Absurd medical claims
palmd | July 3, 2009Yes, every skeptic on the web has posted this, but it is irresistible. Remember, yanks, that A&E in the UK is not a boring cable TV channel but what they call an ER.
palmd | June 29, 2009A long while back, at the original wordpress incarnation of this blog, I wrote a piece on the reasons that chiropractic is unscientific nonsense. Because it was popular, I moved it over here. Well, a chiropractor has come to bravely defend his field and left us a comment.
A study in the May 2007 issue of the Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics reports health plans that use Chiropractors as Primary Care Providers (PCPs) reduce their health care utilization costs significantly.
The study covers the seven-year period from 1999 to 2005. Researchers compared costs and…
palmd | June 25, 2009Medical science rarely undergoes revolutionary changes. Progress tends to be slow and steady, with new ideas undergoing extensive investigation before being implemented. This pace can be frustrating and every once in a while, someone comes along who thinks they have discovered The Secret to It All. Despite the apparent insanity of such grandiosity (or perhaps because if it), you can always rely on the Huffington Post to give it a platform. (Interestingly, most of these Ideas can't be simultaneously correct, but that doesn't seem to bother HuffPo).
The latest Revolutionary Thinker is Dr…
palmd | June 19, 2009I've been a bit remiss in my coverage of the Simon Singh case, reviewed in detail by Phil Plait, among others. As many of my readers already know, respected science writer Simon Singh is being sued for libel in England by the British Chiroquacktic Association (BCA) because he described some of their treatments as "bogus". Despite the fact that he underplayed his hand, he is still getting his legal ass whooped over in the motherland, thanks to their idiotic libel laws.
Be that as it may, the BCA wasn't complaining about Singh being wrong, but about him being mean. You see, "bogus" seemed to…
palmd | June 15, 2009It's just disgusting. Autism spectrum disorders are an important health problem (although not the "epidemic" claimed by some). While real scientists and clinicians (and parents) are looking for causes and treatments based on evidence, fake experts are pulling "answers" out of their backsides. Studies of families with autism have shown specific genetic defects associated with autism, and while this applies only to a small percentage of cases, it is an example of a good lead. Even if a minority of people with autism have similar genetic defects, these findings can lead to more generalizable…
palmd | June 10, 2009The Huffington Post put up a good piece about vaccination. It's by Dr. Harvey Karp, and he does an especially nice job looking at some of the "scary numbers" used by the infectious disease promoters.
He's also getting swamped with wackaloon comments, so if you don't mind giving HuffPo your clicks, you might want to check it out.
BTW, JB Handley has written that Karp is, "a completely arrogant asshole with little grasp of the facts," so you know his creds are legit.
Addendum:
Holy Karp! My head re-asploded! Thanks to our alert reader below, I see that Karp only made a little sense. I…
palmd | June 8, 2009
To wear the mantle of Galileo, it is not enough to be persecuted:
you must also be right.
---Robert Park
As a physician, it's hard for me to support the absurd media fashion of presenting two, equal sides to every issue. In politics, perhaps, many debates have two equally-valid viewpoints, but this isn't so in science and medicine. A treatment is either proven to work or proven not to work. Occasionally, plausible ideas are sitting somewhere in between hoping for evidence to push them one way or the other. Notice the word "evidence"---not waiting for the verdict…
palmd | June 7, 2009A "fan" on twitter sent me the crushing news that all I believed about the science of Lyme disease is wrong. Unlike many fans, he cited a source, a well-known New England publication. The New England Journal of Medicine? Nope. The Darien (CT) Times.
According to the headline, "surveys refute national Lyme disease findings." So they must at least be quoting a science publication. Right?
Actually, they are quoting the famous work of one Kent Haydock, chairman of the Deer Management Committee. How did he accomplish this astonishing first act in what will no doubt be a stunning scientific…
palmd | June 4, 2009One of Oprah's favorite resources for women's health is Dr. Christiane Northrup, a gynecologist with bizarre ideas about health and disease. On the air, she has disputed the connection between HPV and cervical cancer, an uncontroversial scientific fact. Her un-belief in an important scientific fact is disturbing, but if you dig around her published writing a bit, it's even scarier. This doctor is to women's health what Dick Cheney is to human rights.
Northrup on fibroids
Uterine leiomyomas, better known as fibroid tumors, are common, non-cancerous tumors of the uterus. They can be…
palmd | June 2, 2009I've written a number of times about Oprah's support for absurd medical claims, and Dr. David Gorski does a great job detailing the history of Oprah's ability to elevate quacks from obscurity to stardom. Given her latest debacle of taking Jenny McCarthy into her fold, I though I'd explore her website's health section a bit, just to see what's going on. It turns out Oprah's website is the epicenter of the medical crank-o-sphere. Let's take a little trip.
