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Double Standards And The Rise of Placebo Medicine

August 20th, 2009 by Steve Novella, M.D. in Better Health Network, Quackery Exposed

Tags: CAM, Complementary And Alternative Medicine, Placebo, Placebo Effect, Placebo Medicine

It is my contention that terms such as “complementary and alternative medicine” and “integrative medicine” exist for two primary purposes. The first is marketing – they are an attempt at rebranding methods that do not meet the usual standards of unqualified “medicine”. The second is a very deliberate and often calculating attempt at creating a double standard.

We already have a standard of care within medicine, and although its application is imperfect its principles are clear – the best available scientific evidence should be used to determine that medical interventions meet a minimum standard of safety and effectiveness. Regulations have largely (although also imperfectly) reflected that principle, as have academia, publishing standards, professional organizations, licensing boards, and product regulation.

With the creation of the new brand of medicine (CAM and integrative) came the opportunity to change the rules of science and medicine to create an alternative standard, one tailor made for those modalities that do not meet existing scientific and even ethical standards for medicine. This manifests in many ways – the NCCAM was created so that these modalities would have an alternate standard for garnering federal dollars for research. Many states now have “health care freedom laws” which create a separate standard of care (actually an elimination of the standard of care) for self-proclaimed “alternative” practices.

But perhaps the most insidious and damaging double-standard that is being advocated under the banner of CAM is a separate standard of scientific research itself. The normal rules of research that have evolved over the last few centuries are being subtly altered or discarded, with clever newspeak. It is a way for proponents to choose their evidence, rather than having the evidence decide what works and what does not work. We saw this strategy at play with the recent acupuncture study for back pain that clearly showed acupuncture was no more effective than placebo acupuncture. Proponents (propagated by an uncritical media) turned scientific logic on its head by interpreting this result as indicating that placebo acupuncture must work also (if only we could figure out how, they unconvincingly mused).

We see this strategy at work also with the use of so-called “pragmatic” studies – a rebranding of “unblinded” studies. This is a way to choose their evidence – in this case, poorly controlled unblinded studies that are more likely to reflect the bias of the researchers and therefore give them a result that they like. This is their reaction to well-designed placebo controlled trials that show their preferred modality does not work.

Another strategy is to change the meaning of the concept of placebo effects. This one was ready-made, and most people grossly misunderstand the nature of “the” placebo effect. One of my first articles for SBM was about the placebo effect because this concept is so criticial to science-based medicine. To summarize – the placebo effect is really many effects. It is everything other than a physiological response to the treatment. It is not all a real effect of mind-over-matter – it includes every bias and artifact of observation as well. It includes things like subjects reporting they feel better to the researcher because they want the treatment to work and they want to please the authority figure, who also wants the treatment to work and may be encouraging the perception of benefit.

It is most important to understand how the term “placebo effect” is used in the context of a controlled clinical trial. Scientific methodology is about controlling variables – because we want to know which variables work and which ones do not. In any clinical scenario there are a multitude of variables that may affect the outcome or the perception of the outcome. Therefore a well-designed study maximally controls all the variables – ideally so that the one variable of interest (the treatment) is completely isolated. This is accomplished in a number of ways. One method is randomization – randomly assigning subjects to the various treatment and placebo arms of a clinical trial. Randomization combined with sufficiently large trial size (number of subjects) results in all variables not specifically controlled for averaging out among the various arms. Another way to look at is that randomization prevents systematic biases in who gets treated and who gets a placebo from affecting the results.

Another method of controlling variables is the double-blind placebo control. Ideally one group of subjects will receive the treatment being studied while another group will receive a treatment that is identical in every way except that it is inert (i.e. it controls for all possible variables and isolated the one variable of interest – the treatment). Both the subject and the examiner are blinded to which is which to control for psychological effects. In order to conclude that the treatment “works” those subject receiving the active treatment must do statistically significantly better than those receiving the placebo. If the activity of the treatment was the only variable, then we can confidently conclude it was responsible for the improvement.

