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!

MLMs, Pyramids and A Hope of A Quick Buck

We have all been there... bombarded by hundreds of ads and commercials on how to make money fast, and, best of all, do it in the comfort of your own home. The salespeople make you feel guilty and stupid by showing off all the "successful" people who jumped in and made millions. MLMs, Multi Level Marketing schemes, or how I prefer calling them, scams, because after all those years, I still don't know anyone who actually made any significant amount of money out of them. That does not include those who set those scams up and profit from the people who fall prey to their marketing gimmicks and smooth talk.

I have seen Amway, coming and going in the early 1990s, then there was Herbalife, and numerous others, including some fancy "video e-mail/conferencing" in the mid 2000s, which seems to be making a comeback on Facebook in the recent months. For all of them, the idea is the same, but the math (and it's rather simple math) does not work, as you run out of potential customers very quickly.

However, there is always someone who's inventing new tricks to make money using old ideas.
As a good precaution, it's worth diving into this extensive article, published by The Verge, which explores the never ending variations on the good, old pyramid scheme:

Income At Home, Herbalife, and the $8 billion pyramid

It's also worth looking at some statistics on what is actually an average success rate for an MLM-type business:

The Likelihood of MLM Success

and, see the idea from a skeptical point of view:

MLM Watch

More on Dr. Oz

Wow... Dr. Oz is really hitting the waves this week.

After a great article in The New Yorker, exposing Dr. Oz's bland disregard for facts and reality, as well as the real motivation behind his media persona (ratings, money and fame), he dives ever deeper into the abyss of irrationality and pure stupidity. Dr. Oz embraces and endorses homeopathy!

Homeopathy irks me more than other alternative medicine woo, simply because a few years ago I myself watched helplessly, while a homeopathic "doctor" milked hundreds of dollars from someone with no good outlook for improvement and with very limited resources. The money went into useless "interviews" that had nothing to do with the condition of the patient, and into even more useless, "custom-designed drugs" that did nothing (it was pure water after all).

I'm glad that there is finally some bad publicity Dr. Oz gets from the media. Maybe exposing his program for what it really is, an elaborate fraud, not to help people, but to stuff his pockets, will turn away some of his viewers. I'm not against stuffing your own pockets at expense of others, especially when they are willing participants (yes, I go to the movies, and sometimes I even pay to see a really bad movie). What's dangerous about Dr. Oz is the fact that he has positioned himself in a health care "edutainment" sector of the media, and by promoting dubious therapies and just pure intellectual junk, he endangers people who believe him.

In the meantime, there are usual places on the Web that do a great job analyzing Dr. Oz's homeopathic claims:

Orac: Dr. Oz’s journey to the Dark Side is now more than complete: It’s Oz and homeopathy versus science-based medicine

and

Science-Based Medicine Blog: Are You Ready For the Oz Manifesto

Dr. Oz - The Smooth Operator

I am no fan of Dr. Oz. I've been watching (metaphorically speaking, as I can hardly take watching him on TV) his raise to stardom from Oprah's "America's Doctor" wonder boy, to his own TV show, and the beginning of his own Day TV media empire, and I see a scary, scary future ahead of us.

At first, I thought that Dr. Oz basically sells a very typical and widely known advice of good diet, exercise and less daily stress, heavily coated in nonsense of alternative and herbal medicine and, increasingly, in funky spiritualism and pure crap (examples abound). I do realize that just saying "eat well and exercise daily" is not going to sell well on TV, since most of us just want quick fixes for our problems. However, Dr. Oz's endorsement of unproven herbs, vitamins and modalities that belong in Middle Ages, not in the 21st Century, is more dangerous than useful. Dr. Oz is also a proponent of Reiki, which is basically a type of therapeutic touch, which was completely discredited by a 9 year old Emily Rosa years ago. So, there you have it... would you trust that doctor with your health?

I'm glad the mainstream media has finally started noticing. I stumbled on this great article from the New Yorker: "The Operator", written by Michael Specter (the author of “Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives”, which I also highly recommend).
There is a number of really good points in the article, but this one really shows what Dr. Oz is about:

Oz sighed. “Medicine is a very religious experience,” he said. “I have my religion and you have yours. It becomes difficult for us to agree on what we think works, since so much of it is in the eye of the beholder. Data is rarely clean.” All facts come with a point of view. But his spin on it—that one can simply choose those which make sense, rather than data that happen to be true—was chilling. “You find the arguments that support your data,” he said, “and it’s my fact versus your fact.”

His facts are driven by his popularity and how well his show is doing, not by objectiveness. That's why I would never trust neither them, nor him.

