Medicine
lborkowski | May 7, 2015Last week Tyson Foods, the largest US poultry producer, announced that it was working to eliminate the use of human antibiotics in its US broiler chicken flock by September 2017. (Broilers are chickens raised for meat.) Tyson Foods President and CEO Donnie Smith cited global concerns over antibiotic-resistant infections and explained that the company “want[s] to do our part to responsibly reduce human antibiotics on the farm so these medicines can continue working when they're needed to treat illness."
As we’ve written before, the routine use of antibiotics to promote growth in food animals…
oracknows | April 24, 2015Last week, a group of ten doctors led by Dr. Henry Miller, most of whom were affiliated either with the Hoover Institution or the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH)—or both—wrote a letter to Lee Goldman, MD, the Dean of the Faculties of Health Sciences and Medicine at Columbia University complaining that Dr. Mehmet Oz shouldn't be faculty at Columbia University because of his "disdain for science and for evidence-based medicine, as well as baseless and relentless opposition to the genetic engineering of food crops" and "an egregious lack of integrity by promoting quack treatments…
oracknows | April 3, 2015Why, oh why, did I look at GreenMedInfo again?
You remember GreenMedInfo? It's yet another wretched hive of scum and quackery, but with a twist. Its proprietor, Sayer Ji, thinks he's an expert at interpreting the biomedical literature. Unfortunately, as he demonstrates time and time again with depressing regularity, he is nothing of the sort. In reality, what Ji is an expert at is cherry picking medical studies and torturing them until they confess agreement with whatever quack idea he's currently espousing. In the wake of the news coverage of Angelina Jolie's decision to have her ovaries…
oracknows | March 30, 2015As I write this, I'm kind of beat.
The reason for this is simple. Traveling sucks the energy out of me, and I just got back from almost four days in Houston for the Society of Surgical Oncology (SSO) meeting. Yes, I was a mere dozen (at most) miles from that Heart of Darkness known as the Burzynski Clinic for a few days, and I didn't even succumb to the temptation to catch a cab out there and take a selfie with the Burzynski Clinic in the background. Part of the reason was that it would just be more expense than it's worth. The other part of the reason is that it would be a bit hard to…
oracknows | March 27, 2015Homeopathy is quackery. It can't be repeated often enough.
Homeopathy is The One Quackery To Rule Them All. It is based on prescientific vitalism and principles so addled that one must wonder whether Samuel Hahnemann, the guy who dreamt up this medical system, was a fan of excess alcohol use, opium, marijuana, or some unholy combination of the these. Think about it. The first principle of homeopathy is the law of similars, which states that like cures like. In other words, to relieve a symptom, homeopathy tells us, you must use something that causes that symptom in healthy people. There is no…
oracknows | March 25, 2015It's been a while since I discussed medical marijuana, even though it's a topic I've been meaning to come back to since I first dubbed medical marijuana to be the equivalent of herbalism and discussed how the potential of cannabinoids to treat cancer has been, thus far, unimpressive, with relatively modest antitumor effects. The reason I refer to medical marijuana as the "new herbalism" is because the arguments made in favor of medical marijuana are very much like arguments for herbalism, including arguments that using the natural plant is superior to using specific purified cannabinoids,…
oracknows | March 24, 2015Two things have reminded me that it's been a while since I've written about Stanislaw Burzynski, nearly five months, to be precise. First, on Wednesday evening I'll be heading to the city where Burzynski preys on unsuspecting cancer patients, Houston, TX, to attend this year's Society of Surgical Oncology meeting to imbibe the latest research on—of course!—surgical oncology. (If you'll be attending the meeting, look me up. If you're in Houston and want to have a meetup, I might be able to pull it off.) Second, you, my readers, have been telling me there's something I need to blog about. This…
kkrisberg | February 24, 2015It’s a toxic chemical that made headlines when it was linked to deaths and injuries among popcorn factory workers, and federal regulators are well aware of its dangers. But, unfortunately, diacetyl is still hurting workers. In “Gasping for Action,” reporter Raquel Rutledge at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel writes about diacetyl, a chemical that tastes like butter and is used in food products and e-cigarettes, and the dangers it continues to pose to workers who breath it in, particularly coffee workers. She writes:
Coffee roasters sometimes add it to flavor coffee. High concentrations of…
lborkowski | February 23, 2015Last week, FDA warned healthcare providers that the complex design of a piece of endoscopy eqiupment may make it hard to fully disinfect -- which means that using it, even in accordance with the manufacturers' instructions, might allow dangerous bacteria to spread between patients. The warning follows reports of seven patients from UCLA's Ronald Reagan Medical Center becoming infected with the drug-resistant "nightmare bacteria" CRE (Carbapenem-Resistant Enterobacteriaceae) after undergoing procedures using ERCP endoscopes, or duodenoscopes. Of these seven patients, two died, and "the…
oracknows | February 22, 2015Oh, goody. Here's something we didn't need here in the US. While Australian skeptics have successfully been rallying to put a stop to a series of lectures from American antivaccine activist Sherri Tenpenny, we're going to have to put up with a far bigger name in quackery showing up right here in the good ol' U. S. of A. I'm referring to His Royal Highness, the Quacktitioner Royal, Prince Charles, the next King of England. Yes, in March he and Camilla will be here on a four day tour that will include a trip to Louisville to give the keynote address to a symposium on health and nature on March…