I know this is all very basic, but it is these very basic concepts that are being challenged by proponents of so-called CAM. They are trying to say the the effect measured in the placebo arm of such studies is a real effect, something valuable and alone is sufficient to justify the treatment. This philosophy has been termed by critics “placebo medicine” and is just the latest attempt at creating a double standard. But the claim is utterly ignorant of the scientific nature of the placebo effect. It is a method of controlling for biases, artifacts, and variables (known and unknown) – it is not a real effect.

There may be some non-specific therapeutic effects mixed into placebo effects. For example, people who are being studied tend to take better care of themselves and are more compliant with treatments (because they are being watched). They may also feel better as a result of the positive attention from a health care provider – old-fashioned good bedside manner. These are some of the variables being controlled for. But it is scientifically absurd to argue that they justify an ineffective treatment. But that is exactly what CAM proponents are doing.

The latest manifestation of this strategy is a report put out in the UK by The Kings Fund – a health policy charity. They put together a committee to examine how the UK can find evidence to support CAM therapies. They are not interested in figuring out “if” such treatments work, but rather how they can show “that” they work. They report:

Explaining the need for different types of research when assessing complementary practice, Professor Dame Carol Black said: ‘It has become widely accepted that a stronger evidence base is needed if we are to reach a better understanding of complementary practices and ensure greater confidence in their clinical and cost effectiveness. The challenge is to develop methods of research that allow us to assess the value of an approach that seeks to integrate the physical intervention, the personal context in which it is given, and non-specific effects that together comprise a particular therapy.’

Got that? We need new kinds of research (read “double standard”) in order to demonstrate the value of these special CAM practices. The reason that we need to find new ways to demonstrate their value is because they fail under the accepted scientific methods. The last sentence is just a fancy way of saying that placebo effects should count as real effects.

It further says:

‘As long as findings from research can provide confidence in the positive effect of the physical intervention at the heart of the treatment, then any added benefit brought by the therapeutic relationship and the context for treatment should count as part of the treatment effect,’ the report says.

‘For complementary therapies such a holistic approach to effectiveness should be adopted by bodies such as NICE, when comparing cost-effectiveness across a range of treatments.’

The “physical intervention at the heart of the treatment” is functionally the same thing as – non-specific placebo effects. They want to take a “holistic” approach to evidence (another useful marketing brand), meaning they get to decide what the evidence means. George Orwell would be proud.

As usual, Edzard Ernst (the go to expert for the media) gets it exactly right. He is quoted as saying:

‘This is the introduction of double standards through the back door.’

‘In this case we might as well allow an ineffective medication on the market, because it too will have a placebo effect.’

That latter point is a favorite of mine as well. Whenever CAM proponents try to change the rules of science to suit their needs, I invite my r

*This blog post was originally published at Science-Based Medicine*

The History Of Acupuncture: Astrology With Needles

August 13th, 2009 by admin in Better Health Network, Quackery Exposed

Tags: Acupuncture, Astrology, China, History, Needles

Astrology with Needles

by Ben Kavoussi, MS, MSOM, LAc

The following is an excerpt of an upcoming article called “The Untold Story of Acupuncture.” It is scheduled to be published in December 2009 in Focus in Alternative and Complementary Therapies (FACT), a review journal that presents the evidence on alternative medicine in an analytical and impartial manner. It argues that if the effects of “real” and “sham” acupuncture do not significantly differ in well-conducted trials, it is because traditional theories for selecting points and means of stimulation are not based on an empirical rationale, but on ancient cosmology, astrology and mythology. These theories significantly resemble those that underlined European and Islamic astrological medicine and bloodletting in the Middle-Ages. In addition, the alleged predominance of acupuncture amongst the scholarly medical traditions of China is not supported by evidence, given that for most of China’s long medical history, needling, bloodletting and cautery were largely practiced by itinerant and illiterate folk-healers, and frowned upon by the learned physicians who favored the use of pharmacopoeia.

