Category: Basic Science

Pulse oximeters

COVID-19 puts the spotlight on an unexpected racial disparity in health care

Evidence increasingly suggests that pulse oximeters, the little finger clips that measure blood oxygen, overestimate the blood oxygenation in Black patients. It's a problem that's been discussed a long time that took a pandemic to bring to public consciousness. How can SBM decrease or eliminate such healthcare disparities?

/ July 18, 2022

The Science of Biological Sex

What does the science actually say about biological sex?

/ July 13, 2022

100% Cure Rate Is Hard to Believe

An experimental cancer drug made 100% of rectal cancers disappear in a small trial, allowing subjects to avoid the standard treatment of chemotherapy and surgery . “Some scientists say these kinds of results have never been seen in the history of cancer research.” 100% is hard to believe; the 95% confidence interval was 74 to 100. Whatever the true percentage, if this...

/ July 12, 2022

A Pox on All Our Houses

‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy; Thou art thyself, though not a Monkeypox. What’s Monkeypox? It is nor hand, nor foot, Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part Belonging to a man. O, be some other name! What’s in a name? That which we call an orthopoxvirus By any other name would sicken as much; So Monkeypox would, were...

/ June 16, 2022

Do Covid-19 Vaccines Affect Fertility?

Fears of future infertility are keeping some parents from vaccinating their children for COVID-19. These fears are not supported by any evidence.

/ May 31, 2022
MMS is bleach

It rises again! Bleach as an “early treatment” alternative to vaccines and a cure for COVID-19

Bleach...it had to be...bleach. Again. This time around, it's being used to treat COVID-19, because of course it is. MMS is a slasher quackery. No matter how often it appears to have died, it always returns for another installment in its quackery franchise.

/ March 7, 2022
Black Oxygen Organics (BOO)

BOO: Or how “magic dirt” became a MLM miracle cure scam for COVID-19

"BOO" stands for Black Oxygen Organics, a "cure" for COVID-19 that got the attention of regulators last week. Basically, it's dirt billed by its believers as "magic dirt" that sells for $110 a bag (plus shipping) through a multilevel marketing sales model. What can this latest COVID cure tell us about the relationship between alternative medicine and COVID-19 denial?

/ December 6, 2021

Mini-Brains for Disease Research

New research on organoid "mini-brains" highlights the potential of this new kind of scientific research.

/ October 27, 2021
Lab mice

Even in a pandemic, bait-and-switch acupuncture studies still get published in Nature

Last week, a study claiming to have identified a neurologic mechanism by which acupuncture reduces inflammation was published in Nature. It does no such thing. it's another bait-and-switch mouse study that likely would never have been published in such a high profile journal if it hadn't rebranded electrical stimulation as "electroacupuncture".

/ October 18, 2021

Desktop Genetics

We seem to be in the middle of a revolution in genetics research, which has just taken another leap forward.

/ September 15, 2021