Skeptics in Pub. Cholera. Chapter 11a
The morning started too early. For some reason, I snapped awake just before sunrise and could not fall back to sleep. Probably that ball of guilt in the pit of my stomach. I suspected it is a minor example of what a condemned man feels on the morning of his execution. I lay in bed and stared thoughtlessly at the ceiling waiting...
More Evidence that Ignoring Safe Sleep Advice Puts Babies at Risk of Unexpected Death
A new study of thousands of cases confirms that sharing a sleep surface with a caregiver significantly increases the risk of unexpected death in infancy.
Quality differences of supplements vs. drugs
When it comes to drugs or dietary supplements, accuracy should be a given. What’s on the label should accurately describe what’s in the bottle. No exceptions. When it comes to ensuring the products we buy are of high quality, we’re all effectively reliant on regulation to protect us. As a pharmacist, I can’t personally verify that each tablet in your prescription contains...
How antivaxxers weaponize vaccine safety studies to falsely portray vaccines as dangerous
Antivaxxers have weaponized a huge multinational vaccine safety study of 99 million patient records that found rare adverse events and concluded that the risks of COVID-19 vaccines outweigh the benefits. How? A combination of the Nirvana fallacy and spin.
Skeptics in the Pub. Cholera. Chapter 10b
A young woman was waiting at the pump. She introduced herself as Amy Blogg, an Illustrator for the River Weekly. She quickly let us know that she had been briefed by Mrs. Howitt. I demonstrated the workings of the microscope on a blade of grass and an ant. It was met with the usual expressions of amazement by first-timer users. If I...
The Great Barrington Declaration Wasn’t a Plan For Public Health Officials. It Was a List of Absurd Demands of Them.
The authors of the GBD advised and influenced many politicians at the highest level. They claim to have delineated many practical policies to protect the vulnerable, and they said it would’ve been possible, certainly. So an obvious question emerges. Why didn’t they protect the vulnerable?
Pesticide in Oat Products – Should You Worry?
You know the rule about headlines - if there is a question in a headline the answer is almost always "no". This article is no exception.
More Unneeded Adjectives
This is going to be a mostly reference free blog entry. Mostly a rambling opinion about my biases and opinions about science. And you know what they say about opinions. I seem to fret an inordinate amount about adjectives. So often they do not belong in front of the nouns found here at the blog. I remain a touch annoyed at the...
False balance in an NBC news story on whole body MRI scans
Over the weekend, NBC News aired a story on whole body MRI scans. Although it did include the usual cautions about false positives and the harm they cause, the caution was diluted by the story's focus a rare case of a woman who had a brain tumor detected. Overall, it was false balance that reminded me of vaccine/autism stories 20 years ago.
What Is Somatic Therapy?
Is modern medicine descending into pseudoscience, or is scientific medicine still going strong? Unfortunately, I think both of these things can happen at the same time. On the one hand, scientific research in medicine is progressing nicely. We are seeing the results of scientific breakthroughs made decades ago, with monoclonal antibody therapies, new therapeutic targets, the beginning of real genetic therapy, brain-machine...