Patients Blinded by Stem Cell Therapy: FDA (and consumers) win a legal victory!
The Food and Drug Administration just won a court case supporting the agency's ability to regulate stem cell clinics that rely on client-derived adipose tissues. This is a win for consumer protection, though too late to help those already harmed.
Direct to Consumer Telemedicine’s Flaws
Telemedicine is here, probably to stay, but with its arrival come new problems.
Walmart sued for deceiving customers in selling homeopathic remedies
A lawsuit claiming Walmart fraudulently deceives consumers in the sale of worthless homeopathic remedies has been filed by the Center for Inquiry (CFI), acting on behalf of the general public. CFI says co-mingling ineffective homeopathic products with science-based treatments on Walmart's pharmacy shelves and website misleads customers into thinking they are equivalent, when "there is not a shred of credible scientific evidence"...
WHO Promotes Unscientific TCM
The World Health Organization endorses quackery in the form of TCM.
Everlywell: At-Home Lab Tests That Don’t Make Sense
EverlyWell offers 34 at-home tests for everything from IgG tests for food sensitivities to a Sleep and Stress test. Most of them make no sense and are likely to mislead customers.
The FDA’s accelerated drug approval program is failing to protect cancer patients
Drug approval is a process that should be and, for the most part, is rooted in rigorous science. However, there is always a countervailing pressure to approve new drugs rapidly, particularly in cancer. That's why the FDA created the accelerated approval program in the early 1990s. Unfortunately, increasingly this approval process appears to be failing us in oncology. Reform is needed.
U.S. Measles Elimination Status in Jeopardy as the Number of Cases Reach 25 Year High
Thanks in large part to anti-vaccine propaganda and decreasing vaccination rates, 2019 is shaping up to be a bad year when it comes to measles outbreaks, the worst in over 2 decades to be exact. And we are now at risk of losing our hard-fought elimination status.
Infomercial in PLOS One links to website selling unproven treatments for fibromyalgia and dementia
PLOS One recently published a clinical trial that was essentially a poorly-disguised advertisement for an unproven product. I object to this use of the scientific literature to market such a device.
Treating Mental Illness with Nutrition: The Walsh Protocol
The Walsh Institute offers the Walsh protocol for the nutritional treatment of mental illness. This "orthomolecular psychiatry" is not supported by any clinical studies.
Time to Move Beyond the Impact Factor
The impact factor has become the one metric for journal quality. It's time to rethink this system.