I quite like Portlandia. I find it funny and it captures a part of Portland. I recognize large swaths of the city’s culture in the show. Other representations of the city I recognize less. Sunset publishes beautiful photographs of the NW, but when I look at the photos I think, that section of the city never looks that good. It is quite wonderful how Photoshop can improve on reality.
Like most major cities, Portland has a monthly magazine, Portland Monthly. The city represented in that magazine is mostly alien to me. I look at the advertisement, the articles, the photographs, and wonder when did Portland become a city with an average 7 figure income? The Portland in which I grew up and currently live is rarely found in the pages of Portland Monthly. If you are extremely well to do, I suppose you are in the demographic Portland Monthly. But when I flip through the pages of the magazine, I see little I recognize, but I have never completely abandoned the hippie/grunge aesthetic of my younger days.
Every January they have the best Doctors issue* and this year, for the first time, they offer The Portland Alternative Medicine Guide. Well, less a guide and more an extended infomercial filled with ‘facts’ that deserve the quotes. Continue Reading »
Fear sells, and the media loves it. If it’s scary, no matter how tenuous the link or inconclusive the study, you are going to see it on the news. How many times over the years have you heard that your cell phone might give you brain cancer, even though it never turns out to be true? Once such a claim is made, however, it becomes lodged into the public’s psyche and is accepted as true, even after refutations and retractions are published (see Wakefield, Andrew).
And so it is with x-rays. The latest scare du jour, a recent study out of Yale that claims to show a correlation between dental x-rays and intracranial meningioma — the most common brain tumor and usually benign — has been enjoying widespread attention in newspapers and on the evening news. We don’t know if it will be on Dr. Oz, because we can’t bring ourselves to watch that show, but we feel the chances are good. Other alt-medders will no doubt have collective woogasms over the story and will further incite fear and mistrust into the doctor-patient relationship. In fact, the Mercola website wasted no time in weighing in:
While this study does not necessarily establish causation between dental X-rays and tumors, previous research has also implicated dental X-rays in the development of thyroid cancer, and research clearly shows this type of radiation is not harmless…
Typical alarmist fear-mongering. When has any health care professional claimed that radiation is harmless? This is not cutting edge research; Wilhelm Röntgen, the discoverer of x-rays in 1895 and winner of the Nobel Prize in 1901 for his research in the field, advocated the use of lead aprons for protection from the ionizing radiation way back when. Further, trying to lump one study linking dental x-rays to meningioma to another study linking them to thyroid cancer is taking quite the kitchen sink approach. But if there are multiple alleged possible potential theoretical adverse effects from our dental death rays, it must be true, right?
Well, not so fast. We’re dentists, and unlike many knee-jerkers, we’ve actually read the study and would like to offer a little bit of insight into this before everyone panics. In fact, with respect to Letterman, we’d like to offer our Top Three Reasons Not To Panic: Continue Reading »
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. Continue Reading »
With some degree of sadness I recently “outed” a former co-resident of mine who has turned to the dark side and begun putting money-making before truth and science. Without any clear evidence of benefit beyond placebo, platelet-rich plasma (PRP) is now being marketed aggressively as a cure-all for sports injuries. And at about $300 per injection (the NYT reports $2000/treatment), there’s plenty of money to be made.
Like the fake “stem cell” clinics in Russia (where, according to Sanjay Gupta’s recent book, Chasing Life, a person’s fat cells are harvested, washed, and re-injected into their blood stream), PRP also involves injection of autologous body fluids. Essentially, a small amount of blood is drawn from the patient, centrifuged, and the plasma supernatant is then injected directly into tendons and/or joints. After a series of 3 injections (one/month), most sports injuries are “cured.” Of course, most injuries would heal themselves in three months anyway. Continue Reading »
Although this blog is about medicine, specifically the scientific basis of medicine and threats to the scientific basis of medicine regardless of the source, several of us also have an interest in other forms of pseudoscience and threats to other branches of science. One branch of science that is, not surprisingly, critical to medicine is the science of biology, and the organizing theory of biology is the theory of evolution, which was first reported by Charles Darwin and subsequently synthesized with the developing science of genetics in the early 20th century and then with our increasing knowledge of molecular biology, genomics, and proteonomics whose rise ushered us into the 21st century. However, the implications of evolution, namely that humans and apes both evolved from a common ancestor and that humans, for all their belief of being different and superior to animals, are in fact related to animals in the great chain of life going all the way back to single-celled organisms, does not go down well with certain religious fundamentalists, particularly Christian fundamentalists. Whereas I (and I daresay several of my cobloggers) find the interconnectedness of life, including humans, implied by Darwin’s theory to be beautiful and uplifting, many fundamentalists see it as a profound threat to their world view. Consequently, they have attacked the theory of evolution at every turn and tried to insert creationism, particularly the latest incarnation of creationism known as “intelligent design,” into science classes as an “alternative” to “Darwinism.” The manner in which they torture science, logic, and reason to try to cast doubt on a theory that is every bit as rock solid in terms of massive quantities of experimental and observational evidence to support it as any other theory in science, if not more so, is legendary and well documented at blogs such as The Panda’s Thumb and websites such as Talk Origins.
