Chiropractic Vs. Conventional: Dueling Perspectives On Infant Colic…..
Infant colic, while not a deadly disease by any stretch of the imagination, is an extremely troubling entity. Not only can it be quite distressing to caregivers, it is also a well-established risk factor for neglect and abuse of the child. Excessive crying in general, whether diagnosed as infant colic or not, is a frequent impetus for seeking advice from medical professionals....
Food Allergies: Facts, Myths, and Pseudoscience
The price of life is eternal vigilance. If you have severe food allergies, that is your reality. Every day, every meal, every bite. Eating is an intrinsic and essential part of what we do and who we are, so the idea that our bodies can rebel violently to everyday foods can be difficult to believe. But it’s real, and the numbers of...
Everything Causes Cancer
It’s likely you know someone who has bought into the notion that nutrition is everything, the source of all health and the cause of all illness. Nutrition is very important, to be sure, but it is only one of many possible causes of disease, and if you live in a Western industrialized nation you probably have adequate nutrition. The notion, however, that...
What Can We Learn from the Kitavans?
A Swedish researcher, Staffan Lindeberg, has been studying the inhabitants of Kitava, one of the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea. He claims that sudden cardiac death, stroke, and exertion-related chest pain never occur in Kitava; and he attributes this to their eating a Paleolithic diet. 2,250 people live on Kitava. They are traditional farmers. Their dietary staples are tubers (yam, sweet...
Another antivaccine zombie meme: polio vaccine and SV40 and cancer, oh, my!
The Internet has produced a revolution with respect to information. Now, people anywhere, any time, can find almost any information that they want, as long as they have a connection to the global network and aren’t unfortunate enough to live in a country that heavily censors the Internet connections coming in. In addition, anyone any time can put his or her opinion...
I refute it thus. On vaccination.
Reality is one honey badger. It don’t care. About you, about your thoughts, about your needs, about your beliefs. You can reject reality and substitute your own, but reality will roll on, eventually crushing you even as you refuse to dodge it. The best you can hope for is to play by reality’s rules and use them to your benefit. Combined with...
CAM practitioners as primary care providers under the Affordable Care Act: Part 2
In the last post, we took another look at Section 2607 of the Affordable Care Act, which prohibits “discrimination” against licensed CAM practitioners by insurers, and how chiropractors are continuing their PR campaign to rebrand themselves as primary care physicians. This time, we review a recent white paper by the Academic Consortium of Complementary and Alternative Healthcare, an organization that might be seen as CAM’s...
MMR and Autism Rises from the Dead
One of the tactics of snake-oil salesmen is to fearmonger about mainstream medical practices so as to scare potential customers into their clutches. A common target of such fearmongering is vaccines. Vaccine are an easy target – they are generally required by the government to some degree, and involve sticking small children with needles and injecting them with a cocktail that parents...
Does Everybody Have Chronic Lyme Disease? Does Anyone?
A deplorable article by Suzy Cohen on Huffington Post is titled “Feel Bad? It Could Be Lyme Unless Proven Otherwise.” It consists of irresponsible fear-mongering about a nonexistent disease. A science-based article would be titled “Feel Bad? It Couldn’t Be Chronic Lyme Disease Because CLD Is Nonexistent Until Proven Otherwise.” Cohen says: People often attribute uncomfortable symptoms to aging, stress, or the...
The future of “integrative medicine” is too close for comfort
I was the other day. I’ve been on vacation this week (staycation, actually, as I stayed at home and didn’t go on any trips); so you would think it would take a lot to depress me. Unfortunately, today is the last day of that vacation; so the thought of diving back into the fray trying to fund my lab. It didn’t help...