Science-Based Medicine

The principles we espouse on Science-Based Medicine are vitally important, but some of the subjects we address are not so important in the big scheme of things. Homeopathy and electrodermal diagnostic devices don’t actually harm very many people. For today’s post, I’m going to follow the Willie Sutton rule and go where the money is, so to speak.

Smoking is the leading preventable cause of death. No prospective double blind randomized controlled studies have been done, or ever could be done; but a mountain of evidence converging from many avenues has established the health dangers of smoking beyond any doubt. Hill’s criteria of causation have been amply fulfilled.  Smoking causes 90% of all deaths from lung cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). It increases the risk of coronary heart disease, stroke, several types of cancer, infertility, stillbirth, sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), osteoporosis, and premature skin aging (wrinkles). The dangers of second-hand smoke have been amply documented, and where smoke-free laws have been passed there has been a drop in the incidence of heart attacks and of emergency room visits for children with asthma.

Two new studies published in The New England Journal of Medicine reinforce what we already knew and offer both good news and bad news.  Continue Reading »

As I finished last week’s post, I promised myself that I wouldn’t write about Stanislaw Burzynski again this week. After all, counting this post I will have done 13 posts so far in 2013, and, counting this one, four of them will have been about Burzynski, and three out of the last five posts (three out of four, really, if we eliminate my blatant self-promotion for the talk I gave to the National Capital Area Skeptics over the weekend). It’s the same sort of thing that I sometimes comment about over at my not-so-super-secret other blog when seemingly all my posts are about the antivaccine movement for days at a time. Still, as Michael Corleone said in The Godfather, Part III (admittedly the weakest of the Godfather movies), “Just when I thought I was out…they pull me back in.” Except, I guess, that I never really was out and, as long as Burzynski’s propagandist is coming after skeptics, myself included, I’ve come to the reluctant conclusion that I can’t be out for a long time.

Besides, with the first screening of the Burzynski sequel, Burzynski: Cancer Is Serious Business, Part II (which I’ll simply call Burzynski II, given Eric Merola’s penchant for long titles with multiple subtitles) at the San Luis Obispo International Film Festival yesterday, it looks as though I will find myself on the receiving end of what, from what I can gather, will be a withering and deceptive campaign of personal attack directed against myself and other skeptics who are critical of Burzynski’s treatments and methods. Like Josephine Jones, I can’t help but admit to feeling a little trepidation over this. Meanwhile, given that the Burzynski movie is now finding its way out into the wild, I thought it would be worthwhile to compare the myth-making about Burzynski in the movie with reality. There are so many myths being perpetuated by Merola and Burzynski, so I thought I’d take on three of the most flagrant ones. At some point, once I know the nature of the attacks against me, I will have to respond to specific allegations. Unfortunately, that might not be possible until after the DVD release in July. However, for now, I hope to make this post a resource that takes on the most blatant examples of exaggeration, cherry picking, and spin likely to be in the movie. Hopefully after that I can leave this topic alone for a while and explore more of the big wide world of science-based medicine and offenses against it.
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You need to keep an open mind.

A common suggestion offered to naysayers of nonsense.

The usual retort concerns not letting one’s brain fall out.

Evaluating SCAM’s is less about having an open mind and more about having standards, a conceptual framework that is used to interpret and analyze new information. One of the benefits of writing and reading topics covered by science-based medicine (SBM) is it has clarified and sharpened the ideas by which I understand the world. Those concepts were nicely summed up by Steve Novella at Neurologica, and I reproduce them here, slightly modified. They should be on stone tablets, not quite commandants, but strong suggestions. The 8 strong suggestions somehow doesn’t cut it however. Continue Reading »

Acupuncture, or more broadly, Oriental or Traditional Chinese Medicine, is a

weird medley of philosophy, religion, superstition, magic, alchemy, astrology, feng shui, divination, sorcery, demonology and quackery.

And via the particular form of magic known as legislative alchemy, acupuncture is a licensed health care profession in 44 states and the District of Columbia.