oracknows | February 18, 2015
Ever since the Disneyland measles outbreak hit high gear last month and permeated the national consciousness, the antivaccine movement has, justifiably, been on the defensive. We've been treated to the spectacle of a truly despicable cardiologist spewing antivaccine nonsense with an added dollop of contempt for parents of children with cancer who are worried about the degradation of herd immunity by non-vaccinating parents driving vaccine rates down, leading to pockets of low vaccine uptake. We've had antivaccinationists likening vaccine mandates to human trafficking and rape. Then, of…
oracknows | February 18, 2015
It often comes as a surprise to proponents of alternative medicine and critics of big pharma that I'm a big fan of John Ioannidis. Evidence of this can easily be found right here on this very blog just by entering Ioannidis' name into the search box. Indeed, my first post about an Ioannidis paper is nearly a decade old now. These posts were about one of Ioannidis' most famous papers, this one published in JAMA and entitled Contradicted and Initially Stronger Effects in Highly Cited Clinical Research. It was a study that suggested that at least 1/3 of highly cited clinical trials may either…
oracknows | February 16, 2015
If there's one thing that's become clear to me over the years about acupuncture, it's that it's nothing more than a theatrical placebo. Many are the times that I've asked: Can we finally just say that acupuncture is nothing more than an elaborate placebo? Most recently, I asked this question in 2012. What science-based medicine answers is yes. However, there's a large contingent of physicians under the sway of practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) who have fallen under the spell of that theatrical placebo, leading to a whole subdiscipline of quackademic medicine in which tooth…
kkrisberg | February 13, 2015When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first vaccine to protect against cancers caused by certain strains of the human papillomavirus, or HPV, public health advocates cheered its arrival and life-saving potential. Unfortunately, the new vaccine quickly became embroiled in a debate over whether immunizing young girls against HPV, a sexually transmitted disease, would lead to risky sexual behavior. A new study, however, finds that the vaccine is not associated with an uptick in STDs — an indicator that HPV immunization does not promote unsafe sex.
To conduct the study, which…
oracknows | February 5, 2015
Yesterday was a very strange day, at least on the Internet.
I really should learn to remove Twitter from my iPhone on Wednesdays. Why? Wednesdays tend to be my administrative days. I'm not in clinic seeing patients nor am I in the operating room. That's why Wednesday tends to be one of the two days a week when I write grants, do administrative work, and meet with my lab people, among other miscellaneous tasks, such as working on upcoming presentations. So I tend to spend most of the day on Wednesdays sitting in front of my computer, and I'm easily distracted by Twitter or other things…
oracknows | February 4, 2015
And now for something completely different... (Yes, there's been enough vaccine blogging for the moment.)
The date of the Kinsman Sports Celebrity Dinner in Saskatoon is fast approaching on February 6. It reminded me of my discussion of how Gordie Howe was flown to Tijuana to undertake a dubious stem cell therapy for his serious stroke that involved the intravenous and intrathecal (into the cerebrospinal fluid) injection of "stem cells," a treatment that was followed by glowing reports from the family and credulous reporters in the press describing Howe's "miraculous" recovery from his…
lborkowski | February 2, 2015by Amy Liebman, MPA, MA
Pesticide drift from a pear orchard sickened 20 farmworkers laboring in a neighboring cherry orchard in April 2014, in Washington State, according to a new Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Interestingly, and critically, the exposure came to light because a newspaper reporter tipped off the Washington Department of Agriculture, who then contacted the Washington Department of Health. Where were the clinician reports?
Off-drift pesticide poisonings are serious occupational hazards that can be prevented; this…
oracknows | January 29, 2015
Imagine, if you will, a time machine capsule going all the way back to the earliest days of this blog, back in 2005 and 2006. Now consider the antivaccine movement, which somehow I became very interested in very early, an interest that continues to this day. Do you remember one theme that I kept hitting again and again? Besides the pseudoscientific quackery often promoted by antivaccinationists, that is? That theme was false balance. Back when I first started blogging, no matter what the angle of the story, when the press reported about the topic of vaccines—or the topic of autism, for…
oracknows | January 28, 2015
If there's one aspect of 2014 that I enjoyed, it's that it was a very bad year for our old friend, America's quack, a.k.a. Dr. Mehmet Oz. It seemed that, finally, some of the chickens were coming home to roost and Dr. Oz was starting to suffer a bit for his promotion of quackery and pseudoscience on his daytime medical talkshow. The most delicious height of schadenfreude (for skeptics, at least) came mid-year, when Dr. Oz was asked to testify in front of Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill's Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation’s Subcommittee on Consumer Protection,…
oracknows | January 25, 2015
It's no secret to my regular readers that it's highly unlikely that I'll ever be getting a job at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation (CCF) any time soon. After all, I've written posts about the CCF in which I've criticized its promotion of reiki, its establishment of a traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) herbal medicine clinic, complete with a naturopath running it, and its recent embrace of the founder of "functional medicine" (not to mention collaborator with antivaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.) Dr. Mark Hyman. A quick Google would reveal me as the author of such criticisms. Such is…