Cranberry Juice
It always somewhat surprises me how some interventions never seem to die. Theophylline seems to have disappeared in the medical pantheon, but what comes around, goes around. I predict a resurgence of theophylline this century. Despite the recent study that shows, yet again, echinacea has no effect on colds, I predict the study will neither decrease the sales of echinacea nor prevent...
The Good Rewards of Bad Science
All the world sees us In grand style wherever we are; The big and the small Are infatuated with us: They run to our remedies And regard us as gods And to our prescriptions Principles and regimens, they submit themselves. Molière, The Imaginary Invalid (1673)1 The passage above is part of a burlesque doctoral conferment ceremony, where the French playwright Molière (1622-1673)...
1023 2011
The 1023 campaign is a UK based organization whose purpose is to raise awareness of the actual claims of homeopathy. The name is a reference to Avogadro’s number (6.02214179×10^23), which is the number of atoms or molecules of a substance in one unit called a mole. This is an important basic concept in chemistry, for it means that there are a finite...
The Meaning of Secondary Prevention
A November letter to the editor in American Family Physician chastises that publication for misusing the term “secondary prevention,” even using it in the title of an article that was actually about tertiary prevention. I am guilty of the same sin. I had been influenced by simplistic explanations that distinguished only two kinds of prevention: primary and secondary. I thought primary prevention...
Mothering magazine: Peddling dangerous health misinformation to new mothers
Last week, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) published an expose by investigative journalist Brian Deer that enumerated in detail the specifics of how a British gastroenterologist turned hero of the anti-vaccine movement had committed scientific fraud by falsifying key aspects of case reports that he used as the basis of his now infamous 1998 Lancet article suggesting a link between the MMR...
“Piltdown medicine” and Andrew Wakefield’s MMR vaccine fraud
Pity poor Andrew Wakefield. Well, not really. I tend to view what’s happening to him yet again as the chickens coming home to roost. Let’s put it this way. 2010 was a terrible year for him, and 2011 is starting out almost as bad. In February 2010, the General Medical Council in the U.K. recommended that Wakefield be stripped of his license...
Energy Drinks
Energy drinks are becoming more and more common as the stimulant of choice targeted at the young, athletic, and anyone under a deadline. What are the risks, benefits, and above all the science?
Obesity Denial
It seems that for every established science there is an ideological group who is motivated to deny it. Denialism is a thriving pseudoscience and affects any issue with the slightest political or social implications. Sometimes, even easily verifiable facts can be denied, as people seem willing to make up their own facts as needed. Denialists have an easy job – to spread...
Followup: More Evidence against the XMRV Virus as a Cause of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
A mouse leukemia retrovirus, xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus (XMRV retrovirus), has been under consideration as a possible cause of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS, and also prostate cancer). In a study published in Science in October 2009, Lombardi et al. found XMRV in 67% of CFS patients and 3.7% of controls. Several subsequent studies in the UK, the Netherlands, and the US...