OCTOBER 2020 NEWS
Featured topic: coronavirus
On Science-Based Medicine, Jann Bellamy:
Posted “Government watchdog to investigate politicization of CDC and FDA during COVID-19 pandemic.”
Scott Gavura:
Wrote “The top COVID-19 hucksters and grifters so far.” Alex Jones, Mike Adams, Joe Mercola, Jim Bakker, Mike Lindell, Keith Middlebrook, Dave Asprey, and Dominique Fradin-Read are discussed.
David Gorski:
Wrote “Science-based medical lessons from President Trump's case of COVID-19 (thus far).”
Posted “The Great Barrington Declaration: COVID-19 deniers follow the path laid down by creationists, HIV/AIDS denialists, and climate science deniers.” “…the Great Barrington Declaration represents a variation on decades-old astroturf techniques. Just as those behind astroturf campaigns seek to disguise their campaigns as organically arising from grassroots efforts and activism, this form of astroturf seeks to cloak the agenda of business or ideological groups in the disguise of science by portraying their agenda as organically arising from the science, using scientists ideologically sympathetic or aligned with them to spearhead their message and then gathering as many signatures as they can from scientists and doctors, regardless of whether they have actual expertise in the relevant sciences.”
Discussed “Vaccine safety monitoring in the age of the COVID-19 pandemic.” “Here’s what worries me, regardless of who wins the election. By the time COVID-19 vaccines are rolled out and distributed next year (at the earliest), the HHS, CDC, and FDA will have been ‘reorganized’ and stripped of so much expertise through a brain drain resulting from the demoralization caused by so much incompetence and political interference that it will be very difficult for the CDC and FDA to monitor the safety of the new vaccines effectively.”
Steven Novella:
Responding to questions about the president’s personal physician, wrote “Osteopathic medicine – what is it?”
Wrote “Will natural herd immunity end the pandemic?” “Here is why that is a terrible idea.”
Posted “COVID vaccine hesitancy.”
Grant Ritchey:
Posted “The mask ask: understanding and addressing mask resistance.”
On Respectful Insolence, “Orac”:
Posted “Dr. Carrie Madej: COVID-19 mRNA vaccines are transhumanism!” “The bottom line is that Mercola and Madej are doing nothing more than putting a COVID-19-based spin on an old antivaccine trope…”
Discussed rectal ozone treatment for COVID-19.
Wrote “’Masks make you sicker’: The unkillable COVID-19 conspiracy theory.”
Posted “Oblivion Agenda: Mike Adams’ COVID-19-inspired update to his alien vaccine holocaust conspiracy theory.”
Posted “AIER likens anti-‘lockdown cranks to abolitionists. Hilarity ensues.” “Cranks love a heroic persecution narrative, and the climate science-denying right wing think tank American Institute of Economic Research (AIER) has a doozy: COVID-19 ‘anti-lockdown’ cranks like Scott Atlas and those behind the Great Barrington Declaration are the new abolitionists! This is a page from the antivax playbook.” (See also Oct. 15 item below).
Wrote “Quackademic medicine, COVID-19 edition, part 1: magic amulets.” “It’s basically warmed over Béchamp with a whole lot of handwaving about magnetic fields added as the ‘external’ forces that result in the formation of microbes under Béchamp’s pleomorphic theory of disease…A better question is how a quackademic paper this bad got published in a respectable journal.”
Edzard Ernst posted:
“Vitamin D for COVID-19? Findings from a randomised trial are encouraging.” “It is undeniable that this trial has several important limitations (and its authors are very honest to point them out). However, it is equally undeniable, in my view, that it is an important contribution to our current knowledge.”
“Vitamin C, Patrick Holford, and dangerously misleading COVID-nonsense.” “…in this pilot study, vitamin C failed to produce a significant result. Only in a subgroup analysis related to a secondary endpoint was there a slight advantage of vitamin C. This effect is, of course, interesting and needs further investigation…It could have some clinical significance but, just as likely, it could just be due to chance…to hype the findings and to even make statements such as ‘now there is another proven treatment, vitamin C’ is not just exaggerated, it is irresponsible.”
