colon cleanse
oracknows | February 5, 2017"You need to detox."
How many times have you heard or read this? Maybe a friend of yours suggested it for the New Year. Maybe you saw it on a website, in a magazine, or as part of an ad. I like to say sometimes, "Toujours les toxines," because in many branches of alternative medicine the overarching idea behind the interventions used is that vague, unnamed "toxins" are somehow poisoning you and that the only way to fix what's wrong with you is to "detoxify." These "detox" interventions can take many forms, ranging from the relatively (but not completely) benign, such as "juice cleanses," to…
oracknows | July 27, 2016Many are the times that I’ve discussed the issue of quack doctors. I’m not just referring to naturopaths, whose abbreviation ND stands to me for “not a doctor.” In fact, I’m referring to actual, real physicians, doctors with an “MD” or “DO” after their names, doctors who have graduated from reputable medical schools, completed residencies at reputable hospitals, done fellowships, and are respected members of their communities. I’m referring to MDs who have embraced quackery and thus made themselves indistinguishable from NDs. Actually, they are worse than NDs, because, as MDs and DOs, they…
oracknows | June 6, 2016One major thing that differentiated science-based medicine (SBM) from alternative medicine and quackery is that in SBM there is a generally accepted standard of care. This was even the case back in the days before the proliferation of evidence-based guidelines, in which professional societies and expert panels try their best to synthesize what is often an unwieldy mass of sometimes conflicting studies into guidelines on best care practices for different conditions. True, back then there was wider latitude because each physician was largely left to fend for himself in applying the medical…
oracknows | May 6, 2015As hard as it is to believe, I've been spending a significant part of my time countering pseudoscience for close to 17 years, so long that it seems that I've always been doing it. Of course, that's not true; I didn't actually become involved in this seemingly never-ending Sisyphean task until I was in my mid-30s, which means that the majority of my life had been spent more or less blissfully ignorant that there are people out there who passionately believe, for example, that vaccines are dangerous and cause autism and that bleach enemas can reverse that autism or that there were quacks out…
palmd | April 19, 2009My regular readers know that I hold the Huffington Post in the lowest possible regard when it comes to its medical writing. HuffPo offers a daily platform for the worst pseudo-science and infectious disease promotion. Apparently that was getting to hard, because now I think their down to phoning it in. Last week's post by a "body cleanse expert" reads like a late-night infomercial, and is about as accurate.
The article, with the fanciful title of, "Antibiotics Cause Cancer?" is written by Kim Evans whose medical qualifications are apparently limited to selling books on how to cleanse your…