Four letters to the editor critical of papers on Reiki have been published.
For more news, see Dr. William London and Dr. Stephen Barrett's Consumer Health Digest
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SEPTEMBER 1-15 2025 NEWS AUGUST 2025 NEWS ALL PREVIOUS NEWS PAGES
SEPTEMBER 16-30, 2025
Featured topic: vaccine committee meetings
David Gorski (Science-Based Medicine): “Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is definitely coming for your vaccines, part 3: antivax rhetoric and incompetence at ACIP.”
Washington Post: “CDC advisers make their first childhood vaccine edit.”
New York Times: “Kennedy’s advisory panel votes to limit M.M.R. vaccine for children under 4.”
Washington Post: “RFK Jr.’s vaccine advisers add hurdle to getting covid shots.”
Paul Offit and David Wallace-Wells (New York Times): “Kennedy’s vaccine panel is a calamity.”
American Academy of Pediatrics: “AAP continues to support routine immunizations for every child in every community.”
Washington Post: “Vaccine panel that limited covid shot scrutinized after chaotic meeting.”
Washington Post Editorial Board: “Coronavirus vaccines hang by a thread at the CDC.”
Ars Technica: “Bonkers CDC meeting ends with vote to keep COVID shot access.”
Featured topic: Tylenol, vaccines, and autism
Steven Novella (Science-Based Medicine) “That Trump, RFK, Oz presser.”
“Orac” (Respectful Insolence): “The Four Horseman of the Woo-pocalypse join President Trump to spread autism pseudoscience and quackery.”
Edzard Ernst: “Donald Trump will today disclose the 'true' cause of autism – if you don’t want to wait, read this”; “Trump, Kennedy and Oz just announced plenty of untruths about autism and its treatment”; and “The 'acetaminophen debacle': Trump and RFKJr have blood on their hands…and here is why.”
Jonathan Jarry (McGill Office for Science and Society): “All about the Tylenol-autism brouhaha.”
Washington Post: “Trump administration set to tie Tylenol to autism risk, officials say.”
Washington Post: “The drug Trump plans to promote for autism shows real (and fragile) hope.”
New York Times: “Trump issues warning based on unproven link between Tylenol and autism.”
Washington Post: Trump gave medical advice about Tylenol. Here’s what medical experts say.”
KFF Health News: “’Sick to my stomach’: Trump distorts facts on autism, Tylenol, and vaccines, scientists say.”
Andrea Love (ImmunoLogic): “The Tylenol-autism pseudoscience pipeline.”
Washington Post: “Trump gave medical advice about Tylenol. Here’s what medical experts say.”
NBC News: “Trump pushes unproven medical advice around Tylenol and vaccines.”
Washington Post: “What you should know before buying folate and folinic acid supplements.”
Science: “Trump’s autism initiative embraces little-tested vitamin as a treatment.”
Featured topic: vaccines (other)
David Gorski (Science-Based Medicine): “Here we go again: Another study is being misrepresented as evidence that COVID vaccines cause cancer” and “Mark Blaxill: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. resurrects another washed-up antivax activist” (see also: MSNBC: “He helped build the anti-vaccine movement. RFK Jr. just hired him”).
Edzard Ernst: “The EU approved COVID-19 vaccines with ‘ZERO safety checks’! – True or false?” and “Aseem Malhotra: ‘justice for those who have suffered unnecessarily from an mRNA jab’.”
New York Times: “Questions are raised about vaccine panel's reliability as policy review gets underway.”
New York Times: “New York and other states form health bloc as answer to Trump’s policies.”
New York Times: “In Texas, parents fighting vaccinations say their movement is winning.”
PBS: “12 ways RFK Jr. has undercut vaccine confidence as health secretary.”
Vaccine Integrity Project: “Viewpoint: what we don't see about vaccines COULD hurt us.”
Paul Offit (Beyond the Noise): “Jumping without a net.” (hepatitis B vaccine birth dose)
Featured topic: political developments (other)
Edzard Ernst: “The US surgeon general nominee, Casey Means, is a ‘snake-oil saleswoman’” and “It seems to me that Dr. Mehmet Oz is breaking the law.”
Washington Post: “Takeaways from fired CDC director’s Senate testimony.”
New York Times: “5 Takeaways from ousted C.D.C. director’s hearing.”
Inside Medicine: “BREAKING NEWS: Censorship returns to the CDC. At least 22 webpages are down.”
H. Holden Thorp (Science): “Gold standard science requires gold standard scholarship.”
Kevin Folata (Skeptical Inquirer): “The parallels between RFK Jr and Tofrim Lysenko: when pseudoscience infects national leadership.”
NPR: “RFK Jr. ‘rejects’ a U.N. declaration on non-communicable diseases.”
Ars Technica: “50+ scientific societies sign letter objecting to Trump executive order.”
