Ripoff
You may have heard that the FDA recently concluded that a common ingredient in over-the-counter cold medicines doesn ' t work. That ' s a gift link to a NYT essay byRandy C. Hatton andLeslie Hendeles. This may not seem like such a big deal in itself, but there was never any good evidence that it worked in the first place and pharmacologists have been telling the FDA that it doesn ' t work for decades. The fact is that a lot of over-the-counter products that have FDA approval probably don ' t work. Oh, and by the way just about 100% of the so-called " supplements " and homeopathic " remedies " don ' t work either.Thes...
Source: Stayin' Alive - September 29, 2023 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
TikTok Panic Threatens Speech
Will DuffieldTikTok is a social media app that hosts short ‐form videos and serves them to users via algorithm. Because TikTok is owned by the Chinese tech firm ByteDance, its surging popularity with teenagers and young adults in America has prompted concerns that it could be used for illicit data gathering and influence operations. These concerns, and a broader crisis of confidence in American culture, have launched host of proposals to ban TikTok. A ban would frustrate the many millions of Americans who use TikTok to express themselves, and efforts to crush the app risk giving the government new power...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - April 21, 2023 Category: American Health Authors: Will Duffield Source Type: blogs
What Would John Henry Rauch Do Today As A HIT Entrepreneur?
BY MIKE MAGEE
Health entrepreneurs today tend to give themselves very high grades, and seem surprised when their creations fall short of expectations due to a disconnect with funders or regulators with legal authority. But Medicine isn’t fair, and genius is not that common.
What other conclusion can you draw from the thousands of references and citations featuring Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush and his wild ideas on how to heroically treat Yellow Fever in 1793, but likely never heard of Dr. John Henry Rauch. The former signed the Declaration of Independence but directly or indirectly contributed to many an un...
Source: The Health Care Blog - March 8, 2023 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Ryan Bose-Roy Tags: Health Tech Benjamin Rush John Henry Rauch Mike Magee public health sanitation Source Type: blogs
More on pseudoscience and other nonsense
Homeopathy was not invented by hippies of New Age mystics. It was first propounded in 1796 by a German named Samuel Hahnemann. It became popular in the U.S. in the 19th Century, understandably so. As homeopathy does absolutely nothing, it was superior to most medical treatments of the time. There were even homeopathic medical schools. But, in the 20th Century, as scientific understanding of health and disease emerged, homeopathy was discredited by the medical profession and became a fringe practice. Nevertheless it persists. Among the prominent proponents of homeopathy was His Royal Highness Charles, Prince of W...
Source: Stayin' Alive - October 24, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Clinical Trials 101: A digression
I ' m going to take a break from explaining the right way to do clinical trials to say a bit about a really, terribly, awful bad way to do it.That would be homeopathy. The link is to a piece about a consumer organization that is suing CVS for putting homeopathic " remedies " on the shelf next to actual over the counter medications that might do something useful. (A lot of them don ' t really either but that ' s another story.)First there ' s the question of biological plausibility. Homeopathy is radically and irremediably inconsistent with everything we know about physics, chemistry and biology. If we believe everyth...
Source: Stayin' Alive - October 21, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Iatrogenic disinformation
The Covid pandemic brought nuts with M.D. degrees out of the woodwork. Of course they were always around -- Viz. Mehmet Oz, who had a popular TV show he used to spread medical disinformation for years. Many physicians signed a petition to have has medical license pulled, or for Columbia to fire him, but neither happened. Now Richard Baron and Yul Ejnes in NEJM discuss the problem of how licensing boards should respond to physicians who spread disinformation, notably by social media since most of them don ' t have a TV show. (Of course, some of them worked for the Trump Administration and currently work for Ron DeSantis, a ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - July 7, 2022 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
On the bias of science: a digression
This series has elicited a couple of what I consider idiotic and unpublishable comments to the effect that I have just proved why people don ' t trust science. This is a basic problem in science communication to the general public that is much discussed. Here ' s my two cents.The problem is that scientists are generally reluctant to make highly definitive statements. Science is a continuously progressive endeavor and it ' s not uncommon for what we thought we knew yesterday to turn out to be not quite right today. Many conclusions are probabilistic - we ' re 90% or 95% sure of something. Sometimes an association holds unde...
Source: Stayin' Alive - July 22, 2021 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Respect for Science
I vaguely remember discussing some of this before, but anyway . . . Throughout most of the 19th Century, despite the dramatic advances of science in many areas, nobody gained any useful understanding of human health and disease, and effective therapies were largely lacking. In fact, physicians -- medical school graduates -- advocated bloodletting and violent purging with mercury based emetics and laxatives. For obvious reasons, most people preferred other healing methods, which didn ' t work either but at least didn ' t kill you. Hospitals were just places where poor people went to die. So what happened to ...
