Look, it’s one thing to list the beliefs of people with who you disagree. It can even be an invaluable lesson for those who want to understand both sides of a debate. But Adams isn’t interested in anything but the voices in his head and lacking Chopra’s skills in ephemeral technobabble and eloquence, his litany of the evil ideas of those who dare doubt his brilliance in all medical and pharmacological methods reads more like a spit in the face by an angry zealot. Oh and there are no links or sources to support his assertions, but that’s just fine. His fans take his word as absolute truth after applying their double standard to nonsense like this…

Skeptics believe that ALL vaccines are safe and effective (even if they’ve never been tested), that ALL people should be vaccinated, even against their will, and that there is NO LIMIT to the number of vaccines a person can be safely given.

Yes, we’re all slavish believers in the magic of vaccines, so much so that the FDA requires testing of any new or modified vaccines before they’re approved and vaccines that fail to show at least 70% efficacy are deemed to be mediocre at best and usually discarded. Vaccines have also been pulled from the market the minute we hear a report about a statistically notable side-effect which has been shown to be linked to vaccines. And just to make this accusation a perfect example of Adams’ glaring hypocrisy, we should note that his regimens and concoctions have never been clinically tested due to his paranoid fear of an FDA conspiracy against him, but he assures that everything he sells is 100% safe and 100% effective. Pot, this is kettle, come in pot…

Skeptics believe that fluoride chemicals derived from the scrubbers of coal-fired power plants are really good for human health. They’re so good, in fact, that they should be dumped into the water supply so that everyone is forced to drink those chemicals, regardless of their current level[s] of exposure to fluoride from other sources.

And his source for the origin of fluoride in our drinking water are what again? Ah, right. He doesn’t need any of those pesky sources because that’s what skeptics use. Other than that, it seems like a perfectly rational and reasonable stance to say that a successful attempt to reduce tooth decay in developed nations is just voodoo by polluters and ignoramuses. Plus since no one has access to commercial water filters sold for a few bucks at your nearest supermarket, we’re all absolutely forced to drink these evil chemicals. Ok, no, not really.

Skeptics believe that many six-month-old infants need antidepressant drugs. In fact, they believe that people of all ages can be safely given an unlimited number of drugs all at the same time: Antidepressants, cholesterol drugs, blood pressure drugs, diabetes drugs, anti-anxiety drugs, sleeping drugs and more — simultaneously!

Mike, you’re been talking to those strange voices a wee bit too long since just going down to a pharmacy could prove this assertion as nothing more than ignorant tripe. If it was really safe to give kids the same medication as adults, why would there be lower dose pediatric formulations? And if it was really safe to give people all the drugs in the world at the same time, why do pharmacy technicians try as hard as they can to flag adverse drug interactions and warn patients and doctors if taking an anti-depressant and painkillers could be dangerous?

Skeptics believe the human body has no ability to defend itself against invading microorganisms and that the only things that can save people from viral infections are vaccines.

And the parade of blithering inanity rolls on. There are some 1,300 bacteria and viruses that cause disease and yet, vaccines only tackle a tiny percentage of them. Plus, what is the scientific approach to colds and flu- like diseases? Take some pills to soothe the symptoms while your body kicks that virus’ microscopic tail end with killer T cells. Vaccinations are designed to prevent diseases that can cause lifelong complications or we simply can’t handle on our own as history has shown. Oh and here’s the kicker. Vaccines work only because we have such a powerful immune system since instead of defending us from disease directly they… wait for it… train out immune system how to kill them more effectively. If skeptics really believed the nonsense which resides the dusty cobwebs of Mike’s underutilized mind, there would be no scientific rationale for vaccines in the first place. This isn’t just a hit and a miss. This is not even wrong.

Skeptics believe that pregnancy is a disease and childbirth is a medical crisis. (They’re opponents of natural childbirth.)

