What's the Harm? - Part 2

So, after a brief hiatus on my part, with too many projects to complete to count, I have time to brows the news from time to time again.

And, after my last post, I have another depressing news item to share from the "what's the harm?" department.

There are news links in Polish here and here (sorry, I could not find an English version).

To summarize:

A six moth old girl was found dead a few weeks ago in the town of Brzezna in the south of Poland, while in care of her parents. It was determined that she had died as a result of malnutrition. After some initial investigation, it was also determined that the parents started using a "natural" approach for the baby's care, including refusal of any vaccines, lack of medical care and a whole bunch of holistic feeding techniques. They attempted to follow advice from a faith healer, who allegedly told the parents to use skim milk and herbs as the baby's diet staple. The healer, called "God's Man" in the area, is well known for advocating abandoning regular medical care and using herbs, fasting and prayer as remedies for any ailments (including cancer!!!).

This case is not the first one for the supposedly "godly" man. A few years ago it was alleged that he had caused a death of a five year old boy, who had kidney problems. After initial, positive reactions to the standard, hospital medical care, the mother took the boy to the healer and believed in his "miraculous" approach, which ultimately resulted in boy's death.

Those two cases are clear answers to the argument for the alternative medicine that I hear very often: "what's the harm?". The answer is very simple, the harm is in believing that unproven, often completely nonsensical treatments can and do work. When someone abandons reason and critical thinking in small cases, it is easy to do the same in cases that can cause harm, death and destruction. Belief in miracles, prayer, alternative medicine (like homeopathy, chiropractic, acupuncture, etc) when your life, or life of your loved ones, is at stake, can really be deadly.

Do You Believe In Magic?

You do, if you use homeopathy, acupuncture, chiropractic, Reiki, some kind of faith healing, and countless other alternative medicine modalities that have absolutely no roots in modern science, reality and critical thinking. Most of them are just ways of "wishing away" the problem, and while some might "work" as a placebo, the might have some dangers associated with their use, and, when used instead of real medical interventions, all of them can be deadly (see here, here, and here).

So, why do we do it? Because we want miracles? Because we don't know any better? Because science is complex and, sometimes, difficult to understand? Probably, all of the above.

It is good to know that we can count on a few brave authors, who do the research, dig out the details and present it in a nice fashion, digestible by the regular folks like us. Among them is Paul Offit, a medical doctor, a researcher, and a strong proponent of reality-based medicine, including vaccines. His previous books, "Autism False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine and the Search For a Cure", and "Deadly Choices" were both excellent descriptions of the vaccine "controversy", how it started, evolved from bad science to social movement, and how it threatens our health and the well-being (and lives) of our children. Knowing his great writing style and deep commitment to science and research, I was very excited to find out that his new book "Do You Believe in Magic?: The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine" is out. I should have more of my own thoughts about it in a few days (or weeks, it's summer after all), but in the meantime, here are two reviews available on line:

Book raises alarms about alternative medicine - from USA Today, by Liz Szabo
and
Vaccine advocate takes on the alternative medicine industry - NBC News

There is also more on the topic from Liz Szabo: Alternative therapies, supplements can cause side effects and How to guard against a quack

Go, read it all, and stop believing in magic. It's the 21st Century!

Chiropractic Is Bogus

I have no love for the alternative medicine. I think it is based on bogus evidence, or a complete lack of thereof, its various "branches" are mutually exclusive, it feeds on people fears and weaknesses, and it sucks up valuable resources (as in $$$) not only from our individual pockets, but also from larger public funds and governments.

Recent blog activities on the interwebs (some of this can be found here and here), reminded me of a case from a few years ago, in which chiropractic, a widely-accepted, "medical" practice, based on pretty much magic, was put to a test, not only by scientists (this has been settled long time ago), but in a court of law in Great Britain.
In this case, a British science writer, Simon Singh, was accused of libel by the British Chiropractic Association, after he had published an article in The Guardian, claiming that the practice of chiropractic is based on unscientific, unproven principles, and that promoting such practices equals false advertising. Even under the libel-friendly British law, the BSA was forced to withdraw the law suit, after it became evident that Singh was correct in his criticism. A side effect of the case was a magnified focus received by chiropractic and its principles, which boils down to a very simple thing: it is crap.

The problem is that a lot of insurance companies in the US will pay for chiropractic visits and that's the money that eventually comes out of our collective pockets. While I do realize that not all medical treatments are perfect (as all sciences are not perfect and definitive), when I'm paying for something, I would like to make sure that it has at least some validity. In the meantime, chiropractic is based on wishful, magical thinking and 100+ years of coming up with bs to justify charging people for a "fancy" massage. You'd be better off going to a real, licensed physical therapists. At least they get education and training in real medicine, and you get a real treatment.

If you want to find out more about chiropractic, The Skeptic Dictionary is a great place to start.

