often like a group of Cyber Sisters (except that they are comprised of both men and women) ruthlessly descending upon anyone who questions the dogma of their favorite alternative medicine, criticizes their behavior, or suggests that maybe, just maybe, conventional medicine might have value. (No, those on “our side” are not entirely innocent, but in my experience the certain promoters of alt-med tend to be quicker with the ad hominem.) One reason for this, I suspect, is that many of them are also active on moderated groups such as CureZone.com, where anyone questioning the alt-med treatment du jour too long or too vigorously will be banned from the discussion groups, thus providing a nice, safe, cuddly environment, where never is heard a discouraging word towards quackery. #4 and #5 are clearly designed to imply that the so-called “Pharma Bloggers” either don’t have a regular job (why else would they have so much time?) or that they are working for big pharma. Of course, they never provide any evidence to support their accusations. In fact, they almost never provide even any reasoning to support their accusations more substantive than variations on “he’s criticizing alternative medicine a lot so he must be a pharma shill.”
The “pharma shill” gambit, like other varieties of ad hominem or well-poisoning rhetoric, conveniently frees defenders of “alternative” medicine from having to argue for their favorite remedies on the science and clinical studies supporting them (which in most cases tend to be badly designed or nonexistent). It’s a technique that’s not just limited to them, either. Anti-vaccination cranks and mercury/autism conspiracy theorists like it too, and, indeed, I have been the subject of some particularly vicious attacks over the years at the hands of the anti-vaccine movement1,2, Generation Rescue and its founder J. B. Handley in particular3,4,5, all of whom appear to be trying very hard to poison my Google reputation. (Indeed, another such attack rolled in just today, courtesy of AoA hanger-on Harold Doherty.) Moreover, J.B. Handley, in particular, has also attacked our very own Steve Novella. More recently, the late Hulda Clark’s former attack Chihuahua Tim Bolen appears to have decided for some reason that I have been named the heir apparent to Dr. Stephen Barrett. While I’m flattered that he somehow seems to think this, I’ll have to be at this for many more years and become much more effective even to approach Barrett’s legacy. Be that as it may, you have to have a tough skin if you’re going to try to combat the infiltration of pseudoscience into medicine.
Skeptico pointed out, even if a newsgroup denizen were a pharma shill, that wouldn’t necessarily invalidate his argument. Yes, in the case of a true “shill” who does not reveal that he works for a pharmaceutical company and pretends to be “objective,” it would be entirely appropriate to “out” that person with extreme prejudice, so that his bias could be taken into account. That being said, I’ll take this opportunity to point out that I have never over the last decade observed such a person in action, which tells me that they are probably a lot less common than people like PeterB like to claim. Even in the case of a real shill, however, this sort of “outing” is not a refutation of that person’s arguments; it merely serves to increase appropriately the level of skepticism about what that person is saying. Such an “outing” still leaves the task of actually using evidence, logic, and sound arguments to refute what that person is saying, something boosters of alt-med rarely even attempt to do. It’s far easier to fling the accusation of “pharma shill” about and see if they can get it to stick, as PeterB and his ilk do.
No doubt, may of our readers here at SBM have heard of Godwin’s Law, which states:
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.
Over the years, an assumed corollary to Godwin’s Law has become commonly accepted that in essence states that once such an “argumentum ad Nazium” is made, the discussion thread is over, and whoever brought up the Hitler or Nazi analogy first automatically loses the debate. Recently, this corollary was the basis of Scopie’s Law, which is more relevant to the topics covered on this blog and states:
In any discussion involving science or medicine, citing Whale.to as a credible source loses you the argument immediately …and gets you laughed out of the room.
Over time, I and others have suggested that, although Whale.to is clearly The One Quack Site To Rule Them All, there are at least a few other sites whose promotion of pseudoscience lead them to deserve to be included in Scopie’s Law, such as NaturalNews.com, Mercola.com, and the anti-vaccine crank blog Age of Autism. However, I think that there’s another law, a law similar to the original formulation of Godwin’s Law, that applies to virtually any online discussion of anything resembling alternative medicine. Perhaps we could dub it “Gorski’s Law,” and this is what I propose it to say:
As an online discussion of health, in particular vaccines or alternative medicine, grows longer, the probability of the invocation of the ‘pharma shill gambit’ approaches one.
If there’s an exception to this law, other than in moderated forums and (usually but not always) here at SBM, I haven’t found it yet.
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