Heaven is covered with constellations, Earth with waterways, and man with channels.

Acupuncture is presumed to have its origins in blood ritual, magic tattooing and body piercing associated with Neolithic healing practices.^2,3 The Neolithic origin hypothesis is supported by the presence of nonfigurative tattoos on the Tyrolean Ice Man–an inhabitant of the Oetztal Alps in Europe–whose naturally preserved 5,200-year-old body displays a set of small cross-shaped tattoos that are located significantly proximal to classical acupuncture points. Medical imaging shows that the middle-aged man suffered from lumbar arthrosis and the cross-shaped tattoos are located at points traditionally indicated for this condition.^4,5 Similar nonfigurative tattoos and evidence of therapeutic tattooing, lancing and blood ritual have been found throughout the Ancient world, including the Americas.^6,7,8 Health-related tattoos are still prevalent in Tibet, where specific points on the body are needled with a blend of medicinal herbs in the dyes. These practices appear to be largely intended to maintain balance with the natural and spiritual worlds, and also to protect against demonic infestation and malevolence. Seemingly, this Neolithic and Bronze Age lancing heritage, which was intertwined with magic and animism has evolved in various cultures into codified systems of lancing and venesection for assuring good health and longevity. In addition to treating the impurity or superabundance of blood, in various cultures lancing was also believed to affect the flow of a numinous life-force that is, for instance, called qi (or chi, 氣, pronounced “chee”) in Chinese, prāna (प्राण) in Sanskrit, pneuma (πνεύμα) in Greek, etc.⁹ In many instances, elements of metaphysics, mythology, mysticism, magic, shamanism, exorcism, astrology and empirical medicine intimately intertwined, making it difficult for modern scholars to interpret them as mutually exclusive categories.

In China, for instance, the numinous force was believed to mirror the Sun’s annual journey through the Ecliptic-meaning its apparent path on the celestial sphere–and to circulate in a network of 12 primary jing luo (經络) known in English as the chinglo channels or simply channels or meridians (a term coined in 1939 by George Soulié de Morant, a French diplomat). These imaginary pathways run from head to toes and interconnect around 360 primary points on the skin.¹⁰ There is a strong possibility that the web of these channels was a rudimentary model of the vascular system that was conceptualized according to an episteme­-meaning a set of fundamental beliefs-that was based on astrological principles and solar mythology. This episteme­ also indicated that a person’s health and destiny are determined by the position of the Sun, the Moon, the 5 Planets and the apparition of comets, along with the person’s time of birth.¹¹ In this worldview, each body segment corresponds to one of the 12 Houses of the Chinese zodiac system di zhi (地支) known in English as the Earthly Branches, and which consists of 12 two-hour (30°) divisions of the Ecliptic. The channels are therefore named according to their degree of yin (阴) and yang (阳), from tai yang (太阳) to jue yin (厥阴), which are terms that describe the phases and the positions of the Sun and the Moon.¹² Each has five special points designated by the characters 水 (Water), 木 (Wood), 火 (Fire), 土 (Earth) and 金 (Metal) which are also the Chinese terms for Mercury, Jupiter, Mars, Saturn and Venus¹³, and seem to correspond to the transit positions of these Planets in the matching House. Each point is also associated with a color, which comes from the visual appearance of the matching Planet in the night sky. Venus is white, Jupiter blue-green, Saturn golden-yellow, Mars red, and Mercury “black,” for it appears to be the dimmest of the five. Each of these points has also an occult connection with a direction, a segment of time, a season, a number set, a taste, a musical note, an internal organ, a body region, etc, in an ancient Chinese metaphysical cosmology often referred to as “correlative cosmology”¹⁴ and reminiscent of the esoteric and mystical beliefs held by Pythagoras of Samos (c. 580-c. 490 BC) and his followers, the Pythagoreans.¹⁵ In his occult and magico-mystical worldview, the nature of the life-force qi is often described in such terms¹⁶:

