JANUARY 2023 NEWS
Dr. Harriet Hall died on January 11. She was one of the leading critics of unscientific health claims. Dr. Hall wrote regularly for Science-Based Medicine, Skeptical Inquirer, and Skeptic magazine, and she had her own SkepDoc newsletter. The News pages and Articles on the KCAHF website have cited her writings hundreds of times. Her contributions were described by Steven Novella on Science-Based Medicine, by William London and Susan Gerbic on Skeptical Inquirer, and by Michael Shermer on Skeptic.
Featured topic: coronavirus
On Science-Based Medicine,
David Gorski posted:
“Was 2022 the ‘year of the gaslighter’ with respect to COVID-19?”
“When antivax 'died suddenly' conspiracy mongering vultures target a friend and colleague.” “After SBM suffered the unexpected loss of our co-founder Dr. Harriet Hall last week, we were angered and distressed to see antivaxxers saying that she had ‘died suddenly’ because of COVID-19 vaccines... This ‘died suddenly’ phenomenon is not unique to vaccines and antivaxxers. It is, rather, a subset of a more general phenomenon in which those who deny science-based medicine blame deaths on the intervention or preventative, rather than the disease itself. Long before the pandemic, I was writing about how quacks and cranks would seize on the deaths of celebrities of cancer to blame chemotherapy, rather than their cancers, for having killed them…Alternatively, they ‘lament’ how a celebrity with cancer might have lived if only he had chosen (or stuck with) alternative medicine, such as Steve Jobs. The ghoulishness is a feature, not a bug, of the denial of medical science.”
Jonathan Howard posted:
“Is the pediatric COVID vaccine in competition with routine vaccinations?” “Of course not. The sad state of Florida shows us why.”
“Should we accept unvaccinated children dying of DOVID as a ‘matter of course’?” “The same doctors who scold us for potentially minimizing ‘slightest bit of inflammation in the heart’ when the vaccine is to blame, shame us for trying to keep children from dying when the virus is to blame.”
“Medical conservatives: a high rate of COVID-myocarditis is ‘good news,’ a low rate of vaccine-myocarditis is ‘deeply disturbing’.” “Doctors who repeatedly and blatantly contradict themselves, convincing parents that rare vaccine side effects are a fate worse than death, don’t deserve our trust.”
Steven Novella posted:
“Viral videos of alleged vaccine side effects.” “…these videos are not reliable medical evidence. They are anecdotes and very likely do not represent true vaccine side effects. It is unfortunate that some have chosen to exploit them to promote dangerous antivaccine misinformation. Meanwhile, after billions of doses given, the COVID-19 vaccines have proven extremely safe and effective.” A related post from “Orac” was “Elon Musk amplifies dubious claims of 'spasms' and 'seizures' after COVID-19 vaccines.” “Thanks to Elon Musk, two-year-old videos showing people claiming to have ‘seizures’ and ‘spasms’ due to #CovidVaccines have resurfaced and gone viral.”
On Respectful Insolence, “Orac” posted:
“Did Anthony Fauci have a ‘conflict of interest’ because his wife is Chief of Bioethics at NIH?” “Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk resurrected an antivax conspiracy theory that Anthony Fauci’s wife was ‘supposed to make sure’ that he ‘behaves ethically’.”
“Damar Hamlin's collapse: To antivaxxers, it’s always the vaccines” and “Why did antivaxxers seize on the Damar Hamlin case?” “When Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin collapsed from an on-field cardiac arrest most likely due to chest trauma, antivaxxers quickly blamed COVID-19 vaccines. The reason was a particularly nasty preexisting variant of the ‘died suddenly’ myth in which athletes are dropping dead from the vaccine. They aren’t.”
“Economist Mark Skidmore publishes antivax propaganda disguised as a survey.” “…the whole study strikes me as a bait-and-switch to get antivaccine disinformation published in a peer reviewed journal…The bottom line is that this survey, although seemingly a bit more rigorous than the typical antivax survey only in that it used a company that provides a respondent pool designed to mimic the demographics of the US, is at its heart no different than the sorts of bizarre Internet surveys about vaccines that antivaxxers have been doing for years and years and then spinning as ‘proof’ that vaccines are harmful.”
