Absurd medical claims
palmd | December 14, 2009Over at Skeptic North there has been an ongoing discussion about naturopathy. Since it looks like naturopaths are going to get prescribing privileges in Ontario, it's reasonable to subject their practice to some pretty intense scrutiny. One naturopath left some interesting comments about treatment of heart disease, citing relevant literature, but failed to show an actual understanding of the clinical realities of treating heart disease. This is not surprising given that naturopaths aren't required to do residencies like real doctors are.
Another comment referenced the Canadian…
palmd | November 27, 2009A news item this week profiles a northeast naturopath who is using thermal imaging to screen for breast cancers. This is a frightening development. The news about conflicting mammogram recommendations has women wondering what the right approach really is. The question in the new USPSTF recommendations is one of values. The science says that a lot of women in their 40s need to be screened and undergo invasive procedures to save one life. We are left to decide if that life is worth it. Or we can throw our hands in the air and start charging women for useless alternatives.
The technology…
palmd | November 27, 2009I live about ten miles due north of "Canada's automotive capital". We often look across the straits to the medical system in Ontario, one in which all citizens have a provincial insurance card. We see how everyone has access to care---or at least some care. I've treated many Canadian patients who have access to American insurance and prefer to get their care on this side of the border, where there are fewer hassles. Of course if you have no insurance at all, hassles abound, and we'll leave a discussion of the merits and difficulties of the Canadian system to another day. But one move…
palmd | November 25, 2009We already know about the Huffington Post's war on science and its shameless publication of snake oil ads disguised as journalism. Now, Mark Hyman, an evangelist for the cult known as "functional medicine", is giving even more bad flu advice (and shilling for his books).
He begins his blathering, misleading sales pitch with this bit of mendacious drivel:
The main question my patients have been asking is whether they should get vaccinated against H1N1 or against the regular flu.
This is not a simple yes or no answer. The guiding principle of functional medicine is personalized care, not the…
palmd | November 23, 2009Today over at Science-Based Medicine, Dr. Novella has a review of the so-called "biomed" movement in autism treatment. Anyone should be able to understand the desperation of parents with sick kids, but grief can lead to very bad decisions. As physicians, one of our jobs is to guide people away from these decisions and not to give false hope. Telling people what they want to hear might make you as a caregiver feel good, but as physicians, our goal is not to make ourselves feel good but to help others.
It pained me to read this story about a mom who gets her autistic son stoned. As a father…
palmd | November 18, 2009There are a couple of quotes circulating widely claiming that major players in flu vaccine development are "denouncing" the vaccine.
From (shudder!) mercola.com:
"Dr. Anthony Morris, a distinguished virologist and former Chief Vaccine Office at the U.S. Federal Drug Administration (FDA), states that "There is no evidence that any influenza vaccine thus far developed is effective in preventing or mitigating any attack of influenza" and that "The producers of these vaccines know they are worthless, but they go on selling them anyway."
And:
And in November 2007, the UK newspaper The Scotsman,…
palmd | November 12, 2009There's a number of dangers in carrying an analogy too far. One situation may be analogous to another without being identical, or they may not in fact be analogous at all. Forgetting this principle can get you into a wee bit of trouble.
To formalize it a bit, just because you think "A" resembles "B", and "B" has property "P" does not mean that "A" also has property "P". It may be that "A" is not quite enough like "B" to share all of its properties.
But a weak analogy can't stop a weak but persistent mind. Dana Ullman, Hahnemann's cognitively-impaired bulldog, has given us a…
palmd | November 7, 2009I'm told that mathematicians and physicists get a lot of mail from folks with "big discoveries". These discoveries are often of the "Einstein was wrong and I figured out the Theory of Everything" variety. Many of us refer to these folks as "cranks", a catch-all, derogatory term for people who, through their own arrogance and ignorance, think they have, despite little education or work, disproved ideas that have taken lifetimes to assemble.
Enter the anti-vaccination cranks. Immunoprophylaxis---the manipulation of the immune system to prevent disease---is centuries old, and over those…
palmd | November 2, 2009One of my dear readers just left the internet equivalent of a flaming bag of turd on my bloggy doorstep:
Everybody should read this article by Dr. Russell Blaylock http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/11/03/What-We-H…
These are the facts folks, all information is derived from Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the New England Journal of Medicine.
Whenever stamping out the flaming bag of poo, it's wise to remember ones shoes may become sullied. Still, how can I…
palmd | October 28, 2009A hat-tip to my buddy Abel over at TerraSig for keeping this story alive and inspiring me to chime in. --PalMD
It's no secret that I find the anti-vaccination crowd to be abhorrent. The public's health is the first victim, followed closely by individual patients and parents struggling with individual health decisions. I cannot fault patients for making bad decisions---the anti-vaccination movement has a very effective propaganda arm. Folks like Jenny McCarthy have a large audience and make no secret of their desire to see infectious diseases increase in others:
I do believe sadly it's…
palmd | October 22, 2009As many of my readers are aware, most of us are going to need two flu shots this year: one for the seasonal flu, and one for the pandemic (swine) flu. I got my seasonal flu shot two weeks ago, and I'm taking the family to the community college up the street this weekend for our pandemic shots. It's not going to be a lot of fun holding my daughter down, but she's been hospitalized in the past with breathing problems so we're not taking any chances.