The major premise of Chinese medical theory is that all the forms of life in the universe are animated by an essential life-force or vital energy called qi. Qi also means “breath” and air and is similar to the Hindu concept of prāna. Invisible, tasteless, odorless, and formless, qi nevertheless permeates the entire cosmos. Qi is transferable and transmutable; digestion extracts qi from food and drink and transfers it to the body, breathing extracts qi from air and transfers it to the lungs. When these two forms of qi meet in the blood-stream, they transmute to form human-qi, which then circulates throughout the body as vital energy. It is the quality and balance of your qi that determines your state of health and span of life.

Other texts refer to qi as a “cosmic spirit that pervades and enlivens all things”¹⁷ and “from which the world was created.”¹⁸ For instance, the alchemist Ko Hung (葛洪, 2nd – 3rd Century AD) writes that “Man is in qi and qi is in each human being. Heaven and Earth and the ten thousand things all require qi to stay alive. A person that knows how to allow qi to circulate will preserve himself and banish illness that might cause him harm.”^{19, 20} The belief in a “cosmological correlation” between its pathways in the body and the Houses of the Chinese zodiac seems to be based on health and safety beliefs in geocentric cosmology and the related doctrine of “as above, so below” which stipulated that everything in the Heavens has its counterpart on Earth and also in man.

The episteme of “as above, so below” and correlative cosmology were prevalent throughout the ancient world, from the Eastern Mediterranean cultures to Northern Europe. It is notably found in the relics of a collection of occult writings called the Corpus Hermetica which are believed to be compiled in Hellenistic Egypt during the 1st or 3rd century AD and are attributed to Hermes Trismegistus (”Thrice-great Hermes”), the Greek equivalent of the Egyptian god of wisdom, Thoth. The original text was presumably lost or destroyed during the systematic annihilation of non-Christian literature between the 4th and 6th centuries AD. Nonetheless, a section of it known as the Emerald Tablet survived and was translated into Arabic by the Muslim conquerors and later into Latin by John of Seville c. 1140 AD and by Philip of Tripoli c. 1243 AD. An Arabic version of the Tablet by the Muslim polymath and alchemist Abu Musa Jābir ibn Hayyān (أبو موسى جابر بن حيان , c. 721-c. 815 AD) states “That which is above is from that which is below, and that which is below is from that which is above, working the miracles of One.”²¹ Given the prevalence of this set of fundamental beliefs throughout the ancient world, it seems that the natural philosophy that has given rise to the underlying theories of acupuncture in China stems from the same set of beliefs in that were also prevalent along the Silk Road in Persia, Mesopotamia, Egypt and in Greece and that have influenced the health and safety beliefs of pre-Christian Europe, such as the Eastern Mediterranean mystery cults²², or the early Gnostic Christianity.²³ This hypothesis is supported by a statement by Gregor (Gregorius) Reisch (c. 1467-1525) in Margarita Philosophica (Pearl of Wisdom), first published in 1503²⁴:

The pagans believed that the zodiac formed the body of the Grand Man of the Universe. This body, which they called the Macrocosm (the Great World), was divided into twelve major parts, one of which was under the control of the celestial powers reposing in each of the zodiacal constellations. Believing that the entire universal system was epitomized in man’s body, which they called the Microcosm (the Little World), they evolved that now familiar figure of “the cut-up man in the almanac” by allotting a sign of the zodiac to each of twelve major parts of the human body.

Figure 1: European medieval Zodiac Man form John de Foxton’s Liber Cosmographiae, published in 1408. It indicated the repartition of astrological influences on the body which physicians used to determine the auspicious time to let blood. Images courtesy of The Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, UK.

Given this fundamental belief, European physicians Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Science-Based Medicine*

Why Dr. Rich Is Encouraged By Alternative Medicine

August 8th, 2009 by DrRich in Health Policy, Humor, Quackery Exposed

Tags: 34 billion, allopathic medicine, Alternative Medicine, CAM, CDC, Government-run Healthcare, NCCAM, Single Payer System

It is quite popular among certain medical bloggers, who count themselves as scientifically sophisticated, to disparage so-called “alternative medicine.”