A growing body of evidence demonstrates acupuncture is simply an elaborate placebo. Even the CAM-friendly National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, says

Although millions of Americans use acupuncture each year, often for chronic pain, there has been considerable controversy surrounding its value as a therapy and whether it is anything more than placebo.

Someone should tell the state legislatures. Continue Reading »

I thought I’d take advantage of my prerogative as managing editor of this blog to do a quick bit of blatant self-promotion. I will be in the Washington, DC area later this week, and while I’m there to attend the Society of Surgical Oncology Annual Cancer Symposium, I’ll also be taking advantage to do a little side trip to give a talk for the National Capital Area Skeptics. The talk will take place at the National Science Foundation in Arlington, VA on Saturday, March 9, 2013 at 1 PM. So if you’re in the DC area and want to hear me pontificate about quackademic medicine (and, really, what reader of this blog wouldn’t want to?), mosey on over on Saturday. Full details can be found here.

I practice in a university clinic which functions partly as a tertiary referral center, which means we get referrals from other specialists. I also get many referrals for second opinions. Sometimes the entire cause for the patient’s desire for a second opinion, it seems to me, is the simple fact that they did not understand the reasoning of the previous specialist. They were given a diagnosis and a course of treatment, but not an explanation of how their doctor arrived at those conclusions.

I am not being judgmental – different practices are under different pressures and time constraints, and it can be very difficult to gauge a patient’s understanding. Often the physician and the patient are proceeding based upon differing assumptions and narratives that are not expressly stated. The doctor may think they have explained the situation entirely, but simply did not confront misleading assumptions they were not aware their patient had.

This is part of the advantage of engaging the public about health issues and confronting pseudoscience, myths, and misconceptions – you develop a deep awareness of how the general public thinks about medicine.

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Electrodermal testing is a bogus procedure where measurements of skin conductance with a biofeedback device are entered into a computer to diagnose nonexistent health problems and “energy imbalances” and to recommend treatments for them, often involving the sale of homeopathic remedies and other useless products. It falls under the general category of EAV (Electro Acupuncture of Voll). The history and variants of EAV are explained in an article on Quackwatch.

I’ve written about electrodermal testing before. I’ve explained how it amounts to fooling patients with a computerized Magic 8 Ball and I’ve discussed the legal and regulatory issues.

Now Stephen Barrett (founder of Quackwatch and Vice-President of the Institute for Science in Medicine) has written an article in FACT (Focus on Alternative and Complementary Therapies) entitled “Bogus electrodermal testing devices: where are the regulators?” He points out that existing regulations are sufficient to ban these devices, but that regulators have failed to take appropriate action.

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It’s no secret that I happen to be on several mailing lists of groups or doctors whose dedication to science is—shall we say?—questionable. Of course, the reason I join such mailing lists is to keep my finger on the pulse of pseudoscience, so to speak. Between such lists and strategically selected Google Alerts (the latter of which appear to be failing me these days), I’m usually aware of potential blogging material fast on selected topics that have become my bailiwick on this blog. So it was that I became aware on Saturday of a development regarding the movie about Stanislaw Burzynski that was going to be released direct to DVD this week.

I wrote about this “documentary” a couple of weeks ago, because it had become pretty clear that a significant part of the movie will be dedicated to a PR counterattack (more like a smear job) on skeptics who have been critical of Burzynski, criticism that apparently goaded him to use a rather unhinged individual by the name of Marc Stephens to threaten skeptical bloggers who had written posts critical of Burzynski’s science (more appropriately, his lack of science), and his proclivity for charging patients huge amounts of money to be in clinical trials, a practice that is in general considered at best questionable. The brouhaha in the blogosphere led me to pay attention to Burzynski in a way that I hadn’t before. Sure, I had heard of him, but I hadn’t really delved deeply into his claims. That situation was rectified in late 2011, as I reviewed the first propaganda movie made about Burzynski by Eric Merola, Burzynski The Movie: Cancer Is Serious Business. As I delved deeper, I learned that Burzynski’s evidence for the anticancer efficacy of his “antineoplaston therapy” doesn’t hold up; that his “personalized gene-targeted cancer therapy” is anything but personalized or gene-targeted; and that he’s using an orphan drug now in what appears to me to be a strategy to bypass restrictions on his use of antineoplastons that he agreed to in a consent agreement with the Texas Attorney General back in 1998 that allow him only to use these drugs as part of a valid clinical trial.

