Month: July 2023
The Grand Debunk of the antivaxxer book “Turtles All the Way Down” (part 2/10)
The second installment in debunking the antivaxxer book "Turtles All the Way Down": Chapter 2, supposedly concerned with “The Science of Adverse Events”.
Praise for Dr. Monica Gandhi
Ideally, leaders of American medicine would have had the courage to correct misinformation spread by their fellow doctors. At a bare minimum, they didn't have to lavish praise on a doctor who repeatedly polluted our COVID landscape with obvious misinformation and falsely pacified people the worst was over, when in fact the worst was yet to come.
The Grand Debunk of the antivaxxer book “Turtles All the Way Down” (part 1/10)
This book — written by "Anonymous", edited by Children's Health Defense lawyer Mary Holland and Children's Health Defense Publisher Liaison and Thinking Moms’ Revolution co-founder Zoey O’Toole, and published by "The Turtles Team" — purports to use only mainstream references to prove its points. But the book employs all the standard tropes in a master class of science denial and antivax tactics...
FDA Approves Leqembi for Alzheimer’s
FDA upgrades Leqembi for AD from accelerated to traditional approval based on latest clinical data.
The return of marketing hype for “whole body scans”…now with AI!
Two decades ago, I cut my skeptical teeth countering advertising for whole body scans by companies making extravagant promises for their products. This particular medical fad faded for a while, but now it's back with a vengeance...with AI! Looking at these products, what I see is basically the quackery that is functional medicine on steroids and powered by AI.
Delabeling Penicillin Allergies: A Public Service Announcement from Science-Based Medicine
Is your child allergic to penicillin? Are you sure about that? Penicillin allergy is much less common than widely believed and there is a big push to delabel pediatric and adult patients who actually can tolerate these antibiotics.
The effects of vitamin D supplementation on major cardiac events
A large randomized controlled trial of vitamin D supplementation generates good data to show there is likely no benefit.
Aspartame and Cancer
Despite the leaked new classification as a "possible" carcinogen, the evidence still shows aspartame is safe.
When Doctors Have Different Standards of Evidence for the Virus and the Vaccine
817,000 Americans had already died of COVID by December 23, 2021, and 244,000 more would die the next year. Millions more survived, but were injured. These numbers could have been lower if doctors had not become defense attorneys for SARS‑CoV‑2 and prosecutors against the vaccine, and instead applied similar standards of evidence to both.
RFK Jr. resurrects an old antivax half-truth about “saline placebos” in randomized controlled trials of vaccines
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has resurrected the antivax claim that the childhood vaccine schedule has never been tested in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) with a saline placebo controls (and therefore the vaccine schedule is unsafe). This is an old and deceptive antivax half-truth that ignores both what constitutes a scientifically valid placebo and the ethical requirements for RCTs.