Beyond the flu shot: A closer look at the “alternatives”
Once again, it’s influenza season. The vaccine clinics are open, and the hysterical posts about the vaccine’s danger are appearing in social media. There’s familiarity to all of this, but also a big new change – at least in Canada, where I am. Pharmacists can now administer the vaccine. And it’s completely free to anyone in Ontario (where I am), so the...
The Seralini GMO Study – Retraction and Response to Critics
Elsevier has announced that they are retracting the infamous Seralini study which claimed to show that GMO corn causes cancer in laboratory rats. The retraction comes one year after the paper was published, and seems to be a response to the avalanche of criticism the study has faced. This retraction is to the anti-GMO world what the retraction of the infamous Wakefield...
The Skeptics for the Protection of Cancer Patients need your help
We at SBM don’t normally ask our readers for much, if anything, other than to read and for the subset of you who like to be active in the comments to have at it. However, given the story of Stanislaw Burzysnki, which I’ve been covering with frequent blog posts for over two years now, how could I not listen to the appeal...
Philosophy Meets Medicine
Note: This was written as a book review for Skeptical Inquirer magazine and will be published in its Jan/Feb 2014 issue. ————– Medicine is chock-full of philosophy and doesn’t know it. Mario Bunge, a philosopher, physicist, and CSI (Center for Skeptical Inquiry) fellow, wants to bring philosophy and medicine together for mutual benefit. He has written a book full of insight and wisdom, Medical Philosophy:...
Vaccines work. Period.
Over my blogging “career,” which now stretches back nearly nine years, and my hobby before that of engaging in online “debates” on Usenet newsgroups back before 2004, I developed an interest in the antivaccine movement. Antivaccinationism, “antivax,” or whatever you want to call it, represents a particularly insidious and dangerous form of quackery because it doesn’t just endanger the children whose parents...
You be the judge
Jann Bellamy recently recapped her experience attending a meeting sponsored by her local Healing Arts Alliance. As you re-read her article pay particular attention to the language used by the Alliance to describe themselves and the treatments they offer. For me, there is one word that really stands out. It is emblematic of the attitude of the complementary and alternative medicine community....
Happy Thanksgiving!
We celebrate Thanksgiving Day in the U.S. on the fourth Thursday in November. Because I live in the U.S. and Thanksgiving falls on my regular blogging day this year, I get the day off. On this Thanksgiving Day, I am thankful for the cornucopia of blog fodder coming up as we move toward the end of 2013 and into 2014. The Bravewell...
The FDA and Personalized Genetic Testing
The company 23andMe provides personal genetic testing from a convenient home saliva sample kit. Their home page indicates that their $99 genetic screening will provide reports on 240+ health conditions in addition to giving you information on your genetic lineage. The benefits, they claim, are that you will learn about your carrier status and therefore the risk of passing on genetic diseases to your...
New Cholesterol Guidelines
On November 15, the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association released an updated guideline for the use of statins to prevent and treat atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD). The full report is available online. It has already generated a lot of controversy. The news media have characterized it as a “huge departure” from previous practice and have trumpeted that it...
“Low T”: The triumph of marketing over science
A man on TV is selling me a miracle cure that will keep me young forever. It’s called Androgel…for treating something called Low T, a pharmaceutical company–recognized condition affecting millions of men with low testosterone, previously known as getting older. —The Colbert Report, December 2012 And now for something completely different…sort of. After writing so much about the latest developments in...