DECEMBER 2021 NEWS
Featured topic: coronavirus
On Science-Based Medicine,
Jann Bellamy posted:
“Tennessee hamstrings medical board fight against COVID misinformation and unproven treatments.” Sen. Heidi Campbell: “Once we start as a legislature telling doctors how to practice medicine to the point we’re intervening in their ability to perform their duties, then we’ve got a big problem.”
“Florida Surgeon General declares single positive COVID test proves immunity forever.” “This is but one example of recently enacted laws and similar efforts gutting public health protections in Florida…”
David Gorski posted:
“BOO [Black Oxygen Organics]: or how ‘magic dirt’ became a MLM [multilevel marketing] miracle cure scam for COVID-19.”
“John Ioannidis and the Carl Sagan effect.”
“As 2021 shambles to a close, the misuse of VAERS by antivaxxers continues apace.”
Jonathan Howard posted:
Concerning how some doctors persist in promoting incorrect numbers concerning the effects of the pandemic on children.
“Loud silenced doctors.” “When the history of this pandemic is written, contrarian doctors divorced from patient care won’t be seen as its principal victims because YouTube removed their video, because someone called them ‘fringe,’ or because someone put up posters reminding them of words they said.”
“Why it’s worthwhile to debunk Shivambu.”
“I disagree with an article called ‘Vaccines save lives.” “For contrarian doctors anchored to their ideas and sheltered from their consequences, it’s easier to erase 1,000 dead children, ignore overwhelmed pediatricians, and disparage an effective vaccine than to consider they could have been wrong. How sad.”
On Respectful Insolence, “Orac” posted:
“One more time: The Republican Party is the antivaccine party.”
“The antivax assault on state medical boards has begun.”
“Dr. Robert Malone goes full antivaccine conspiracist.”
“RFK Jr. then vs. RFK Jr. now: Still fiercely antivaccine after all these years.”
“The BMJ editors strike back against Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook.” “I was reluctant to write any more about The BMJ and its descent into bad journalism, one of its editors amplifying antivaccine misinformation, and its publishing of outright conspiracy theories by a hack journalist, but unfortunately its editors leave me little choice.”
Edzard Ernst posted:
“Despicable anti-vax comments from American right-wing journalists.”
“A change in diet protects us from severe COVID symptoms – REALLY?” “…the confusion of correlation with causality is both frequent and potentially harmful. And it is unquestionably poor science!”
December 15 – Smith wrote “How a Kennedy built an anti-vaccine juggernaut amid COVID-19.”
Other topics
Best of the blogs, December – on Science-Based Medicine,
Jann Bellamy:
Posted “Quack protection acts advance in state legislatures.” “Proposed laws in Wisconsin and Massachusetts would protect quacks who defraud patients with useless, and sometimes dangerous, nostrums, by essentially allowing them to practice medicine without a license...In what other profession or industry is this tolerated? None, to my knowledge. We do not permit unregulated banks run by people who have no education or training in finance to hold deposits, make loans, operate without audits, and so on, based on the fiction that they are providing ‘complementary and alternative’ banking services...”
Scott Gavura:
Discussed “NAD Therapy.” “Despite decades of pre-clinical research and a number of clinical trials that are small and lacked rigorous controls, there is no persuasive or convincing evidence that supplementation with NAD or its precursors has any medicinal or health benefits for the treatment of addiction or any other medical condition. Regrettably there is no shortage of providers that are willing to sell access to this therapy at exorbitant cost.”
Harriet Hall:
Posted “Nuubu: Here we go again! Recycling debunked foot detox myths.” “What I can say with confidence is that there is no evidence that removing toxins through the skin of the feet is possible.”
Discussed Bioptron, “an energy medicine device intended to balance your chakras and do all sorts of wonderful things.”
Clay Jones:
Posted “A journalist asks if your child needs an energy healer. The answer probably won’t surprise you.” “Your child does not need an energy healer. Energy healing is silly. It’s fantasy and barely more plausible than homeopathy. It has no place in the treatment of pediatric patients with pain, or any patient with any condition for that matter.”
Steven Novella:
Discussed “Radioactive 5G pendants.” Pendants sold to protect against the non-existent danger of radiation from 5G were found to contain hazardous levels of radioactive material.
David Weinberg:
Discussed “The stem cell ophthalmology treatment study.” “In this study we have 300 patients with 47 different diseases subject to 7 experimental treatments among 3 treatment groups and no control group. What could possibly go right?”
Edzard Ernst:
Posted “Quackery promoter, Dr. Mehmet Oz, is running for the U.S. Senate.” “Orac” also discussed Oz on Respectful Insolence.
Discussed a review on “Mind-body therapies for cancer patients.” “The authors concluded that mind-body therapies may be effective in improving cancer pain, but the quality of the evidence is low. There is a need for further high-quality clinical trials...The effects of these treatments are about the same regardless of which one we use. This might lead us to suspect that they work not via specific but via non-specific effects, e.g. placebo.”
Wrote “Lian gong: a little-known form of so-called alternative medicine (SCAM).” “…it is a set of stretching, breathing exercises, and self-massaging techniques aimed at preventing and relieving stress as well as acute pains around the neck, shoulders, back, hips, legs, joints, and connective tissues…I would not be all that surprised to learn that these exercises can have beneficial effects for a range of conditions. What seems doubtful in my view, however, is whether it is superior to more conventional exercise therapies.”
Posted “Does diagnostic imaging affect the clinical outcome in patients with low back pain presenting for chiropractic care?” “The authors concluded that diagnostic imaging did not result in better clinical outcomes in patients with low back pain presenting for chiropractic care. These results support that current guideline recommendations against routine imaging apply equally to chiropractic practice. This study confirms what most experts suspected all along and what many chiropractors vehemently denied for years. One could still argue that the outcomes do not differ much and therefore imaging does not cause any harm. This argument would, however, be wrong. The harm it causes does not affect the immediate clinical outcomes. Needless imaging is costly and increases the cancer risk.”
