Mark Alden Crislip is an infectious disease doctor in Portland, Oregon and chief of infectious diseases at Legacy Health hospital system. Crislip hosts the QuackCastpodcast. He also produces two other podcasts, has written and edited several books, and regularly writes for medicine-related blogs. He is a co-founder of the Institute for Science in Medicine as well as a co-founder and the current president of the Society for Science-Based Medicine.
Crislip is the producer and host of three podcasts: QuackCast, Gobbet o' Pus, and PusCast. Each episode of QuackCast features Crislip delivering a monologue about a topic related to medicine, usually a critique of an alternative medicine practice or set of beliefs. He was inspired to create his own science-based medicine show after listening to the popular podcast Slacker Astronomy. The first episode of QuackCast was released on 5 May 2006, and other episodes have been released intermittently since then. The podcast has won three Podcast Awards in the Health/Fitness category, for the years 2009, 2010, and 2011. Crislip has been producing the Gobbet o' Pus podcast since 2009. The show features short discussions of interesting cases he has encountered in his medical practice and other topics of interest to infectious disease specialists. A new episode is released every few days. PusCast is a bimonthly review of the infectious disease literature. Crislip has been producing this podcast since November 2006.
Writings
Crislip is an editor of and writes biweekly posts for the Science-Based Medicine blog. There, he writes on investigating the claims of alternative medicine. He is the co-editor, along with Steven Novella and David Gorski, of a 12-volume series of Science-Based Medicine Guides, based on posts from the Science-Based Medicine blog. He also posts several times a week on a blog for Medscape called Rubor, Dolor, Calor, Tumor. He compiled selections from his Medscape blog into two e-books titled Puswhisperer: A Year in the Life of an Infectious Disease Doc and Puswhisperer Part Deux: Another Year of Pus. He is also the author of a medical app for Android and iPhone called Infectious Disease Compendium: A Guide to Infectious Diseases. Skeptic magazine published an article by Crislip in 2008 titled "Near Death Experiences and the Medical Literature," in which he criticized a Lancet article that reported on near-death experiences without considering all the physiological factors that may have accounted for patients' subjective experiences.
Other activities
Crislip is the president and co-founder of the Society for Science-Based Medicine, an organization that seeks to educate medical professionals and the general public about the importance of basing medical practices on science. It also advocates for laws that support the use of science in medicine. The organization's website features a wiki-based repository of material about questionable medical practices from Dr. Stephen Barrett's extensive Quackwatch website. He is a founding fellow of the Institute for Science in Medicine, a non-profit educational and policy institute that promotes science-based medical practices. Several organizations that promote science and skepticism have invited Crislip to give lectures about alternative medicine and the anti-vaccine movement. He has spoken at The Amaz!ng Meeting three times, most recently in 2013. In June 2010 he gave a talk called "The Vaccine Pseudo-Controversy" for the Center for Inquiry Portland. In November 2013 he spoke at a meeting of Oregonians for Science and Reason on the topic of "Supplement, Complementary and Alternative Medicine Myths." He was also a featured speaker at the in Manchester, England in April 2014. Crislip is credited with an oft-cited quote of integrative medicine: "If you integrate fantasy with reality, you do not instantiate reality. If you mix cow pie with apple pie, it does not make the cow pie taste better; it makes the apple pie worse."
Awards
Crislip has been on the Top Docs list published by Portland Monthly magazine several times, most recently in 2014. U.S. News & World Report listed him as a Top U.S. Physician in 2012. The residents at his hospital also named him "Attending Most Likely to Tell It Like It Is."
