January 1st, 2012 by BarbaraFederOstrov in Health Policy, News
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Medical Marijuana: Advocates are pushing forward a California ballot initiative that would create a Board of Medical Marijuana Enforcement to oversee the state’s burgeoning industry, Lisa Leff reports for the Associated Press. We’re imagining the snacks at board meetings.
Health Reform: California Healthline’s Dan Diamond highlights five health reform issuesfor reporters and policymakers to watch closely in 2012. First among them: the Supreme Court review of health reform’s constitutionality.
Medicare: Scammers create intricate webs of Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Reporting on Health - The Reporting on Health Daily Briefing*
August 22nd, 2011 by Steve Novella, M.D. in Health Policy, Opinion
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In 1994 Congress (pushed by Senators Harkin and Hatch) passed DSHEA (the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act). As regular readers of SBM know, we are not generally happy about this law, which essentially deregulated the supplement industry. Under DSHEA supplements, a category which specifically was defined to include herbals, are regulated more like food than like medicinals.
Since then the flood-gates opened, and there has been open competition in the marketplace for supplement products. This has not resulted, I would argue, in better products – only in slicker and more deceptive claims. What research we have into popular herbals and supplements shows that they are generally worthless (except for targeted vitamin supplementation, which was already part of science-based medicine, and remains so).
A company can essentially put a random combination of plants and vitamins into a pill or liquid and then make whatever health claims they wish for their product, as long as they stay within the “structure-function” guidelines. This means they Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Science-Based Medicine*
June 14th, 2011 by Mark Crislip, M.D. in Opinion, Quackery Exposed
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Ambiguity. Medicine, like art, is filled with ambiguity, at least the way I practice it. Most of my practice is in the hospital. I am sometimes called to see patients that other physicians cannot figure out. And that puts me at a disadvantage, because the doctors who were referring patients to me are all bright, excellent doctors. Often the question is ‘Why does the patient have a fever?’ or ‘Why is the patient ill?’ Sometimes I have an answer. Most of the time I do not.
I am happy, however, to be able to tell the patient what they don’t have. I can often inform the patient and their family that whatever they have is probably not life-threatening or life-damaging, just life-inconveniencing, and most acute illnesses go away with no diagnosis. I always put the ‘just’ in air quotes, because illnesses that require hospitalization are rarely ‘just.’ Just without quotes is reserved for the antivaccine crowd and applied to the small number of deaths from vaccine preventable diseases in unvaccinated children. John Donne they ain’t.
We are excellent, I tell them, at diagnosing life-threatening problems that we can treat, and terrible at diagnosing processes that are self-limited. Of course diagnostic testing is always variable. No test is 100% in making a diagnosis, and often with infections I cannot grow the organism that I suspect is causing the patient’s disease. So for hospitalized patients, ambiguity and uncertainty are the rule of the day. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Science-Based Medicine*
June 3rd, 2011 by ErikDavis in Quackery Exposed, True Stories
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The team of nutritionists at D’avignon Digestive Health Centre on Danforth Avenue in Toronto are an impressive bunch — just consider their qualifications:
- Louise Comtois – CNP, RNCP, Colon Therapist
- Heidi Horowitz – CNP, RNCP, Live Cell Analyst
- Marnie Ryan – CNP, Colon Therapist
- Natasha Audette – RHN, Colon Therapist
- Jane Sloan – CNP, NNCP, RhA
CNP, RNCP, RHN, NNCP. I single out D’avignon only because they came up at the top of my Google search, but the story is consistent across the nutritionist community — there are an awful lot of letters next to the names of practitioners. So what exactly do they all mean? Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Skeptic North » Erik Davis*
March 27th, 2011 by Lucy Hornstein, M.D. in Health Tips, True Stories
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There’s a new scam in town.
Company calls over and over again (claiming to be the phone company, actually) just wanting to “verify your address”. Over and over again they get told we aren’t interested, leave us alone, don’t call. Finally, my solitary staffer gets sick of fending them off and goes through their voice activated “address verification”, during which a mechanical voice asks questions, followed by a command to “Say Yes or No, then press the pound key.”
So she goes through the innocuous questions, including her full name, the office address and phone number, plus several iterations of saying “Yes or No, then press pound.” The calls stop; everyone is happy.
Until I get the phone bill six weeks later. Lo and behold, there is an extra $49.99 charge (plus tax) from a company I never heard of. Multiple phone calls reveal it to be a company providing “Internet optimization, web services, and a toll free number,” stuff I neither need nor want. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Musings of a Dinosaur*