Wasting Your Tax Dollars In The Name of Science

Our governments on all levels have an incredible ability to waste our tax dollars, especially when ideology and plain stupidity get mixed up. This is exactly what happened with The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, which was created out of someone "beliefs" and not a sound science. The center continues to waste our money on studies and alternative therapies that have no basis in reality and keep returning negative results.
It is nice to see that a respected journalist Trine Tsouderos, in a major news outlet such as Chicago Tribune, takes a hard and critical look at the Center:

Thanks to a $374,000 taxpayer-funded grant, we now know that inhaling lemon and lavender scents doesn't do a lot for our ability to heal a wound. With $666,000 in federal research money, scientists examined whether distant prayer could heal AIDS. It could not.
The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine also helped pay scientists to study whether squirting brewed coffee into someone's intestines can help treat pancreatic cancer (a $406,000 grant) and whether massage makes people with advanced cancer feel better ($1.25 million). The coffee enemas did not help. The massage did.

Federal center pays good money for suspect medicine

This is our tax dollars at work, and while the amount might be insignificant in a large scheme of things, this money would be better used for a real research that could, one day, help someone live a little bit longer. David Gorski of Science-Based Medicine put it nicely:

"We have to be good stewards of public money for science," said Gorski, the cancer researcher. "I don't view NCCAM as being a good steward of our public money at the moment. Even if they are doing rigorous science, they are still looking at incredibly implausible things."

What Is Chiropractic?

Check out this great comic from Darryl Cunningham about history and principles of chiropractic:

Here is the beta version of my strip on chiropractic therapy. It's a little rough and will need proofreading from those of you with eyes sharper than mine. All comments welcome.

See the comic strip here: Chiropractic

It's interesting and worth looking at, because most of the people I know think chiropractic is just a form of massage and spine manipulation, very similar to physical therapy. However, physical therapy is based on real science, studies and knowledge of human anatomy, and chiropractic is, well... mostly unscientific wishful thinking and semi-magical approach to healing. Such is the case with most (if not all) of "alternative medicine".

As Promised: Author Simon Singh Puts Up a Fight in the War on Science

As I promised last week, here is the link to the article in "Wired":

Author Simon Singh Puts Up a Fight in the War on Science

Wired Gets It - Again

I just got my monthly dose of "Wired"... still in the print form, and I was pleasantly surprised to find a short, but very good interview with Simon Singh. If you don't know him, I'd recommend one of his excellent books:















He has spent the last two years fighting British Chiropractic Association's bogus libel lawsuit, and won!!!
In the interview, he talks about the lawsuit and science vs. pseudoscience struggle in general. In all, it's another proof that Wired is one of the few mainstream media outlets that promotes good and sound science.
As soon as the link is up on their page, I'll post it here.

Top 10 Scams of 2009

ConsumerAffairs.com has the Top 10 Scams of 2009 list on line.

I'm glad to see some of the most annoying woo-woo like:

• Acai Berry (who still thinks that it slims down anything but your wallet???)
• Kevin Trudeau - I'm always surprised when I find one of his books in someone's home library, but obviously people still fall for his nonsense.
• Work-at-home schemes - I see a lot of those, targeted especially at stay-at-home moms. The math is too complicated for a regular person to figure out the scam, and the salespeople are really good at what they are doing. We need to spread the word to make sure people realize you can't make real money this way.

They should also add:

• Chiropractic.
• Homeopathy.
• Acupuncture.
• ... and all other "alternative" medicine nonsense

to the list. Let's hope it'll happen next year.

Thanks to poradniksukces.com for the link...

Chiropractic - Calling It What It Is: Woo-Woo

For all, who still think that going to a chiropractor is a good idea for a treatment (ok, maybe short of getting a massage), here is a research paper that came out of the chiropractic community itself:

An epidemiological examination of the subluxation construct using Hill’s criteria of causation

with some excellent comments from the excellent Science-Based Medicine Blog:

As the authors of this paper indicate, the subluxation construct must go. And without the subluxation, the whole rationale for chiropractic collapses, leaving chiropractors no justifiable place in modern medical care except as competitors of physical therapists in providing treatment of certain musculoskeletal conditions.

The End of Chiropractic

A Few Books of Note...

There are two books I've been reading recently that I would like to recommend to anyone with some curiosity and open mind.

First, there is "Trick or Treatment", by Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst, MD.
I finished it a few weeks ago, and it was a jackpot!!! This is a very well written, popular research book on a number of alternative medicine therapies. Included are: acupuncture, homeopathy, chiropractic, herbal medicine, and a few others in lesser detail. Since the two authors represent two opposed sides of the equation (Singh being a scientists and a journalist, and Ernst being an alternative medicine practitioner), it gives this piece additional credibility. As the authors proclaim at the beginning, their goal was to objectively evaluate the above therapies, showing their history, scientific background and the state of current research. While I sort of knew what the outcome would be, it was very interesting to learn about the exact historical background of those modalities, and to see what research has been done so far. Not surprisingly, all of the therapies discussed in the book, did not yield any real results in many scientific test, beyond a simple placebo effect. Some interesting outcomes were found for acupuncture and chiropractic, associated with pain management and back problems. Herbal medicine, being what it is: a sloppy, uncontrolled application of real drugs, shows some use, but one must be careful, watching for drug interactions and dosage.

Secondly, I enjoyed "Confessions of an Alien Hunter" by Seth Shostak, which is an incredibly entertaining account of the last 50 years of SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), as told by one of the most authoritative individuals of the field. From history of the research, to some politics, and outlooks for the future, it's a pure fun to read. The best part of this book is that it really shows SETI being so much more than most of the people would think: biology, anthropology, physics, and many other fields, make up this broad, scientific approach to finding our neighbors in the Universe.