Quackery Then and Now
“The forces of graft and unrighteousness are peculiar to no country or clime, and they have their champions in the high places and the low. Until the people themselves are better educated concerning the danger and iniquity of quackery, they must be protected from the forces that prey. The popular understanding of these matters is becoming better every day, and, aided by...
Reporting Preliminary Findings
While scanning through recent science press releases I came across an interesting study looking at the use of a pharmaceutical grade antioxidant, N-Acetylcysteine (NAC), in the treatment of certain symptoms of autism. This is a small pilot study, but it did have a double-blind placebo controlled design. The press release reports: During the 12-week trial, NAC treatment decreased irritability scores from 13.1...
Bee Pollen Supplements – Not Safe or Effective
Among the myriad of supplements being offered to the public are various bee products, including bee pollen. The claims made for bee pollen supplements are typically over-hyped and evidence-free, as is typical of this poorly regulated industry. The claims from bee-pollen-supplements.com are representative: The benefits are enormous and the substance has been proven by many health experts. This particular substance is known...
Prince Charles Alternative Medicine Charity Closes
The Princes Foundation for Integrated Health closed shop in 2010. Now the company that ran the foundation has officially closed. The foundation was a vanity project by Prince Charles, who had a soft spot for so-called alternative medicine and natural therapies. The foundation was established in 1993 and in the last 19 years has misinformed the public about CAM therapies, promoted nonsense like...
Pseudoscience is not Cost Effective
Industrialized nations are in the middle of a health care crisis (some more than others), or at least a dilemma. As our medical technology advances, people are living longer, they are living with chronic diseases, and they are consuming more health care. The cost of this health care is rising faster than economic growth, so it is becoming a greater and greater...
Funding CAM Research
Paul Offit has published a thoughtful essay in the most recent Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in which he argues against funding research into complementary and alternative therapies (CAM). Offit is a leading critic of the anti-vaccine movement and has written popular books discrediting many of their claims, such as disproved claim for a connection between some vaccines or ingredients...
Hypnotherapy For Pain and Other Conditions
Hypnotherapy is the use of hypnosis as a medical intervention, usually for the treatment of pain and other subjective symptoms. It remains controversial, primarily because the evidence for its efficacy is not yet compelling, but also because it is poorly understood. This situation is not helped by the fact that it is often characterized as an “alternative” therapy, a label that can...
The Skeptical Clinician
All scientists should be skeptics. Serious problems arise when a less-than-skeptical approach is taking to the task of discovery. Typically the result is flawed science, and for those significantly lacking in skepticism this can descend to pseudoscience and crankery. With the applied sciences, such as the clinical sciences of medicine and mental therapy, there are potentially immediate and practical implications as well....
Herbal Medicine and Aristolochic Acid Nephropathy
Herbs are little more than dirty drugs, with uncertain dosing, potency, and often-unrecognized side effects. Aristolochic acid, which is present in the Aristolochia genus of plants often used in Traditional Chinese Medicine for many uses. Used in the West as a weight loss aid, Aristolochia is a case study in the unrecognized dangers of herbal medicine; it is a powerful nephrotoxin, and...
Whooping Cough Epidemic
The Washington State Department of Health has released a statement stating that they are in the midst of a whooping cough epidemic, which will likely reach its highest levels in decades. So far this year there have been 640 cases, compared to 94 cases over the same time period last year. This is a dramatic increase. Whooping cough is a vaccine preventable...