Indeed, there are entire websites devoted to demonstrating (in homage to Penn and Teller) that various forms of alternative medicine – such as homeopathy, therapeutic touch, the medical application of crystals, Reiki, naturopathy, water therapy, bio-photons, mindfulness training, energy healing and a host of others – are completely devoid of any scientific merit whatsoever; are pablum for the uneducated masses; are, in short, irreducibly and unredeemably woo.

These same medical authors are scandalized into virtual apoplexy by the fact that the NIH has funded an entire section to “study” alternative medicine, and worse, that most respected university medical centers in the land now seem to have embraced alternative medicine, and have established well-funded and heavily-marketed “Centers for Integrative Medicine” (or other similarly-named op-centers for pushing medically suspect alternative “services”).*

Until quite recently, DrRich counted himself among the stalwarts of scientific strict constructionism. He was truly dismayed that the NIH and some of our most well-regarded academic centers (under the guise of wanting to conduct objective “studies” of alternative medicine) have lent an aura of respectability and legitimacy to numerous bizarre ideas and fraudulent claims masquerading as legitimate medical practices. To DrRich, such developments were yet another clear and unmistakable sign of the End Times.

Furthermore, DrRich (a well-known paranoid when it comes to covert rationing) saw a more sinister advantage to the official and well-publicized support that government-funded institutions were giving to the alternative medicine movement. Namely, fostering a widespread impression among the unwashed rabble that alternative medicine is at least somewhat legitimate (and plenty respectable) will further the cause of covert rationing. That is, the more people who can be enticed to seek their diagnoses and their cures from the alternative medicine universe, where they are often spending their own money, the less money these people will soak up from the real healthcare system. With luck, real diagnoses can be delayed and real therapy put off until it’s far too late to achieve a useful outcome by more traditional (and far more expensive) medical means.

So, for several years alternative medicine was seen by DrRich pretty much as it is seen by all of the anti-woo crowd – as an unvarnished evil.

But in recent days the scales have fallen from DrRich’s eyes. He now realizes he was sadly mistaken. Rather than a term of opprobrium, “alternative medicine” may actually be our most direct road to salvation. Indeed, DrRich thinks that far from damning alternative medicine, we should be blessing it, nurturing it, worrying over it, in the precise manner that a mountaineer trapped in a deadly blizzard would worry over the last embers of his dying campfire.

What turned the tide for DrRich was a recent report, issued by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, estimating that in 2007, Americans spent a whopping $34 billion on alternative medicine. Even more remarkably, a goodly chunk of this money was paid by Americans themselves, out of their own pockets.

The implications of this report should be highly encouraging to those of us who lament the impending creation of a monolithic government-controlled healthcare system, and who have been struggling to imagine ways of circumventing the legions of stone-witted, soul-eating bureaucrats now being prepared (Sauron-like) to descend upon us all, doctor and patient alike.

This is why DrRich has urged primary care physicians to break the bonds of servitude while they still can, strike out on their own, and set up practices in which they are paid directly by their patients. Such arrangements are the only practical means by which individual doctors and patients can immediately restore the broken doctor-patient relationship, and place themselves within a protective enclosure impervious to the slavering soul-eaters.

One reason so few primary care doctors have taken this route (choosing instead to retire, to change careers and become deep-sea fishermen, or simply to give up and become abject minions of the forces of evil) is that they do not believe patients will actually pay them out of their own pockets.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, this new report from the CDCP demonstrates once and for all that Americans will, indeed, pay billions of dollars from their own pockets for their own healthcare – even the varieties of healthcare whose only possible benefits are mediated by the placebo effect.  DrRich believes that many of the people buying homeopathic remedies are doing so less because they believe homeopathy works, and more because they feel abandoned by the healthcare system and by their own doctors, and realize they have to do SOMETHING. The CDCP report, in DrRich’s estimation, reflects the magnitude of the American public’s pent-up demand for doctors whose chief concern is for them, and not for the demands of third party payers.