I wonder, does he mean that kind of natural childbirth that was one of the biggest killers of women until we’ve mastered the germ theory of disease and sanitary practices? The kind that was insanely dangerous for both the mother and the baby by modern standards? And if women deliver babies safely and with much less pain, how could it possibly harm the child to be born into a medically advanced world that has cures for many of the things that will ail him or her throughout the next 70 to 80 years, vs. the 40 to 50 less than a century ago? Mike is just being an idiot at this point. Sorry, I meant more of an idiot.

Skeptics do not believe in hypnosis. This is especially hilarious since they are all prime examples of people who are easily hypnotized by mainstream influences.

As opposed to the alt med faithful who believe that anything advertised with the words “natural” or “organic” is immediately safer, better and more effective than medication that spent a decade in testing, development and had a successful public release? No, this is not another case of projection that would make Freud himself rise from his grave, point his bony finger at Adams and yell “aha!” to today’s psychologists. Not at all…

There’s more nonsense in the article but as you can see, every single statement is utterly wrong in ways that lets me know that if facts came to life in the form of a vicious dog and slammed its jaws around his nose, Mike wouldn’t recognize them if he used every working brain cell left in the wet tissue between his ears. But hey, he makes a good living off lying, scamming and slandering those who have the audacity to challenge his ideas so he really doesn’t have to be intellectually honest or scientifically sound as long as he issues the good old Quack Miranda of the DSHEA and vomits forth woefully ignorant and ridiculous caricatures of all his doubters. Until someone gets hurt and sues him for selling worthless cures and lying through his teeth that is…

[ illustration by Sven Prim ]

You see, homeopaths, naturists and faith healers like reiki practitioners, reject or just ignore the modern germ theory of disease, the whacky notion that microorganisms like bacteria and viruses attack your body and make you sick in the process. Instead, they focus on ideas dating back to ancient times. Your body has a balance so whenever you get sick, it means your balance has been tipped and must be restored with touching, needles, magical water or just plain old faith healing. Makes perfect sense, right? I mean it’s not as if antibiotics and an advanced understanding of microorganisms save millions of lives on an annual basis and were responsible for nearly doubling the average life expectancy of people in the developed world along with sanitary conditions and better nutrition… Oh wait. they were? And the disruptions of the four humors…? Really? No such thing? So the whole thing about restoring natural balances is just taking a 300 year step back in medicine?

Now that we got the snark out of our system, let’s consider the position of today’s medical quacks. Clearly, the references to toxic miasmas and the “dis-eases” caused by either the disturbances in the balance of our four humors, the bad alignment of our chakras, or a drop in our qi, aren’t going to do it since they’re covered in any history class as outdated ideas which held sway only due to the lack of proper equipment and sound science. If they’re going to be effective, they need something that sounds more scientific and this is when Einstein and a famous, instantly recognizable equation of his are abducted by the forces of woo and subjected to the kinds of verbal torment that would’ve probably made poor Albert swear off science for good. As we’ve seen before in a terrifying example of physics abuse by Charlene Werner, the correlation between energy and mass is used to justify that we’re all just energy and by manipulating this energy, we can cure disease, live longer, healthier lives and even prevent illness, in a manner similar to this…

“I’m a Reiki Master,” she told the crowd. “I use energy to heal. I was skeptical, too. My father’s a doctor, my brother’s a doctor, my husband’s a doctor. I was actually a little contemptuous of Reiki at first. But life is energy. The difference between those body organs over there and you is energy. Everything is energy.” Using Einstein’s world-changing equation to make her point, Mrs. Oz said, “Physics has evolved. It’s not the old mechanistic model anymore. But medicine hasn’t.”

If you’re wondering who this Mrs. Oz is, you may be in for a little surprise. She’s the wife of Oprah’s TV doctor Mehmet Oz, a surgeon who plunged deep into the profitable world of woo. So while Mrs. Oz is trying to give a scientific backing for her beliefs that faith healing that combines Christianity with Eastern mysticism into a few touching exercises and breathing methods, is somehow as effective as modern medicine, she takes a rather bold plunge into the inane territory so richly mined by the aforementioned Charlene Werner. Note that if those who trot out the “everything is energy” argument to justify their woo actually spent even a few minutes doing a little math using the very formula they want to shout from the rooftops, they would know that a rather average, 75 kilogram person would put out around 6.7 EJ, or exajoules, i.e. the equivalent of 1.6 billion tons of TNT.

