Ministry of propaganda

Is it too much to ask that the Trump administration simply tells the damn truth?

That's all I ask.  Just stop lying.  I'm fine with having differences of opinion over policy.  For example, claiming that unhooking from fossil fuels and switching to renewable energy would be an unreasonable burden on our economy is not the same thing as saying climate change isn't occurring.

The first is a policy question we could discuss, and perhaps, come to consensus about.  The second is a lie.  And as long as you're simply lying about the facts, there is no discussion to be had.

Take, for example, the person who would have to be included in the top five most dangerous members of this regime; Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.  He is an anti-science ideologue of the worst sort, and because of him the CDC is now limiting access to COVID-19 vaccinations and canceling funding for this year's flu vaccine -- including the potentially pandemic bird flu.

All part of his "Make America Healthy Again" campaign.  Because horrible policies are just fine as long as you give them a snappy name, right?

Of course right.

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of the U. S. Air Force]

It doesn't end with anti-vaxx nonsense, either.  Just this week, RFK stated that gender-affirming care for individuals with gender dysphoria should be discontinued -- once again, flying in the face of scientific study after scientific study.  Ignore the science, he says; instead, listen to the directives from the government.

And what is the government suggesting instead?

Why, "conversion therapy."

Yep, the same thing that was touted to "cure homosexuality," and which (once again) study after study has shown to be (1) ineffective, and (2) psychologically damaging.  RFK's letter to healthcare providers states that they should uphold their oaths to "do no harm" by following a strategy that has been conclusively shown to do harm.

Then there's his report on "gold-standard" scientific research that allegedly supports his viewpoints on holistic health and the sins of Big Pharma -- which contains (1) dozens of citations that were identified as mischaracterized by the actual authors themselves, and (2) at least seven citations for studies that appear to be nonexistent.  In other words, RFK pulled the middle-school bibliography-boosting stunt of making up plausible-looking sources, taking others and claiming they said things they didn't actually say, and hoping like hell no one notices.

Well, someone noticed.  But did he retract the report and apologize?

Ha.  Of course he didn't.  This administration never apologizes for anything.  Confronted by their own blatant lies, they just double down, stamping their feet and saying "it is so true!", and rely on the fact that their supporters have no scientific training and very short memories.

Oh, and also this week, he promised a ban on federally-funded medical researchers from publishing in top-flight journals like Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, and Journal of the American Medical Association.  Why?  Because they're "corrupt."  Instead, he wants them to publish in a journal he's going to run, after vetting researchers as "good, legitimate scientists" -- meaning, of course, that they agree with him.

Look, it's not (as I've said many times before) that I'm unaware of the problems inherent in the American medical system.  My wife is a nurse, so I hear about a lot of it from her, and I've witnessed the misery that friends and family members have gone through trying to navigate their way through predatory insurance companies, inefficient and understaffed medical care providers, and ridiculously overpriced pharmaceuticals.  I have one friend who's had a ton of chronic health problems, and has gone through the wringer with misprescribed medications and unmanaged side effects.

But RFK is making a bad situation much, much worse.  His outright lies and barrage of unapologetic misinformation are going to kill people, pure and simple.  But my guess is that no one is going to pull on the reins, because we can't stop a program called "Make America Healthy Again," right?  What, do you want to Make America Unhealthy Again?

Honestly, I put the lion's share of the blame here on the members of Congress who voted to approve his appointment to the Cabinet.  It's not like his views were some kind of a secret; we knew about incidents like his lies about the measles vaccine resulting in an epidemic in Samoa that killed eighty people.  The man goes way past "unqualified," into the territory of "outright dangerous."  He should never have been appointed, much less confirmed.

So this is episode #352,981 of "We Tried To Warn You."  And now we're seeing the results of that dreadful lapse of civic responsibility on the part of our elected officials.

All I can say is that insofar as you can, take care of your health.  Take precautions, get the vaccines that are available, and educate yourself using actual scientific research and not Ministry of Propaganda doublespeak.  Even so, my suspicion is that it's going to be a rough few years.

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Diagnosing what ails you

When I was a kid, my parents had a set of books called The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Modern Medicine.  Now, this was circa 1972, so keep that in mind when you read the word "modern," but for the time, they were exhaustive.

Now, I was fascinated by biology even back then, at something like age twelve, so those medical encyclopedias were a source of real curiosity for me.  Not just the pages with the naughty bits -- being right on the cusp of puberty, those were really fascinating -- but all of it.  All the systems and organs and tissues and all the different ways things could go wrong.

That's where the trouble started.  Because I was an imaginative child, I lived up to the maxim of a little bit of knowledge being a dangerous thing.  I could find a good reason why I had damn near every disease mentioned in the The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Modern Medicine.  If I coughed a couple of times... well, it could be tuberculosis.  Or pleurisy.  Or lung cancer.  (Being a twelve-year-old, I didn't smoke.  My father did, although he quit cold turkey right around that time and never had another cigarette.  Still, how much exposure to smoke was... enough?)

I even remember being in the shower and convincing myself that I had a swelling in my armpit (I didn't), and forthwith deciding that I was going to die of Hodgkins' lymphoma.  "Prognosis is poor, even with prompt treatment," said The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Modern Medicine.  So that was it, then.  So young, with such a promising future... cut short by a horrific disease.

Well, of course, it turned out I didn't have any of the above.  I did start to get migraines when I was sixteen, but that didn't take any great insight to figure out given that I had weird visual disturbances, crashing headache, sound and light sensitivity, and horrid nausea, sometimes for twenty-four hours at a time.  But that set of symptoms -- which the Medical Encyclopedia correctly informed me was typical of a migraine -- is the single time I ever self-diagnosed using the books and got it right.

