OCTOBER 2024 NEWS

Other topics

On Science-Based Medicine,

Mark Crislip:

Discussed treatments for hangovers.

David Gorski:

Posted “Antivax as ideology: 'limited hangouts' run by ‘controlled opposition’.” “Antivax is more ideology and conspiracy than science. The recent accusation that antivax influencers are running “limited hangouts” as part of “controlled opposition helps illustrate this characteristic, in which the insufficiently radical are portrayed as useful idiots for the enemy or even heretics.”
Wrote “Antivaxxers easily see through the misdirection of RFK's MAHA.” “Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has been antivax for two decades. His fellow travelers are not happy about his leaving out vaccines in his ‘Make America Healthy Again.’ To them it’s an obvious misdirection, and they are turning on him.”
Posted “RFK Jr. declares MAHA war against the FDA.” “There are very real concerns about US health policy, but, as is the case with the nostrums RFK Jr. champions for disease and to demonize vaccines, he’s applying policy quackery to address these problems in a way that is inherently self-contradicting…I fear that federal health policy will end up being the worst of both worlds, with far less regulation on big pharma and much laxer standards for drug approval, plus a lot more freedom for quacks to peddle quackery like bogus stem cell therapies, chelation, and ‘repurposed’ ivermectin for everything, while NIH is forced to waste even more money studying useless quackery.”

Scott Gavura:

Discussed potential benefits of elderberry. “Very weak data suggest that elderberry may offer some benefit for colds and flu, but it’s also refuted with conflicting evidence that is more compelling. I don’t recommend elderberry, but it has a reasonable safety profile for most adults. If people really want to self-medicate with something, I warn them that it may not be helpful and there’s a suggestion it could actually be harmful.”
Wrote “Widespread use of dietary supplements linked to liver damage.” “Millions of Americans are taking herbal remedies that may be toxic to the liver.” The study was discussed in AUGUST 2024 NEWS. An editorial in Lancet Gastroenterology & Hepatology (2024 Nov;9(11):965), entitled “Herbal and dietary supplements: unregulated hepatotoxicity,” also discussed the study. It noted that for new dietary ingredients, manufacturers were supposed to notify the FDA with evidence of safety. “However, between 1995 and 2015, the FDA received only 725 notifications, when more than 50 000 supplements were being sold.”

Steven Novella:

Wrote “Conspiracy thinking and alternative medicine.” “The end result is that media driven, snake oil financed, conspiracy thinking is rotting out the core of our society. It is also compromising the quality of our health care, luring people away from complicated but at least tested and standardized interventions to harmful and expensive fantasies. It is creating a generation that does not even recognize expertise, that sees all claims as equally valid, in fact validity does not even come into it. Claims are all performance, and exist solely to generate social media engagement.”
Discussed “Latest acupuncture pseudoscience.” A paper concerning chronic sciatica was discussed. “Regardless of justification – a non-blinded study with a subjective outcome is not rigorous, it is scientifically worthless. In fact it is worse than worthless, it is actively harmful because it is useful for propaganda and deception. The editors of JAMA Internal Medicine have now played into this propaganda. It also has to be noted that this is an entirely Chinese study. This is relevant for acupuncture studies because reviews have found that Chinese studies on acupuncture are essentially never negative. They have a near 100% positive bias. This is statistically impossible, and absolutely calls into question the results of acupuncture studies coming out of China.” Edzard Ernst also discussed the paper.
Posted “EMDR is still dubious.” “A recent meta-analysis of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy concludes that the evidence ‘confirms’ EMDR is effective in treating depression. It is a great example of the limitations of meta-analysis, and how easy it is to create essentially a false narrative using poor quality research…If you go through the individual studies you will see that none of them are compelling evidence for the efficacy of EMDR, and therefore adding a lot of weak studies together does not create a strong study.”

On Respectful Insolence, “Orac”:

Posted “Antivax cancer quacks go 'orthomolecular'.” “Antivaxxers have gone full cancer quack. This time, they’re peddling ‘orthomolecular medicine’ nonsense in the form of a bad study. Same as it ever was…The Joe Tippens protocol of course, has basically no good evidence to support its being superior to existing therapies for any cancer, much less that it is any sort of ‘miracle cure’ for advanced cancer. Moreover, quacks gonna quack, and of course ‘new school’ cancer quacks attracted to ivermectin would also be attracted to a different drug targeting parasitic worms that cause disease, such as fenbendazole and mebendazole.”
Wrote “Antivaxxers embrace the solvent DMSO as a cure-all.” “Showing once again that there is no old quackery that antivaxxers won’t embrace, ‘A Midwestern Doctor’ touts the solvent DMSO as a cure-all…I also note that the ‘evidence’ cited by AMD/AMQ consists mainly of anecdotes and cherry picked studies, many of which are cell culture and animal studies and few of which are well-designed clinical trials…when a substance (or drug) is claimed to be beneficial for such a huge range of conditions (including cancer), chances are very good that it’s not really effective against any of them, or at least against the vast majority of them.”