Applying this fact across the global population of almost 7 billion people would yield roughtly 4.6 × 10²⁸ J or if you prefer, 11 billion gigatons, enough to turn the surface of our planet unto an uninhabitable wasteland if we were to release it in one, huge blast. Which we’d have to if we’re all just energy as is being claimed here. The kind of power wielded by a reiki practitioner should strike fear into the hearts of generals because it would be measured in hundreds of megatons and could wipe entire cities off the map. Then again, it could all just be a flimsy excuse for making a few ritualized gestures and telling patients that this will heal them from everything under the sun before handing them an invoice for providing nothing but technobabble and a mental placebo. I would certainly lean towards the second scenario considering what the very equation they use as proof of the great energies they control say about their claims.

Here’s the simple moral of the story. If you’re going to talk about religious notions of mystical auras flowing in and around human bodies, it’s a very bad idea to confuse them with the energy described by modern physics, that is the ability of a system to do work. All you’ll end up doing is throwing out an equation which could easily prove that you’re clueless on the topic, or explain that your remedies are actually radioactive hazmat, while blissfully unaware of what you’ve just done in your quest to justify the woo that pays your bills…

[ illustration by KcaudesiGn ]

If you think this is some random passage stuffed in by a special interest group, you’d be only half right since it was crafted by Sen. Orrin Hatch and was supported by the late Ed Kennedy. Also trying to lend his credentials is the man who spectacularly fumbled his way out of a potential presidency, Sen. John Kerry. Why would Kerry and Edwards support a bill forcing insurers to cover faith healing? Because their home state is also the HQ of the so-called Christian Science movement which thinks that prayer can be just efficient as actual medicine so an already tax exempt organization collecting $20 to $40 per prayer session and impromptu Bible study would also get checks from insurance companies. And that’s on top of the fact that the IRS will already allow patients of their squad of faith healers to deduct their expenses as medical in nature. Oh and here’s the punchline…

“We are making the case for [faith treatment], believing there is a connection between healthcare and spirituality,” said Davis, who distributed 11,000 letters last week to Senate officials urging [for] support on the measure.

“We think this is an important aspect of the solution, when you are talking about not only keeping the cost down, but finding effective healthcare,” he said.

Fantastic! We’ll get to lower the costs of healthcare by strong-arming insurance companies into ignoring their guidelines and covering treatment methods that failed utterly against everything from the flu, to tuberculosis, to the Black Plague over the last 5,000 years. And then, when they have to pay for people getting real treatment in the next hospital room as well, guess who’s premiums they’ll raise? Yours. There’s a good reason insurers are loath to cover pseudoscientific and alt med woo unless they’re forced to by law. It doesn’t work and they end up paying for sick people turning themselves into medical experiments for quacks who don’t have a clue what they’re doing. In the end, they lose money and have to boost premiums to cover the added risk.

Also, pardon my dabbling in law here since I’m not an attorney (my education in law consists of AP Civics and an introductory course in college), but wouldn’t the federal government mandating faith healing run contrary to the Establishment Clause? The idea that prayer is as effective as medical treatment is purely a statement of faith and thus falls into the realm of religion. And according to the Constitution, lawmakers can’t make any law which gives a nod of approval to a religious institution. Unless of course they’re willing to unload a giant can of very nasty worms and let every faith healer, sleazy televangelist and profiteering witch doctor bill their patients’ insurance companies and raising our already out of control healthcare costs. Forget all that scaremongering about government death panels in the nation’s medical overhaul. I’d be far more scared of this and at the risk of sounding alarmist, I think you should be concerned as well.