“Manifesto Against Pseudosciences in Health.” The text of the document (with 2750 signatories from 44 countries) was given. Although focused on Europe, it is relevant to all countries. “Influential lobbyists have been given the opportunity to redefine what a medicine is, and now they are selling sugar to sick people and making them believe it can cure them or improve their health. This has caused deaths and will continue to do so until Europe admits an undeniable truth: scientific knowledge cannot yield to economic interests, especially when it means deceiving patients and violating their rights…Lying to a sick person is not another type of medicine, it is simply lying to a sick person.”
“Misinformation and fraudulent claims about boosting immunity during the pandemic.”
September 24 – Writing for the McGill Office for Science and Society, Jonathan Jarry profiled Andrew Kaufman in “The psychiatrist who calmly denies reality.” “Take-home message: Dr. Andrew Kaufman, a psychiatrist essentially turned naturopath, has become very popular on YouTube for denying the existence of the coronavirus; He claims the coronavirus is instead an exosome, a natural transport vehicle made by our cells, and while exosomes do have some similarities to viruses, there is undeniable evidence that the coronavirus exists; Dr. Kaufman is part of a conspiracy movement that believes the pandemic is being manufactured to take away people’s rights, and his calm and confident demeanour can appear very convincing even when he makes outrageous claims like that appendicitis is simply constipation.”
October 1 – Joan Conrow of The Cornell Alliance for Science posted “What drove the COVID misinformation ‘infodemic’?” “The most popular topic was what study authors termed ‘miracle cures.’ This topic appeared in 295,351 articles — more than the other 10 topics combined. The study found that comments by US President Donald Trump drove major spikes in the ‘miracle cures’ misinformation topic…These findings suggest that President Trump was quite likely the largest driver of misinformation during the COVID pandemic to date, the study authors noted…The second-most prevalent topic was the allegation that the COVID pandemic was created to advance a ‘new world order/deep state.’ The claim that the global pandemic was a hoax perpetrated for political gain by the Democratic Party was the third most common topic, followed by conspiracies contending the novel coronavirus was a bioweapon intentionally or accidentally released by a laboratory in Wuhan, China.”
October 15 – Stephanie Lee of BuzzFeed News wrote “Scientists are slamming the Great Barrington Declaration’s call for 'herd immunity'.” “The evidence is very clear: controlling community spread of COVID-19 is the best way to protect our societies and economies until safe and effective vaccines and therapeutics arrive within the coming months.”
October 23 - As reported in Consumer Health Digest Consumer Health Digest, “The University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics Forecasting Team has estimated that universal mask use (95% mask use in public) could save an additional 130,000 lives from September 22, 2020 through the end of February 2021, when compared the reported national usage of 49% reported on September 21” (IHME COVID-19 Forecasting Team. Nat Med. 2020 Oct 23. Epub ahead of print Paper).
Other topics
Best of the blogs, October – on Science-Based Medicine, Jann Bellamy:
Discussed “Acupuncture and cupping for adult idiopathic scoliosis at the VA.” “To me, the article confirms that the ideology of so-called integrative medicine is firmly imbedded in the VA and that veterans are being subjected to unethical, time-consuming, and worthless treatments that pose risks without the possibility of benefit. These treatments are being foisted upon veterans by ‘health care providers’ who do not have sufficient knowledge of even the most basic medical facts behind their patients’ presenting condition. All of this, by the way, is being done on the taxpayers’ dime.”
Harriet Hall:
Provided an update on hydrogen water. “Researchers are continuing to evaluate the possible health advantages of drinking hydrogen water, and some of their preliminary results look promising. I will keep an open mind and stay tuned, but we know that promising small preliminary studies tend not to pan out. Meanwhile, I am not convinced by the evidence. I see no reason to buy expensive tablets or invest in a machine to produce hydrogen at home.” Edzard Ernst also discussed hydrogen water. “Whenever I see a treatment that never fails to produce positive results, regardless of the conditions it is applied to, I start asking myself, are these findings not too good to be true?”