Perhaps more importantly, this new report implies that it will be somewhat more difficult than DrRich previously believed for the government to outlaw private-sector healthcare activities. Creating a monolithic government-controlled healthcare system would naturally require the authorities to make it illegal for Americans to spend their own money on their own healthcare, thus rendering direct-pay medical practices illegal, and putting the final stake into the heart of the doctor-patient relationship. But the rousing success of the alternative medicine universe will make such laws difficult to enact.

To see why, consider just how encouraging this new CDCP report must be to the third-party payers. Thanks in no small part to the efforts of the government (and the academy) to legitimize alternative medicine, Americans are spending $34 billion a year on woo. This amount indicates tremendous savings for the traditional healthcare system. The actual amount saved, of course, is impossible to measure, but has to be far greater than just $34 billion. Some substantial proportion of patients spending money on alternative medicine, had they chosen traditional medical care instead, might have consumed expensive diagnostic tests, surgery, expensive prescription drugs, and other legitimate medical services. Furthermore, those legitimate medical services (as legitimate medical services are wont to do) often would have generated even more expenditures – by extending the survival of patients with chronic diseases, by identifying the need for even more diagnostic and therapeutic services, and by causing side effects requiring expensive remedies. (While alternative medicine is famous for being useless, it is also most often pretty harmless, and tends to produce relatively few serious side effects – except, of course, for causing a delay in making actual diagnoses and administering useful therapy, but that’s a good thing if you’re a payer.) So the amount of money the payers actually save thanks to alternative medicine must be some multiplier of the amount spent on the alternative medicine itself.

What this means is payers (which under a government system means the government) will be loathe to do anything that might discourage the success and growth of alternative medicine, and this fact alone may stop them from making it illegal for Americans to pay for their own healthcare.

Still, we musn’t be too sanguine about these prospects. Under a government-controlled system, the imperative to control every aspect of healthcare (in the name of fairness) will be very, very strong. It is easy to envision the feds declaring several varieties of alternative medicine to be covered services, so people wouldn’t have to buy alternative medicine themselves.

But alternative medicine (bless it) will be impervious to government control. Practitioners of alternative medicine aren’t doing what they are doing in order to be subject to federal regulation and bureaucratic meddling. If the feds declare, say, homeopathy and therapeutic touch to be legitimate, covered services under the universal health plan, why, the alternative medicine gurus will simply come up with entirely new forms of alternative medicine specifically to remain outside the universal plan. (New varieties of alternative medicine already appear with dizzying speed, and can be invented at will. No bureaucracy could ever hope to keep up.)

Therefore, as long as the central authorities depend on alternative medicine as a robust avenue for covertly rationing healthcare, the purveyors of woo will always be able to flourish outside the real healthcare system. And this, DrRich believes, represents the ultimate value of woo, and establishes why we should all be encouraging and nurturing woo instead of disparaging it.

DrRich has speculated before on various black market approaches to healthcare which could be attempted by American doctors (and investors) should restrictive, government-controlled healthcare become a reality.  Some of these were: medical speakeasies; floating off-shore medical centers on old aircraft carriers; medical centers just south of the border (the establishment of which, at last, would stimulate the feds to seal the borders against illegal passage once and for all); and combination medical center/casinos on the sovereign land of Native American reservations.

But now, thanks to the success of alternative medicine, there is a direct and straightforward path for American primary care physicians to practice a form of now-long-gone “traditional” American medicine, replete with a robust doctor-patient relationship, right out in the open. Simply declare this kind of practice to be a new variety of alternative medicine. Likely, you will need to come up with a new name for it (such as “Therapeutic Allopathy,” or “Reciprocal Duty Therapeutics”), and perhaps invent some new terminology to describe what you’re doing. But what you’re actually doing will be so fundamentally different from what PCPs will be doing under government-controlled healthcare as to be unrecognizable, and nobody will be able to argue it’s not alternative medicine. In fact, it will seem nearly as wierd as Reiki.