Other topics
Best of the blogs, January – on Science-Based Medicine,
Scott Gavura:
Posted “The New Year’s detox secret THEY don’t want you to know about.” “Popular ideas of detoxification and cleansing have no basis in reality. There’s no published evidence to suggest that detox treatments, kits or rituals have any effect on our body’s ability to eliminate waste products effectively. ‘Detox’ focuses attention on irrelevant issues, giving the impression that you can undo lifestyle decisions with quick fixes. Improved health isn’t found in a box of herbs, a bottle of homeopathy, or a bag of coffee flushed into your rectum. The lifestyle implications of a poor diet, lack of exercise, smoking, lack of sleep, and alcohol or drug use cannot simply be flushed or purged away. Our kidneys and liver don’t need a detox treatment. If anyone suggests a detox or cleanse to you, remember that you’re hearing a marketing pitch for an imaginary condition.”
Wrote “CBD oil fails to improve symptom control in advanced cancer.”
David Gorski:
Posted “Tess Lawrie: ivermectin isn’t just for COVID-19 but cures cancer too!” “In a turn that should surprise exactly no one, the BIRD Group’s Tess Lawrie effortlessly pivots from promoting ivermectin as a cure for COVID-19 to promoting it as a cure for cancer. It’s another example of how single-issue quacks almost inevitably embrace more diverse quackery.”
Harriet Hall:
Reviewed the book Quack Quack, by Joe Schwarcz, “an informative and entertaining look at quackery and pseudoscience past and present.”
Steven Novella:
Posted “Eight glasses of water myth.” “The notion that everyone should drink eight glasses of water per day is a persistent myth.”
Wrote “Pushing naturopathy in Canada.” “Another attempt to insert naturopathic pseudoscience into mainstream medicine, this time in Canada…Any reasonable assessment of naturopathy leads to some clear conclusions. Naturopaths are not qualified to function as primary care practitioners. Most of their practices are demonstrable pseudoscience, and at best they flirt with the limits of evidence-based medicine. What they offer is either redundant, or ranged from useless to harmful. And overall they foster a culture of antiscientific notions about health and medicine.” “Orac” also discussed the story on Respectful Insolence.
Edzard Ernst:
Posted “JAMA just published another truly awful acupuncture study.” The study was published in JAMA Network Open, and concerned irritable bowel syndrome. “The results are clearly negative, yet the authors seem to attempt to draw a positive conclusion. The main question that occurs to me is this: how low has the JAMA sunk to publish such junk?”
Wrote “Time for Gwyneth Paltrow’s 'Emotional Detox Bath Soak'.” “Clinically proven, you ask? Well, perhaps not in the sense that sad, retired academics tend to understand the term, but you have to realize, this is a different world where words have different meanings, the meaning entretreneurs want them to have. What is proven though is this: at $40 a tiny jar, the detox bath will eliminate some cash from your pocket – after all, that’s what detox is all about, isn’t it?”
Posted “Massage therapy for postoperative pain?” “In the end, we have to realize that, with clinical trials of certain treatments, scientific rigor can reach its limits. It is not possible to conduct double-blind, placebo-controlled studies of MT. Thus we can only conclude that, for some indications, massage seems to be helpful (and almost free of adverse effects).”
Discussed “Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), the treatment Harry Windsor uses.” “The question I ask myself is, of course: Does EMDR work? The evidence is mixed and generally flimsy. A systematic review showed that ‘limitations to the current evidence exist, and much current evidence relies on small sample sizes and provides limited follow-up data’.”
Wrote “Brillia: homeopathic quackery for autistic children?” “So, they have a study that they commissioned in Europe; it was done by researchers unnamed. The firm then put some data of it on their website. In other words: we don’t know who was responsible for the study; we cannot evaluate how rigorous it was; it has never been peer-reviewed; it is now being used for promotional purposes. Personally, I don’t find this acceptable. In my view, this does not provide a legitimation to make far-reaching claims about the remedy. Until I have evidence to the contrary, I thus deem it safe to conclude that Brillia has no effect other than enriching the manufacturer.”
