medicine
palmd | January 13, 2010Two recent posts raised some ethical questions about the practice of a very public doctor who has proclaimed himself (on the front page of his website) to be an expert on testosterone replacement therapy.
Leading TRT expert Dr. Crisler is now available for consultations, lectures, advanced physician training, conference hosting, interviews, and more.
Well, Dr Crisler was apparently not happy with my critique. He was kind enough to drop by and leave several comments explaining why, the first and longest I will reprint here. He has also sent me a great deal of traffic from his own message…
oracknows | January 13, 2010Yesterday, I expressed dismay at how Dr. Mehmet Oz, the protege of Oprah Winfrey who now has his own popular syndicated daily show, recently named the quackery known as reiki as number one in his list of "Dr. Oz's ulimate alternatie medicine secrets," leading me to characterize him as having "gone completely over to the Dark Side." You, my readers, kindly provided me with a YouTube video of actual segments from the show in which Dr. Oz has a reiki master demonstrate reiki on an audience member:
Ugh. Get aload of this introduction:
Now you're about to see things that are going to challenge…
grrlscientist | January 12, 2010tags: man drinking fat, NYC Health Anti-Soda Ad, Are You Pouring on the Pounds?, diet, nutrition, sports drinks, soda, sweetened drinks, television, disgusting, streaming video
Most people don't realize how easy it is to gain weight from drinking sugary sodas, juice drinks, sport drinks and sweetened tea and coffee drinks. Just one 20-ounce bottle of soda can pack 250 calories and more than 16 teaspoons of sugar. Is the lemon-flavored iced tea any better? Not by much with 210 calories and 14½ teaspoons of sugar. Sugar-sweetened beverages add hundreds of calories to your diet each day. Don't…
grrlscientist | January 12, 2010tags: Grab More Science, LabGrab, science news, technology, graphic, image of the day
Image: LabGrab, 13 January 2010.
An American start-up company in Portland, Oregon, announced the release of their new technology that creates a colorful chart to visualize the volume of science and medical stories published by discipline (above). The boxes are defined by discipline and their sizes are determined by the total number of article headlines published by universities, journals, science news aggregators, and science blogs within the given time period (as defined by the user).
"We read a…
scientificactivist | January 12, 2010Have you gotten your H1N1 flu shot yet? If not, it's still not too late. Due in part to the successes of the public health campaign against H1N1 influenza, people have begun adopting a rather casual attitude toward it. This is problematic, because due to an extent to initial shortages of vaccine, a very large portion of the population remains unvaccinated and susceptible to another wave of flu outbreaks. In fact, I only managed to get my H1N1 flu vaccine about a week ago, when my place of employment began offering it to workers who weren't part of the original target group.
I imagine that…
oracknows | January 12, 2010For some reason, I've tended to give Dr. Mehmet Oz a bit of a free pass when it comes to promoting woo. I don't know why. Maybe it's because I just haven't paid that much attention to him. Perhaps it's because, even when he was on Oprah's show, he didn't delve as deeply into the woo as her other frequent guests, such as Christiane Northrup, Suzanne Sommers, or Jenny McCarthy. The one or two times I saw him with Oprah, usually online because I'm never home to watch Oprah during the day and on those rare days when I am home on a weekeday, trust me, I don't watch Oprah. Then Dr. Oz got his own…
oracknows | January 11, 2010I've discussed why Barbara Loe Fisher is a hypocritical coward for trying to silence her opponents using the courts. Now Rebecca Watson, a.k.a., The Skepchick, schools Barbara Loe Fisher for in essence pissing on the memory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt:
For some reason, my irony meter didn't register the point that the Skepchick laid down. Perhaps it had already been so completely vaporized by the Loe Fisher's ranting about wanting a "fearless conversation about vaccines" hot on the heels of having tried to sue Dr. Offit for doing just that.
You know what's rather interesting, though? Ever…
tqa | January 11, 2010
As you might have seen, there's a fitness challenge going on here at ScienceBlogs. A few years ago, when I first started blogging here, my non-participation in any fitness-related activity would have been a safe bet. But that was then.
Over the last couple of years, I've come to realize that the numbers coming off the blood pressure cuff were not actually figments of the doctor's crazed imagination. I've also started to recognize that the number "2" should not be appearing in my weight twice, and it probably shouldn't be the first digit in the number. I've finally acknowledged, in other…
palmd | January 11, 2010Yesterday I wrote a piece expressing some concerns about a physician's practice featured in the news recently. Dr. John Crisler is a self-described anti-aging and men's health physician. A couple of my concerns regarded his prescribing practices and his possible practice of distance medicine.
