A remedy against pseudoscience

I've got a medication for you to take.  Here are the ingredients:

• nux vomica -- the seed of the plant Strychnos nux-vomica, the natural source of strychnine.
• belladonna -- Atropa belladonna, also called deadly nightshade.
• hydrastis -- another toxic plant, Hydrastis canadensis, better known as goldenseal.
• kali bichromicum -- chemists call it potassium dichromate, and it's carcinogenic and causes contact dermatitis.
• ephedra vulgaris -- an extract of the plant of the same name, which contains the dangerous stimulant ephedrine.
• histaminum hydrochloricum -- the organic compound produced by the human body in response to an allergic reaction, which is responsible for much of the misery of allergies and colds.  (Thus -- antihistamines.)

If by this point you're getting worried that anyone would suggest ingesting any of these, much less a combination of all six, fear not: the manufacturer takes them, dissolves them in water, then dilutes the combined solution by a factor of ten, six times in a row.  By this time, what's left has one millionth the concentration of the original.  And in fact, the advertisement for this "remedy" reassuringly tells prospective customers that it "contains no ephedrine, pseudoephedrine, or alkaloids."

So, for twenty-five bucks, you too can purchase a spray bottle filled with a liquid containing no active ingredients whatsoever.

Oh, and I didn't tell you what it's supposed to cure; snoring.  It's called "SnoreStop," and you're supposed to squirt it up your nose.

People in the know (and certainly regular readers of Skeptophilia) will recognize this as a prime example of the pseudoscientific horseshit known as homeopathy, which -- for some reason -- is still a lucrative business.  You can find homeopathic "remedies" on pharmacy shelves pretty much everywhere; they come in liquid and tablet form, and are recognizable by the presence of a number like "10x" on the label (that's the dilution factor; 10x would be diluted to one part in ten billion).

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Dr. Moumita Sahana, Homeopathy globules, CC BY-SA 4.0]

But what sets apart SnoreStop from even the common run of homeopathic "remedies" -- which aren't going to cure anything, but at least won't make you sicker -- is that SnoreStop nasal spray has been found to contain potentially dangerous numbers of pathogens, including yeasts, molds, and bacteria like Providencia rettgeri, which can cause pneumonia and bacterial meningitis.

The company that produces SnoreStop, Green Pharmaceuticals, was notified of this back in 2022, but did nothing to fix the problem; in fact, why this comes up now is it just came to light that instead of destroying the contaminated lots, they simply relabeled, repackaged, and sold them.  They've also been charged by the FDA for selling an unlicensed and unregulated drug designed to treat a specific disorder, without going through the approval process.  (I guess they forgot to put the "This product is not intended to treat or cure any disorder, disease, or ailment" disclaimer on the package, which seems to be some kind of Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card for these charlatans.)

The problem is, even if SnoreStop is taken off the market -- even if Green Pharmaceuticals goes out of business -- it's only the tip of the iceberg.  Homeopathy scams people for millions of dollars yearly.  And despite my previous statement that at least most of these "remedies" don't make you sicker, there is real harm done, when people refuse conventional (i.e. effective) medical treatment for illnesses in favor of homeopathy and magical thinking.  (There's good evidence that computer entrepreneur Steve Jobs significantly hastened his death from cancer by foregoing medical treatment for "alternative medicine.")

I know, caveat emptor and all that sort of thing.  People are gonna make ill-informed decisions, and you can't legislate away stupidity.  But what the producers of homeopathic remedies are doing -- as well as homeopathic "doctors" -- is deliberately misleading sick people into risking their health by taking a thoroughly discredited pseudoscientific concoction that relies on nonsense like water molecules having a "memory."

The only remedy against pseudoscience is science.  Learn some -- preferably before you need to make decisions regarding your health.

Just remember what the inimitable Tim Minchin said, in his wonderful diatribe against alternative medicine called Storm: "There's a name for alternative medicine that works.  It's called... medicine."

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Fracking, the EPA, and slanted journalism

Popular media make me crazy sometimes.

It's intensely frustrating to see science misrepresented by news outlets, and people unquestioningly accepting that misrepresentation as fact.  Some copy writer with who-knows-what background in actual science is given the task of summarizing scientific research, and then it's headlined with a catchy phrase that not only doesn't reflect the story accurately but simply reiterates whatever political slant that media corporation has.  Readers then take away from that inaccurate summary whatever they got from it -- sometimes only by reading the headline -- and interpret it via whatever biases they came equipped with.

Any wonder why the average American's knowledge of science is so skewed?