Posted “SCAM [so-called alternative medicine]-induced liver injuries are more common than you think.”
Asked “Does meditation have positive impact on gut and overall health?” “...dozens of factors other than meditation could very easily be responsible for the observed differences; nutrition and lifestyle factors are obvious prime candidates. The fact that the authors fail to even discuss these possibilities and more than once imply a causal link between meditation and the observed outcomes is more than a little irritating, in my view. In fact, it amounts to very poor science. I am dismayed that a respected journal published such an obviously flawed study without a critical comment...”
Posted “More acupuncture promotion (sponsored by a top journal) masquerading as research.” In a study published in Cancer, “the impact of a multimodal integrative oncology pre- and intraoperative intervention on pain and anxiety among patients undergoing gynecological oncology surgery was explored.” “...Therapy A and therapy B will always generate better outcomes than therapy B alone. But that does not mean that therapy A per se is effective. Because therapy A generates a placebo effect, it might just be that it has no effect beyond placebo. And that acupuncture can generate placebo effects has been known for a very long time; to verify this we need no RCT [randomized controlled trial]. As I have so often pointed out, the A+B versus B study design never generates a negative finding. This is, I fear, precisely the reason why this design is so popular in so-called alternative medicine (SCAM)! It enables promoters of SCAM (who are not as dumb as the studies they conduct) to pretend they are scientists testing their therapies in rigorous RCTs. The most disappointing thing about all this is perhaps that more and more top journals play along with this scheme to mislead the public!”
Wrote “Rife therapy? No, thanks!” The Rife machine produces low-energy electromagnetic waves that are supposed to provide healing effects. “Rife therapy is not biologically plausible, has never been shown to be effective for any condition, might have adverse effects, and is not cheap. Therefore, we have a responsibility to warn consumers and patients not to use it.”
Posted “My concerns about the current research activity in so-called alternative medicine (SCAM).” Ernst surveyed alternative medicine papers published in the first three weeks of 2023. “Glancing at these papers I did not get the impression that many approached their subject critically, In fact, most of the papers looked to me overtly promotional and of poor quality. For instance, I did not see a single paper assessing the risks of SCAM which arguably is the most important issue in SCAM research.” Moreover, more than half the papers originated from China, where there are great concerns about the reliability of published research.
Wrote “Habitual fish oil consumption and chronic kidney disease: there is a link, but is it causal?” “I like this paper! It shows in an exemplary fashion how to interpret an association between two variables: fish oil consumption does not necessarily CAUSE the lower risk, it is merely associated with it and there might be a number of non-causal explanations for the link. Whether there is a true cause-effect relationship needs to be investigated in further, differently designed studies. The present paper does not overstate its conclusions but it is nevertheless important, as it hopefully will prompt others to clarify the crucial issue of causality.”
Asked “Does acupuncture reduce the risk of stroke in patients with migraines?” “After merely 10 minutes of critical analysis, ‘real-world data’ turn out to be real-bias data, I am afraid. The first question to ask is, were the groups at all comparable? The answer is, NO [seven important differences between groups were listed]... The potentially more important flaw in this study lies elsewhere. Imagine a group of people who receive some extra medical attention – such as acupuncture – over a long period of time, administered by a kind and caring therapist; imagine you were one of them. Don’t you think that it is likely that, compared to other people who do not receive this attention, you might feel encouraged to look better after your health?...I am not saying that such studies are totally useless. What often renders them worthless or even dangerous is the fact that the authors are not more self-critical and don’t draw more cautious conclusions...My advice to researchers of so-called alternative medicine (SCAM) and journal editors publishing their papers is this: get your act together, learn about the pitfalls of flawed science…, and stop misleading the public.”
Posted “Quackademia galore: an Oxford ‘university’ starts a course in veterinary chiropractic.” “I am unable to find a jot of good evidence that veterinary chiropractic is effective for any condition...If I am right, the new course could be a fine example of quackademia where students are ripped off and taught to later rip off the owners of animals after the academically trained quacks have mistreated them.”