Edzard Ernst:

Posted “Prevention and so-called alternative medicine (SCAM).” “Despite the prominent place prevention assumes in discussions about SCAM, the actual evidence fails to show that it has an important role to play in primary, secondary or tertiary prevention.”
Wrote “Is there an association between chiropractic spinal manipulation and cauda equina syndrome?” “Cauda equina syndrome (CES) is a lumbosacral surgical emergency that has been associated with chiropractic spinal manipulation (CSM) in numerous case reports.” The study found that CSM is not a risk factor for CES. “This is an interesting and well-reported investigation. Its particular strength is the huge sample size. Its weakness, on the other hand, is the fact that, despite the researchers best efforts, the two groups might not have been entirely comparable and that there could be a host of relevant factors that the propensity matching was unable to control for.
Posted “Artificial intelligence (AI) could be a game-changer in protecting the public from misinformation about so-called alternative medicine (SCAM).” A study (Rose et al. R. Soc. Open Sci.11240698 Paper) employed AI to identify false or misleading claims in web pages. “I congratulate the authors on their important study and hope they are correct – but I am not holding my breath.”
Wrote “The importance of diet in so-called alternative medicine.” Proponents of alternative medicine claim to be more concerned with diet than conventional medical practitioners. However, a Medline search revealed: “As of 6 October, there are 1 453 clinical trials listed on Medline as published in 2024. Between 1957 and today, around 57 000 such trials have been published. Their number shows an almost exponential growth during this period…There are as good as no trials on any of the SCAM diets. The researchers doing the diet trials are almost exclusively conventional medics or nutritionist. I did not find any SCAM practitioners in the list of authors.”
Discussed “Misleading 'cancer cure' books on Amazon: the scandal that has so far been widely ignored.” “This is an excellent paper that is long overdue. The plethora of dangerous books on so-called alternative medicine (SCAM) targeted at lay people is nothing short of a scandal. It was high time that we expose it, because it kills vulnerable patients.” The Paper is: Zenone et al., J Med Internet Res 2024;26:e56354.
Wrote “The infamous journal 'Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine' is no more.” “I went on to Medline and saw that EBCAM had to retract 1 497 (!) of its papers.”
Posted “Ayurvedic medicine in the management of hypertension: how to kill millions with quackery and bullshit.” “Today, we fortunately have many conventional treatments that control hypertension well and with no or just minimal adverse effects. Advocating quackery or unproven therapies for managing hypertension is thus deeply unethical. It could contribute to the premature deaths of millions.”
Asked “Is chiropractic efficient in treatment of diseases? A review of systematic reviews.” The paper discussed is Salehi et al. Int J Community Based Nurs Midwifery. 2015 Oct;3(4):244-54. The authors concluded, “The results showed the influence of chiropractic on improvement of neck pain, shoulder and neck trigger points, and sport injuries. In the cases of asthma, infant colic, autism spectrum disorder, gastrointestinal problems, fibromyalgia, back pain and carpal tunnel syndrome, there was no conclusive scientific evidence.” Ernst commented, “The conditions for which there is tentatively positive evidence (btw: most rely on my research!!!) are arguably not diseases but symptoms of underlying conditions. Therefore, the answer to my question above is: NO.”
Discussed spending by the British National Health Service hospitals on “’quack therapies’ such as reiki and foot massages.” “Complementary medicine is an umbrella term for more than 400 treatments and diagnostic techniques. Some of them work but many don’t; some are safe but many are not. If the NHS would spend £250000 – a tiny amount considering the overall expenditure in the NHS – on those few that do generate more good than harm, all might be fine. The problem, I think, is that the NHS currently uses complementary medicine rarely based on good evidence but often based on the lobbying of influential proponents of quackery.”
Posted “Does conventional medicine invite the rise of alternative medicine?” “I disagree with several points the author makes here. Nevertheless, his overall notion - namely that conventional medicine is partly the cause for the popularity of so-called alternative medicine – is correct, in my view. I have often stated that modern medicine often lacks time, compassion, empathy and understanding. Yet patients frequently crave these qualities. Many practitioners are particularly good at providing them, and it is little wonder that patients then seek their help.”
Wrote” A new study suggests that lavender oil is effective for pain and anxiety – but I have my doubts.” “As it stands, the honest conclusion should be something like this: aromatherapy using Lavender essential oil might reduce pain and anxiety after cesarean delivery. Whether this is due to a specific effect of the oil or the non-specific effects of expectation needs to be seen.”
Noted that “Mistletoe, a cancer SCAM, can cause an anaphylactic shock.” “Mistletoe therapy has become more popular as a supportive cancer therapy. Therefore, rare but serious to life-threatening side effects should be known to the therapists and patients…”

On McGill Office for Science and Society:

Christopher Labos:

Wrote “Let’s put water fluoridation myths to rest.” “The City of Montreal wants to stop adding fluoride to the West Island's tap water. While such programs cost money, they prevent disease in the long term.”

