Respectful Insolence



Respectful Insolence is a blog by a breast oncology surgeon and researcher which focuses on medical issues in woo and pseudoscience as well as cutting edge research in the author's field. It is written using the pseudonymous nom de blog "Orac", named after a sentient machine from the British sci-fi series Blake's 7. Orac was later "outed" as Gorski is also a managing editor of Science-Based Medicine. Respectful Insolence was originally started on Blogspot in 2004, it was a part of ScienceBlogs from 2006 until November 2017.

Orac is best known for his posts examining vaccine hysteria and the "mercury militia" claims of a link between autism and vaccines. He has had several Internet debates with neurosurgeon Michael Egnor (now a Discovery Institute fellow) about Egnor's claims that modern neuroscience has provided evidence for a non-materialistic interpretation of mind. In 2012 and 2013, he also took on exposing pseudoscience in anti-GMO activism, drawing parallels between it and the anti-vaccine movement.

The comments section in the blog is surprisingly good. Of course, there are trolls here and there, but they are frequently shot down by the commenters. Herr Doktor Bimler is the wittiest commentator, and Narad is a tremendous douche suffering from Dunning-Kruger.

As of November 2017, in response to the shutdown of ScienceBlogs, Orac will continue blogging in a new domain.

Some subjects

 * Age of Autism
 * Anti-vaccination movement
 * GreenMedInfo
 * NaturalNews. Mike Adams has been breaking his back at character assassination and ruining Orac's reputation. He calls him one of the evilest persons in medicine and "malevolent", "psychopath", "[he] controls Wikipedia!" and more than 200 other snarl words in Breaking our own record for their page! Since they are incapable of debunking his work, each paragraph resorts to shill gambits, snarl words, and (clumsy) character assassination, claiming that he has psychotic behavior/is mentally unstable, referring to his work as a "rant", or claiming that he has impersonated the families of vaccine injured people to convert people (without proof, of course).