Alternative medicine, in other words, will provide American doctors who want to practice the kind of medicine they should be and want to be practicing with the cover they need to do so. And this is why we must support medical woo, and celebrate its continued growth and success.

* A list of these academic medical institutions now sporting Centers of Woo is maintained by Orac, and can be found here. The length of Orac’s cavalcade of woo, and the famous names appearing on it, is truly stunning. The sinking feeling one gets from looking at Orac’s list can only be surpassed by actually clicking on a few of the links he provides, and sampling some of the actual woo-sites offered by these prestigious academic centers, which read like excerpts of some of the more unguarded moments from Oprah, or even the Huffington post.

*This blog post was originally published at The Covert Rationing Blog*

Dr. Sears Cashes In On Vaccine Fears

August 4th, 2009 by John Snyder, M.D. in Better Health Network, Quackery Exposed

Tags: Bad Advice, Dr. Sears, False, Misleading, Pediatrics, Vaccines

I generally know what’s coming next when a parent asks about altering their child’s vaccine schedule: “I was reading Dr. Sears….”

Dr. Sears is a genius. No, not in an Albert Einstein or Pablo Picasso kind of way. He’s more of an Oprah or a Madonna kind of genius. He’s a genius because he has written a book that capitalizes on the vaccine-fearing, anti-establishment mood of the zeitgeist. The book tells parents what they desperately want to hear, and that has made it an overnight success.

Dr. Robert Sears is perhaps one of the best-known pediatricians in the country. The youngest son of Dr. Bill Sears, the prolific parent book writer and creator of AskDrSears.com, Dr. Robert Sears has become the bane of many a pediatrician’s existence. He has contributed to his family dynasty by co-authoring several books, adding content to the family website, and making myriad TV appearances to offer his sage advice. But Dr. Bob is best known for his best-selling The Vaccine Book: Making the Right Decision for your Child. This book, or at least notes from it, now accompanies many confused and concerned parents to the pediatrician’s office. Parents who have been misled by the onslaught of vaccine misinformation and fear-mongering feel comforted and supported by the advice of Dr. Sears, who assures parents that there is a safer, more sensible way to vaccinate. He wants parents to make their own “informed” decisions about whether or how to proceed with vaccinating their children, making sure to let them know that if they do choose to vaccinate, he knows the safest way to do it. And for $13.99 (paperback), he’ll share it with them.

In the final chapter of his book (entitled “What should you do now?”), after reinforcing the common vaccine myths of the day, Dr. Sears presents his readers with “Dr. Bob’s Alternative Vaccine Schedule.” He places this side-by-side with the schedule recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. He then explains why his schedule is a safer choice for parents who chose to vaccinate their children. Without a doubt, the alternative vaccine schedule is among the more damaging aspects of this book. It’s the part that gets brought along to the pediatrician’s office and presented as the the plan going forward for many parents today. But the book is also dangerous in the way in which it validates the pervasive myths that are currently scaring parents into making ill-informed decisions for their children.

Dr. Sears discusses these now common parental concerns, but instead of countering them with sound science, he lets them stand on their own as valid. He points out that most doctors are ill-equipped to discuss vaccines with parents, being poorly trained in the science of vaccine risks and benefits. He then claims to be a newly self-taught vaccine expert, a laughable conceit given the degree to which he misunderstands the science he purports to have read, and in the way he downplays the true dangers of the vaccine-preventable diseases he discusses in his book. He then provides parents with what he views as rational alternatives to the recommended vaccination schedule, a schedule designed by the country’s trueauthorities on vaccinology, childhood infectious disease, and epidemiology.