Daniela Padres:

Wrote “A well-established balancing act.” “We don’t need alkaline water to balance our body’s pH.”

Joe Schwarcz:

Discussed products offered by Dr. Carolyn Dean, including RnA Reset Drops, “promoted as a key to longevity” (video with transcript).

October 1 – F. Perry Wilson wrote “Time-restricted eating is not a metabolic magic bullet.” “Taken together, we can say that, yes, it seems like time-restricted eating can help people lose some weight. This is essentially due to the fact that people eat fewer calories when they do time-restricted eating…But, in the end, this trial examined whether this relatively straightforward lifestyle intervention would move the needle in terms of metabolic syndrome, and the data are not very compelling for that…So I am left wondering whether there is nothing metabolically magical about time-restricted eating. If it just leads to weight loss by forcing people to consume less calories, then we need to acknowledge that we probably have better methods to achieve this same end.”

October 3 – Amendolara and others published “Effectiveness of osteopathic craniosacral techniques: a meta-analysis” (Front Med (Lausanne). 2024 Oct 3;11:1452465 paper). The techniques are also known as craniosacral therapy or cranial osteopathy. “The existence of the CRI [cranial rhythmic impulse] is in direct conflict with current understanding of anatomy and development. It has been well established by current and past literature that cranial sutures are fused by early adulthood and have minimal clinically significant motion thereafter. Thus, despite the theories put forth by proponents of CST, no plausible biological mechanism for CST exists…CST demonstrated no significant effects in this meta-analysis, indicating a lack of usefulness in patient care for any of the studied indications.”

October 8 – As reported in Consumer Health Digest, “The Committee on the Ethics of Cell & Gene Therapy of the International Society for Cell & Gene Therapy (ISCT) has created a webpage providing guidance on how to distinguish safe and approved cell- and gene-therapy products from products that have neither a proven record of safety and efficacy nor approval from appropriate regulatory organizations.”

October 29 – Anahad O’Connor asked “Can apple cider vinegar really do wonders for your health?” “Several studies have shown apple cider vinegar can lower blood sugar levels and slightly improve cholesterol, but there are caveats…Most of the studies on apple cider vinegar have been fairly small and, in some cases, poorly designed. So the evidence is not particularly strong or definitive, experts say. Apple cider vinegar also has the potential to cause side effects in people who are taking medication to treat Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and other chronic conditions…In many of the studies, apple cider vinegar was paired with a low-calorie diet, which could have explained the improvements in weight and metabolic health”

Additions to previous months

August - Merenstein and others published “Is there evidence to support probiotic use for healthy people?” (Adv Nutr. 2024 Aug;15(8):100265 paper). “We concluded that there is sufficient evidence of efficacy and safety for clinicians and consumers to consider using specific probiotics for some indications – such as the use of probiotics to support gut function during antibiotic use or to reduce the risk of respiratory tract infections – for certain people. However, we did not find a sufficiently high level of evidence to support unconditional, population-wide recommendations for other preventive endpoints we reviewed for healthy people.”

September – The Australasian Society for Intellectual Disability (ASID) has issued a Position Statement on Facilitated Communication and Rapid Prompting Method. This page gives links for pdf files for the full statement and for a plain English version. “Facilitated Communication is also called ‘Supported Typing’ and other names. Rapid Prompting Method is also called ‘Spelling to Communicate’ and other names such as ‘Informative Pointing’…It is often claimed that Facilitated Communication and Rapid Prompting Method help people who have little or no speech to communicate. There is no scientific, rigorous evidence to support these claims.”

September 24 – Upmanis and others examined ingredients in phenibut-containing “nootropics” (Medicina (Kaunas). 2024 Sep 24;60(10):1561 paper). “Phenibut is a central nervous system drug that is registered and used in clinical practice as a prescription medication. In recent decades, the drug has become popular as a ‘nootropic and cognition enhancer’ because of its active marketing as a dietary or food supplement sold online. This has resulted in a growing number of case reports on acute toxicity and withdrawal symptoms and has raised concerns about the quality of phenibut-containing products…The online-purchased phenibut products contained undeclared ingredients and the content of phenibut differed from the declared. The combinations of these additional ingredients with phenibut have not been tested for activity or safety and their use warrants further attention to avoid potential health problems.”

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