The 2014 Ohio Mumps Outbreak

As I write this post, a large outbreak of mumps is ongoing in Columbus, Ohio. The city, which on average sees a single case each year, has seen over 250 since February. To put things in further perspective, only about 440 cases are normally diagnosed in the entire United States annually. The outbreak began on the campus of Ohio State University, where...

/ April 25, 2014

Naturopathy vs. Science: Vaccination Edition

We saw it coming. The re-emergence of vaccine-preventable disease should surprise no-one that’s been following the anti-vaccine movement. Rebutting anti-vaccine rhetoric feels like a Sisyphean struggle. Steven Novella likened it to a game of whack-a-mole, where the moles are the same old tropes that keep popping up, no matter how often they are refuted with facts. Vaccines are a remarkable success of...

/ April 24, 2014

Herbal Center at Cleveland Clinic

The infiltration of pseudoscience and simply bad medicine into mainstream medicine continues. Hospitals are an easy breech point because they are run by administrators who may have more talent and interest in marketing than in science. Many hospitals in my area, for example, proudly display their “integrative” centers, offering nutrition advice and massage alongside more dubious offerings, such as reflexology and reiki....

/ April 23, 2014

Curing Hepatitis C: A Success Story and a Price Tag

Previously incurable, hepatitis C now has a treatment. A very, very expensive treatment. But there is hope for acutely and chronically infected people.

/ April 22, 2014

Gluten-free skin and beauty products: Extracting cash from the gullible

Gluten-free doesn't make sense for a lot of diets. Except for lip balm and toothpaste, it makes an order of magnitude less sense for beauty products.

/ April 21, 2014

Moxibustion

Moxibustion is the burning of mugwort close to, or sometimes into, the skin. Does it work? No. Why do people use it? Because it's old.

/ April 18, 2014

What Whole Foods Markets Doesn’t Tell You

Whole Foods Market is a relentlessly hip American supermarket chain which prides itself on organic fruits and vegetables, gluten-free just-about-everything, and high-end touches like wine bars and exotic take out items (roasted yucca, anyone?). The health products aisle is stocked with Bach Flower and homeopathic remedies. For example, in-house brand Flu Ease: “an established homeopathic formula that should be taken at the...

/ April 17, 2014

GSK Investigated for Bribing Doctors

The BBC reports that 11 doctors and a GlaxoSmithKline regional manager in Poland have been charged with alleged corruption. The apparent scheme was simple — GSK sales reps are given targets for new prescriptions for whatever drugs they are promoting. In order to meet those targets, it is alleged that one sales rep agreed to pay doctors £100 to give educational lectures...

/ April 16, 2014

Risk of Intussusception with Rotavirus Vaccines

Rotavirus is the leading cause of severe diarrhea in infants and children worldwide, leading to more than half a million deaths each year in children under the age of 5. Before the introduction of the rotavirus vaccine, almost all children in the US were infected by the age of 5, and rotavirus infections were responsible for 400,000 doctor visits, 200,000 ER visits,...

/ April 15, 2014

Bill and Hillary Clinton go woo with Dr. Mark Hyman and “functional medicine”

Mark Hyman is a "pioneer" (if you can call it that) in a new form of quackery known as functional medicine, which combines a lot of the worst features of conventional medicine with a large dollop of "make it up as you go along" quackery. Unfortunately, it appears that the Clintons find his narrative compelling.

/ April 14, 2014