So what does Dr. Sears have to say, exactly, about the risks of vaccines, and just how out of touch is he with medical science and epidemiology? Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Science-Based Medicine*

Magical Thinking Of The Week: The Anti-Inflammation Diet

July 29th, 2009 by Peter Lipson, M.D. in Better Health Network, Quackery Exposed

Tags: Diet, Inflammation, Inflammation Factor, Magical Thinking, Monica Reinagel, Nutrition

Alternative medicine practitioners love to coin magic words, but really, how can you blame them? Real medicine has a Clarkeian quality to it*; it’s so successful, it seems like magic. But real doctors know that there is nothing magic about it. The “magic” is based on hard work, sound scientific principles, and years of study.

Magic words are great. Terms like mindfulness, functional medicine, or endocrine disruptors take a complicated problem and create a simple but false answer with no real data to back it up. More often than not, the magic word is the invention of a single person who had a really interesting idea, but lacked the intellectual capacity or honesty to flesh it out. Magic is, ultimately, a lie of sorts. As TAM 7 demonstrates, many magicians are skeptics, and vice versa. In interviews, magicians will often say that they came to skepticism when the learned just how easy it is to deceive people. Magic words in alternative medicine aren’t sleight-of-hand, but sleight-of-mind, playing on people’s hopes and fears.

A reader has turned me on to another magic word I hadn’t known about. It’s called the “Inflammation Factor”, and is the invention of a nutritionist named Monica Reinagel. Like most good lies, this one builds on a nidus of truth.

Inflammation is a medical term that refers to a host of complex physiologic processes mediated by the immune system. Inflammation gets its ancient name from the obvious physical signs of inflammation: rubor, calor, dolor, tumor, or redness, heat, pain, and swelling. As the vitalistic ancient medical beliefs bowed to modern science, inflammation was recognized to be far more complex than just these four external characteristics. In addition to being a response to injury and disease, the cellular and chemical responses of inflammation can cause disease. For example, in asthma and food allergies, a type of immune reaction called type I hypersensitivity elicits a harmful type of inflammation. Coronary heart disease, the biggest killer of Americans, is believed to have a significant inflammatory component.

But nothing in medicine is perfectly simple. For example, corticosteroids, which can be used effectively to treat the inflammation in asthma are not effective against the inflammation in cororary heart disease. It’s just not that simple.

But while inflammation may not be that simple, people can be. People want easy answers, and quacks are happy to step in to provide them.

So Ms Reinagel has invented a diet, available for sale in a book called The Inflammation Free Diet Plan. Her premise is that inflammation is at the root of all major diseases, and that your diet can affect inflammation, thereby improving your health.

While the hypothesis is intriguing, each step of the argument has problems, leading to an invalid conclusion.

Inflammation is the root of all disease

No, it’s not. “Inflammation”, which is actually refers to a lot of different processes, plays an important role in many diseases. But not all inflammation is the same.

The most important factor in fighting inflammation is the food you eat every day.

Um, no. If you have a staph infection on your arm, your eating habits will not change the amount of heat, pain, swelling, or redness. The kernel of truth here is that diet can affect various measures of inflammation, such as C-reactive protein (here is one of many examples). There’s a long leap between this fact and the conclusion that diet can “stop inflammation”.

The benefits of reducing inflammation are immediate as well as long term. You’ll notice that your skin looks younger, your joints feel better, and your allergy symptoms improve. At the same time, when you reduce inflammation, you also reduce your risk of heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, osteoporosis, diabetes, and other complications of aging.

It’s a very long walk from the claim that reducing inflammation is “a good thing” to proving that your particular diet reduces inflammation and thereby improves health . A hypothesis is not true simply because it sounds pretty.

Who wouldn’t love a magic book that would prevent and cure all illness? Perhaps you’ve noticed that these books come along every few months. None of them ever has the one true answer. Life is much more complicated and beautiful than any magic book. It may be a lot more difficult to commit science than to commit quackery, but in the end it’s a lot more satisfying and a lot more useful.

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*”Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” –Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law

*This blog post was originally published at Science-Based Medicine*