Turns out I'm not the only one.  According to a paper in The Medical Journal of Australia, even today's online resources -- sites like WebMD -- only give the right answer one-third of the time.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

A team of researchers from Edith Cowan University decided to test thirty-six different online "symptom checkers" using forty-eight (anonymous) case files for which the actual answer was known, and found that the top diagnosis from the websites was correct only for a third of them.  Even if you gave them the leeway of considering the top three diagnoses, they still only hit it half the time.

The authors admit there are limitations to their study, beyond the fairly small sample size.  None of the patients had comorbid conditions -- underlying diseases that contributed to the symptoms that presented (such as circulatory failure in the feet having as its ultimate cause poorly-controlled diabetes).  And there are a wide variety of other symptom-checking websites out there, some of which may work better than the relatively poor showing these ones made.

But still.  What this indicates is that if you've got symptoms that worry you, see a doctor.  Now, yes, I know, doctors make mistakes.  They're human, and while a great many are awesome, some are certainly slipshod and careless.  So don't start regaling me with horror stories about misdiagnosis.  I have a friend who damn near died of post-operative peritonitis which was misdiagnosed as, of all things, a urinary tract infection -- so I get it.  Yes, it happens, and it's awful and tragic when it does, and sometimes crosses the line into true medical malfeasance.

But as Carl Sagan points out in his wonderful book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, if you're going to be fair, you have to consider the hits along with the misses.  How many people are treated daily in your average city hospital -- and of those, how many suffer the effects of significant medical bungling?  By and large, modern medicine has done astonishingly well.  At the present time we have the longest average life span the human species has ever enjoyed, and diseases that were a death sentence only a hundred years ago are now completely curable.

So please, please don't rely on self-diagnosis.  Your ten minutes of online "research" is not equivalent to your family medical practitioner's ten-plus years of education and experience.

After all, I probably did myself more damage worrying over whether I had chronic myelogenous leukemia or myasthenia gravis or Creutzfeld-Jakob syndrome than any benefit I gained from finding out about them.  I'm now 59, and have been pretty healthy overall.  I don't even get migraines any more.

But if something does go wrong, I'm gonna go to the doctor, not go running to find out what WebMD might have to say about it.

**********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is six years old, but more important today than it was when it was written; Richard Alley's The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future.  Alley tackles the subject of proxy records -- indirect ways we can understand things we weren't around to see, such as the climate thousands of years ago.

The one he focuses on is the characteristics of glacial ice, deposited as snow one winter at a time, leaving behind layers much like the rings in tree trunks.  The chemistry of the ice gives us a clear picture of the global average temperature; the presence (or absence) of contaminants like pollen, windblown dust, volcanic ash, and so on tell us what else might have contributed to the climate at the time.  From that, we can develop a remarkably consistent picture of what the Earth was like, year by year, for the past ten thousand years.

What it tells us as well, though, is a little terrifying; that the climate is not immune to sudden changes.  In recent memory things have been relatively benevolent, at least on a planet-wide view, but that hasn't always been the case.  And the effect of our frantic burning of fossil fuels is leading us toward a climate precipice that there may be no way to turn back from.

The Two-Mile Time Machine should be mandatory reading for the people who are setting our climate policy -- but because that's probably a forlorn hope, it should be mandatory reading for voters.  Because the long-term habitability of the planet is what is at stake here, and we cannot afford to make a mistake.

As Richard Branson put it, "There is no Planet B."

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Preventing the unknown

Some days it's no great mystery why the general public is dubious about scientists.

I mean, a lot of it is the media, as I've discussed here at Skeptophilia ad nauseam.  But there are times that the scientists themselves put their best foot backward.  As an example, consider the announcement from the World Health Organization this week that their Research & Development Blueprint for priority diseases includes "Disease X."

A disease that is as-yet unidentified.

The blueprint itself says this:

Disease X represents the knowledge that a serious international epidemic could be caused by a pathogen currently unknown to cause human disease, and so the R&D Blueprint explicitly seeks to enable cross-cutting R&D preparedness that is also relevant for an unknown “Disease X” as far as possible.

On the one hand, there's a grain of sense there.  Recognizing the fact that there are "emerging diseases" that are apparently new to humanity, and that could cause epidemics is the first step toward readying ourselves for when that happens.  (Recent examples are Ebola and Lassa fever, Marburg virus, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), and chikungunya.)

The Ebola virus [image courtesy of the World Health Organization]

But still.  What the WHO is telling the public is that they're putting time and effort into preventing an epidemic from a disease that:

• may not exist
• if it does exist, has unknown symptoms, origins, and mode of transmission
• may or may not be preventable
• may or may not be treatable
• may or may not be highly communicable
• may or may not be carried by other animals
• is of unknown duration and severity

Is it just me, or does this seem like an exercise in futility?

Like I said, an awareness of the unpredictability of disease outbreaks is a start, but this seems like trying to nail jello to the wall.  Each time humanity has been faced with a potential pandemic, we've had to study the disease and how it moves from one host to another, scramble to find treatments for the symptoms while we're searching for an actual cure (or better yet, a vaccine to prevent it), and do damage control in stricken areas.  So I can't see where the "Disease X" approach gets us, except to put everyone on red alert for an epidemic that may never happen.

I think my eyerolling when I read about this comes from two sources.  First, I'm all too aware that life is risky, and although it's certainly laudable to try to reduce the risk as much as you can, the bare fact is that you can't remove it entirely.  After all, none of us here are getting out of this place alive.  And second, there is an unavoidable chaotic element to what happens -- we get blindsided again and again by bizarre occurrences, and the professional prognosticators (not to mention professional psychics) get it wrong at least as often as they get it right.