The short version of the story is that an article written by Singh took issue with some chiropractors’ claims of treating illnesses and conditions with no evidence for the efficacy of their methods and asked why the BCA, or the British Chiropractic Association, allows its members to advertise treatments that were bogus as far as the science was concerned. In response, the BCA sued Singh for libel and has made pretty much every effort to cover their tracks, then justify their claims with cherry-picked data after a solid year of being shouted down by skeptical bloggers and groups in the UK, and make themselves look as desperate and malicious as they possibly could. The big problem is that libel laws in UK place the burden of proof on the defendant rather than the plaintiff which means that rather than having to prove that they were indeed defamed, the BCA could just haul Singh to court and force him to defend his words to the tune of tens of thousands of pounds sterling. And that’s exactly what they did.

Now, after over a year of fighting and having sunk £100,000 into legal fees, Singh wrote an op-ed in which he gives his British readers a dire warning. The backwards libel laws used by courts in the UK are being used by various cranks and quacks to intimidate and silence bloggers and scientists into submission. Question a big shot homeopath without the legal resources to fight his army of lawyers and lose every last penny in your bank account. Post a scathing critique on your blog and have it taken down by hosts threatened with legal action. By making it so easy to use the law to protect the wallets of pseudoscientists and quacks, the UK is allowing the people who should be subject to criticism and public scrutiny to be the bullies on the playground. Worse of all, the government might be putting people in danger. When it becomes too risky to warn the public that what they’re buying is dangerous, ineffective or just a scam, the quacks, cranks and those who profit from them will get far more victims than they would without a skeptical voice there to do the necessary reality check.

There’s still hope for Simon Singh’s case. He was recently granted the right to appeal a ruling against him and can continue the fight to preserve his reputation, though he’ll have to spend even more on trying to rebuke the BCA’s attacks. However what would really help matters is a change in UK’s bizarre libel laws to defend the freedom of speech in the media, allow skeptics to take on harmful quackery and pseudoscience without fear of malicious retribution, and make those who use intimidation and this form of indirect censorship to protect their cash flow come up with evidence or stop wasting the courts’ and the writers’ time and money. And as odd as it sounds, you could help in bringing this change around. Sense About Science, a group dedicated to keep libel laws out of scientific discussions in the UK, is looking for help in its mission. If you can help them make their case, make a donation, or offer any kind of expert assistance, do it by all means. Your contribution could make a difference for Singh and any other blogger, writer or academic who wants to inform the public about a case of bad science or potentially dangerous quackery.

[ illustration from a Brazilian anti-censorship ad ]

So let’s think about this. You’re an executive of a major drug maker and you’re dealing with product that could take several decades to reach the market after extensive trials, reviews and an average investment of around $800 million. Oh and your potential product might never reach the market or make it into final trials and end up as nothing more than a very expensive waste of time. After trying to figure out what markets you could possibly target with your R&D program, you get word that there’s magical water or miraculous plants and juices able to cure everything from the common cold to an advanced case of Ebola. What’s more, you can find all the basics for making these treatments in the produce section of a local supermarket and that people are already going out and spending between 33 and 50% of your total market value on this stuff already.

Of course, before you hear the chime of the cash register in your head and greedily rub your hands together as your pupils turn into dollar signs, there’s a snag to consider. None of this stuff is proven to work. While all your medications are sold only after stringent due diligence and an approval by a government agency, all these alt med remedies are sold as food, exempt from the same standards as you by a special law. Granted, approval by the FDA doesn’t mean your drug is perfect or that everyone who takes it will benefit. But at least you have to prove that it’s better than a placebo and doesn’t pose any immediate danger to those who will take it. No such reviews apply to homeopaths or naturists who freely sell their wears under the protection of the DHSEA. And when their treatments are actually analyzed by researchers and pitted against conventional medicine, they’re shown as no better than a placebo time and time again, miserably failing the standards for drug efficacy.