Other topics
On Science-Based Medicine,
Scott Gavura:
Posted “Red flags for red light therapy.” “Overall, the evidence for red light therapy as a weight loss intervention remains weak. Apparent effects may reflect temporary fluid shifts, measurement bias, or placebo effects rather than true fat loss. Red light cannot ‘vaporize’ fat – the body has no mechanism to simply eliminate it this way, and metabolism doesn’t work like that… Red light therapy is widely promoted as a treatment for many conditions. The evidence for weight loss is not impressive. While some small studies suggest modest improvements in certain measures, the evidence is inconsistent and based on short-term outcomes. As they say, more research is required. From a first principles perspective, it seems obvious that red light therapy cannot simply ‘melt fat’ or trigger effortless weight loss. Moreover, sustained health changes will be necessary to sustain any temporary effects, even if they are real.”
Edzard Ernst:
Posted “Iridology for detecting abnormalities in the female reproductive system?...HEAVENS NO!” “What I am trying to explain: the iridologists probably used all sorts of clues to guess which group each patient belonged to. In any case, the study is so poorly conceived and described that we really cannot be sure what happened.”
Wrote “A new study of agrohomeopathy - will it change the hitherto negative evidence?” “Don’t we just love the way enthusiasts of homeopathy call even a squarely negative study ‘inconclusive.’ In turn, they tend to call any fatally flawed trial with a hint of a positive effect solid proof for the effectiveness of homeopathy…Needless to mention that, both from a scientific point of view as well as from a proper understanding of Hahnemann’s homeopathy, agrohomeopathy is a nonsensical and ridiculous impossibility.”
On McGill Office for Science and Society:
Joe Schwarcz:
Posted “More nonsense about the autism-acetaminophen link” (video with transcript). “It didn’t take long for Shane Ellison, the self-anointed ‘People’s Chemist,’ to try to profit from President Trump’s pseudoscientific claim that taking acetaminophen during pregnancy has been proven to increase the risk of the child becoming autistic…Now he has seized upon the purported acetaminophen-autism link to promote ‘Relief FX’ a ‘light speed pain reliever’ he sells.” The product contains willow bark extract. “Willow bark contains salicin, a compound metabolized in the body into various salicylate derivatives that do have pain-relieving and fever-reducing properties. But here is the rub. Salicylates fall into the non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) category, and these are absolutely contraindicated in pregnancy, especially during the third trimester when pain is most likely!”
September 21 – As reported in Consumer Health Digest:
“Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare has announced that a foreign woman in her 50s who had received stem cells derived from her own fat as elective medical treatment to treat chronic pain at Tokyo Science Clinic (Chuo-ku, Tokyo) suddenly took a turn for the worse during treatment and died.”
“The Health and Youth Care Inspectorate in the Netherlands has ordered a Veldhoven anesthesiologist who administered umbilical cord blood to 200 children hoping to cure them of autism or cerebral palsy to stop the treatments.”
September 22 – Assadourian and other published “Label statements and perceived health benefits of dietary supplements” (JAMA Netw Open. 2025 Sep 2;8(9):e2533118). “In this survey study, commonly used structure/function claims on supplement labels were often misinterpreted by consumers to imply a disease-specific benefit, contrary to their regulatory intent. Improved regulations for supplement labeling may be needed to minimize consumer misunderstanding.”
September 30 – Nick Tiller (Skeptical Inquirer) wrote “Wrestling, WiFi, and the war on science.” “Aires Tech surfaced in Russia in the 1990s and only broke into Western markets around 2012, after a string of patents for EMF-blocking trinkets. Its marketing targets people worried that everyday radiation—from phones, laptops, and Wi-Fi—damages cells and causes ill health. Its product line is variations on a theme: plastic–silicone composites studded with holograms or molded shapes…As we’ve come to expect, evidence long ago pulled back the curtain on those claims. Experts who have examined the literature, including Harriet Hall at Science-Based Medicine, find no robust basis that ordinary EMF exposure causes the type of harm suggested in the Aires Tech marketing. Electrohypersensitivity—a cluster of headaches, fatigue, and skin complaints some people attribute to EMF— is real and is potentially debilitating. But it’s an imagined condition rather than one demonstrably caused by EMF…RFK Jr. has long sounded the alarm about EMFs. The official MAHA report names EMFs on its very first page as a major contributor to chronic disease, and on Joe Rogan’s podcast, RFK has claimed Wi-Fi radiation ‘does all kinds of bad things, including causing cancer.’ That EMF-blocking devices now turn up as a sponsorship in mainstream televised entertainment only fuels the MAHA machine.”
Addition to previous issue
September 13 – Kate Lindsay (New York Times) wrote “The wellness industry carves out a new niche: pets.” “Many of the products are marketed as ‘vet-created’ and ‘science-backed,’ but their proliferation has made some in the veterinary field nervous. Michael San Filippo, a spokesman for the American Veterinary Medical Association, suggested pet owners approach products that make ‘broad or anecdotal claims about boosting health or vitality’ with caution, as they may not always be rigorously tested. Pet supplements are not directly regulated, he added, ‘which can leave gaps with respect to ingredient accuracy, quality control and the potential for interactions with other medications’.”