So there probably will eventually be a new emerging epidemic.  On a long enough time scale, there's probably going to be a true pandemic as well.  I hope that with our advances in medical research, we'll be able to respond in time to prevent what happened during the Black Death, or worse, the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 to 1919, that killed an estimated 40 million people (over twice the number of deaths as the battlefield casualties of World War I, which was happening at the same time).

In one sense, I take back what I said about not being able to do anything about it ahead of time.  We can give ourselves the best shot at mitigating the effects of an outbreak -- by funding medical research, and encouraging our best and brightest to go into science (i.e., education, a topic I've also rung the changes on more than once).  Other than that, I'm just going to eat right, exercise, and hope for the best.

Chemotherapy lies

A musician friend of mine, a flutist of tremendous talent, drive, and skill, was diagnosed with leukemia when she was seventeen years old, only months before her high school graduation.  This was (of course) a devastating blow to a young woman with aspirations to head off to college and pursue a career as a professional musician, but fate often intervenes in the best-laid plans (as Robert Burns said much more eloquently).

She began chemotherapy almost immediately after the diagnosis.  The process was excruciating.  She experienced all of the familiar awful side effects -- hair loss, weakness, nausea, headache.  She lost weight, and felt fatigue so crushing that it was hard for her to do anything other than sleep.  Her family and friends rallied around her, and she called on her own strength of spirit to get her through the pain.

And she made it.  The leukemia went into remission.  She was able to resume normal activities, including playing her beloved flute.  She's been cancer-free for over five years now -- and is soon to release her first album.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

It's stories like this that are why I become apoplectic with rage when I read things like a post that came out at The Mind Unleashed last week.  Entitled, "Chemotherapy Proven to Spread Cancer, Cause Lethal Tumors in Groundbreaking New Study," the writer begins with a bang by saying, "Albert Einstein College of Medicine proves chemotherapy is a cash machine for Big Pharma."  The post goes on to say:

In a groundbreaking new study, they’ve proven that chemotherapy causes cancer cells to spread throughout the body – to replicate themselves, making your cancer worse, not better...  The researchers, George S. Karagiannis, Jessica M. Pastoriza, Yarong Wang, Allison S. Harney, et all, suggest that though chemotherapy may shrink a cancerous tumor, but it simply sends the cancer cells off into other parts of the body to rebuild into yet additional destructive tumors. 

This study makes a massive move in exposing the perpetual fraud of the chemotherapy/cancer industry. In American alone, it’s a $200 billion-dollar industry. It’s part of the reason why our insurance premiums are ridiculously high, and unassuming cancer sufferers, keep suffering.

Of course, the Karagiannis et al. paper, released earlier this month in Science, says nothing of the sort.  Here's the summary of the study the editors of the journal wrote:

Breast cancer is one of the most common tumor types, and metastasis greatly increases the risk of death from this disease.  By studying the process of intravasation or entry of cells into the vasculature, Karagiannis et al. discovered that, in addition to killing tumor cells, chemotherapy treatment can also increase intravasation.  Groups of cells collectively known as tumor microenvironment of metastasis (TMEM) can serve as gateways for tumor cells entering the vasculature, and the authors discovered that several types of chemotherapy can increase the amounts of TMEM complexes and circulating tumor cells in the bloodstream.  The researchers also determined that a drug called rebastinib can interfere with TMEM activity and help overcome the increased risk of cancer cell dissemination.

Two things stand out.  The researchers studied one type of cancer -- breast cancer.  Chemotherapy differs greatly depending on cancer type, so it's highly unlikely that all chemotherapy increases TMEM production.  Second, and most important: did you catch the last line?

They showed that the drug rebastinib acts to prevent metastasis, thus removing any increased risk of TMEM formation resulting from the chemotherapy.

So basically, it's the opposite of what the people over at The Mind Unleashed claimed.  If "Big Pharma" wants us all to stay sick and keep suffering, they're doing a pretty lousy job.  Humans in industrialized countries have the highest overall life span, and (more importantly) the best health, of any society the world has ever seen.  A lot of the credit for this goes to the medical establishment -- especially the development of vaccines and antibiotics.  And the cancer sufferers who owe their lives to chemotherapy far outnumber the ones whose cancer recurred or metastasized due to the drugs they were given.

In other words: the article at The Mind Unleashed is misleading at best, and an outright bald-faced lie at worst.  They took a study whose title seemed to give some vague support to their anti-science stance, and (apparently without reading the actual paper itself) claimed that it proved that "Big Pharma" is engaging in some kind of giant conspiracy to make us all sick.

And this is not just an ordinary lie; it's a downright dangerous one.  Most of us aren't scientists, and a paper like Karagiannis et al. is beyond our ability to comprehend in anything more than a superficial manner.  On the other hand, bullshit alarmism like what I found over at The Mind Unleashed is easy to read -- and easy to swallow whole.  As we've seen more than once here at Skeptophilia, emotional appeals usually work better than intellectual ones.  If you hook into people's fears, you're likely to convince them even if what you're saying makes no rational sense whatsoever.

So what we have here is a claim that could very well make cancer patients -- who are already likely to be in a maelstrom of worry, doubt, and anguish -- decide that what their doctors are recommending is just going to make them worse.  Add to that the fact that even the best chemotherapies cause pretty unpleasant side effects, and you get a toxic combination that could well persuade someone to forgo treatment, or opt for some useless quack "alternative medicine" instead.

The case of Steve Jobs bears remembering -- who, when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, delayed conventional treatment for nine months, opting instead for "alternative medicine" and changes in diet.  Jobs realized his mistake, but too late.  "He wanted to talk about it, how he regretted it," his biographer, Walter Isaacson, said.  "I think he felt he should have been operated on sooner...  I think he felt: if you ignore something you don't want to exist, you can have magical thinking.  It had worked for him in the past.  He did end up regretting it."

