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Alternative Vaccination Schedules

Posted by on October 21, 2011

Evidently the 7 billionth human is going to be born on October 31. Happy birthday and welcome to the Earth.  If you were unfortunate enough to be born into a developing country or a affluent California family, you may not receive your vaccinations, and may join one the 57 million who die each year of vaccine preventable diseases (VPD).

I totally misread the table.  It’s about 4,320,000 who die of VPD. Well, I said I was no damn good at stats.

And if you are doubly unlucky, you may be exposed to illness from an unvaccinated friend, family or health care worker before you can get your vaccines, and join the ranks of the ‘only’s.’  The ‘only’s’ are those who die of vaccine preventable diseases and are mentioned in anti-vaccine literature in a sentence like ‘VPD X is a mild illness in most children and only kills Y% of cases ’.  As I have said before the anti-vaxers do not care for whom the bell tolls.

I am no good at statistics.  I signed up for, and dropped, statistics at least 4 times in college.  Once they got past the bell shaped curve, it was one incomprehensible huh?  Part of the problem with statistical concepts such as risks, both relative and absolute, is that it is often impossible to get a feel from what they represent. For me it is like metric measurements.  I know what a 8 mile hike represents, but not an 8 kilometer hike.  Same with centigrade and liters.  I have been unable to internalize what metric means in my daily life. (more…)

Posted in: Vaccines

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The Cure

Posted by on October 20, 2011

Legislative Alchemy

In Legislative Alchemy I: Naturopathy, II: Chiropractic and III: Acupuncture, we learned how state legislatures transform scientifically implausible and unproven diagnostic methods and treatments into legal health care practices. Examples typical of the sheer nonsense found in both proposed and actual legislation include:

Naturopathic health care [is] a system of health care practices for the prevention, diagnosis, evaluation and treatment of illnesses, injuries and conditions of the human body through the use of education, nutrition, natural medicines and therapies and other modalities which are designed to support, stimulate or supplement the human body’s own natural self-healing processes.

[Chiropractic is] the science of adjustment, manipulation and treatment of the human body in which vertebral subluxations and other malpositioned articulations and structures that may interfere with the normal generation, transmission and expression of nerve impulse between the brain, organs and tissue cells of the body, which may be a cause of the disease, are adjusted, manipulated or treated.

[Acupuncture is] a form of health care that is based on a theory of energetic physiology that describes and explains the interrelationship of bodily organs or functions with an associated acupuncture point or combination of points that are stimulated in order to restore the normal function of the bodily organ or function.

This is gobbledygook, tarted up with a few scientific-sounding terms — “physiology,” “tissue cells,” “diagnosis.”

 

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Posted in: Acupuncture, Chiropractic, Legal, Naturopathy, Politics and Regulation

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Reiki

Posted by on October 19, 2011

Reiki (pronounced raykey) is a form of “energy healing,” essentially the Asian version of faith healing or laying on of hands. Practitioners believe they are transferring life energy to the patient, increasing their well-being. The practice is popular among nurses, and in fact is practiced by nurses at my own institution (Yale).

From reiki.org, we get this description:

Reiki is a Japanese technique for stress reduction and relaxation that also promotes healing. It is administered by “laying on hands” and is based on the idea that an unseen “life force energy” flows through us and is what causes us to be alive. If one’s “life force energy” is low, then we are more likely to get sick or feel stress, and if it is high, we are more capable of being happy and healthy.

Reiki is therefore a form of vitalism – the pre-scientific belief that some spiritual energy animates the living, and is what separates living things from non-living things. The notion of vitalism was always an intellectual place-holder, responsible for whatever aspects of biology were not currently understood. But as science progressed, eventually we figured out all of the basic functions of life and there was simply nothing left for the vital force to do. It therefore faded from scientific thinking. We can add to that the fact that no one has been able to provide positive evidence for the existence of a vital force – it remains entirely unknown to science.

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Posted in: Energy Medicine

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Birth Control

Posted by on October 18, 2011

From a message posted on Facebook:

 Is the pill safe? The International Agency for Research on Cancer in a 2007 study made by 21 scientists reported that the pill causes cancer, giving it the highest level of carcinogenicity, the same as cigarettes and asbestos. It also causes stroke, and significantly increases the risk of heart attacks. Several scientific journals have stated that the natural way of regulating births through the Billings Ovulation Method has no side-effects, and is 99.5 % effective.