Discussed the McDougall Diet. “Dr. McDougall is a maverick who disagrees with most experts. He recommends a high starch, low fat diet with no dairy or animal foods and other prohibitions. Its severe restrictions make it nutritionally questionable and it has never been properly tested in a controlled study.”
Clay Jones:
Posted “Chiropractic, chiropractic for kids, and a few of my greatest hits.” While Jones came to find some use for evidence-based chiropractors, he still sees the field as filled with pseudoscience, and is particularly outraged by the dangerous nonsense in pediatric chiropractic.
On Respectful Insolence, “Orac”:
Posted “Duke University’s stem cell program for autism: The dark(er) side of quackademic medicine.” “All of this is well and good as far as the development of new techniques to harvest, isolate, and grow stem cells goes, but there isn’t any good evidence that autism is treatable with stem cells. It’s not even very biologically plausible… Basically, through its hard-to-find ties to the Stem Cell Institute Duke University has sullied its good name by getting into bed with stem cell quacks like Neil Riordan. It’s all fun and games (and easy to laugh at and off) when academic medical centers embrace, for example, the faith healing that is reiki. It’s not so funny any more when they start taking money from believers in quackery to run scientifically dubious clinical trials of that quackery and even set up centers dedicated to dubious treatments. Real children could end up being hurt.”
Wrote “Mike Adams: Why doesn’t Rush Limbaugh try ‘natural’ treatments for his lung cancer?” “Mike Adams has long used celebrities with cancer to claim ‘natural’ treatments could cure them. Now he’s doing the same with Rush Limbaugh…”
Edzard Ernst:
Discussed enzyme therapy for cancer. “My searches located no prospective clinical trials supporting the notion that enzyme therapy is an effective cancer cure for any type of human cancer…In my view, it is a dangerous and highly irresponsible claim that endangers the lives of many vulnerable cancer patients desperately looking for alternative cancer cures.”
Posted “Dietary Supplements for Cancer Patients: NO EFFECT ON OVERALL SURVIVAL.”
Wrote “So-called alternative medicine for post-caesarean pain? A Cochrane review.” “I feel that the Cochrane Collaboration does itself no favours by publishing such poor reviews. This one is both poorly conceived and badly reported. In fact, I see little reason to deal with pain after CS differently than with post-operative pain in general. Some of the modalities discussed are not truly SCAM [so-called alternative medicine]. Most of the secondary endpoints are irrelevant. The inclusion of adverse effects as a primary endpoint seems nonsensical considering that SCAM studies are notoriously bad at reporting them. Many of the allegedly positive findings rely on trial designs that cannot control for placebo effects (e.g A+B versus B); therefore they tell us nothing about the effectiveness of the therapy. Most importantly, the conclusions are not helpful. I would have simply stated that none of the SCAM modalities are supported by convincing evidence as treatments for pain control after CS.”
Posted “Another attempt to ‘white-wash’ the evidence on homeopathy.”
Commented on a massive study supposedly showing the value of homeopathy. “In a nutshell: this new German ‘study’ is a textbook example for arguing in favour of conducting proper research rather that rampant pseudo-research.”
Discussed a paper on energy medicine in “A quantum physics perspective on acupuncture and other SCAMS??” “Is that what the Wake Forest School of Medicine considers to be ‘expanding knowledge … through research and educational opportunities’? Where is the actual research that backs up any of the weird claims made above? Is it truly knowledge that is being expanded here … or is it perhaps total, utter BS?”
Reported on a study of recent patents of homeopathic remedies. This “squarely defeats the argument that homeopathic formulations cannot be patented” (and thus there is no money for proper research on them). Some interesting new remedies were listed, such as “Car Exhaust” and “Irish Wet Turf.”
Discussed an analysis of randomized controlled trials of homeopathy, published by the Homeopathy Research Institute.
