Category: Science and Medicine
Monkey business in autism research, part II
Over the last couple of months, I’ve noticed something about the anti-vaccine movement. Specifically, I’ve noticed that the mavens of pseudoscience that make up the movement seem to have turned their sights with a vengeance on the Hepatitis B vaccine. The reason for this new tactic, I believe, is fairly obvious. The fact that the Hep B vaccine is administered shortly after...
Autism Prevalence
Two recent studies concerning the prevalence of autism in the US have been getting a lot of attention, because they indicate that autism prevalence may be higher than previously estimated. This, of course, fuels the debate over whether or not there are environmental triggers of autism. One study was conducted by the CDC but has yet to be published. The results were...
Petit canard, grand canard
The flu pandemic of 1918 was horrific. Millions of people died (by some estimates 4% of the world’s population), and the medical establishment worked feverishly to find a cause and a treatment. There were many dead-ends in the search for the cause of the flu. One of the most enduring errors was the attribution of the pandemic to a bacterium called Haemophilus...
The “Iron Rule of Cancer”: The dangerous cancer quackery that is the “German New Medicine”
Given that I trained as a cancer surgeon, do laboratory and translational cancer research, and spend my clinical time taking care of breast cancer patients, not surprisingly one topic that gets me the most irritated and provokes a lot of my verbiage for SBM is cancer quackery. As I was perusing my list of posts the other day, it occurred to me...
Confusing correlation with causation
These two video explains it better than anything I’ve seen in a long time: That’s right. Vaccines educate the immune system. Use them. I got my flu shot on Thursday.
Head-In-The-Sand Consumer Affairs
Editor’s Note: Please be aware that Ben is deployed in Iraq right now. What that means is that his Internet access is somewhat sporadic. He will show up from time to time to answer comments, however. ERRARE HUMANUM EST, SED PERSEVERARE DIABOLICUM – To err is human, but to persist diabolical – Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c. 4 BC – 65 AD) The...
The Need for Transparency
A recent editorial in PLOS Medicine discusses the need for transparency in the medical literature, specifically with regard to comparative effectiveness research (CER). The editorial makes many excellent points, but also puts into clear relief the double standard that is consciously being fabricated by proponents of non-science-based medicine. I wrote previously about another editorial that took a very different approach. Speaking for...
Cold Flusion?
This is a quick entry to allow me to have a little spleen venting. And I am cross posting this over at Medscape. Background for you youngsters. In 1989 two electrochemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, announced they had successfully developed cold fusion: nuclear fusion at room temperature. Pons was chairman of the chemistry department at the University of Utah at the...
AAFP Endorses CAM
I recently chastised the American Family Physician (the journal of the American Academy of Family Physicians) for assigning a high SORT (strength of evidence) rating to acupuncture treatments that did not merit that rating. While the AAFP claims to strongly support evidence-based medicine, I have observed a gradual infiltration of CAM into their journal, their website, and their CME offerings. They seem...
HIV/AIDS denialists do it too!
Remember my post from Monday about fake scientific conferences organized by the anti-vaccine movement that are designed to paint a picture of legitimate science being done, so much so that they even fool some academics into speaking there? (I realize that the server issues we had from Monday through Wednesday that rendered the site completely FUBAR may have prevented some of you...