Final Post: Good Bye!

So, it's less than an hour before the December 21, 2012 is upon us, and, as we all know, our World will end soon. By the way, I assume the people in other time zones are toast already!

Therefore, I figured, some goodbyes are in order, to all who have ever ventured here...

I don't think we have any way out of this one, since the Mayan calendar (or at least its long count, known as b'ak'tun) ends tomorrow, and we all know how good the Mayans were with predicting the future. And if the Mayans don't get us (rightly so, for all the wrongs we've done to their great civilization), our own calendar ends just a few days later, so I do not think we'll see the light of day on January 1st, 2013.

Seriously though, click over to the Bad Astronomy blog and see why the World will probably NOT end tomorrow: Worried About the End of the World on Dec. 21? Don’t Be.

To those who still believe in this nonsense: please, send my your money, before you close down your bunker hatches!

Boiron Settles, Can't Prove Homeopathy Works

Boiron settles one of the lawsuits against them and their bogus homeopathic product Oscillococcinum. They can't prove the product works, so they rather settle than expose themselves to more scientific scrutiny. As written in the lawsuit:

According to the class action lawsuit, the active ingredients in Boiron’s products are so diluted that they are “effectively non-existent,” making them nothing more than sugar pills.

Yet, those products are still available in our local pharmacies and people still continue to use them, despite the fact that there is absolutely no evidence they do anything more than emptying your pockets.

Here is some additional info on a different lawsuit (Coldcalm): The CAM Docket: Boiron II

I wrote about a Canadian lawsuit earlier this year: Boiron, the Maker of Oscillococcinum Gets Sued

Let's hope, if nothing else, the public gets to see what homeopathy really is, and how alt-med is used by those big, bad pharmaceutical conglomerates to make tons of money from selling us pure sugar. The next time you hear someone defending alternative medicine as opposed to the Big Pharma, think twice... the reality is not always what it seems.

Boiron, the Maker of Oscillococcinum Gets Sued

It's good to see that a crappy sugar pill flu medicine Oscillococcinum, which I blogged about more than a year ago, finally gets a fair treatment from the public in a form of a lawsuit filled in Canada.

As I pointed out before, the pill:

Each 0.04 oz. dose (1 g) of Oscillo contains 1 g of sugar

or, if you want to be picky:

1g pill contains 0.85g sucrose and 0.15g lactose

Hmmm... you do the math...

Those pills are all over the pharmacies in the USA and Canada, and, since they do nothing (just as the Airborne used to do) to improve your health, except emptying your pockets, I hope the makers (Brion, a big pharma!!!) get their pockets emptied too.

More: Class Action Lawsuit Filed against Homeopathy Manufacturer Boiron and Shoppers Drug Mart

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."

Burzynski Clinic: More Data, Less Confidence

Following up on my last post, and the "uncertainty" about Burzynski's cancer cure, which I expressed in it, I find it refreshing to know that real experts are analyzing the data (or lack of thereof), separating facts and fiction.

Also, it is definitely not wise to try silencing your critics by threatening them, as the Burzynski Clinic attracted more scrutiny and attention than they probably ever wished for.
Orac presents a very in-depth analysis of the "proofs" and data in his excellent article Burzynski The Movie: Hitting you over the head with pseudoscience, just like Burzynski the man, which is a good primer on how to approach this controversy.

Some other articles worth reading:
Stanislaw Burzynski: Bad medicine, a bad movie, and bad P.R.
and
Burzynski Clinic? Meet the Streisand Effect

There is no conspiracy here, just a general lack of good data and what seems to be pure greed.

The Burzynski Clinic: Truth or Fiction

There is an interesting piece of news making its way around the blogosphere: The Burzynski Clinic – Another Crank Tries to Intimidate a Blogger.

First and foremost, I'm appealed that anyone, especially a scientist (and I assume Burzynski wants to call himself that), would resort to intimidating anyone who voices his or her opinion on the Internet, especially when such an opinion is backed by rather solid facts. In case of a scientist, and a medical doctor, who wants to promote modern and possibly radically game changing therapies that could cure cancer, such an intimidation is not only out of place, but it is unthinkable.

I am somehow familiar with Burzynski's claims, even though I have not been following his progress for many years. As a person born and raised in the same country as him, I was "bombarded" with news of his amazing and revolutionary therapies, by the New York City's Polish community grapevine in the early 1990s. At that time it appeared that our war with cancer had just been won, and Burzynski had been the general who'd taken the final stronghold of the enemy. And then, slowly, it faded away. People kept dying of cancer and new, amazing discoveries were made, promising new cures for cancer (vilcacora comes to my mind, which hasn't cured anyone I know so far either).

