Denialism Blog

Category: Medicine

  • Medical Hypotheses—"just make shit up; we'll publish it"

    Orac was kind enough to pollute my inbox with the latest idiocy from the journal that has never met a crank it didn’t like. As Orac says, “Medical Hypotheses [is] the journal where the editors encourage the authors to make shit up.”

    Before I tell you about the latest “hypothesis”, let me give you an idea of what kind of thinking goes into this publication. The latest issue has an editorial that argues that it is the “maverick” scientist who makes the real scientific breakthroughs, and that teamwork is only for the “modestly talented”.
    (more…)

  • Eating can be bad for your health. Oh, and don't forget the phages.

    Sure, we have obesity problems in this country, but we also have more direct food safety problems. Summer has brought with it news of the bungled tomato-Salmonella affair, and now, from the Midwest, contaminated beef.

    One of our local supermarket chains has been forced to recall hamburger meat because of over a dozen cases of E. coli-related disease. These cases have occurred over a wide area, and the bacteria are genetically linked, indicating a likely common source.
    (more…)

  • As goes Vermont…

    I hadn’t realized that Vermont has passed a law requiring insurers to cover naturopathic care.

    We’ve covered extensively the quackery that is naturopathy, but really, if a patient chooses to see a quack, it’s their business. But with health care costs soaring, requiring insurers to pay for voodoo is a rather bad idea. Already, many plans cover chiropractic, another unproven treatment. Throwing more health care dollars at more unproved and disproved treatments will help no one (except the quacks who have boat payments to make).

    There are many causes of high costs of health care: we hate the idea of rationing, so many American cities have more MRIs than the whole country of Canada; we incentivize doctors and others to order tests and treatments that may or may not be necessary; we inadequately reimburse preventative care. The list goes on.

    (more…)

  • Watch as Pfizer desperately clings to a patent…

    …instead of focusing on innovation. I’ve written about Pfizer and Lipitor a few times in the last year. Now, Pfizer has found a way to extend its patent on Lipitor, a very profitable drug used in the management of heart disease and high cholesterol.

    Lipitor’s a great drug. It treats high cholesterol very effectively, and is effective as both primary and secondary prevention for cardiovascular disease (there is much more to the story, but that’s it in a nutshell). It’s also costs about $120.00 for a month of therapy, and therapy is usually life-long.

    In contrast, simvastatin, a generic drug, is also effective for primary and secondary prevention (once again, it’s a bit more complicated than that) but is generic and costs between $2.00 and $20.00 per month of therapy.

    Not all statins are created equal. Some have better data in primary or secondary prevention, in coronary artery plaque regression, in reduction of mortality, stroke prevention, side-effect profile…you get the idea.

    What we do know is that statins save lives, and cheap statins probably save lives just as well as expensive ones.

    Pfizer suffered a big setback last year. A trial of a new type of cholesterol medication failed badly (link to my old blog above). Drug development is risky business. But clinging to an old drug by squeezing more time out of a patent is doomed to fail. Insurance companies put a lot of pressure on doctors and patients to prescribe generic alternatives where appropriate, and in the era of high deductibles, patients want the cheaper drug.

    Hopefully, companies like Pfizer will invest more resources in drug discovery and development, and let the market do away with it’s enormous Lipitor profits. After all, if you can keep a patent forever, what use is looking for new drugs?

    Definitions:

    Primary prevention: preventing a first incident (first heart attack, stroke, etc.)

    Secondary prevention    : preventing further events in established disease (subsequent heart attacks, strokes, etc.)

  • Pain, privacy, and safety

    Abel over at TerraSig dug up an interesting story about a man who was “murdered” killed rendered not-living (in the moral if not legal sense) by a “fake chiropractor” (although it’s not clear to me what science separates a “real” from a “fake” chiropractor). One of the commenters wondered if lack of health insurance had driven the man away from standard medical care. Another bemoaned the inadequacy of treatment for chronic pain conditions.