The Billings Ovulation Method (BOM) is a method of natural family planning where women are taught to recognize when they have ovulated by examining their cervical mucus, allowing them to avoid intercourse during fertile periods or conversely, to have intercourse during fertile periods when pregnancy is desired. We used to call people who used the rhythm method “parents,” but BOM is more reliable than older abstinence methods.

I’m a big fan of oral contraceptives. They contributed to women’s liberation by giving us a reliable method of planning, delaying, or avoiding pregnancy.  They also have medical uses that go beyond contraception. Birth control pills (BCPs) have had such an important impact that they are known as simply “The Pill.” We have always known they were not 100% risk free; but we also know they are less risky than pregnancy itself. There are other methods of birth control; but they are generally less effective and less convenient.  For those who want permanent solutions, tubal ligation and vasectomy are available; but even they have occasional failures. What does science tell us about the effectiveness and safety of BCPs as compared to other methods?  (more…)

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Posted in: Obstetrics & gynecology, Pharmaceuticals

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Cranial Osteopathy in Dentistry

Posted by on October 17, 2011

Editor’s note: Having just submitted a major grant on Friday and then having had to turn around and head to an NIH study section meeting today in Bethesda, I just didn’t have the time to produce something up to the usual standards of SBM for today. (And, being managing editor, I should know what’s up to the usual standards of SBM; what I started to write wasn’t it. Trust me on this.) Fortunately, Dr. Grant Ritchey and Dr. Steve Hendry, two skeptical, science-based dentists, did submit something up to SBM’s usual standards. Even better, since we’ve been having a number of requests for posts involving dentistry, it seemed like a perfect time to publish their first contribution to SBM and see how our readers like it. Maybe next time around, I’ll have them update the “state of knowledge” regarding amalgams.

Form follows function, as the old saying goes. Nowhere in the human body is this adage more fitting than in the oral cavity.  In less than two generations, the practice of dentistry has evolved from basic pain relief and function-based procedures (such as extractions and fillings), into today’s practices of complex cosmetic rehabilitation, orthopedic and orthodontic management of the teeth, jaws, and facial structures, replacing missing teeth with dental implants, and treatment of sleep apnea and temporomandibular joint (TMJ) disorders, to name but a few.   With such rapid progress, it is to be expected that for every science based advance made in our field, there are just as many claims that are either dubious in their evidential support or outright pseudo-scientific or anti-scientific nonsense.

In this article, we’ll be taking a look at the roles that health care practitioners such as chiropractors, osteopathic physicians, and physical therapists, are attempting to play in the dental field.  We will also see how well-meaning dentists have been trained in and apply their pseudo-scientific principles in their dental practices. In particular, we’ll be examining Cranial Osteopathy (also known as Craniosacral Therapy or Cranial Therapy) in the management of the dental patient, the purported benefits claimed by practitioners of cranial osteopathy, and the quality and quantity of evidence for this type of treatment in the scientific literature.
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Posted in: Chiropractic, Dentistry, Science and Medicine

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Dummy Medicine, Dummy Doctors, and a Dummy Degree, Part 2.2: Harvard Medical School and the Curious Case of Ted Kaptchuk, OMD (cont. again)

Posted by on October 14, 2011

“Strong Medicine”: Ted Kaptchuk and the Powerful Placebo

At the beginning of the first edition of The Web that has no Weaver, published in 1983, author Ted Kaptchuk portended his eventual academic interest in the placebo:

A story is told in China about a peasant who had worked as a maintenance man in a newly established Western missionary hospital. When he retired to his remote home village, he took with him some hypodermic needles and lots of antibiotics. He put up a shingle, and whenever someone came to him with a fever, he injected the patient with the wonder drugs. A remarkable percentage of these people got well, despite the fact that this practitioner of Western medicine knew next to nothing about what he was doing. In the West today, much of what passes for Chinese medicine is not very different from the so-called Western medicine practiced by this Chinese peasant. Out of a complex medical system, only the bare essentials of acupuncture technique have reached the West. Patients often get well from such treatment because acupuncture, like Western antibiotics, is strong medicine.

