palmd

One of the questions addressed in this space is, "what makes a particular condition susceptible to quackery?"  Some of the common features we've seen over time are: Diverse and protean symptoms: fatigue, "brain fog", diffuse pain, and other vague symptoms are often used as diagnostic criteria for…

I was catching up again on my favorite periodical (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report---the Dengue Fever story is Awe.Some.) I came across the official recommendations for Gardasil for males. Gardasil is the vaccine produced by Merck that can protect women against infection by four strains of…

As we ramped up for the H1N1 influenza pandemic last year, one of the worries expressed by the public and by the alternative medicine establishment was Guillain Barre Syndrome (GBS). As explained by neurologist Steven Novella, GBS is a serious auto-immune neurologic disease that causes weakness.…

I'm not sure what to write about this, but I feel a need to write something. There has been an interesting and infuriating discussion going on at Jason and Zuska's blogs. Jason, whose posts on learning and cognition rock, started the discussion with an examination of a small amount of scientific…

Joe Mercola's website has always been a "target-rich environment" for quack hunters. His rants against vaccines, his incorrect flu information, his support of homeopathy, and just about everything else at his website comes free of evidence and full of unfounded assertions (as well as some…

Not an opium poppy I took this picture a couple of days ago. This poppy popped up as a volunteer in my front bed. It's about four feet tall and the flower is about 5 cm in diameter. It's not an opium poppy, but it could pass, and I've been looking for an excuse to use the picture. Opium…

According to my family's recollection, none of our relatives has died fighting for the United States. My grandmother was from a small town in what is now Belarus and most people in the family were born, lived, and died there. One of her brothers, though, did something remarkable. If family…

I'm off to watch my daughter march in some sort of neo-fascist parade (Daisy scouts) and then off to the hospital, but first some quick housekeeping issues: You can subscribe to WCU's feed here. You can have updates delivered by email. There is a facebook page on which updates are posted. The…

As summer approaches and people spend more time outdoors, many parts of the country will start to see cases of Lyme disease. It is carried by deer ticks and is especially common in the Northeast. Tick bites often go unnoticed, but the rash of Lyme disease is pretty characteristic and occurs in…

As my regular readers know, I'm not a big fan of our current health care system. Our bloated, industry-driven system manages to deliver less effective care at a higher cost than most other industrialized nations. The system is Byzantine, unnavigable, and dangerous, and is kept that way in the…

A few news items of import: Andrew Wakefield, formerly a licensed to practice medicine in England, has officially lost that privilege.  Others have covered this more comprehensively than I'd ever be able to, but this is big news.  Wakefield is the father of the modern anti-vaccine movement.  His…

Too many too soon: that's Jenny McCarthy's rallying cry.  The disingenuous activists of the antivaccine movement use this motto as a foot in the door, claiming that they are not truly "anti-vaccine", just pro-"safe vaccines".  This is despite the fact that vaccines have proved themselves to be one…

Of all the crappy things I eat, bacon is probably the crappiest. Thankfully, I eat it only rarely, but if you were to put a pound of cooked bacon in front of me, I would eat a pound of cooked bacon and ask for more. But since I want to live long enough to watch my kid grow up, it's better to wax…

I hate writing about politics, but the mainstreaming of racism since the election of Obama makes writing about politics a moral imperative. We'll start with Dr. Rand Paul, who is running for one Kentucky's senate seats. The usual racist dog whistles are apparently too subtle for Paul, which is…

Dana Ullman, a Huffington Post blogger who never fails to bring the stupid, has now gathered all the idiocy he can find, put it in a wheelbarrow, and dumped it into his latest piece up at HuffPo. In this piece, he calls on readers to stop all medications (except, presumably, the voodoo potions he…

If there were a parallel universe, and in that universe medicine, instead of being based on science, was simply a gemisch of various folkways and superstitions, medicine in that universe would be called "naturopathy". "Remember. Hey, how come this never works with water?" I've discussed the…

Common osteoporosis drugs do not increase the risk of unusual fractures (probably): Bisphosphonates (such as Fosamax and Actonel), a class of medications used to prevent fractures in osteoporosis, are effective in preventing certain types of common back and hip fractures.  As we've developed more…

We're now fifty years into the history of oral contraceptive pills, and we've learned an enormous amount. We've learned about various therapeutic uses of the Pill and unanticipated risks. We've learned to adjust the amount of medication to a lower effective dose. We've given women the…

So-called "morgellons syndrome" is an interesting phenomenon. This syndrome is not at this point generally recognized by the medical community, but its sufferers describe many different systemic symptoms, such as "brain fog" and fatigue, and characteristic skin lesions which they describe as…

You know that big oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico?  It turns out that the folks who drilled it, the folks who pumped it, and the folks who worked on it weren't at fault---at least according to their sworn congressional testimony.  And I sure as hell know it's not my fault.  I mean, I do commute to…

Last week I gave you a refresher course on the invalid arguments used by altmed boosters. The Turf Battle Fallacy and Pharma Shill Gambit are classics for a number of reasons. The most amusing thing about these gambits is their hypocrisy.   The alternative medicine movement is  essentially a…

Smallpox was one of the world's most devastating diseases, and its eradication one of medicine's most spectacular successes. Over the course of a couple of centuries, this disease went from killing and maiming millions (200-500 million in the 20th century alone), from helping to depopulate the…

Alternative medicine is very profitable. Herbs and supplements are a multi-billion dollar industry. The practice of primary care medicine is not terribly lucrative, and adding on some "integrative medicine" can turn that around. A primary care doc can significantly increase their income by…

So I gave that talk yesterday at the Great Lakes Homeland Security Expo. It went better than I had expected, as the audience was willing to be interactive and ask tough questions. The audience was a mixed group of health care professionals, first responders, communications directors, and disaster…

Most mornings, I get up with my daughter, or more accurately, I wake her up. We have our little morning rituals---I turn on her lamp (or this time of the year, open her shade), pick her up and take her downstairs (something I might not be able to do for much longer). I turn on the TV and let her…

Many years ago, when fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen was riding a wave of racist sentiment in France, I was a young student out with friends on a perfect spring evening along the Seine. There was at that time always a vigorous national police presence in Paris. The CRS with their sub-machine guns were…

I've been a bit busy lately and haven't been able to update you on some important developments in the field of imaginary diseases. Update 1: Chronic Lyme Disease So-called "chronic Lyme disease" (CLD) is a diverse constellation of symptoms which are often attributed to Lyme disease, but without…

Dana Ullman is an idiot. Or maybe insane. I'm not sure which, but his latest article at the Huffington Post reveals such a severe defect in rational thought that it must be one or the other (charitably speaking). He calls it "Lies, Damn Lies (sic), and Medical Research," and the point of it is…

I've never liked Gary Null. Early in my blogging "career" I wasted thousands of words expressing my incredulity at his horrible health advice, his paranoid rants, and his shameless hucksterism. Then I saw something shiny and forgot about him for a while. But now blog bud Orac has ruined my…

Thanks for all of your help since yesterday. Here's some of the data I've culled out from the first 24 hours: Blogpost visits: 654 Visitor sources:  24% of entrances to the post were from Greg Laden's blog. Feedburner (probably multiple sources): 165 facebook: 98 Retweets: 83 (probably)…