Month: October 2009

Medicine is hard and should be practiced with caution

It’s tempting to think that the practice of medicine should be simple and intuitive.  Unlike other sciences, we all have access to the basic materials—ourselves.  We feel that because we are intimately familiar with our bodies, we know a lot about how they work.  Unfortunately, it’s a little more complicated than that.  The biochemical processes walking around in this sack of meat...

/ October 12, 2009

The Science Fiction of Nutritional Genomics

EDITOR’S NOTE: Dr. Gorski is currently in Chicago attending the American College of Surgeons Clinical Congress. As a result, he has not prepared a post for this week (although he doesn’t feel too guilty about missing this week, given that he did write two rather hefty posts last week, one on the cancer quackery known as the German New Medicine and the...

/ October 12, 2009

Flu Vaccine Efficacy

I guess I will be spending the rest the flu season writing about the nonsense that is promulgated about the flu vaccine and the disease. One of the more common laments about the flu vaccine is that it doesn’t work: I got the flu vaccine and still got the flu. Well maybe. Maybe not.  It takes a few weeks to get protection, so...

/ October 9, 2009

David & Goliath: A Dramatic Role Reversal Spurred On By The Media

The Internet is teeming with false health claims and a long line of celebrities willing to throw their media weight behind every new flavor of snake oil. The irony is that alternative medicine proponents see themselves as a persecuted minority – the victims of some nebulous health industry conspiracy. But in reality, they have ingratiated themselves with the media to such an...

/ October 8, 2009

Monkey business in autism research, part II

Over the last couple of months, I’ve noticed something about the anti-vaccine movement. Specifically, I’ve noticed that the mavens of pseudoscience that make up the movement seem to have turned their sights with a vengeance on the Hepatitis B vaccine. The reason for this new tactic, I believe, is fairly obvious. The fact that the Hep B vaccine is administered shortly after...

/ October 8, 2009

Autism Prevalence

Two recent studies concerning the prevalence of autism in the US have been getting a lot of attention, because they indicate that autism prevalence may be higher than previously estimated. This, of course, fuels the debate over whether or not there are environmental triggers of autism. One study was conducted by the CDC but has yet to be published. The results were...

/ October 7, 2009

“Obesity Linked to Stupidity”- an Example of Stupid Reporting

A news story on Science a Gogo reports that obesity is linked to stupidity, according to a new study based on brain scans. Apparently the reporter can’t read. That’s not at all what the study showed. What the Study Really Said The study was entitled “Brain structure and obesity.”It was published in Human Brain Mapping. There were 10 authors listed, with the...

/ October 6, 2009

Petit canard, grand canard

The flu pandemic of 1918 was horrific. Millions of people died (by some estimates 4% of the world’s 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...

/ October 5, 2009

The “Iron Rule of Cancer”: The dangerous cancer quackery that is the “German New Medicine”

Given that I trained as a cancer surgeon, do laboratory and translational cancer research, and spend my clinical time taking care of breast cancer patients, not surprisingly one topic that gets me the most irritated and provokes a lot of my verbiage for SBM is cancer quackery. As I was perusing my list of posts the other day, it occurred to me...

/ October 5, 2009

Confusing correlation with causation

These two video explains it better than anything I’ve seen in a long time: That’s right. Vaccines educate the immune system. Use them. I got my flu shot on Thursday.

/ October 3, 2009