Discussed a paper on “The incidence of severe adverse events after chiropractic spinal manipulation therapy.” “The authors concluded that, in this study, severe SMT-related AEs were reassuringly very rare… However, there seem to be several problems with this study… The findings seem reassuring but sadly they are not fully convincing.”
January – Edzard Ernst wrote “Applying science to SCAM [so-called alternative medicine]: a brief summary of the past thirty years” for Skeptical Inquirer.
January – Tiller, Sullivan, and Ekkekakis published “Baseless claims and pseudoscience in health and wellness: a call to action for the sports, exercise, and nutrition-science community” (Sports Med. 2023 Jan;53(1):1-5 Abstract). “This is a call to action to unify exercise scientists around the world to more proactively challenge baseless claims and pseudoscience in the commercial health and wellness industry. Furthermore, we must shoulder the burden of ensuring that the next generation of exercise scientists are sufficiently skilled to distinguish science from pseudoscience, and information from mis- and disinformation. Better population health, sports performance, and the very reputation of the discipline may depend on it.”
January 3 - Nick Tiller wrote “The Liver King, lies, and logical fallacies.” Brian Johnson marketed his “Ancestral Tenets,” including an extreme form of the paleo diet. “But leaked emails recently revealed that his astounding physique wasn’t due to his diet of raw animal organs and powerful supplements, as he claimed, but instead his extensive use of anabolic steroids.”
January 13 – Nicole Blanchard published “Idaho faith healing exemption still unchanged. Canyon County counts 8 more deaths.” Preventable deaths of children continue among members of the Followers of Christ Church, who rely on faith healing instead of conventional care. “Today, Idaho is one of a few states whose faith healing exemptions persist.”
January 13 – Jonathan Jarry wrote “You don’t need a binder in your detox kit, and you don’t need a detox kit.” “Not only are binders useless for the purpose of human detox, but they can lead to harm. They have the potential to cause constipation and some of them can bind minerals our bodies need and thus create deficiencies, which is why the people selling them often suggest using them for short periods of time and cycling through different ones. Of course, cycling through different binders conveniently means buying more products... Take-home message: Binders are natural substances, like clay and charcoal, that the wellness industry is selling, claiming that they bind to ‘toxins’ during a cleanse to prevent you from feeling ill and to stop the body from reabsorbing the toxins. The idea that we need to regularly detox our bodies is not based on good science.”
January 23 – Li and others reviewed the effects of flaxseed supplementation on blood pressure (Food Funct. 2023 Jan 23;14(2):675-690 Abstract). “Supplementation with various flaxseed products significantly reduced SBP [systolic blood pressure] and DBP [diastolic blood pressure] levels, confirming the hypothesis that flaxseed could be used as an effective supplement for blood pressure management, alongside routine medications.”
Additions to previous months
September 15, 2022 – Hatfield and others published “Dietary supplements and bleeding” (Proc (Bayl Univ Med Cent). 2022 Sep 15;35(6):802-807 Paper). “We found that garlic and hawthorn supplementation is strongly associated with surgical bleeding independent of anticoagulants. Cordyceps sinensis, echinacea, and aloe vera are loosely associated with surgical bleeding independent of anticoagulants. In patients on anticoagulants, ginkgo biloba, chondroitin-glucosamine, melatonin, turmeric, bilberry, chamomile, fenugreek, milk thistle, and peppermint are associated with bleeding risk. No evidence was found for bleeding with these supplements independent of anticoagulants. Fish oil, ginseng, and saw palmetto are not associated with bleeding. Evidence for overall bleeding risk associated with St. John’s wort, ginger, ginkgo biloba, or cranberry supplementation is conflicting.”
December 2022 – Liu and others discussed statistics used in analyzing acupuncture trials (J Clin Epidemiol. 2022 Dec;152:1-12 Paper). “The use of statistical methods among acupuncture RCTs [randomized controlled trials] is far from satisfactory. Our findings highlighted the need for researchers to carefully use the optimal statistical methods and for journal editors to strengthen the use of statistical methods.”