This is why over the same year as alt med spending was tracked in the report, Americans spent $287 billion on drugs that actually do more than make them feel hopeful that it’s working. While drug companies could be making a good deal of money by legitimizing and popularizing alternative medicine, they can’t sell treatments that do nothing. Even though they could save hundreds of millions in R&D by piggybacking on reports from alt med practitioners and going straight to manufacturing the products, they would never get FDA approval if they intend to sell them as genuine, legitimate treatments for a particular disease. Why do you think homeopaths and naturists like to talk about “holistic health” and “treating the person rather than the symptoms?” Because the minute they claim to treat a specific disease, the FDA will demand proof, their lucrative loophole vanishes, and they’re left to the mercy of doctors, medical bureaucrats and scientists just like any drug maker.

As it turns out, the correlation is there and unfortunately, it’s negative. Children who see alternative medicine providers are up to 75% more likely not to receive the four major vaccines intended to prepare their immune systems against chicken pox, diphtheria, mumps, measles and hepatitis among other infections. And even worse, they were notably more likely to be diagnosed with a preventable childhood disease when compared to kids who were treated by conventional doctors and received their vaccine regimen. The best case scenario found that children treated by chiropractors were 25% less likely to get their shots which is not good, but it’s a drastic improvement over the aforementioned three quarters of pediatric patients treated by naturopaths.

Yes, a study that uses insurance claims is inherently limited in the information it can collect and there is the possibility that vaccinations were done without the companies’ involvement. However, given the high costs of medical care, it’s not likely that the omissions were all that drastic. It’s cheaper to have insurers who already cover vaccinations to a significant extent, pay for them than to shell out for them yourself. And as was noted by Orac, the study can’t be taken to mean that alternative medicine practitioners are actively deterring patients in their care from getting their kids vaccinated. Quite a few people who go to naturists or chiropractors who still ascribe to the idea that alignments of the spine cause all disease rather that those who simply say they can help you with your back pain, already have a deep seeded suspicion of conventional medicine in general.

However, there are cases of homeopaths trying to scare potential patients with stories about how evil and dangerous vaccines can be. We also know that naturism and other types of medical woo reject the reliable and successfully used germ theory in favor of vitalism and the ever ill-defined “aggregate toxicity,” so for them, vaccines are either a menace or totally useless. Even if they don’t outright reject the merit of vaccinations, it’s not very likely that they’ll be rushing patients to get their regimens. Let’s remember that alternative medicine is a business that makes billions of dollars in selling unregulated treatments exempt from FDA review thanks to the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 which treats alt med products as food rather than a medical treatment. When naturists and homeopaths attack conventional evidence-based medicine as limited, useless against numerous diseases, narrow-minded, arrogant, poisonous and profit-minded, they’re really protecting their income in a rather callous and hypocritical way.

When it comes to vaccines, we know that while they’re not perfect, they work. We have volumes of evidence for how effective they are, which is why we rely on them to control dozens of diseases. However, on the other side of the debate, we have people who deal in fears rather than fact and go by stubborn personal opinions on a subject they know very little about. And even worse, alongside them we have quacks who promote anti-vaxer rumors and accusations for their personal gain while hypocritically accusing doctors of giving vaccination only for the sake of profit. Together, they seem firmly committed to slam over half a century of radical progress into reverse, obliviously unaware of just how dangerous their proposition really is. All doctors want to do is infuse us with potential defenses for as widespread diseases and vaccines are the best technology we have at the moment. Why should those of us who have nothing to gain from it attack their goal of helping us live a longer and better life by training our immune systems?

See: Downey, L., Tyree P., Huebner, C., Lafferty, W. (2009). Pediatric Vaccination and Vaccine-Preventable Disease Acquisition: Associations with Care by Complementary and Alternative Medicine Providers Maternal and Child Health Journal DOI: 10.1007/s10995-009-0519-5

Beloved actor Patrick Swayze died yesterday evening after a 20-month battle with pancreatic cancer. Having put his faith in conventional chemotherapy, he largely dismissed ideas that nutrition, superfoods or “alternative medicine” might save him, instead betting his life on the chemotherapy approach which seeks to poison the body into a state of remission instead of nourishing it into a state of health. [...]