Other than to wonder if Kaptchuk had watched too many cowboy ‘n’ Native American movies as a kid, when I first read that passage I barely blinked. Although the Chinese peasant may have occasionally treated someone infected with a bacterium susceptible to his antibiotic, most people will get well no matter what you do, because most illnesses are self-limited. Most people feel better even sooner if they think that someone with special expertise is taking care of them. If you want to call those phenomena the “placebo effect,” in the colloquial sense of the term, fine. That, I supposed, was what Kaptchuk meant by “strong medicine.”

Turns out I was mistaken. Let’s briefly follow Kaptchuk’s career path after 1983. In the 2000 edition of The Web, he wrote:

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Posted in: Acupuncture, Basic Science, Book & movie reviews, Chiropractic, Clinical Trials, Homeopathy, Medical Academia, Science and Medicine

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What’s all that other stuff in my medicine?

Posted by on October 13, 2011

If you read enough supplement advertisements, like I do, you’ll often see the purity of  a product often cited as one of its merits. It’s usually some phrase like:

Contains no binders! No fillers! No colours! No excipients! No starch! No gluten! No coatings! No flow agents!

It’s a point of pride for supplement manufacturers to advertise that their product contains nothing but the labelled ingredient. And that’s also seen as an important benefit to many that purchase supplements. The perception from many consumers (based on my personal experience) seems to be that products are inferior if they contain non-drug ingredients. By this measure, drug products are problematic. Pharmaceuticals all contain an array of binders, coatings, supplements and fillers.  Even (gasp) artificial ingredients and sweeteners! And they’re often, though not always, disclosed on the package label.

But rather than being a negative feature, these supplementary, non-medicinal ingredients play a critical role in ensuring that drug products are of consistent and reproducible quality. Without them, we’d have products that are potentially unstable, we’d be unclear if they were actually being absorbed, and we wouldn’t know if they actually delivered any active ingredients into the body. In short, we’d be in the same situation we’re currently in with many herbal remedies and other types of supplements.

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Posted in: Pharmaceuticals

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Vitamins and Mortality

Posted by on October 12, 2011

The discovery of various vitamins – essential micronutrients that cause disease when deficient – was one of the great advances of modern scientific medicine. This knowledge also led to several highly successful public health campaigns, such as vitamin-D supplementation to prevent rickets.

Today vitamins have a deserved reputation for being an important part of overall health. However, their reputation has gone beyond the science and taken on almost mythical proportions. Perhaps it is due to aggressive marketing from the supplement industry, perhaps recent generations have grown up being told by their parents thousands of times how important it is to take their vitamins, or eat vitamin-rich food. Culture also plays a role – Popeye eating spinach to make himself super strong is an example this pervasive message.

Regardless of the cause, the general feeling is that vitamins are all good – they are not only important for health, they promote health. Many people take vitamin supplements on the idea that more is better, or for nutritional “insurance” to make sure they are getting enough of every vitamin.

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Posted in: Nutrition

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Pursued by Protandim Proselytizers

Posted by on October 11, 2011

I’m fed up! In August 2009 I wrote about Protandim, pointing out that it’s not supported by good evidence. I thought I had made myself clear; but apparently I had only made myself a target. True believers have deluged the Internet with attacks on my article, calling it mere “opinion,” ignoring its main points, and denigrating me personally. I have ignored the Internet attacks, but I’m beginning to feel personally harassed: I have lost count of the e-mails I have received from Protandim enthusiasts trying to convince me that it works and that I should change my mind. I’ve spent hours trying to explain my reasoning in e-mails, and it’s becoming a repetitive chore, so I am writing this so that next time I get an e-mail inquiry I can simply forward this link.

What Is In It?

Protandim is a mixture of milk thistle, bacopa extract, ashwagandha, green tea extract, and turmeric extract (all of which, incidentally, can be purchased individually at much lower cost).

What Do They Claim It Does?

As described on Wikipedia:

The manufacturers of Protandim claim the product can indirectly increase antioxidant activity by up-regulating endogenous antioxidant factors such as the enzymes superoxide dismutase (SOD) and catalase, as well as the tripeptide glutathione, and by activation of theNrf2 pathway.

Nrf2 is a transcription factor that upregulates the expression of various genes that may regulate oxidative stress. Drugs to target that pathway might have benefits for diseases that are caused or exacerbated by oxidative stress. Such drugs are investigational at this point, but the makers of Protandim have skipped the investigational stage and are marketing a product that they think is effective for almost every ailment known to man and that they are promoting as an anti-aging supplement.

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Posted in: Herbs & Supplements

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