So I awaited the approach of this week with a mixture of anticipation and trepidation; anticipation because I wanted to see what sort of bizarre new conspiracy theories (or new twists on old conspiracy theories) that Merola could weave, and trepidation because I don’t know how badly Merola will trash me (and people I know) in his movie and such attacks could cause me difficulties. Suffice to say, it looked very much as though Merola was going to resurrect Jake Crosby’s scurrilous attacks against me from three years ago. So it was with great surprise that I read this e-mail on Saturday morning, sent to the Burzynski Movie mailing list:

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As a pediatrician caring for hospitalized children, I deal with fear on a daily basis. My day is saturated with it. I encounter fear in a variety of presentations, with parental fear the most obvious but probably least impactful on my management decisions. I do spend a lot of time and mental energy calming the fears of others but more managing my own, both struggling to prevent it from biasing my thought process and harnessing it as a productive motivational force. I devote a significant amount of effort towards teaching residents and students the practice of inpatient pediatric medicine and fear can be a valuable teaching tool when used appropriately.

So I admit that I take advantage of fear to a certain extent in my practice. Most pediatricians do. Maybe we all do. Proper informed consent, for instance, must include potential poor health outcomes related to medical intervention or the refusal of them. I accept that fear is an impetus for seeking medical care. Parents should be afraid of poor health outcomes from vaccine-preventable illnesses, for example. They should be made aware of the repercussions of poor adherence to home asthma management or of not placing their child in a proper car seat every time they put them in a car. Fear can serve the greater good.

But there is a difference between these unavoidable aspects of science-based medical care and the abuse of fear by practitioners of irregular medicine.

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Why take a drug, herb or any other supplement? It’s usually because we believe the substance will do something desirable, and that we’re doing more good than harm. To be truly rational we’d carefully evaluate the expected risks and benefits, estimate the overall odds of a good outcome, and then make a decision that would weigh these factors against any costs (if relevant) to make a conclusion about value for money. But having the best available information at the time we make a decision can still mean decisions turn out to be bad ones: It can be that all relevant data isn’t made available, or it can be that new, unexpected information emerges later to change our evaluation. (Donald Rumsfeld might call them “known unknowns.”)

As unknowns become knowns, risk and benefit perspectives change. Clinical trials give a hint, but don’t tell the full safety and efficacy story. Over time, and with wider use, the true risk-benefit perspective becomes more clear, especially when large databases can be used to study effects in large populations. Epidemiology can be a powerful tool for finding unexpected consequences of treatments. But epidemiologic studies can also frustrate because they rarely determine causal relationships. That’s why I’ve been following the evolving evidence about calcium supplements with interest. Calcium supplements are taken by almost 1 in 5 women, second only to multivitamins as the most popular supplement. When you look at all supplements that contain calcium, a remarkable 43% of the (U.S.) population consumes a supplement with calcium as an ingredient. As a single-ingredient supplement, calcium is almost always taken for bone health, based on continued public health messages that our dietary intake is likely insufficient, putting women (rarely men) at risk of osteoporosis and subsequent fractures. This messaging is backed by a number of studies that have concluded that calcium supplements can reduce bone loss and the risk of fractures. Calcium has an impressive health halo, and supplement marketers and pharmaceutical companies have responded. There are pills, liquids, and even tasty chewy caramel squares embedded with calcium. It’s also fortified in foods like orange juice. Supplements are often taken as “insurance” against perceived or real dietary shortfalls, and it’s easy and convenient to take a calcium supplement daily, often driven by the perception that more is better. Few may think that there is any risk to calcium supplements. But there are now multiple safety signals that these products do have risks. And that’s cause for concern. Continue Reading »