Results for: emf

About that Cell Phone and Cancer Study

Recently there was another round of scaremongering headlines and articles claiming that cell phones can cause brain cancer. The Daily News wrote: “The scientists were right — your cell phone can give you cancer.” Many online news sites declared: “SHOCK STUDY: CELLPHONES CAN CAUSE CANCER,” in all caps to make sure you understand that you should be alarmed. None of the mainstream...

/ August 5, 2015

The Windi: Revolutionary Relief for Colic or a Pain in the Butt

We tend to cover some very serious topics here on Science-Based Medicine. In fact, most of our posts are downright depressing. This will hopefully not be one of them. In just the past few weeks we have written about the public health menace of anti-vaccine pseudoscience, autistic children being subjected to dangerous bleach enemas, and chiropractic-induced stroke in children. Unsurprisingly, there is...

/ June 19, 2015

“Finally…The Low Back Pain Solution”: A Chiropractor Makes Questionable Claims

The ads in my local newspaper are a never-ending source of questionable health claims, most often from diet supplement manufacturers and chiropractors. There’s no single spokesman like Dr. Oz, but as a group they remind me of Oz’s unending series of weight loss miracles, each one the perfect solution until the next one comes along. The proliferation of chiropractic ads is bad...

/ May 5, 2015

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

Undermining the regulation of stem cell therapies in Italy: A warning for the future?

Stem cells are magical. At least, if you listen to what docs and “practitioners” who run stem cell clinics in various parts of the world, usually where regulation is lax and money from First World clientele is much sought after, that’s what you could easily come to believe. Unfortunately, it’s not just Third World countries in which “stem cell clinics” have proliferated....

/ May 6, 2013

Three myths about Stanislaw Burzynski and The Skeptics

As I finished last week’s post, I promised myself that I wouldn’t write about Stanislaw Burzynski again this week. After all, counting this post I will have done 13 posts so far in 2013, and, counting this one, four of them will have been about Burzynski, and three out of the last five posts (three out of four, really, if we eliminate...

/ March 11, 2013

Picking Cherries in Science: The Bio-Initiative Report

by Kenneth R. Foster & Lorne Trottier Science-based medicine is great, but it all depends on how you evaluate the scientific evidence. A bad example is the  BioInitiative Report (BIR), an egregiously slanted review of health and biological effects of electromagnetic fields (EMF) of the sort that are produced by power lines, cellular telephones, Wi-Fi, and other mainstays of modern life. When first...

/ February 15, 2013

Nonsense about the Health Effects of Electromagnetic Radiation

There is a widespread belief that low energy electromagnetic radiation fields can cause a wide variety of health issues. Fortunately, there is no convincing evidence that such fears are warranted.

/ January 15, 2013

Are Cell Phones a Possible Carcinogen? An Update on the IARC Report

EDITOR’S NOTE: Because I am at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research in Chicago, between the meetings, working on a policy statement, working on a manuscript, and various other miscellaneous tasks, I alas was unable to produce a post worthy of the quality normally expected by SBM readers. Fortunately, Lorne Trottier, who’s done a great job for us...

/ April 2, 2012

Reassessing whether low energy electromagnetic fields can have clinically relevant biological effects

It is with some trepidation that I write this, given that I realize this post might lead to charges that I’ve allowed myself to become so open-minded that my brains fell out, but I think the issues raised by what I’m about to discuss will make our readers think a bit—and perhaps spark some conversation. Because I’m in a bit of a...

/ January 23, 2012