From closer perusal of his site it would appear that he may not require the use of his pharmacy, but he does charge his patients to send prescriptions to pharmacies other than his own. It's not unreasonable to charge patients for the use of your time, but I feel very uncomfortable with what amounts to…
palmd | January 11, 2010The shamans of stupidity over at Huffington Post recently wrote a completely insane article whining about how unfair it is that science keeps winning. Orac did his usual best to illustrate how bizarre these folks are (and how wrong). But I also love the comments to the piece. They were an interesting mix of jaws hitting the floor in shock at the inanity, and "crank magnetism", as other idiots piled on science, which despite its successes must somehow bow to an alternative magical belief system. This comment was the best (broken down for your convenience):
Having been trained in the…
j7uy5 | January 11, 2010Those of us who watch the drug development pipeline have been pining
for a nonaddictive anti-anxiety drug. Occasionally there are
glimmers of hope. One candidate is
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emapunil">emapunil, aka XBD-173
or AC-5216. In 2004, there was an article in the British
Journal of Pharmacology about this. That article described
promising findings, in rats and mice. Now, there is an article in
Science that finally show some findings in humans.
href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1575165/">Antianxiety
and antidepressant-like effects of AC-5216, a…
oracknows | January 11, 2010Being a Doctor Who fan and all, I've often wondered what it would be like to be able to travel through time and visit times and places in history that I'm most interested in. For instance, being a World War II buff, I'd certainly want to be able to check out what every day life was like here in the U.S. during World War II. Given my affinity for psychedelic music and that I was only four years old during most of the Summer of Love, I'd think it cool to check out Haight-Ashbury, although I suspect my reaction to the reality of it would be similar to that of George Harrison when he checked it…
palmd | January 10, 2010An interesting discussion has been going on over at TerraSig. Abel used his expertise in pharmacology to help explain some of the nearly-inexplicable events that led to the injury of dozens and deaths of several participants in a sweat lodge ceremony. The investigation led to a Michigan physician who runs a "men's health" practice and pharmacy. The leader of the sweat lodge ceremony was apparently found to have prescription medications prescribed by and purchased from this doctor.
The medications were putatively for "anti-aging" and "low testosterone" treatments. It would clearly be…
terrasig | January 10, 2010Our post on drugs and documents found in the Sedona resort room occupied by self-help guru James Ray requires a correction and a clarification related to the Michigan doctor of osteopathy who, according to publicly-available records, prescribed some of the drugs as detailed in these publicly-available documents.
1. Correction: Dr. John Crisler was referred to as an "Internet physician from Michigan." To be clear, he is a physician with an office in Lansing, Michigan, with an internet presence at allthingsmale.com. On his website, he lists an "Office Visit Fee - Office or Virtual" for $60.00…
oracknows | January 9, 2010As regular readers know, I really like Tim Minchin's take on skepticism in general and on alternative medicine in particular. His piece de resistance thus far in his career is a "nine minute beat poem" entitled Storm, in which at a dinner party our performer is forced to deal with a female version of Mike Adams spewing nonsense about "natural remedies," how "science doesn't know everything," how "there's more" than just the material world and "you can't know anything," and how big pharma is just out for profit. Minchin's slapdown of this woo-filled nonsense is epic and hilarious.
It turns out…
oracknows | January 9, 2010I've said it before, and I've said it more times than I can remember. Purveyors of unscientific medicine don't have the goods. If they had the goods, then their nostrums wouldn't be called "alternative" medicine anymore; they'd just be medicine. Because they don't have the goods in the form of science and clinical evidence, all that leaves is to attack those who criticize their lack of science and clinical evidence. Most recently, we saw this in the reaction of the British Chiropractic Association, which is suing Simon Singh over the most bogus of reasons, and in the grande dame of the anti-…
oracknows | January 9, 2010So many adherents to "alternative" medicine detest modern medicine, which they see as not being "natural." In contrast, herbalism, homeopathy, acupuncture, various forms of "energy healing," are touted as being highly in tune with nature. They're right about one thing. Throughout the vast majority of human history, humans have relied on unscientific treatments for illness that were indeed much more "in tune" with nature (mainly because they didn't have the knowledge to do much else). Indeed, it's only been in the last 100 to 150 years that science advanced to the point where real advancements…
oracknows | January 8, 2010I realize that I haven't done an installment of Your Friday Dose of Woo for a while--well over a month, in fact. Because of the gap between woo installments, I had been thinking that today was the time. There are at least a couple of really good candidates (and a host of halfway decent ones) in my Folder of Woo. However, sadly, another installment in the unfortunately never-ending story of YFDoW will have to wait at least another week. You see, the Bat Signal went up (or should I call it the Woo Signal?), and duty calls. What is the particular instance of someone being wrong on the Internet…
oracknows | January 7, 2010I've been criticizing the grande dame of the anti-vaccine movement, Barbara Loe Fisher, for her cowardly attempt to shut up vaccine expert Dr. Paul Offit and to intimidate journalists into not writing exposes of the anti-vaccine movement by suing Dr. Offit, Amy Wallace, and WIRED Magazine for Wallace's excellent article in which Dr. Offit was quoted as saying "She lies" about Loe Fisher. Such is her commitment to free speech that she is trying to shut down criticism through legal bullying.
That's why Barbara Loe Fisher's latest screed overloaded yet another of my irony meters and sizzled that…
palmd | January 7, 2010As we mentioned earlier, Barbara Loe Fisher, founder of the infectious disease promotion group NVIC, is suing a bunch of people for "defaming" her.
Today she posted a piece at Age of Autism entitled, "2010 Needs A Fearless Conversation About Vaccination." She is suing a nationally-known vaccine expert, the reporter who interviewed him, and the magazine which ran the story about vaccination.
So much for fearless conversation.