    This got me thinking…
    (more…)

  • Placebo effect, not placebo treatment

    In the course of reading the comments in the last several posts, I’ve come upon many mentions of the “placebo effect”. Steve Novella has a few good posts on the placebo effect, but I’d like to take a look at the clinical view.
    (more…)

  • Goodbye, Mr. Russert

    Tim Russert died suddenly today. I admired his journalism, his ability to press questions that has become so rare. He didn’t seem to suffer from the “two-side-ism” that has become so common in today’s journalism; he realized that some issues don’t have two valid opposing views. But others will eulogize him. I’d like to talk about why he died.
    (more…)

  • Faith Healing in the WSJ

    The WSJ brings us news of increasing opposition to laws that would protect faith healing. Or as I call it, negligence. As usual it has required the death of innocents before people will come to grips with common sense.

    The recent death from untreated diabetes of an 11-year-old Wisconsin girl has invigorated opposition to obscure laws in many states that let parents rely on prayer, rather than medicine, to heal sick children.

    Dale and Leilani Neumann of Weston, Wis., are facing charges of second-degree reckless homicide after their child, Madeline Kara Neumann, died on Easter after slipping into a coma. The death, likely preventable with insulin, has renewed calls for Wisconsin and dozens of other states to strike laws that protect parents who choose prayer alone in lieu of medical treatment.

    I’ll take issue here. “Likely preventable with insulin” should actually be, “completely and totally, unquestionably, preventable with insulin.” In fact for type I diabetics, and critically in diabetic ketoacidosis, the choice really is insulin or death, with no middle ground. You need insulin to live. But I digress.

    Lawyers nationwide say they are eager to see if the Neumann case sparks more changes in state laws. It raises a “national discourse as to whether children can be medically neglected legally,” says Marci Hamilton, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York who writes about children’s rights. In another recent case, a 15-month-old child in Oregon died in March from a form of pneumonia and a blood infection after her parents opted to try to heal her with prayer. Oregon law provides no defense for parents charged with causing the death of a child through neglect or maltreatment, and the couple has been charged with second-degree manslaughter and criminal mistreatment.

    There’s been a small, steady pushback against state provisions protecting spiritual healing. A Massachusetts bill that would have protected parents who used prayer in lieu of medical treatment stalled in committee last year, despite the measure’s broad sponsorship by 33 lawmakers.

    In Maryland, lawmakers in 2005 repealed part of a law that had protected parents from losing custody if they withheld medical treatment because of religious belief. And in Maine that year, legislators amended several laws regarding religious treatment, and repealed part of its family law that stated that children couldn’t automatically be considered abused solely because they were treated “by spiritual means by an accredited practitioner.” Evert Fowle, the district attorney in Augusta, Maine, said the amendments would now allow him to bring charges against guardians should a child be harmed after being treated with prayer alone.

    And here is the question for my readers, although to me it isn’t much of a question at all. Do parents have a duty to their children to protect their health using the best information available? Or does freedom of choice dictate the ability of parents to decide whether their children can live or die based upon unethical human experimentation with prayer or quack therapies? Because that’s what you call it when you take an unproven modality and try it out on someone to see if they get better – experimentation. Did I load that question heavily enough?

    More below the fold:

    (more…)

  • Naturopathy

    My little post on naturopathy was more controversial than I had anticipated. Some of the commenters gently (and otherwise) suggested that I should learn more about the subject, so I’ve been doing a little reading. Here are the basic questions: what is naturopathy, and what might it have to offer that “conventional” medicine lacks?
    (more…)

  • Can't get into med school? Legislate your own doctorate!

    I guess it’s not just doctors watching this one—an alert reader and a fellow SciBling both picked up on this one. Apparently, in my neighboring state of Minnesota (really, check the map), home to Greg Laden, PZ Myers, and lutefisk, doctor wannabes have legislated themselves into “doctorhood”. You see, there is this entity called a “naturopath”, or “naturopathic doctor”, which is some sort of shaman that likes to think that if you study woo long enough, it becomes science.
    (more…)