There's yet a third flu shot out this year. It's called the "Emergen-C Shot". I saw it on TV advertised homonymically as "emergency shot",…
palmd | October 21, 2009How may topics are there on which Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Arianna Huffington, Bill Maher, and now Louis Farrakhan can agree?
One, and one only: flu vaccination.
Let's give a run down of the "reasoning":
Glenn Beck: the safest option is doing the exact opposite of what the government recommends.
Limbaugh won't get one because HHS Secretary Sibelius recommends it
HuffPo: need i say more?
Maher: too bat-shit insane to think properly about it
Farrakahn thinks it's a plot to reduce the Malthusian crush of minorities
Anything that unites these folks just has to be wrong.
palmd | October 20, 2009Michigan has suffered enough. We've been devastated by economic and manufacturing changes, leading to mass unemployment, poverty, and poor education. That last one is really killing us.
According to news reports, more than half of Michiganders plan to forgo vaccination, mostly for reasons that betray a lack of education. This is at a time when schools across the state are closing their doors because of the flu. They aren't closing their doors out of irrational fears, or for quarantine or isolation purposes, but because so many people are sick that it's not worth it to keep the doors open…
palmd | October 18, 2009Dr. Weil is often seen as the smiling "mainstream" of alternative medicine. He's a real doctor (unlike, say, Gary Null), and much of what he advocates is standard and uncontroversial nutritional advice. But Weil illustrates the two biggest problems with so-called alternative medicne: once you've decided science is dispensible, the door is open to anything, no matter how insane; and no matter how altruistic you may start, sooner or later you start selling snake oil. Most doctors out there are working hard to help their patients prevent and overcome disease use the available evidence. …
palmd | October 12, 2009A 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 generalizable:
While receiving Western biomedical treatment for ADD, the side effects of my therapy convinced me that western medication alone would not provide a solution…
palmd | October 11, 2009I was going to try to sleep in this morning but my kid couldn't find her femur---long story. So I figured I might as well brew up a pot of Pal's Special, put up some Irish steel cut oatmeal, and review this weeks insanity.
This has been a rough week for the public's health education. The flu pandemic is still on the rise, and if trends continue, we will hit a record number of cases quite soon. Currently the best primer on influenza is Joe Albietz's, which I encourage you to read. But rumors about the flu are spreading nearly as fast as the virus, and we need a nearly real-time response to…
palmd | October 9, 2009Alternative medicine boosters promote bad health practices that hurt real people---that's been a theme in my writing for nearly three years. It's bad enough that they sell people fake cures and encourage them to avoid real medical care, but apparently, that's not enough anymore. It's getting to the point where they might as well line their victims up against a wall and shoot them. You see now, not satisfied with their current body count, they are suing the FDA to remove the current pandemic flu vaccine. This not only affects the members of their medical cults, but all of us.
According…
palmd | October 7, 2009Even with cable, there isn't much on TV before six in the morning. On the stationary bike today I was flipping through the channels and I just had to watch the infomercial for No Evil Oil. According to the testimonials, this stuff not only keeps out the Devil, but gets rid of shingles and makes you rich. The smiling preacher with the mullet will send it to you for free (but there are plenty of donation buttons).
You may be asking yourself, "How dumb/desperate/gullible do you have to be to use the No Evil Oil?" Even my most credulous readers would agree that this stuff is snake oil.…
palmd | October 5, 2009From time to time, my wife or one of our friends will forward one of the latest health rumors going through the email lists in our community. The usual email list is the one that goes out to moms of young kids living in our ethnic/geographic community. Usually I shrug it off, but every once in a while, my wife and I get fed up and try to spread the truth.
The latest was sent by a friend and colleague who took one look at it and thought, "I bet this'll piss off Pal." She was right. The email contained a link to a notorious anti-vaccination site, and to one post in particular that repeats…
palmd | October 4, 2009The flu pandemic of 1918 was horrific. Millions of people died (by some estimates 4% of the world population), and the medical establishment worked feverishly to find a cause and a treatment. There were many dead-ends in the search for the cause of the flu. One of the most enduring errors was the attribution of the pandemic to a bacterium called Haemophilus influenzae. It turned out that the flu was actually caused by a virus rather than a bacterium, but H. flu is still an important discovery. The fight against influenza was in many ways successful (although too late for the 1918…