Take, for example, the recent report by the Environmental Protection Agency regarding hydrofracking and its effect on drinking water.  Here's a brief excerpt:

From our assessment, we conclude there are above and below ground mechanisms by which hydraulic fracturing activities have the potential to impact drinking water resources. These mechanisms include water withdrawals in times of, or in areas with, low water availability; spills of hydraulic fracturing fluids and produced water; fracturing directly into underground drinking water resources; below ground migration of liquids and gases; and inadequate treatment and discharge of wastewater.

We did not find evidence that these mechanisms have led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States. Of the potential mechanisms identified in this report, we found specific instances where one or more mechanisms led to impacts on drinking water resources, including contamination of drinking water wells. The number of identified cases, however, was small compared to the number of hydraulically fractured wells. This finding could reflect a rarity of effects on drinking water resources, but may also be due to other limiting factors. These factors include: insufficient pre- and post-fracturing data on the quality of drinking water resources; the paucity of long-term systematic studies; the presence of other sources of contamination precluding a definitive link between hydraulic fracturing activities and an impact; and the inaccessibility of some information on hydraulic fracturing activities and potential impacts.

So far, kind of an equivocal finding.  There has been some well contamination... but it doesn't seem to be very frequent... but it does sometimes happen... but there could be several reasons for that including "inaccessibility of information" -- i.e., the natural gas corporations not releasing said information when contamination happens, or maneuvering the people affected into silence via gag orders.

Understandable, of course, that the EPA wants to keep a low profile these days, considering the number of legislators who would like to see it defunded or dismantled completely.  So it's unsurprising that they're taking a "maybe so, maybe not" approach and trying to fly under the radar.

But that, of course, is not how the media spun the report.  The day the report was released, The Washington Times and The New York Post both had articles headlined, "EPA: Fracking Doesn't Harm Drinking Water."  The Times later amended their headline to read "EPA Finds Fracking Poses No Direct Threat to Drinking Water" after enough people wrote in to say, "Did you people even read the report?"  Which is marginally better but still not reflective of the waffling language in the report itself.  Even Newsweek went that way, with an article headlined, "Fracking Doesn't Pollute Drinking Water, EPA Says."

But lest you think that the conservative, pro-fracking media sources were the only ones who gave the report their own unique spin, the liberal, anti-fracking sources were just as quick to jump in and claim that the report proved that fracking was highly dangerous.  Common Dreams, an online progressive news source, ran it as "EPA Report Finds Fracking Water Pollution, Despite Oil and Gas Industry's Refusal to Provide Key Data."  Nation of Change had the story headlined with, "Long-Awaited EPA Study Says Fracking Pollutes Drinking Water," along with the following photograph:

So the conservative outlets told the conservative readers what they wanted to hear, and the liberal outlets told the liberal readers what they wanted to hear, and neither one reflected accurately what the original report said, which was virtually nothing of substance.

Add to that the fact that what little the EPA's report did say was immediately called into question, in one of those examples of weird synchronicity, by the resignation of Mark Nechodom, director of the California Department of Conservation, the day after the report was released -- over allegations that he had looked the other way while natural gas companies disposed of fracking wastewater by injecting it into central California agricultural and drinking water aquifers.

"Nechodom was named this week in a federal lawsuit filed on behalf of a group of Kern County farmers who allege that [California Governor Jerry] Brown, the oil and gas division and others conspired with oil companies to allow the illegal injections and to create a more lax regulatory environment for energy firms," an article in The Los Angeles Times said.  "Nechodom's resignation was unexpected, although he had increasingly been called upon by state officials to explain problems in the oil and gas division’s oversight of the oil industry and a parade of embarrassing blunders."

Not only that, a criticism levied against the EPA report itself appeared in EcoWatch, claiming that the writers of the report cherry-picked their data to ignore cases of contamination, including 313 documented cases of well contamination in a six-county region in Pennsylvania.  You have to wonder how much damage there'd have to be before the EPA did consider it "widespread."

So once again, we have government agencies waffling and misrepresenting the data, special interests and slanted media obscuring the real situation, and hardly anyone checking their sources, resulting in everyone pretty much thinking what they thought before.

And, of course, doing nothing about the actual problem.

The whole thing makes me want to scream.  Because what we need is responsible media, giving accurate and comprehensive reporting on issues like this -- not more shallow and skewed blurbs that do nothing but muddy the water (as it were).  And we need readers who are willing to follow the first rule of critical thinking -- check your sources.

And we also need government agencies that are willing to bite the bullet and tell people the truth, come-what-may.

And because none of that is likely, what I need is a couple of ibuprofen and another cup of coffee, because all of this depressing stuff has given me a headache.