Posted “Conversion therapy is ‘despicable and degrading’. IT SHOULD BE BANNED EVERYWHERE.” “Conversion therapy has been banned last week in Canada. These therapies – also known as sexual orientation change effort (SOCE), reparative therapy, reintegrative therapy, reorientation therapy, ex-gay therapy, and gay cure – rely on the assumption that sexual orientation can be changed, an idea long discredited by major medical associations in the US, the UK, France, and elsewhere.”
Asked, “Dance therapy: is it effective?” “I think the most obvious conclusion is that, during their supportive care, cancer patients can benefit from: attention, empathy, movement, self-expression, social interaction, etc. This, however, is not the same as claiming that DMT [dance/movement therapy] is the best option for them.”
Posted “What a surprise! A fatally flawed, Boiron-sponsored study of HOMEOPATHY yields a positive result.” “…there was no verification whatsoever of the primary endpoint. In itself, this flaw would perhaps not be so bad. But put it together with the fact that patients were not blinded (there were no placebos!), it certainly is fatal. In essence, the study shows that patients who perceive to receive treatment will also perceive to have fewer URTIs.”
Wrote “Inhalation aromatherapy for kids: it smells nice, but is it really a THERAPY?” “I think the findings show quite clearly that there is no sound evidence to suggest that inhalation aromatherapy might be effective for kids.”
Posted “Osteopathy does not improve breastfeeding.” “The only question that I can think of is this: why did osteopaths ever think that OMT might facilitate breastfeeding?”
Wrote “’There is a clear conceptual similarity between homeopathy and vaccination’ NO, THERE ISN’T!”
Discussed blood letting: “yes, it’s still a thing in so-called alternative medicine.” In response to a review concluding that “BLT is effective in alleviating pain and decreasing CRP level in AGA patients with a lower risk of evoking adverse reactions,” Ernst wrote: “This conclusion is optimistic, to say the least. There are several reasons for this statement: All the primary studies came from China (and we have often discussed that such trials need to be taken with a pinch of salt). All the studies had major methodological flaws. There was considerable heterogeneity between the studies. The treatments employed were very different from study to study. Half of all studies failed to mention adverse effects and thus violate medical ethics.”
Asked “'Access Consciousness', alternative medicine or cult?” “‘Access Consciousness’ (AC) is claimed to be a form of self-improvement therapy based on the idea that you are not wrong, that you know, and that consciousness can shift anything….Some ex-members have alleged that AC is a ‘scam cooked up by a conman to rinse the vulnerable of their savings, a Scientology knock-off, and even a cult’…In each 90-minute session, which costs up to US$ 300, 5,000 to 10,000 years of ‘limitations are released, it is claimed. My conclusion: there is no evidence that AC is plausible or effective and it is a SCAM and possibly also a cult.”
December – Clark and Welch published “Comparing effectiveness of fat burners and thermogenic supplements to diet and exercise for weight loss and cardiometabolic health” (Nutr Health. 2021 Dec;27(4):445-459 Abstract). “…responses induced from weight-loss supplements were less effective than what is obtained from utilizing exercise, or diet and exercise, without additional weight-loss supplements.” Moreover, there likely are negative effects arising from long-term use of such products.
December – Whaley, Sylvester, and Deuster published “A threat to military combat power: dietary supplements” (Am J Med. 2021 Dec;134(12):1560-1563 Abstract). “The use of dietary supplements by young warfighters is pervasive and comes with a readiness cost, especially in the deployed setting. Predatory targeting and marketing by various unscrupulous companies put this population at risk for a higher than baseline risk for adverse events.”
December 14 – Cook and others published “Weighing up the evidence used by direct-to-consumer stem cell businesses” (Stem Cell Reports. 2021 Dec 14;16(12):2852-2860 Paper). “We identify over a dozen forms of evidence, noting that businesses are less likely to rely on ‘gold-standard’ scientific evidence, like randomized clinical trials, and instead draw substantially on forms of evidence that we identify as being ‘ambiguous’."
December 20 – Tiller wrote “Can You Breathe Your Way to Better Health? The Science and Pseudoscience of ‘Training Your Lungs’ for Skeptical Inquirer. “Respiratory training can be hugely beneficial for certain groups, but it’s a poorly understood area that’s open to exploitation. Commercial respiratory products often claim ‘immune boosting’ or ‘healing’ properties that aren’t supported by the evidence.”
December 23 – Pfeiffer wrote “Everyday people fear they have CTE [chronic traumatic encephalopathy]. A dubious market has sprung up to treat them.” “There are no Food and Drug Administration-approved treatments for CTE, yet numerous products and services are marketed as possibly able to ease its symptoms, from craniosacral therapy to a type of light therapy known as photobiomodulation to a wide range of dietary supplements.” Therapies provided by Dr. Daniel Amen are highlighted.
December 31 – English published “Refuting ‘Crazy Joe’ Mercola’s glyphosate-autism scare story.” “Alternative health guru Joe Mercola claims there's been a massive increase in autism cases since the 1960s and that the weedkiller glyphosate is a ‘key culprit.’ He's wrong on both points.”
Addition to previous months
September 20 – Maher and others published “Placebos in clinical care: a suggestion beyond the evidence” (Med J Aust. 2021. 215(6):252-253.e1 Paper). “The recent enthusiasm for the clinical use of placebos seems driven by myths and misunderstandings.. there is no evidence that placebos have much to offer for clinical care…It may be better to dismiss placebos and instead manage patients with evidence-based treatments.”