All About Homeopathy
Oprah has a nice, long section on the pre-scientific religion of homeopathy. It's so internally inconsistent that it…
palmd | May 31, 2009One of the hardest things about practicing medicine is being compassionate and dispassionate at the same time; acknowledging a person's pain, but standing aside enough to view the problem with a degree of objectivity. This is one of the easiest mis-steps to make in medicine, and is the root of the problem of many so-called alternative medicine practitioners. Take a look at this email from a fan:
I find it interesting and short sighted that you (and many medical providers) require published research in order to be convinced that a new medical condition exists. Have you ever considered that…
palmd | May 27, 2009In case you were worried that the Huffington Post had "gone legit" with regards to medical reporting, fear no more. Barry Sears, creator of a popular diet book, has written a searingly stupid piece called We're Fighting the Wrong Epidemic. Like Gaul, it is divided into three parts: wrong information about influenza; an invented medical condition with enough truth to sound plausible; and a pitch.
Barry doesn't get the flu
And it's not because of his splendid diet. He really doesn't get it. I'm up to my eyeballs in influenza A at a time when flu season should be but a memory. The H1N1 flu…
palmd | May 27, 2009Earlier this month I wrote about some of the people who claim to be Lyme disease experts, and specifically about an article in the Journal of Medical Ethics, and its author. The article was truly horrid, especially when presented in the context of an ethics journal. My ethicist friend weighed in at the time, and now she informs us that the journal has printed a response.
Background
Lyme disease is a relatively common bacterial infection acquired from the bite of a tick. Many people who are infected develop a characteristic rash, and if they are treated at that point, that's the end of that…
palmd | May 24, 2009I'm actually rather surprised that the movement to castrate autistic kids isn't more in the news. Parents of autistic kids are very good at advocacy, so where are they on this one? On the other hand, the abuse of the mentally and cognitively disabled is so ingrained in our society, that perhaps these parents can't even see it.
The idea of castrating undesirables is not new. An American eugenics movement arose in the early part of the 20th century, leading to eugenics legislation, such as the Johnson Immigration Act of 1924. To give you an idea of some of the thinking that went into this…
palmd | May 22, 2009It would certainly seem so. Alternative autism "experts" have a long history of dehumanizing autistic kids. But the Geiers take it one step further. The father-son team is chemically castrating autistic children. And what do they have to say about this?
...the Geiers focus on issues most likely to disturb parents, such as aggressive behavior and excessive masturbation.
"With masturbating there is a degree of normal, and then there is autism. Parents will say: 'He will hump pillows, he will hump your leg,' " David Geier told doctors at Eisenstein's office. He made similar statements on the…
palmd | May 22, 2009You don't have to be a parent to care about the welfare of children---but it does bring things into a sharp, personal light. I recently wrote about Daniel Hauser, a child likely to die of Hodgkin's disease due to his parents' cult medicine beliefs. Cases like his are aberrations---they stand out for their rarity, but also for their horror. Still, the horror is mitigated somewhat by the rarity.
More frightening are systemic abuses of children via cult medicine beliefs, ones that affect dozens or hundreds of kids at a time. One of the most egregious of these is Lupron therapy for autism.…
palmd | May 20, 2009I've been reluctant to write about the Daniel Hauser case. I don't even want to imagine what his parents are going through. If you're not a parent, I can't explain it to you, so you'll have to trust me---having a kid with a life-threatening illness can drive you to do the unimaginable.
And what Daniel's parents have chosen to do is nearly unimaginable, but until you've been there, judgment must be tempered by compassion. But that compassion is only for the parents and the patient, not for those who are supporting their horrible decisions.
The basics
Daniel is 13 year old boy with…
palmd | May 18, 2009Blogging requires a thick skin. So does life, so I don't get personally worked up about shit that happens on line. But some things do piss me off.
Chapter One: Blinded by...
I wrote a little piece about the Obama/Notre Dame flap. I wanted to look beneath the putative reasons for the protest (abortion). Some of my readers would not allow that. There were a few types of stupid responses:
The non sequitur: "I didn't bother to read but abortion is BAD."
The burningly stupid analogy: "If you let Obama speak, the terrorists win!!!"
The Reading Comprehension Fail: "Don't accuse me of teh…
palmd | May 15, 2009People who identify themselves as having "morgellons" syndrome claim to have fibers and parasites emerging from their skin. As my commenters have pointed out, it's a rather simple task to evaluate such samples in a laboratory. If "morgellons" "researchers" wish to illuminated this "novel" "disease" (I just wanted to see how many scare quotes I could squeeze in), then where are the case series or other published data?
A PubMed search reveals no published research on the topic---not even case studies. The Morgellons Research Foundation website, however, has a "research" section. Of what…
palmd | May 14, 2009I've decided I love Jenny McCarthy's Oprah-blog. It's like watching a mad scientist---you know he's gonna blow something up, but still, those Tesla coils have a beautiful inutility. Her latest piece is truly a monument to stupidity, and if she really keeps this up, I'll never run out of blog-fodder.
It's called "Poop Stories", and it's about, well, Jenny's poop, so pull on those hip-waders and let's go take a look.
I don't know why I've always loved talking about poop, but to me it is a great tool in detecting what's wrong in our bodies.
Heh heh. She said "tool".
I continuously monitor…