In the case of my musician friend, the situation is crystal-clear.  If she had chosen to ignore the advice of her doctors and avoid chemotherapy, she would have died.  Pure and simple.  We are fortunate enough to have a fine person and truly talented flutist still with us, living a healthy and productive life, because of "Big Pharma's chemotherapy/cancer industry."

And the biased, anti-scientific ignorance the people over at The Mind Unleashed are peddling is 100% USDA Grade-A bullshit.

I smell a rat

I think I've made my position on GMOs plain enough, but let me just be up front about it right out of the starting gate.

There is nothing intrinsically dangerous about genetic modification.  Since each GMO involves messing with a different genetic substructure, the results will be different each time -- and therefore will require separate testing for safety.  The vast majority of GMOs have been extensively tested for deleterious human health effects, and almost all of those have proven safe (the ones that weren't never reached market).

So GMOs are, overall, as safe as any other agricultural practice -- i.e. not 100% foolproof, but with appropriate study, not something that deserves the automatic stigma the term has accrued.

There are a great many people who don't see it that way.  One of the most vocal is Gilles-Éric Séralini, who made headlines back in 2007 with a study that alleged that rats fed genetically modified corn showed blood and liver abnormalities.  When the study was published and other scientists attempted to replicate it (and failed), the results of Séralini's study were attributed to "normal biological variation (for the species in question)."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Undeterred, Séralini went on in 2012 to publish a paper in Food and Chemical Toxicology about long-term toxicity of glyphosate (RoundUp) that is still the go-to research for the anti-Monsanto crowd.  He claimed that rats dosed with glyphosate developed large tumors and other abnormalities.  But that study, too, failed in attempts to replicate it, and it was withdrawn from FCT, with the editor-in-chief stating that the results were "inconclusive."

So if you smell a rat with respect to Séralini and his alleged studies, you're not alone.

But there's no damage to your reputation that can't be made worse, and Séralini took that dubious path last week -- with a "study" that claims that a homeopathic remedy can protect you from the negative effects of RoundUp.

So, to put it bluntly: a sugar pill can help you fight off the health problems caused by something that probably doesn't cause health problems, at least in the dosages that most of us would ordinarily be exposed to.

Being that such research -- if I can dignify it by that name -- would never pass peer review, Séralini went right to a pay-to-play open-source alt-med journal called BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine.  Steven Savage, a plant pathologist, had the following to say about the study:

The dose is absurd.  They gave the animals the equivalent of what could be in the spray tank including the surfactants and the a.i. (active ingredients).  If glyphosate or its AMPA metabolite ever end up in a food it is at extremely low concentrations and never with the surfactant.  Unless you were a farmer or gardener who routinely drinks from the spray tank over eight days, this study is meaningless.

Furthermore, Andrew Porterfield, who wrote the scathing critique of Séralini I linked above, pointed out an additional problem:

Scientists have been sharply critical of the study’s methodology and conclusions... the paper has no discussion on the natural variability in locomotion or physiological parameters, making it impossible to tell if anything was truly wrong with any of the animals.

And if that weren't bad enough, Séralini proposes to counteract these most-likely-nonexistent health effects with pills that have been diluted past Avogadro's Limit -- i.e., the point where there is even a single molecule of the original substance left.  There have been dozens of controlled studies of the efficacy of homeopathy, and none of them -- not one -- have shown that it has any effect at all except as a placebo.

So we have doubtful health problems in animals that were not evaluated beforehand for health problems being treated by worthless "remedies" that have been shown to have zero effect in controlled studies.

Of course, considering how powerful confirmation bias is, I'm not expecting this to convince anyone who wasn't already convinced.  I will say, however, that we'd be in a lot better shape as a species if we relied more on reason, logic, and evidence -- and less on our preconceived notions of how we'd like the world to be.

Nutritional hydrogen

Yesterday I ran into an interesting example of the fact that a novel idea, explained by a non-scientist, can skew a person's reaction toward thinking it's nonsense.

The topic came up because of an email from a loyal reader of Skeptophilia who sent me a link to the website of one Zen Honeycutt, called Moms Across America, wherein she touts the value of molecular hydrogen as a nutritional supplement.  The email said, in toto, "What the hell?"

And to read what she writes, it seems like woo of the worst kind.  I mean, listen to how she sells this stuff:

Approximately 3.6 billion years ago Molecular Hydrogen served as the original energy source for Primordial cellular life, fueling its metabolic processes and protecting it from the hostile environment of early Earth. Without it, life would not exist.

Which is true in the sense that 99% of the atoms in the universe are hydrogen, and a great proportion of the atoms making up the organic compounds in our body are hydrogen (in fact, they're only outnumbered by carbon).  Add that to the fact that hydrogen is what fuels the nuclear fusion reactions in our Sun, then yeah... I'd say hydrogen is pretty important.

[image courtesy of NASA]

She goes on to say:

Hydrogen is the first and most abundant element in the Universe! Two atoms combine to form hydrogen gas, H2, the smallest and most mobile molecule. This exclusive property gives it greater cellular bioavailability than any other nutrient or nutraceutical. Molecular Hydrogen can rapidly diffuse into cells, mitochondria and fluids throughout the body to deliver its unique and abundant benefits.

And once again, there's truth here, but it's so mixed up that it's misleading.  Hydrogen ions are used as energy carriers in both respiration and photosynthesis, but it's unclear if this is what she's referring to.  And the part about hydrogen diffusing quickly is a pretty dubious selling point.  After all, hydrogen cyanide is also a small, mobile molecule, capable of diffusing rapidly into your cells and your mitochondria.  The problem is, it also blocks cellular respiration, leading to the unfortunate side effect of death.

