More Nonsense from Dr. Jay Gordon
Dr. Jay Gordon is a pediatrician to a particular subculture of pseudoscientific celebrities, such as Jenny McCarthy. He lends his MD cred to this community. He also appears, in my opinion, to be a shameless self-promoter – one of those pop professionals (Dr. Oz, Dr. Phil) who has sold his soul for some easy celebrity. Regardless of his motivations, he has been...
CFS: Viral vs somatization
If the association is confirmed, the finding will have near-revolutionary implications for our understanding disease – particularly infectious disease. If there is a confirmed model for such a vague set of symptoms signifying some occult infection limited to immune cells, which produces no repeatable cellular or antibody abnormality, no susceptibility to other infections (such as with HIV) and in which the sites...
H1N1 Update
I know we have been focusing on the vaccine issue extensively, but this is crunch time and the anti-vaccine forces are relentless. We are now facing a regular seasonal flu spiked with the H1N1 pandemic. Our best weapon against morbidity and mortality caused by the flu is information, and yet the public is being barraged with misinformation designed to encourage poor choices...
Science-based medicine and Eurocentrism
A reader sent me an interesting post from her own blog. It’s well-written, compelling, and betrays an exceptional intelligence. It’s also completely wrong. The piece is called, “Bias, Racism, and Alternative Medicine”, an intriguing title. The first part tries to establish that “Western medicine” in one of many ways of understanding health and disease. She starts with some personal anecdotes—always interesting, rarely...
Resveratrol: Of Mice and Men
We would all like to live longer. The most promising longevity research indicates that severe calorie restriction might extend life span, but such a diet is difficult to follow. Resveratrol, a phytochemical found in red wine, has been evaluated as a possible way out of the dilemma. When given to obese mice on a high calorie diet, it produced a number of...
Medicine is hard and should be practiced with caution
It’s tempting to think that the practice of medicine should be simple and intuitive. Unlike other sciences, we all have access to the basic materials—ourselves. We feel that because we are intimately familiar with our bodies, we know a lot about how they work. Unfortunately, it’s a little more complicated than that. The biochemical processes walking around in this sack of meat...
The Science Fiction of Nutritional Genomics
EDITOR’S NOTE: Dr. Gorski is currently in Chicago attending the American College of Surgeons Clinical Congress. As a result, he has not prepared a post for this week (although he doesn’t feel too guilty about missing this week, given that he did write two rather hefty posts last week, one on the cancer quackery known as the German New Medicine and the...
Flu Vaccine Efficacy
I guess I will be spending the rest the flu season writing about the nonsense that is promulgated about the flu vaccine and the disease. One of the more common laments about the flu vaccine is that it doesn’t work: I got the flu vaccine and still got the flu. Well maybe. Maybe not. It takes a few weeks to get protection, so...
David & Goliath: A Dramatic Role Reversal Spurred On By The Media
The Internet is teeming with false health claims and a long line of celebrities willing to throw their media weight behind every new flavor of snake oil. The irony is that alternative medicine proponents see themselves as a persecuted minority – the victims of some nebulous health industry conspiracy. But in reality, they have ingratiated themselves with the media to such an...
Monkey business in autism research, part II
Over the last couple of months, I’ve noticed something about the anti-vaccine movement. Specifically, I’ve noticed that the mavens of pseudoscience that make up the movement seem to have turned their sights with a vengeance on the Hepatitis B vaccine. The reason for this new tactic, I believe, is fairly obvious. The fact that the Hep B vaccine is administered shortly after...