The IV league

At the risk of beating a dead horse, can I implore you to avoid whatever appears on Gwyneth Paltrow's aptly-named site Goop?

I know we've been here before, and frankly, after the episode of the "psychic vampire repellent" she was selling last fall, I thought I was done with her.  But thanks to a reader of Skeptophilia, I am reluctantly forced back to "Goop" to consider the concept of:

"Holistic IV treatments."

You're probably thinking, "This can't mean what it sounds like."  But yes, sadly, it does.  Unsatisfied by taking dubiously-useful alternative health products by mouth, or even squirting them up your ass with what amounts to a turkey baster, now Gwyneth wants you to hook yourself up to an IV so that these products can be introduced directly into your bloodstream.

Yes, I know that last summer a woman died from the effects of having an extract of turmeric (curcumin) delivered into her vein by an IV, ostensibly to treat her eczema.  Yes, I know that there is a good reason why your average bloke off the street isn't allowed to jab a needle into your circulatory system and inject some random compound.

No, this does not appear to bother Gwyneth.

She tells us about lots of places where we can go to get these "natural alternative" IV treatments for everything from migraines to (I shit you not) hangovers.  Why the better "natural alternative" to hangovers is to stop drinking so damn much alcohol, I don't know.  Be that as it may, we are given a smorgasbord to choose from.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

There's the "IV Doc," which has not only "partnered with Goop" but has expanded overseas so "you can now get a refreshment sesh in London or a much-needed hangover fix in Ibiza."  Gwyneth tells us that this one's especially good because it's "managed by physicians," which makes it sound like this is unusual and should put you on notice that the bottom of the barrel here is very, very deep.

Then there's "VIVAMAYR" of London, England and Lake Worth, Australia, which can "reset your digestive system" and also specializes in "oxygen therapy."  "Oxygen therapy," which involves introducing into your body one way or the other a higher concentration of oxygen than you are generally exposed to, is pretty clearly snake oil -- in fact, breathing oxygen-enriched air is, for a healthy individual, fairly dangerous due to oxygen's reactivity with organic materials.  (It is, unsurprisingly, what chemists call a "strong oxidizer," which means that it's good at grabbing electrons away from other molecules -- which in the case of organic compounds, generally makes them fall apart.)

Then there's the amusingly-named "NutriDrip" of New York City, which offers you four different choices of stuff to put in your IV -- under the categories "Immunity," "Toxins," "Beauty," and "Performance."  The word "toxin" immediately sets my teeth on edge, and I challenge you every time you hear someone talk about "detox" or "flushing out toxins" to demand to know one specific toxin that they're referring to.  That's it.  One.  A single compound that your liver and kidneys are incapable of handling, so you need to take purified extract of papaya seeds or some such nonsense to take care of it.

Let me know what they say.

Then there's "IV Vitamin Therapy" of Los Angeles, which not only has various combos of stuff to put into your IV bag, has flat-screen televisions and lots of books to distract you from your infusion of snake oil.   In New York City, however, they have "House Call Aesthetics," which can bring the snake oil right to the comfort of your own home.

There are probably readers who are still on the fence, or who doubt my credentials to make these sorts of criticisms.  As far as the latter, I admit you are right to ask; I'm a biology teacher, not a medical professional.  So perhaps you'll give more weight to Scott Gavura, a pharmacist who has acted as an advisor on new drug development in Ontario, and who wrote the following for the wonderful site Science-based Medicine:

With so many purveyors of vitamin infusions, one would hope the practice was grounded in good science.  But it isn’t, and that shouldn’t be a surprise.  Despite the lack of good evidence, there is a near-obsessive devotion to touting the benefits of intravenous vitamins while railing against the mysterious entities which are blocking The Truth.  But the reality is more mundane.  In the absence of a deficiency, vitamin infusions don’t do much of anything.  To the worried well, intravenous vitamins are going to be a harmless panacea that just succeed in enriching the revenues of the purveyor.