Then we hear that hydrogen is found in high quantities in "healing waters" and raw foods:

An additional benefit is that Active H2 generates an electron-rich potential (-ORP) in the water (you can measure it!). This rare property is uniquely found in fresh, raw living foods and juices, mothers milk and many of the world’s healing waters.

And that, unfortunately, is just plain nonsense.

So anyway, on and on she goes, sounding like the wooiest woo that ever wooed.  But the ironic part?

This all has some basis in fact, as far-fetched as it sounds.

Shigeo Ohta, of the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology at the Nippon School of Medicine, wrote a paper describing research he'd performed on the effects of molecular hydrogen on oxidative stress.  His research, described in "Recent Progress Toward Hydrogen Medicine: Potential of Molecular Hydrogen for Preventive and Therapeutic Applications" in the June 2011 Current Pharmaceutical Design, is described as follows:

Persistent oxidative stress is one of the major causes of most lifestyle-related diseases, cancer and the aging process.  Acute oxidative stress directly causes serious damage to tissues.  Despite the clinical importance of oxidative damage, antioxidants have been of limited therapeutic success.  We have proposed that molecular hydrogen (H2) has potential as a “novel” antioxidant in preventive and therapeutic applications [Ohsawa et al., Nat Med. 2007: 13; 688-94].  H2 has a number of advantages as a potential antioxidant:  H2 rapidly diffuses into tissues and cells, and it is mild enough neither to disturb metabolic redox reactions nor to affect reactive oxygen species (ROS) that function in cell signaling, thereby, there should be little adverse effects of consuming H2.  There are several methods to ingest or consume H2, including inhaling hydrogen gas, drinking H2-dissolved water (hydrogen water), taking a hydrogen bath, injecting H2-dissolved saline (hydrogen saline), dropping hydrogen saline onto the eye, and increasing the production of intestinal H2 by bacteria.  Since the publication of the first H2 paper in Nature Medicine in 2007, the biological effects of H2 have been confirmed by the publication of more than 38 diseases, physiological states and clinical tests in leading biological/medical journals, and several groups have started clinical examinations. Moreover, H2 shows not only effects against oxidative stress, but also various anti-inflammatory and anti-allergic effects. H2 regulates various gene expressions and protein-phosphorylations, though the molecular mechanisms underlying the marked effects of very small amounts of H2 remain elusive.

When I read this, I said, and I quote, "Well, I'll be damned."  Upon doing some digging, I found corroborating papers in the Journal of Oxidative Medicine and Cellular Longevity, Applied Biochemistry and Biotechnology, the Journal of Biomedicine and Environmental Science, and the prestigious Nature Medicine.

Now, it's important to note that the research I read was pretty clear that these were preliminary results, and it is far from certain what positive effects a person might accrue from consuming hydrogen-infused water.  A lot of interesting supplements and medical therapies have turned out, upon further study, not to live up to their promise.  Certainly Zen Honeycutt's enthusiasm seems a little premature.

But what I find most interesting about all of this is how unscientific commentary, blended in with misunderstanding and outright silliness, can blind you to something that actually has scientific merit.  I know that my own reaction, upon reading Honeycutt's website, was "Wow, this is serious bullshit."  And had I dismissed it out of hand because it "sounded silly," that wouldn't have been proper skepticism -- it would have been scoffing at a claim because it didn't fit my preconceived notion of how the world works.

All the more indication that the fundamental rule, when reading anything, is "check your sources."

Especially when it sounds like nonsense at first.

Giving up on convincing the pigeons

The furor over vaccinations has a long history.

The history, which is intensely frustrating to people like me who think that the anti-vaxxers' rhetoric borders on deliberate endangerment of people's lives, seems always to play out the same way.  In 1998, the now-infamous Dr. Andrew Wakefield published a study in Lancet claiming that there was a connection between the MMR vaccination and autism.  The study turned out to involve only twelve patients, so there was a bias right from the beginning that was so big you could drive a tanker truck through it.  When you add the investigation by Brian Deer that uncovered the fact that Wakefield was being subsidized by a group of lawyers who were conspiring to file lawsuits against vaccine manufacturers, then... well, you get the picture.

The British Medical Journal called Wakefield's study "fraudulent."  Ten of the twelve authors of the Wakefield paper formally withdrew their support in 2004, stating, "We wish to make it clear that in [the 1998] paper no causal link was established between MMR vaccine and autism as the data were insufficient.  However, the possibility of such a link was raised and consequent events have had major implications for public health.  In view of this, we consider now is the appropriate time that we should together formally retract the interpretation placed upon [the] findings in the [1998] paper, according to precedent."

None of that mattered.  The anti-vaccination movement was off and running.  A claim was made that thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative in many vaccines, was what was causing the link between vaccines and autism (which was based on a fraudulent claim from the beginning, remember?).  Many governments caved to the hype, removing thimerosal, which had been used safely since the 1930s.  Surprisingly enough, the rates of autism were unaffected.

That apparently didn't matter, either.

[image courtesy of the Center for Disease Control and the Wikimedia Commons]

Then the claim started running about that getting "natural" diseases was better for your immune system than getting "artificial" vaccines.  Apparently the idea was that getting diseases was like lifting weights for the immune system.  In 2002, the American Institute of Medicine sponsored a study to see if this was true.  They found no support for it.

Guess what effect this had on the anti-vaccination movement?