So, going back to the news, I find it shocking that Burzynski and his people would go after those who question their ideas, data and methods. If you are a real scientist, who has solid data and believes in his or her outcomes, you should publish it, let the peer review scrutinize it, and reap the benefits, if there are any. From my previous experience with this topic, and from some of the more recent articles (The Burzynski Clinic – Another Crank Tries to Intimidate a Blogger, The False Hope of the Burzynski Clinic, Harnessing the generosity of kind-hearted strangers to pay for woo, Stanislaw Burzynski and "Antineoplastons") I remain very skeptical of his claims. I hope Burzynski can change my mind, but I would not bet my life on it.

In the meantime, trying to scare bloggers with some vague legal actions is not the way to win you supporters. It is also very educational to read comments under any of the negative articles on Burzynski's clinic. The "big pharma" conspiracy hounds come out not realizing that the clinic/research institute makes tons of money too.

What's The Harm?

Believing in supernatural seems harmless, and most of the time it probably is. However, it can turn ugly, even deadly at times, and our daily tolerance of it makes it possible.
We pass by roadside psychics every day and most of us pay no attention to their shady business, but the harm, usually financial, but sometimes physical, they extend to gullible and needy people is real and can have devastating effects on individuals and families.
As an example, check this story from St. Petersburg Times:

The Florida family claimed to confer with gods, spirits and even Michael the Archangel to cure diseases and break curses, asking for and accepting jewelry, gold coins and luxury cars in return.

Whole story: Fortune-telling Florida family scammed victims out of $40 million, prosecutors charge

Monday Musings

A few interesting links popped up today on my radar.

The first one is the challenge issued by JREF (The James Randi Educational Foundation) to the psychics who took part in a recent Nightline TV program about psychic celebrities. As always, they BS-ed their way around the gullible, showing no real "powers". And we all know they are not showing up to claim the prize (as Sylvia Browne never did), because they know they don't have any special psychic powers, just the power to scam some people out of their money.

But to win $1 million, you better have the real deal psychic power in your back pocket. Participants must prove their worth on randomly chosen strangers in controlled environments, two conditions that take all the fun—and likelihood—out of pocketing people's money.

I like what JREF says:

“James Van Praagh and Allison DuBois have turned the huckster art of ‘cold reading' into a multi-million-dollar industry, preying on families' deepest fears and regrets,” he says in a statement announcing the challenge. “They should be embarrassed by the transparent performances.”

More from Time: Calling All Psychics: Prove Your Worth for $1 Million

Now, on to the second one... the scary prospect of an dumb a#$ running this country after the next presidential elections:

...the odds are that one of these years the world’s greatest nation will find itself ruled by a party that is aggressively anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge. And, in a time of severe challenges — environmental, economic, and more — that’s a terrifying prospect.

Republicans Against Science

I think Paul Krugman's analysis is dead-on. The disconnect from reality that is not only rampant and accepted, but that has become a virtue on the American right (a.k.a. G.O.P.) is frightening and could lead us into a future that's bleak. And when we get there, no amount of prayer will help us.

Homeopathy - Bullying Again

I do not like homeopathy. I made it clear a number of times on this blog. I don't like it because homeopathy is pure magic, wishful thinking at its best. There is nothing but sugar (or water) in those homeopathic mixtures, since by simple math there can't be anything there at all.
Worst of all, people pay real money for this nonsense and put their trust in individuals and companies that sell them nothing but fake hope.
It is sad to see when companies that make homeopathic products (read: sugar pills), threaten those who are willing to expose them with aptly named "corporate legal thuggery". Such is the case with Boiron, a company which was nicely exposed in a CBC documentary earlier this year. They complained about the TV documentary, hoping to shut up the media; now they seem to be going after a lonely blogger:

Homoeopathy multinational Boiron threatens amateur Italian blogger

A letter sent by the Italian arm of multinational company Boiron, threatening to sue an amateur blogger over remarks he made about homoeopathy, has sparked a strong internet reaction in defence of freedom of speech.

Samuele Riva posted two articles on his blog, blogzero.it , on 13 and 27 July,which included pictures of Boiron’s blockbuster homoeopathic product Oscillococcinum, marketed as a remedy against flu symptoms. The pictures were accompanied by captions, which joked about the total absence of any active molecules in homoeopathic preparations.

More can be found here: Homeopathic Thuggery

In order to sell this stuff, you have to be either one:
- pretty clueless on how homeopathy works (or doesn't), or
- scamming people into believing that it works

I wonder which one it is in case of Boiron?