Source: Stayin' Alive - July 5, 2021 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Epistemology III: The Scientific Method
Okay, here ' s the dirty secret: there is no such thing. Scientists use many different methods. Some methods are characteristic of certain disciplines, while within disciplines there may be groups of scientists who specialize in or emphasize various methods. This is territory I fear to tread because it can give people some wrong ideas, also because it ' s quite complicated, but I ' ll try to keep it simple and be careful about walling off the wrong ideas.In fact philosophers have found it very difficult to define science, or to clearly distinguish it from non-science or pseudo-science. Despite the pretensions of some, scie...
Source: Stayin' Alive - May 11, 2021 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Testicular Rejuvenation Therapy for Treating Azoospermia
The ability of IVF specialists to fool their patients continues to boggle my mind. One of the most frustrating unsolved problems in reproductive medicine is that of primary testicular failure . The man hasazoospermia ( zerosperm count) because his testes do not work properly. Spermatogenesis ( sperm production) is impaired, and we do not know why and cannot do anything about this.There have been many experiments with in vitro spermatogenesis, where researchers have tried to create sperm from sperm precursors (spermatogonia and spermatocytes) in the laboratory , but none of these have worked . These patients are understanda...
Source: Dr.Malpani's Blog - December 10, 2020 Category: Reproduction Medicine Source Type: blogs
Testicular Rejuvenation Therapy for Treating Azoospermia because of testicular failure
The ability of IVF specialists to fool their patients continues to boggle my mind. One of the most frustrating unsolved problems in reproductive medicine is that of primary testicular failure . The man hasazoospermia ( zerosperm count) because his testes do not work properly. Spermatogenesis ( sperm production) is impaired, and we do not know why and cannot do anything about this.There have been many experiments with in vitro spermatogenesis, where researchers have tried to create sperm from sperm precursors (spermatogonia and spermatocytes) in the laboratory , but none of these have worked . These patients are understanda...
Source: Dr.Malpani's Blog - December 10, 2020 Category: Reproduction Medicine Source Type: blogs
Freeze Peach
Many people seem confused about the concept of freedom of speech. The First Amendment literally constrains only congress. Here it is:Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.The courts generally understand that this also constrains the executive, since there cannot in principle be a law that gives the executive (i.e. the president) the power to violate these prohibitions. Subsequently, the 14th A...
Source: Stayin' Alive - October 28, 2020 Category: American Health Source Type: blogs
Why p values can ’ t tell you what you need to know and what to do about it
Conclusions in the 2017 paper).
If you were willing to assume a 50:50 prior chance of there being a real effect the p = 0.005 would correspond to FPR50 = 0.034, which sounds satisfactory (from Table, above, or web calculator).
But if, for example, you are testing a hypothesis about teleportation or mind-reading or homeopathy then you probably wouldn’t be willing to give a prior of 50% to that being right before the experiment. If the prior probability of there being a real effect were 0.1, rather than 0.5, the Table above shows that observation of p = 0.005 would suggest, in my example, FPR = 0.24 an...
Source: DC's goodscience - October 18, 2020 Category: Science Authors: David Colquhoun Tags: Uncategorized P values seminars statistics Source Type: blogs
COVID-19: Hidden Coinfections and Chain Reactions Parasitic Infectious Relationships within Us
By SIMON YU, MD, LT COL, USA (Ret)
Dr. Tom Frieden, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), opened up a new front in the Coronavirus War by saying we don’t just need to treat the acute disease, we need to treat the underlying conditions that make people more susceptible to serious disease progression. He focused on heart disease, and managing mitigating risk factors such as CVD, diabetes, hypertension and smoking in order to increase people’s odds for recovery. The initial focus has been pneumonia and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), with risk factors including asthma, chr...
Source: The Health Care Blog - April 15, 2020 Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Christina Liu Tags: COVID-19 CDC chronic disease holistic care Pandemic SDoH Source Type: blogs
Hahnemann University Hospital Closing; 570 Residents Stranded
Very disturbing recent news is that historicHahnemann University Hospital in Philadelphia is now scheduled to be shut down in early September (see:Hahnemann University Hospital to Close, Leaving Thousands Out of Work), Below is an excerpt from the article:Historic Hahnemann University Hospital in Center City, Philadelphia, is slated to close later this summer....Nurses and other employees were told the hospital on North Broad Street is slated to close on Sept. 6....The closure would leave around 800 union nurses and about 3,000 total employees out of work, said the union, which represents around 8,500 nurses across the sta...
Source: Lab Soft News - July 9, 2019 Category: Laboratory Medicine Authors: Bruce Friedman Tags: Healthcare Business Healthcare Delivery Hospital Financial Medical Education Public Health Quality of Care Source Type: blogs