Further studies tried to find a link between vaccination and multiple sclerosis, ALS, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, and sudden infant death syndrome.  Yup... no connection.  So the anti-vaxxers decided that some children were more sensitive to vaccines, and the studies hadn't taken that into account.  Other, more extreme spokespeople for the movement started claiming that the researchers, not to mention all the doctors and nurses, were shills for "Big Pharma."  "Big Pharma," they say, wants to keep people sick (or worse, make people sick) in order to keep making profits.  And people like me, who object to policy being driven by folks who evidently have no understanding of how science and peer review are done, are just plain stupid.

But the research continued to pile up, and always in favor of the safety of childhood vaccination.  So the anti-vaxxers shifted the goalposts again.  Now they went after gardasil, the vaccine against HPV, a virus shown to be one of the main triggers for cervical, oropharyngeal, vaginal, and anal cancer.  So that was studied.  Once again: the vaccine is safe and effective.  Any side effects are extremely uncommon, and the risk is far lower than the risk of contracting the virus and eventually developing cancer.  But the claims continued to circulate; I've heard more than one parent say, "I'm not having my kid get the HPV vaccine!  It's too risky!"

So more studies were done.  No connection continued to be found.  And just last week, a study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association showing that in a study of 95,000 children, there was no link between vaccinations and autism -- being vaccinated doesn't alter the risk even in children who have a higher risk of autism from other factors.

An article about the study in Vocativ states that "this should end the debate once and for all."  But it won't.  You know why?

This is not a debate.  This is people who understand science trying to argue with alarmists who believe every damn thing a celebrity says, over the advice given by medical researchers.  This is playing chess with a pigeon -- no matter how cleverly you play, the pigeon just shits all over the chessboard and then struts around like it won.

This should have been over, as a discussion, twenty years ago.  Eliminating vaccines is dangerous and irresponsible.  The childhood diseases of the pre-vaccine period are not mild tummy aches; kids died of them.  Lots of kids.  But you know why the anti-vaxxers don't recognize that?  Here's why.

No one in the United States remembers how horrific these diseases are.  Hardly anyone dies of them any more, because nearly everyone has had the fucking vaccine.  Measles is not just "a bunch of spots," it causes sky-high fever that can leave a child deaf or permanently brain damaged.  Mumps can cause sterility, especially in young men.  Diphtheria kills you by slow suffocation.  Typhoid gives children such serious vomiting and diarrhea that they can die of dehydration, not to mention getting lovely symptoms like intestinal hemorrhage.

Vivid enough mental images for you?

Some people do change their views, but it often takes being walloped by a metaphorical two-by-four for it to happen.  Last month there was the highly publicized story of a mom from Ottawa who was an outspoken anti-vaxxer, but changed her tune after all seven of her unvaccinated children simultaneously contracted whooping cough.

Wouldn't it be nice if people could be convinced by evidence and logic, and not by their children being at risk of dying?

So my general opinion is that if the research we already had hasn't convinced people, further research won't, either.  It's time we stop wasting resources on these people.  The evolutionary biologists learned that long ago; you don't see them doing research and publishing papers to demonstrate over and over again that the Earth is not six thousand years old.  We need to treat the anti-vaxxers as what they are -- the young-earth creationists of the medical world.

And mandate that children be vaccinated, nationwide.  No exemptions, sorry.

This discussion is over.

Trials of faith

The state of Tennessee is in a bit of a quandary at the moment.

Back in 2002, one Jacqueline Crank was sentenced to unsupervised probation for negligence in the death of her fifteen-year-old daughter Jessica from Ewing's sarcoma.  Jessica was not brought in for conventional medical treatment, but instead was subjected to a bout of "faith healing" on the part of the girl's "spiritual father," Ariel Sherman, and various family friends.

"Laying on of hands" in a Pentecostal Church [image courtesy of photographer Russell Lee and the Wikimedia Commons]

Despite the light sentence, Crank hasn't been willing to let the matter go, and has pursued appeals all the way up to the Tennessee Supreme Court.  And the sticky part of the issue is that Tennessee has something called the Spiritual Treatment Exemption Act, which allows parents to avoid medical treatment for their children if it would interfere with their religious beliefs.  Crank's claim -- and it's hard to see how she's wrong -- is that this protects certain established religious sects who don't believe in using modern medicine (e.g. Christian Scientists) but it didn't protect her, because she belongs to a sect that includes only her and about two dozen others, living "in a cult-type religious environment with many people... all of whom they consider 'family' although none of them are related."

Her last appeal, in which her sentence was upheld, was decided in June of 2013.  In the decision, the following provision of the Spiritual Treatment Exemption Act was quoted:

Nothing in this chapter [Tennessee Code Annotated Title 39, Chapter 15, setting forth certain offenses against children, including child abuse and neglect] shall be construed to mean a child is neglected, abused, or abused or neglected in an aggravated manner for the sole reason the child is being provided treatment by spiritual means through prayer alone in accordance with the tenets or practices of a recognized church or religious denomination by a duly accredited practitioner thereof in lieu of medical or surgical treatment.

I have two issues with this.

First, how is denying a child medical treatment ever anything other than child abuse?  Allowing a child to remain in pain, or perhaps even to die, of a treatable illness is "abuse and neglect" no matter whether the reason is negligence or "deeply held religious beliefs."  You can't "provide treatment by spiritual means," because it doesn't work.  The list of children who have died in the hands of faith healers -- some from agonizing conditions like appendicitis -- is long.

Second, how do you become a "duly accredited practitioner" of faith healing?  Cf. my earlier comment about the fact that it doesn't work.  I suppose, of course, that there are also training programs for astrology, crystal energy healing, and homeopathy, so having a certificate in Latin on your wall saying you're an accredited faith healer isn't that much more ridiculous.