Why I Do Not Watch Dr. Oz

Why? Reason #1: It's on when I'm still at work. However, I would not watch this quack even if his show were in prime time. That leads to...
Reason #2: He's a quack, promotes nonsense, unrelated (or even worse, contradictory) to the current medical knowledge, and in my opinion is a disgrace to the medical profession. If you ask me, he should be stripped of the M.D. title. At least he would not be going around, pretending to be a doctor and disposing dubious advice (faith healing/reiki, anyone?).
I'm no medical expert, but I want to be able to trust one. That's why I expect those titles to mean something. When I need to see a doctor and get his or her advice, I do not have time to do extensive research on their medical opinions. I have to trust that they follow established facts and current research, not some out-of-this-world fad that just happens to sell well at the moment.
Dr. Oz is the negation of science and reason. He promotes what sells and makes his TV show look good. He can do it as much as he wants, but should not be allowed to do it as a doctor.
Interestingly enough, I might make an exception and DVR his show on Tuesday, April 26. Why? Because he will have Steven Novella (from The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe podcast). As Orac suggests, the editing might change the actual message, but it's good to know that a hard-core skeptic is invited into the "devil's lair".
It should be interesting to watch.

Homeopathy on CBC

Great documentary on homeopathy from Canadian CBC:

CBC Marketplace - Homeopathy: Cure or Con? Part 1 of 2

and 

CBC Marketplace - Homeopathy: Cure or Con? Part 2 of 2


If you still buy and use them... well, there is no excuse for your brains anymore. Unless you believe in magic and witchcraft.


Want to have some laughs, check my post here.

Power Balance... and Others

If you sport one of those "fancy" looking bracelets, it'd better be for fashion, not some other, health-related reason:

The Australian manufacturer of Power Balance, the wildly popular rubbery bracelets embedded with holograms claimed to somehow adjust the body’s energy or vibrations, has admitted that there is no proof their product works.

Read more: Power Balance Maker Admits Bands Are Worthless

I actually saw them at a few gas stations along the I75 corridor last week, and just yesterday I noticed a rather lengthy commercial on the Weather Channel for a similar product here in the US from a company called iRenew, with an extensive use of the video of people being thrown out of balance without the bracelet, and standing still with it. Same old trick, and no essence. Don't get fooled! They are pricey for a piece of rubber. One must wonder, how a piece of crap like that would help you "live life to its fullest"?

Let Oprah Know What YOU Think

Following the article I linked to yesterday, and my own post, here is an appeal from Orac:

This strategy requires a lot of people bombarding the Oprah website with requests. It's unlikely to work just from my readership alone. It needs other bloggers willing to urge their readers to do the same thing to have even a wisp of a chance of working. So, if you have a blog, consider urging your readers to remind Oprah's producers about Kim Tinkham. Let's put it this way. Even if nothing at all comes of this, at the very least Oprah should be made aware of the price of quackery such as that which is about to claim Kim Tinkham. Yes, I know that Tinkham is an adult. I know that she bears major responsibility for her own choices. Yes, I know it's true that no one forced Tinkham to go to Robert O. Young for help. On the other hand, I also know that it is true that the sort of wishful thinking that Oprah promoted "primed the pump," so to speak. Even so, Robert O. Young and, yes, Oprah also bear a major share of the responsibility as well. Robert O. Young is beyond shame, but maybe Oprah is not.

Let Oprah know that Kim Tinkham is dying of cancer


Great idea!!!
Maybe it'll take away a few drops from the flood of nonsense coming from Oprah, maybe it'll make her think about consequences next time she promotes some total BS. Like Orac says, it's worth giving a try.

The Appeal of Woo: Be Careful

The story below (from Science-Based Medicine) is a sad and unfortunate example of what uncritical thinking can lead to. It shows the real dangers of alternative medicine, the dangers most people don't perceive, usually responding: "what's the harm?"
It also presents yet another example why Oprah is a villain in my book, despite all the good she's done in other fields.
Read it, think about it, and make sure to follow your brains, not someone's "feel good" woo, when faced with important decisions.

Basically, The Secret is what inspired Kim Tinkham to eschew all conventional therapy for her breast cancer and pursue “alternative” therapies, which is what she has done since 2007. Before I discuss her case in more detail, I’m going to cut to the chase, though.

Death by “alternative” medicine: Who’s to blame? (Revisited)

Friday Dose of Humor

Check this out to start off the weekend early:

Mr. Credulous

Gotta love that one!!!