Could Patrick Swayze have saved his own life with natural medicine? Absolutely. Without question. Even late-stage pancreatic cancer can be reversed (yes, reversed) with full-on naturopathic treatments involving Chinese herbal medicine, deep body detoxification that includes sweat saunas and colon cleansing, radical changes in diet from “dead” foods to “live” foods, a healthy dose of vitamin D and the daily consumption of raw anti-cancer living juices made from fresh, organic produce like cabbage, broccoli and garlic.

Obviously Mike has never actually seen or dealt with a pancreatic cancer patient or talked to an actual doctor with a real medical degree. Pancreatic cancer is an extremely aggressive disease that’s very difficult to detect early enough to treat with any chance of success and the prognosis for those diagnosed is usually very poor. While the brightest minds in oncology work on cutting edge research in targeting and suppressing tumors to save lives, this bozo is actually talking about sweating and eating veggies as the ultimate cure for any cancer, and accusing drug companies of “keeping natural cures a big secret” so they can make more money? This is inexcusable idiocy that should carry with it legal responsibility and it’s inane on every level, from the science to the business. Nothing about his statements makes any logical sense when put in relevant context.

Imagine for a moment that just eating vegetables cures any Stage IV cancer. Do you have any idea how fast a pharmaceutical company would be packaging and selling whatever enzymes suppress tumor activity? You’d hear a sonic boom as the scientists rush to their labs with lettuce, carrots and broccoli and executives would be giving speeches on how they can not only supply a cure for cancer, but they don’t need to spend billions of dollars on developing a new drug, just cover the costs of production. Big Pharma is and always has been into making easy money and vegetable extracts as cancer cures is about as easy as it gets. For them to keep this a secret so they could plow tens of billions of dollars into oncology research that may or may not pan out and probably won’t be able to cover the development costs, makes absolutely no sense. Either Big Pharma execs and the vast army of researchers they employ are clueless, or Adams simply doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Call me crazy but I’m willing to bet on the latter.

From a scientific standpoint, Mike’s claims are basically just a string of meaningless alt med buzzwords that are of absolutely no use to any doctor with a grip on what actually causes diseases. What toxins should we be getting rid of? What are they? How did we get them? How do we live with them in between diseases? What’s the toxin accumulation threshold? Nobody in the alt med world knows. They just invoke this stuff to sound like they actually studied something that passes the smell test of scientific jargon. Likewise, what are all of these potent anti-cancer juices? How do they work? How have they been tested? What’s the active ingredient? And if this stuff works as well as Adams vows it does, where are all the people who were cured by his therapy? How come we don’t see them on National Geographic or featured in the news? Big Pharma conspiracy? Uh-uh. In the real world, you’re going to have to do better than that. Appeals to conspiracy are the adult version of saying that the dog ate your homework. Even if it did, you should be able to re-write it.

By the way, has Mike ever heard of Steve Jobs who tried to treat his pancreatic cancer with alternative and folk medicine only to realize that his only chance to survive was a surgery by real doctors? Of course he has! He even tried to give public health advice to Jobs on his blog, admitting he didn’t have access to the relevant medical data but without letting such little things as zero medical training or knowing the patient’s history get in the way of going in with both barrels loaded with pure insipidity. So even in the face of evidence that alternative medicine is useless against a serious disease which requires attention from actual doctors with a legitimate medical education, he’s still trying to push his pseudo-cures.

Here’s the bottom line. Mike Adams is a good, old-fashioned snake oil salesman. It doesn’t matter whether he really believes what he writes. What matters is that his advice to eschew medicine that actually produces real results in favor of pseudoscience that comes with no explanations and is sold on the basis of vague rhetoric about “toxins” and “poisons” designed to scare patients into trusting their lives to a bunch of quacks, is an inexcusable public health hazard. Has anybody told Mike that selling false hope to people who are seriously ill to line your pockets is just evil and when you ask them not to help themselves to make a buck, it makes you a lesser human being? I wonder what Mike will do if he needs real medical attention. Something tells me that he won’t just be munching on broccoli and giving himself enemas in a sauna…