The problem is, of course, that this puts the Tennessee Supreme Court in the awkward position of either having to admit that the basis of their Spiritual Treatment Exemption Act is a flawed belief that systematizes child abuse, or siding with a woman who while her child was experiencing bone disintegration from a grapefruit-sized tumor, "decided to turn to Jesus Christ, my Lord and my Savior, my Healer, Defender for her healing. That being a believer in the Lord, being a believer in this Word, that He was the only Healer. And through that belief we took it in our hands to pray for her, to heal her with prayer, to know that Jesus Christ is the Healer, is the Deliverer."

So the decision will either imply that all religious beliefs are equal, even the loony ones, or that some beliefs are more equal than others.  And either way, the justices on the Tennessee Supreme Court will have painted themselves into a legal corner that it's hard to see an escape from.

Burn your way to better health

At what point does a publication become so filled with dangerous misinformation that the powers-that-be should step in and shut it down?

I'm all for freedom of speech, and everything, and definitely in favor of people educating themselves sufficiently that they won't fall for ridiculous bullshit.  But still: the media has a responsibility to police themselves, and failing that, to have the rug pulled out from under them.

If such a line does exist -- and I am no expert in jurisprudence who could state the legality of such a move -- then the site Natural News has surely crossed it.  They have become the prime source of bogus "health news," promoting every form of medically-related lunacy, from detox to homeopathy to herbal cures for everything from cancer to depression.

Take a look at their latest salvo, entitled, "What They Won't Tell You: The Sun Is a Full-Spectrum Medicine That Can Heal Cancer."  In it, author Paul Fassa tells us that contrary to conventional wisdom, you are not putting yourself at risk by exposing your skin to the sun; you are giving yourself "healing medicine."  "Truth is," Fassa writes, "we've been systematically lied to about the sun and skin cancer for years...  How many know that there is no definitive proof that the sun alone causes skin cancer?"

Other than, of course, this exhaustive report from the National Cancer Institute.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

He quotes a "naturopathic doctor," David Mihalovic, as support:  "Those that have attempted to convince the world that the Sun, the Earth's primary source of energy and life causes cancer, have done so with malicious intent to deceive the masses into retreating from the one thing that can prevent disease."  Righty-o.  So let me respond with a quote of my own, from the Wikipedia page on "naturopathy:" "Naturopathic medicine is replete with pseudoscientific, ineffective, unethical, and possibly dangerous practices...  Naturopathy lacks an adequate scientific basis, and it is rejected by the medical community...  The scope of practice varies widely between jurisdictions, and naturopaths in some unregulated jurisdictions may use the Naturopathic Doctor designation or other titles regardless of level of education."

Which might seem like an ad hominem, but I don't really care.

What is as certain as anything can be in science is the connection between blistering sunburns, especially in children, and later incidence of melanoma, the most deadly kind of skin cancer.  (Here's one source that lays it out pretty explicitly.)  Instead, Natural News is promoting a combination of misinformation, outright error, and paranoia so extreme that as I read the article I kept wondering if I was reading something from The Onion.  "The reality is that the vast majority of people, including doctors, have been duped into believing the myth that the sun is toxic, carcinogenic and a deadly health hazard," Fassa writes.  "That's why most people slavishly and lavishly slather toxic sunscreens on their skin whenever they anticipate direct contact with the sun's rays.  But in fact, most conventional sunscreens are cancer-causing biohazards.  Meanwhile, the multi-billion-dollar cancer industry and the billion-dollar toxic sunscreen industry are making hay with this hoax."

I think this was the point that my blood pressure rose to dangerous levels, because I am absolutely sick unto death of people yammering about the evils of Big Pharma and Big Medicine as if they were some kind of Illuminati-based death cult.  Could the medical system in the United States be reformed and improved?  Of course.  Is it an evil institution that is trying to make us all sick so as to keep itself in business?  Come on.  We are, right now, one of the healthiest societies the world have ever seen.  Our longevity and quality of life have risen steadily.  On a more personal level, I owe my life to "Big Pharma;" if my mother had not been given the RhoGAM injection when she was pregnant with me, I would almost certainly be dead of Rh-incompatibility syndrome...

... like my older sister, who was born before "Big Pharma" developed the injection, and who only lived ten days.

On some level, of course, this all falls under caveat emptor.  If you are sufficiently ignorant, gullible, or paranoid that you buy what sites like Natural News are selling, then sucks to be you.  The government, I suppose, is not in the business of protecting people from their own stupidity.  But at the same time, that isn't honestly a very ethical position, and there's part of me -- free speech be damned -- that would love it if there was a way for some kind of media watchdog to step in, and shut down what has become a conduit not only for bullshit, but for dangerous (possibly deadly) misinformation.

Strong medicine

Pleo-FORT, Pleo-QUENT, Pleo-NOT, Pleo-STOLO, Pleo-NOTA-QUENT, and Pleo-EX are all names of homeopathic "remedies" that are being sold as cures for infections of various kinds.  All of them are made from extracts of molds from the genus Penicillum, which is then (as is typical with these remedies) diluted until there's basically none of the original substance left.  As an example, here's what the site Natural Healthy Concepts has to say about Pleo-QUENT:

Pleo QUENT (Quentakehl) Drops 5X is a homeopathic decongestant medicine indicated for supporting the temporary relief of congestion due to colds and minor respiratory infections*.

• Supports the temporary relief of congestion due to colds and minor respiratory infections* 
• Quentakehl is indicated for acute, chronic and latent viral conditions* 
• Quentakehl, extracted from the mold-fungus Penicillium glabrum, is not an antibiotic and produces no antibiotic substances. Therefore, there are no side-effects which could occur during an antibiotic treatment, such as allergies, liver damage, destruction of the intestinal flora and the formation of penicillin-resistant strains.

