The FDA Cracks Down on Fake Cancer Cures
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the agency that regulates the drug industry in the US, put out a press release yesterday warning “Individuals and Firms to Stop Selling Fake Cancer ‘Cures’.” The press release reports: “Although promotions of bogus cancer ‘cures’ have always been a problem, the Internet has provided a mechanism for them to flourish,” said Margaret O’K. Glavin, the...
Not Treating – A Neglected Option
One of the criticisms of modern medicine is that doctors prescribe too many pills. That’s true. Patients and doctors sometimes get caught up in a mutual misunderstanding. The patient assumes that he needs a prescription, and the doctor assumes that the patient wants a prescription. But sometimes patients don’t either need or want a prescription. I’ll use myself as an illustration. I...
Why the latest Geier & Geier paper is not evidence that mercury in vaccines causes autism
Several people have been sending me either links to this paper or even the paper itself: Young HA, Geier DA, Geier MR. (2008). Thimerosal exposure in infants and neurodevelopmental disorders: An assessment of computerized medical records in the Vaccine Safety Datalink. J Neurol Sci. 2008 May 14 [Epub ahead of print]. (Full text here.) A few have asked me whether I was...
The media versus the frontiers of medicine and surgery
A couple of months ago, one of my esteemed co-bloggers, Wally Sampson, wrote an excellent article about borderlines in research in conventional medicine. Such borderlines are particularly common in my area of expertise (cancer, which is also Dr. Sampson’s area of expertise) because there are so many cancers for which we do not as yet have reliably curative therapies. Patients faced with...
Another State Promotes the Pseudoscientific Cult that is “Naturopathic Medicine.” Part 1
Minnesota has recently become the 15th state in the U.S. to formally endorse the claims of a tiny group of naturopaths who portray themselves as physicians.* The bill , like the popular-media “CAM” reports that Steve Novella criticized on Wednesday, merely parrots what these naturopaths claim about themselves. It reveals no attempt to investigate or to judge the tenets of the field. The following excerpts present...
Forks in the road
It’s been decades since the onslaught of organized quackery began against science and reason. Although most physicians are still capable of reasoning, the percentage of medical graduates whose brains have been cleansed of that ability seems to have increased. Either the brains have been cleansed or they have learned to coexist with unreason and to use both functions simultaneously. The latter is...
The Media and “CAM”
Recently I have been generally critical of how mainstream media deals with scientific topics. Science is often complex and requires hard work and diligence on the part of a journalist to get the story right. In recent years mainstream news outlets have been downsizing or eliminating their science journalists and tasking general reporters and editors to handle science stories. Meanwhile, as science...
Mercury Must Be Bad – If Not in Vaccines, In Teeth
Those of us who are baby boomers or older can remember playing with mercury when we were young. The thermometer broke, and you pushed the little globules around. Or you fooled around with the stuff in science class. My husband says he used to get mercury to flow over the surface of a dime and make it look really shiny. Who knew...
Jenny McCarthy, Jim Carrey, and “Green Our Vaccines”: Anti-vaccine, not “pro-safe vaccine”
Last week, there was a rally in Washington, D.C. How many people actually attended the rally is uncertain. The organizers themselves claim that 8,500 people attended, while more objective estimates from people not associated with the march put the number at probably less than 1,000. Of course, such wide variations in estimates for the attendance at such events are not uncommon. For...
The Weekly Waluation of the Weasel Words of Woo #7
What Talent! I, like Joe, am utterly humbled by the translations of the entry in the W^5/2 #6! Namidim (twice), Stu (m’man!), Michelle B (using the Now-Venerated, Awesome Power of Simple Substitution that had Suddenly Swept Stu to SuperStar Status lo! These many W^5/2s ago!), and Michael X (it’s Larry’s turn to cry!) each nailed that passage lacka split hawg through the Penetrating Power of Poignant...