November 14th, 2009 by David Kroll, Ph.D. in Better Health Network, Quackery Exposed
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Yesterday, the real-life mailbox brought the Pharmboy household the Fall 2009 issue of DukeMedicine connect, a biannual publication on current news from the Duke University Health System. Produced by DUHS Marketing and Creative Services, it “strives to offer current news about health topics of interest” to its readers. This issue is not yet online but you can see the Spring 2009 issue here.
What caught my eye was a cover teaser titled “Detox Delusion” and an article on detoxification diets focusing on an interview with Beth Reardon a nutritionist with Duke Integrative Medicine. (The articles sadly don’t have bylines so I can only give credit to the editor, Kathleen Yount.)
The article focuses on the fallacy of detoxification diets, extreme and sometimes dangerous regimens of purges, enemas, supplements, herbs, with the misguided goal of clearing one’s body of “toxins.” These amorphous toxins are never named, much less denoted with an IUPAC chemical name, but prey upon the fears of our “chemical” environment. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Terra Sigillata - PostRank (PostRank: All)*
November 8th, 2009 by David Kroll, Ph.D. in Better Health Network, News, Quackery Exposed
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I should probably create a new blogpost category just for erectile dysfunction dietary supplements adulterated with authentic or synthetic analogs of prescription phosphodiesterase-5 (PDE5) inhibitors (e.g., Viagra, Cialis).
However, FDA has already created a page for this earlier this year after dozens of companies have been identified as putting real drugs into their erectile dysfunction products.
Do the brains behind these companies not realize that FDA is now monitoring every erectile dysfunction supplement for all manner of PDE5 inhibitors?
Apparently not: Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Terra Sigillata - PostRank (PostRank: All)*
November 2nd, 2009 by David Kroll, Ph.D. in Better Health Network, Quackery Exposed
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One of the most engaging and clearly-written pieces of science journalism over the last year or so was published in Wired magazine last week. Amy Wallace’s, “An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All,” is part interview with rotavirus vaccine developer, pediatric infectious disease physician, Dr Paul Offit, and description of the anti-vaccination movement in the United States.
Wallace’s work is the centerpiece a collection of smaller articles providing science-based information about vaccination that also refutes common anti-vaccination myths including “How To Win An Argument About Vaccines” and “The Misinformants: Prominent Voices in the Anti-Vaccine Crusade”.
Wired’s follow-up discussion of the issue includes, “A Short History of Vaccine Panic,” for those of us who “have a day job” and not enough time to read Paul Offit’s 2008 book, “Autism’s False Prophets.”
Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Terra Sigillata - PostRank (PostRank: All)*
October 10th, 2009 by David Kroll, Ph.D. in Better Health Network, News
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The tweet came just about an hour ago announcing the well-deserved and much-predicted award of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider, and Jack Szostak for their work on “how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase.”
I wrote about this team and their accomplishments three years ago when the won the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research, considered the “American Nobel.”
I said then: Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Terra Sigillata*
October 3rd, 2009 by David Kroll, Ph.D. in Better Health Network, Expert Interviews
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This morning, I once again get to join in with a group of noted journalists, authors, educators, and all-around people-who-do-things-I-can’t for the annual advisory board meeting of the M.S. in Medical and Science Journalism Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Program founder and current director, Tom Linden, MD, is a Yale- and UCSF-trained physician-journalist with extensive broadcast experience across a series of California television stations. Dr Linden also recognized very early the potential value and pitfalls of the web for communicating health information and published in 1995, with Michelle Kienholz, one of the first consumer guides to medical information on the internet. I also featured Tom here in December 2007 when he launched his own blog.
So today, Dr Linden has asked me to speak to about science and medical blogging but with respect to how it has augmented my own professional career. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Terra Sigillata*
