Category: Health Fraud

Chelation: Compounding Pharmacy’s Problems

Chelation is the provision of a substance to increase the body’s excretion of heavy metals. In poisoning situations (lead, aluminum, iron, etc.), chelation is medically necessary, objectively effective, and approved for use. But the same term has a completely different meaning in the alternative medicine universe, where proponents often believe heavy metal toxicity is the “one true cause” of disease, and chelation...

/ September 30, 2010

Evidence-Based Medicine, Human Studies Ethics, and the ‘Gonzalez Regimen’: a Disappointing Editorial in the Journal of Clinical Oncology Part 2

NB: If you haven’t yet read Part 1 of this blog, please do so now; Part 2 will not summarize it. … At the end of Part 1, I wrote: We do not need formal statistics or a new, randomized trial with a larger sample size to justify dismissing the Gonzalez regimen. In his editorial for the JCO, Mark Levine made a...

/ September 20, 2010

Mike Adams on Dr. Mehmet Oz’s colon polyps: “Spontaneous” disease?

Given that it’s a holiday and I debated whether or not I even wanted to post anything today, I think I’ll keep things light and uncharacteristically brief today. After all, not every post can be like last week’s epic on Avastin or the week before’s epic on peer review. That’s a lot of work, and it is a holiday, after all. Besides,...

/ September 6, 2010

Alchemy Is Back

Alchemy is alive and well! Yes, that medieval precursor of chemistry, that chimerical search for the philosopher’s stone and the transmutation of lead to gold. Modern alchemists have found the philosopher’s stone and are selling it and teaching people how to make it themselves out of dew and Celtic sea salt. The philosopher’s stone apparently is an elixir of life that you...

/ August 10, 2010

The Texas Medical Board acts in the case of the Winkler County whistle blowing nurses

I can’t speak for anyone else who blogs here at Science-Based Medicine, but there’s one thing I like to emphasize to people who complain that we exist only to “bash ‘alternative’ medicine.” We don’t. We exist to champion medicine based on science against all manner of dubious practices. Part of that mandate involves understanding and accepting that science-based medicine is not perfect....

/ July 19, 2010

New CMS Chief Donald Berwick: a Trojan Horse for Quackery?

NB: I posted this on Health Care Renewal a couple of days ago, figuring that Dr. Gorski’s post would suffice for the SBM readership (he and I had discussed the topic while at TAM8 last week). But Managing Editor Gorski has asked me to repost it here, which I’m happy to do. I am especially pleased to demonstrate that I am capable...

/ July 15, 2010

Doctor’s Data Sues Quackwatch

A few weeks ago I posted an article about bogus diagnostic tests. I cited Doctor’s Data, Inc. (DDI), as “a company with a long history of dubious offerings.” I also wrote: You can’t help but have noticed that many of the links in this post are to articles on Quackwatch. That’s because the site is chock full of useful information about bogus tests,...

/ July 5, 2010

Professional Integrity for Sale? “Sure,” Says Medscape!

Some chiropractors also practice homeopathy. According to Frank King, D.C., many more should be doing just that: Homeopathy is an energetic form of natural medicine that corrects nerve interferences, absent nerve reflexes, and pathological nerve response patterns that the chiropractic adjustment alone does not correct. The appropriate homeopathic remedies will eliminate aberrant nerve reflexes and pathological nerve responses which cause recurrent subluxation...

/ June 25, 2010

Lying Liars and their Lying Lies

Carlyle said “a lie cannot live.” It shows that he did not know how to tell them. — Mark Twain There is an infamous hoax from last century called The Protocols of the (Learned) Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic text purporting to describe a plan to achieve global domination by the Jewish people. Despite the fact that the Protocols is a work...

/ May 27, 2010

The latest chapter in the seemingly never-ending saga of dichloroacetate as a cancer treatment

The road from an idea to a useful drug is a long one, and in cancer it is often particularly long. One reason is that to be able to tell whether a given treatment is effective against cancer often takes several years at a minimum, in order to determine if patients receiving the new treatment are surviving their disease longer than those...

/ May 17, 2010