Tag: heart disease

How Naturopaths Treat Heart Disease

Naturopaths claim to excel at preventing and treating cardiovascular disease. Their claims don't stand up to scrutiny. They co-opt from mainstream medicine, add non-evidence-based treatments, and fail to use effective drugs.

/ July 3, 2018

What the Health: A Movie with an Agenda

The documentary "What the Health" espouses the fairy tale that all major diseases (heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and many others) can be prevented and cured by eliminating meat and dairy from the diet. It is a blatant polemic for veganism, biased and misleading, and is not a reliable source of scientific information.

/ July 11, 2017

If You Think Doctors Don’t Do Prevention, Think Again

One of the common criticisms we hear from alternative and integrative medicine proponents is that doctors don’t do anything to prevent illnesses and have no interest in prevention. They claim that doctors are only trained to hand out pills to treat existing illnesses. Sometimes they even accuse them of deliberately covering up cures and wanting to perpetuate illnesses like cancer so they...

/ August 9, 2016

Statin Side Effects

How bad are the side effects of statin use? A recent article on the subject suggests that they are not bad, comparable to the base rate in the population.

/ March 8, 2016

Low Dose Aspirin for Primary Prevention

A new study published in JAMA sheds further light on a controversial question – whether or not to prescribe low-dose aspirin (81-100mg) for the primary prevention of vascular disease (strokes and heart attacks). Primary prevention means preventing a negative medical outcome prior to the onset of disease, in this case preventing the first heart attack or stroke. Secondary prevention refers to treatments...

/ November 19, 2014

K2: The Vitamin, Not the Mountain

Science is complicated. Simple concepts that appear at first to be obviously true or untrue usually turn out to be more nuanced than we thought. Newtonian physics was taken as “the truth” until we learned in the 20th century that it didn’t apply on cosmological or subatomic scales. Medicine and human physiology are more complicated than most people realize or want to...

/ September 30, 2014

An Owner’s Manual for the Heart

In writing about science-based medicine, we give a lot of attention to medicine that is not based on good science. We use bad examples to show why science is important and how it is frequently misapplied, misinterpreted, misreported, or even wholly rejected. It’s a pleasure, for a change, to write about a straightforward example of the best of science-based medicine in action....

/ January 24, 2012

Vitamin E and Stroke

One of the recurrent themes of science-based medicine is that any medical intervention that can plausibly cause physiological benefit can also plausibly cause physiological harm.  There is no such thing as “it can’t hurt.” Sometimes the risk may be minuscule – but we should never assume that it is zero. Being “natural” or “holistic” or being blessed with some other alleged marketable...

/ November 10, 2010

Tactless About TACT: Critiques Without Substance Should Be Abandoned

In May 2008, the article “Why the NIH Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy (TACT) Should Be Abandoned” was published online in the Medscape Journal of Medicine. The authors included two of our own SBM bloggers, Kimball Atwood and Wallace Sampson, along with Elizabeth Woeckner and Robert Baratz. It showed that the existing evidence on treating heart disease with IV chelation did not...

/ June 23, 2009

Hyping Health Risks

Three kids on the same block were diagnosed with leukemia last year. That couldn’t happen just by chance, could it? There MUST be something in the environment that caused it (power lines, the chemical plant down the street, asbestos in their school, iPods, Twinkies?). Quick, let’s measure everything we can think of and compare exposures to other blocks and find an explanation....

/ March 31, 2009