Month: July 2014

Upper Neck Manipulation: Caveats for Patients and Providers

Chiropractors often deny that neck manipulation can be a primary cause of stroke by injuring vertebral arteries. But according to Jean-Yves Maigne, M.D., head of the Department of Physical Medicine at the Hôtel-Dieu Hospital in Paris, France: It is now a well established fact that cervical thrust manipulation can harm the vertebral artery. This accident was formerly regarded as very rare, although...

/ July 31, 2014

Drinkable Sunscreen Snakeoil

In May, prompted by an uncritical article in the Daily Mail, the internet was buzzing about a company that was offering drinkable sunscreen. This is one of those game-changer health products that immediately garners a great deal of attention. At first the claim seems extraordinary, but it is not impossible. It is theoretically possible to drink a substance that becomes deposited in...

/ July 30, 2014

A Misguided Apology

A new book by Thomas Schneider, MD, offers A Physician’s Apology. The subtitle asks, “Are WE making you sick?” I was eager to read it, because I could think of many things doctors might be apologizing for: overdiagnosis, overtreatment, ordering unnecessary tests, pathologizing the vicissitudes of everyday life, offering misleading low-fat diet advice, misrepresenting inadequately tested treatments, not putting enough emphasis on...

/ July 29, 2014

“Atavistic oncology”: Another dubious cancer therapy to be avoided

An idea promulgated by physicist Paul Davies that cancer is a reversion to a primordial cell type has been making the rounds. It's even spawned a form of quackery, atavistic chemotherapy, promoted by Dr. Frank Arguello. Davies, in his hubris and his view of himself as an "outsider," seems to think he's the first scientist to have ever had this "brilliant insight,"...

/ July 28, 2014

How “they” view “us” revisited: Mike Adams goes off the deep end

Internet crank and quack Mike Adams recently likened Monsanto and its supporters to Nazis, as he so frequently does when it comes to people and companies he hates. This time he went too far, echoing the sentiment that "“it is the moral right — and even the obligation — of human beings everywhere to actively plan and carry out the killing of...

/ July 27, 2014

Why People Continue to use SCAMs

I remain curious as to why people use, and continue to use, useless pseudo-medicines. I read the literature, but I find the papers unsatisfactory. They seem incomplete, and I suspect there are as many reasons people choose a pseudo-medicine as those use them. There are numerous surveys on what SCAMs people use. Designing and offering these surveys to every possible medical condition...

/ July 25, 2014

Food fights in the courtroom

What’s in a name? Will sugar by any other name taste as sweet? Well, yes, but calling sugar “evaporated cane juice” in an ingredient list may get food manufacturers into trouble. Consumers in several class action suits allege that companies are trying to disguise the amount of sugar in their products by calling it something else. Robin Reese filed a class action...

/ July 24, 2014

Another Lawsuit To Suppress Legitimate Criticism – This Time SBM

I suppose it was inevitable. In fact, I’m a bit surprised it took this long. SGU Productions, the Society for Science-based medicine, and I are being sued for an article that I wrote in May of 2013 on Science-Based Medicine. My SBM piece, which was inspired by an article in the LA Times, gave this summary: The story revolves around Dr. Edward...

/ July 23, 2014

Medical Malpractice Lawsuits

We hear a lot about medical malpractice suits and how they affect the practice and the cost of medicine. Doctors sometimes get the feeling that a lawyer is looking over their shoulder as they interact with patients, and sometimes they practice “defensive medicine,” ordering unnecessary tests and doing what they think would look best in court rather than what is really in...

/ July 22, 2014
Right-to-try

The false hope of “right-to-try” metastasizes to Michigan

State "right-to-try" bills are springing up like kudzu all over the US. Their advocates promise that they will save lives by allowing terminally ill patients access to experimental therapeutics, when in fact they are highly unlikely to do any such thing given that the federal government, not the states, controls drug approval. In reality, right-to-try laws are a cruel sham that will...

/ July 21, 2014