In any case, it's clearly unwise to buy something (literally or figuratively) from someone who has the track record for veracity of Gwyneth Paltrow.  Myself, I'm going to keep taking vitamins the regular way -- from a good diet -- and avoid "Goop's" recommendation to have some random substance injected directly into my bloodstream.  Call me overcautious, but there you are.

The natural way

I'm always hesitant whenever I am considering posting something negative about alternative medicine.

I mean, sometimes it's clear.  I have no problem saying homeopathy is grade-A bullshit.  A meta-analysis of 1,800 studies intended to determine if there are positive effects from homeopathic "remedies" found no results -- as one would expect from a "medicine" that has been diluted past Avogadro's limit and which relies on nonsense like "frequencies" and "energetic imprints" to explain how it could work.

I always feel a little shakier when the target is naturopathy.  A great deal of what you hear from this branch of alternative medicine seems to me to rely on the naturalistic fallacy -- if it's natural, it must be good for you.  (And the converse, if it's artificial, it must be bad.)

That said, there are a great many therapeutically useful medicines that do occur naturally.  Aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid) is found in willow bark, vincristine (used to treat Hodgkin's disease) in the sap of the Madagascar periwinkle, and an extract of the venom from the deadly cone snail shows great promise for treating intractable pain.

But to disabuse yourself of the notion that natural = good for you, look no further than the quack remedy "laetrile" made from apricot pits that supposedly destroyed cancerous tumors -- and which contained dangerous amounts of cyanide.

So I'm definitely of two minds regarding "natural medicine."  Just taking something because it's "natural" could have no effect on whatever's ailing you, or worse, might kill you.  But ignoring a potentially valuable substance because it comes from the annals of naturopathy is no better.

Of course, the good thing is that science has a way of evaluating claims of this type.  It's called a "controlled study" and it's the gold standard for testing this sort of thing.  Many naturopaths, however, claim that the game is rigged -- any substance that could be therapeutically useful that was not developed by the pharmaceuticals industry (or, in their lingo, "Big Pharma"), or which wouldn't make them lots of money, gets summarily ignored.

Myself, I've always thought that objection was a little dubious, given the fact that medical researchers have done 1,800 controlled clinical trials of freakin' homeopathy.  If they're willing to give something ridiculous like that close to two thousand tries to prove itself, it's hard to see why they'd balk at testing some potentially useful plant extract.

What I didn't realize, however, was that the naturopaths themselves have their own problems with dubious practice.  A long-time reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link a couple of days ago to an article in Vice about a former naturopath who has completely flipped her perspective -- and become a whistleblower for cases where naturopaths have used unapproved drugs, suggested useless therapies for ailments, and worst of all, conspired to cover up their own failures.

The article, "The Former Naturopath Who Became a Whistleblower on the Industry" by Kaleigh Rogers, is an interesting if disturbing read.  The naturopath in question, Britt Marie Hermes, was trained at Bastyr University, one of the best known naturopathic medicine teaching facilities.  She threw herself into it full-throttle -- until what she was seeing around her pulled her up short.

"It was world-crushing," Hermes said.  "I came to the conclusion that naturopathy is rife with unethical practices and undertrained professionals.  It was really hard to process...  I guess I have become a thorn in the profession's side."

Which highlights what I was saying earlier; we do have the means to test claims, it's just that the naturopaths often don't do that (or, as with homeopathy, don't believe the results even when we do).  It's a shame, because that means that any potential good discoveries -- the next generation of substances like vincristine -- gets lost under tons of confirmation bias and defensiveness.

It's why we need people like Britt Hermes.  It keeps us honest.  It keeps us from trusting our gut instead of peer-reviewed science.

But it does raise hackles.  I get more hate mail when I criticize alternative medicine than I do when I criticize young-earth creationism, and that's saying something.  People feel strongly about this, which is why Hermes herself is facing a defamation lawsuit by a German naturopath who took exception to her slamming dubious and poorly-tested "cures" (such as intravenous baking soda to treat cancer).  The bottom line is that we have a tried-and-true method for determining the efficacy of potential drugs.

It's better known as "science."

Or, as Tim Minchin put it, "There's a name for alternative medicine that works.  It's called... medicine."

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.