Posted “Coffee enemas: a tragically foolish way to die.” The enemas are used for “detox” and also as a cancer treatment. “So-called alternative medicine (SCAM) is full of truly barmy ideas, but coffee enems [sic] are amongst the worst. They are disgusting, uncomfortable, useless and risky. I am posting this article with the sincere hope that nobody reading it will ever consider using such nonsense.”
October – Crawford and others wrote “The scoop on brain health dietary supplement products containing huperzine A” (Clin Toxicol (Phila). 2020 Oct;58(10):991-996 Abstract). Huperzine A is a natural chemical but it is unclear whether it is a legal ingredient in dietary supplements in the U.S. The authors found that many products containing huperzine A were adulterated with dangerous stimulant ingredients not listed on the labels.
October – Frances Berg’s book Health Risks of Weight Loss is now available for download from Quackwatch at this link:
Although the book was published in 1995, the author notes that “Most everything in the report is still relevant.”
October 7 – Lindsay Gellman wrote “Dubious alternative Lyme treatments are killing patients” for Bloomberg Businessweek. "Patients, family members, physicians, and government officials describe LLMDs [‘Lyme-literate medical doctors’] routinely misdiagnosing Lyme disease instead of other, treatable conditions and injuring patients. Many of these stories have effectively been buried—quashed by confidentiality agreements struck during litigation, papered over by bureaucratic procedure, stuck in limbo between agencies, or redacted as they pass through layers of compliance…physicians at the CDC are aware of malpractice allegations at a constellation of private clinics. Since around 2013 they’ve tracked dozens of reports of significant harm, including several deaths, that were the direct consequence of procedures ordered or administered by LLMDs. And yet, even those who’ve been reprimanded have tended to face few professional repercussions. Often, they’ve continued to practice.”
October – Hallajzadeh and others reported beneficial effects of Nigella sativa “on fasting glucose, HbA1c, triglycerides, total‐, VLDL‐, LDL‐cholesterol levels” (Phytother Res. 2020 Oct;34(10):2586-2608 Abstract).
October 9 – The FDA issued warning letters concerning cesium chloride in dietary supplements. “Cesium chloride is sometimes promoted as an alternative treatment for cancer, but it has never been proven to be safe and effective to treat cancer or for any other use.”
October 13 – The FDA published “Do Not Use: Black Salve is Dangerous and Called by Many Names.” “Salve products containing corrosive ingredients, including black salve, are dangerous and are not approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to treat or cure any skin condition, particularly not skin cancer. Specifically, the FDA is warning consumers not to use any salves or other topically applied products that list any of the following potentially dangerous ingredients: sanguinarine, Sanguinaria canadensis, or bloodroot, alone or in combination with zinc chloride. Although not all salves are dangerous, topically applied products with the above ingredients can destroy the skin and result in permanent disfigurement, tissue necrosis (death of cells in living tissue), and can result in infection. Furthermore, using salve products such as black salve for serious conditions like skin cancer can result in delayed cancer diagnosis and cancer progression.”
Additions to previous months
August - Naserizadeh and others reviewed “The effect of crocin supplementation on lipid concentrations and fasting blood glucose” (Complement Ther Med. 2020 Aug;52:102500 Abstract). Crocin is a carotenoid that gives the red color to crocus flowers. The authors concluded that “crocin supplementation can decrease significantly FBS [fasting blood glucose] and TC [total cholesterol] without any beneficial effects on TG [triglyceride], LDL-C [low- density lipoprotein cholesterol], and HDL-C [high-density lipoprotein cholesterol] levels.”
September – Patel et al. reviewed “The role of acupuncture in the treatment of chronic pain” (Best Pract Res Clin Anaesthesiol. 2020 Sep;34(3):603-616 Abstract). “Based on the most recent evidence, migraine and fibromyalgia are two conditions with the most favorable outcomes after acupuncture. At the same time, abdominal pain has the least evidence for the use of acupuncture. Acupuncture is efficacious for reducing pain in patients with LBP [low back pain], and for short-term pain relief for those with neck pain.” However, “many of the current studies have a risk of bias due to lack of blinding and small sample size.”