Results for: vitamins
Yes We Can! We Can Abolish the NCCAM!
…and in so doing, President Obama, you and we would abolish the NIH’s second most prodigious squanderer of precious research funds! Surprise: The National Cancer Institute (NCI) spends slightly more on humbug than does the Center created for that purpose. All told, the NIH squanders almost 1/3 of a billion dollars per year promoting pseudoscience. I’ve decided to add my two cents to the recent groundswell of demand...
The “Gonzalez Trial” for Pancreatic Cancer: Outcome Revealed
A Review Dr. Lipson’s “detoxification” post on Thanksgiving Day and Dr. Gorski’s recent post about “Gerson Therapy” were timely, because last weekend I noticed something that I should have noticed months ago. Before delivering the punch line, let me remind you, Dear Reader, of the nature of the topic. The regimen advocated by Nicholas Gonzalez is a variation of a “detoxification” treatment for cancer that has...
The science of purging, or the purging of science?
It’s Thanksgiving in the U.S., one of my favorite holidays. Thanksgiving habits get set down early in life, and the while I may find your lima bean casserole execrable, to you it’s just not Thanksgiving without it. And speaking of excrement, you can expect to see adds encouraging you to “detox” from all of your holiday excesses. Outside the field of substance...
Vitamin Cocktail with a Meme Twist (Supplement my gimlet with a dash of dissonance)
A trail of recent reports is trying to tell us something. But are we listening, and are “they” listening? If so, does it mean the same to “them” as it does to us? The report trail is telling us that multiple vitamins fail as preventatives against cardiovascular disease, cancer, or even for anything other than for dietary vitamin deficiency. And that is...
Functional Medicine – New Kid on the Block
What is functional medicine? An indecipherable babble and descriptive word salad.
Placebos in the news again
Towards the end of last week, I was contemplating what I would be writing about for Monday. No topic had quite floated my boat, but I hated to dip into the archive of topics I’ve written about before to update a post. After all, I like to be topical whenever possible. Then what to my wondering eyes should appear (yes, I know...
Pitfalls in Regulating Physicians. Part 2: The Games Scoundrels Play
A Few Things that No Doctor Should Do When a physician is accused of DUI, “substance abuse,” being too loose with narcotic prescriptions, throwing scalpels in the OR, or diddling patients, the response of a state medical board† tends to be swift and definitive. Shoot first, ask questions later. After all, the first responsibility of the board is to the public’s safety, not to preserving...
What’s for Dinner?
Diet advice changes so fast it’s almost a full-time job to keep up with it. Avoid cholesterol; no, avoid saturated fats; no, avoid trans-fats. Avocados are bad; no, avocados are good. Wheat germ is passé; now omega 3s are de rigueur. The supermarket overwhelms us with an embarras de richesses, a confusing superabundance of choices from “organic” to low-sodium. How can we...
Prepare for Surgery, Heal Faster?
Quacks and their apologists often cite surgery and emergency treatments of traumatic injury and a few other catastrophic or potentially catastrophic events as the only “conventional” or “allopathic” methods that they consistently recommend. Explicitly or implicitly, for most problems they tout “holistic” or “CAM” treatments. In modern medicine, however, there are plenty of non-surgical and non-emergency treatments whose outcomes are so manifest that even the most exuberant advocates of implausible medical claims (IMC) seem careful to steer...