You could, of course, change the line about "no side effects" to read "no effects whatsoever" and the sentence would still be true.  A 5x serial dilution means that you now have 9,999 parts water added to 1 part of the original substance -- a dilution which would render far more dangerous substances than mold extract completely harmless.

[image courtesy of photographer Casey West and the Wikimedia Commons]

So imagine my surprise when I found out that Terra-Medica, Inc., the company that manufactures the various Pleo-WHATEVERS, is voluntarily recalling 56 lots of the "remedies."  Here's part of the statement from Terra-Medica:

Terra-Medica, Inc. is voluntarily recalling 56 lots of Pleo-FORT, Pleo-QUENT, Pleo-NOT, Pleo-STOLO, Pleo-NOTA-QUENT, and Pleo-EX homeopathic drug products in liquid, tablet, capsule, ointment, and suppository forms to the consumer level. FDA has determined that these products have the potential to contain penicillin or derivatives of penicillin.

If you're wondering if you read that right, you did:  Terra-Medica is recalling these remedies because they have actual medically active ingredients in them.

Just reading the headline in the Patheos article I linked above, which says, and I quote, "Homeopathic Products Recalled Because They Might Have Actual Medicine In Them," made me choke-snort an entire mouthful of coffee.  This might, in fact, be the best headline I've read in years.

Because, let's face it: we wouldn't want anything potentially effective sneaking into our homeopathic remedies.  *brief pause to stop guffawing uncontrollably*

Terra-Medica is, I have to admit, doing the right thing; if there really is penicillin in the "remedies" they're selling, then some poor misguided soul, who evidently failed high school biology and thought he could cure his cold by taking drops of water, could be killed if said poor misguided soul was also unlucky enough to have a penicillin allergy.  But that the chemical they suspect of having contaminated their "remedies" is an actual medicine is a circumstance that brings the term "poetic justice" to whole new levels.

You have to wonder how much longer the homeopaths will be allowed to remain in business, what with admissions like this one (not to mention an increasing number of websites devoted to debunking the whole thing, including What's the Harm, which is devoted to stories of people who were injured or killed by taking a homeopathic remedy instead of seeking conventional medical care).  There is no scientific support whatsoever for this practice; it is pseudoscience at its worst, because not only is it ripping people off, it's putting lives and health in jeopardy.  By not taking proven, effective, safe medications for treatable diseases, people are risking protracted illness, complications, and death, not only for themselves but (worse) for their children.  Simply put, a sugar pill or a bottle of water from which virtually all biologically active molecules have been removed will not treat disease.

Which makes the strong medicine that Terra-Medica is having to swallow taste pretty sweet to me.

Homeopathy, allopathy, and the right to prescribe drugs

New from the "This Is Seriously Not A Good Idea" department: the Indian Medical Association has just announced a decision to allow homeopathic "doctors" prescribe real medicines, i.e., substances that have actual therapeutically active compounds in them.

Not everyone is thrilled by this idea, fortunately.  Dr. Jayesh Lele, who is the secretary of the IMA's Maharashtra chapter, didn't sound particularly sanguine.  "We have gathered over thirty judgments delivered in various Indian courts, including the Supreme Court, that ruled against practitioners of alternative therapy prescribing allopathic medicines," Dr. Lele told The Times of India.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the terminology, "allopathy" means "real medical science."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

You'd think that the homeopaths would be elated to have this kind of Official Seal of Approval.  After all, the fact that they're being allowed to prescribe actual medicines could be construed as some sort of vindication of their skills as healers by the powers-that-be.  But in an odd twist, not all of the homeopaths are happy with the decision.  "Dr." Shreepad Khadekar, a Mumbai homeopath, hinted that the ruling would dilute homeopathic practice, which I find so ironic that it should somehow be added to the Alanis Morissette song.

Khadekar said, "It is definitely the darkest period in a real homeopath's life.  Soon my science will become extinct, thanks to the unfortunate decision."

My response, predictably, is I doubt that we'll be that lucky.   Khadekar's "science" has thus far survived a concerted effort by the folks over at the James Randi Educational Foundation, not to mention a whole list of lawsuits against the manufacturers of homeopathic "remedies" and the charlatans who dispense them.  Of course, the situation in India adds a whole new layer of crazy to the topic; do we really trust people who don't understand the concept of serial dilution, Avogadro's limit, and the placebo effect to dispense real drugs correctly?  Individuals who in order to prop up their bizarre concept of how the body works have to resort to blathering about "energies" and "vibrations" and "quantum imprints?"

I mean, at least before, all they were handing out were vials of water and sugar pills.  Sure, they weren't curing diseases, but at least what they were giving you was harmless.

I have a dear friend whom I watched studying for the board exams to become a nurse practitioner -- the amount of information you have to have at your fingertips in order to decide which drug to prescribe, not to mention correctly calculating dosage, is absolutely immense.  So the folks over in India think it's a good idea to allow people to do that who evidently don't understand the fact that zero atoms of an active ingredient have no effect?

I don't see this ending well.

I find it amazing that this nonsense is still out there, given what we now understand about biochemistry.  Here in the United States homeopathic "remedies" are ubiquitous -- they're on the shelves in our local pharmacy, row upon row of glass vials containing nothing of value (but quite expensive, I feel obliged to point out).  But at least we haven't taken the further step of allowing the homeopaths themselves to have access to real drugs.  That, fortunately, is still the purview of people who have the educational background to know what they're doing.  If you're in India, though, and you fall ill -- well, all I can say is, make sure you ask what your medical service provider's background is before you take his or her advice, and beyond that, caveat emptor.