Although one day I plan on writing about how insights from evolutionary theory have led to deeper understandings of human disease and strategies to improve human health in the future, this time I want to concentrate on the similarities in techniques of spreading disinformation between creationists and purveyors of unscientific medical “treatments.” For background, first, you need to be aware of a movie that was released in April. The movie, Expelled!: No Intelligence Allowed was released. Starring Ben Stein at his most unctuous sporting a bullhorn and styling himself as a conservative, buttoned-down version of Angus Young through his choice of apparel in its promotional material, the movie’s main theme is that any academic who “questioned Darwinism” is “expelled” from academia. The basic idea is that “intelligent design” creationism is being “suppressed” by biologists who just can’t accept the thought of the existence of a “designer” (i.e., God). Indeed, the movie goes so far as to equate biologists and scientists who accept the theory of evolution as the best current explanation for the diversity of life to Hitler and the Nazis and their “suppression” of “alternatives” (word choice intentional) to “Darwinism” to Nazi and Stalinist persecution of dissidents and perceived threats to the regime. The movie even features a sequence where Ben Stein visits Dachau and Auschwitz, as though to imply that biologists are busy firing up the ovens for the Brave Maverick Scientists who “dissent from Darwin.”
These Brave Maverick Scientists are a lot like the Brave Maverick Doctors who champion unscientific medicine. After all, Kevin Trudeau has made a cottage industry and sold millions of books based on the claim that there are “natural cures” that “they” (as in doctors, pharmaceutical companies, and the government) don’t want you to know about and that as a consequence the full forces of these groups are being marshalled to “suppress” them and “persecute” the Brave Maverick Doctors who dare to question the “orthodoxy” of “allopathic medicine,” up to and including claims of “Nazi”-like suppression. (Just read those repositories of quackery NaturalNews.com and Whale.to if you don’t believe me.) For the “alternative medicine” movement, it’s all there, in websites, blogs, and books. But one thing that the movement pushing unscientific treatments has lacked, and that’s a movie to call its own, a movie to spread the same message.
Those of us who are baby boomers or older can remember playing with mercury when we were young. The thermometer broke, and you pushed the little globules around. Or you fooled around with the stuff in science class. My husband says he used to get mercury to flow over the surface of a dime and make it look really shiny. Who knew our old playmate would turn out to be such a bugaboo?
The real dangers of mercury have been recognized. Guidelines have been published to limit exposure. Instructions for safe cleanup of mercury spills are available online. This is good. Other developments are not so good. Scaremongers have demonized mercury and blamed it for everything from autism to Alzheimer’s.
Just when you thought the mercury/autism scare was finally subsiding, another mercury scare has resurfaced. The alarm has been raised (again!) about the mercury in amalgam fillings. Continue Reading »
One of the most pernicious medical myths of recent years has been the claim, promulgated by a subgroup of parents of autistic children and facilitated by scientists of dubious repute, that somehow the mercury in the thimerosal (ethyl mercury) preservative used in common childhood vaccines in the U.S. until early 2002 causes autism. Although it had been percolating under the radar of most parents and scientists for several years before, this belief invaded the national zeitgeist in a big way in 2005, beginning with the publication of a book by journalist David Kirby entitled Evidence of Harm: Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic: A Medical Controversy. The fires of hysteria were stoked even higher by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who published a truly twisted and misleading piece of pseudojournalism and pseudoscience published simultaneously in Rolling Stone and on Salon.com entitled Deadly Immunity. Relying primarily on quote-mining of the transcripts of both a conference held Atlanta by the CDC to discuss the question of whether autism is related to thimerosal in vaccines and an Institute of Medicine report on vaccines while simultaneously misrepresenting the results of two studies by Verstaeten et al to paint a false picture of a government coverup, RFK Jr. almost single-handedly managed to stoke fears that vaccines were causing an “epidemic of autism.”
I say “almost” single-handedly, because, unfortunately, he had help. Relying on the dubious research of a variety of investigators, such as the father-and-son team of Dr. Mark Geier and David Geier, whose prodigious output of badly designed studies emanating from a lab in their home in suburban Maryland, done using a rubberstamp institutional review board stacked with friends and cronies to approve the studies, and published for the most part in non-peer-reviewed journals, activists loudly insisted that mercury in vaccines was the cause of most autism. Others claiming to demonstrate this link include Boyd Haley, a chemist from the University of Kentucky, and a few other vocal scientists and advocates, who claim that autism is, in essence, mercury poisoning. Facilitating the dissemination of this message were reporters such as David Kirby, activists such as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and media personalities such as Don Imus. Indeed, some activists claimed that some vaccines were “poisoning” our children, even going so far as show photos of autistic children with the label “mercury-poisoned“ underneath them on placards held aloft at protest rallies. They made quite a splash then, and still do to a lesser extent even today. There’s just one problem. Continue Reading »
