HPV Vaccine Compliance
There are few home-runs in medicine. Most of our choices have some sort of trade-off – drugs have side effects, interventions have risks, and many treatments have marginal benefits. Sometimes, however, medical science hits one out of the park and develops a treatment that is safe, effective, cost effective, and convenient. Any dispassionate view of the evidence can only lead to one...
Vitamins and Cancer Risk
Vitamins have been promoted as a general panacea, as well as a means of preventing cancer. In reality, high doses of vitamins may even cause cancer.
Pepsi Removing Aspartame
Pepsi has announced that it will remove aspartame from its formulation of diet Pepsi products in the US this year. Apparently this is a reaction to a 5% drop in the sales of Pepsi. Seth Kaufman, vice-president of Pepsi, said “Aspartame is the number one reason consumers are dropping diet soda.” This move comes in the same week that Chipotle announced it...
Still No Association Between MMR and Autism
A new study published this week in JAMA, “Autism Occurrence by MMR Vaccine Status Among US Children With Older Siblings With and Without Autism”, puts one more nail in the claim that the MMR is associated with autism. You may wonder why, after years and multiple studies showing no association between the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine (MMR) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) there would...
WHO Statement on Reporting Clinical Trials
The World Health Organization (WHO) has recently released a new position statement on mandatory reporting of all interventional clinical trials. This is a positive step in the trend towards higher quality and greater transparency in clinical trials. The underlying ethical concept here is that the public has a right to data that results from experimentation on humans. The researchers do not ethically...
Wikipedia vs Quackery – Standards vs Chaos
Wikipedia, an online open-source encyclopedia, can boast 470 million visitors each month, making it one of the most popular websites on the internet. It is an incredibly useful resource – I think it’s fair to say it is the online reference of record. For that reason people care how topics important to them are represented in Wikipedia. Wikipedia, in fact, has become...
Update on the Tobinick Lawsuit
Last year Edward Tobinick sued the Society for Science-Based Medicine, SGU Productions (the producers of the Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe podcast), Yale University, and me personally for libel and (of all things) false advertising. I am frequently asked how the suit is going so here is an update. Background The lawsuit involved an article I wrote on Science-Based Medicine on May...
What Is Brain Death?
Of course, any story illustrating the issues surrounding brain death is going to be a sad and tragic tale. In December of 2013, Jahi McMath suffered bleeding complications following a tonsillectomy and tissue removal for sleep apnea. This resulted in a cardiac arrest with an apparent prolonged period of lack of blood flow to the brain. While her heart function was brought...
Making One’s Own Reality – Food Babe Edition
The default mode of human activity is to construct our own internal model of reality based upon our desires, biases, flawed perceptions, memories, and reasoning, and received narratives from the culture in which we live. That model of reality is then reinforced by confirmation bias and jealously defended. But we also have the capacity to transcend this pathway of least resistance. Philosophy...
Another Review Finds Homeopathy Worthless
Australia has published a report on the evidence supporting homeopathy - and concluded rightly that there is no convincing evidence. It joins a number of other nations that have conducted similar reviews, and reached the same conclusion. Homeopathy is not effective, not medicine, and not worthwhile.