The FDA recently amended their draft proposal for: FDA Education Blueprint for Health Care Providers
Involved in the Management or Support of Patients with Pain. The draft proposal includes this statement:

“Nonpharmacologic therapies – includes psychological, physical rehabilitative, surgical approaches; and complementary therapies.”

And below further defines, ” Complementary therapies – e.g., acupuncture, chiropracty”

Recommending:

“HCPs should be knowledgeable about the range of available therapies, when they may be helpful, and when they should be used as part of a multidisciplinary approach to pain management.”

While the current problems with opioid overuse are significant and adequate pain management remains a challenge, introducing unscientific methods will not help health consumers and will only waste resources. Introduction of these recommendations for unscientific methods does not reflect scientific consensus, but intense lobbying by proponents who stand to financially gain from their inclusion.

Acupuncture specifically has been studied extensively, with thousands of clinical trials, and yet proponents have not been able to demonstrate that acupuncture is effective for any indication, including pain. In short, acupuncture does not work.

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Anti-vaccine nonsense is relentless, and spreads through social media like a measles virus in an upscale private California school. Therefore we need frequent skeptical booster shots.

I will usually decide to take on a topic if I see it spreading or if fellow skeptics aren’t sure what the deception is. A story is sending up red flags, but a more expert eye is needed.

Pretty much every word in this headline is wrong or deceptive: Harvard Study Proves Unvaccinated Children Pose No Risk.

First, there is no study. This is not in any way about some new study or research, but simply an article by an anti-vaccine crank, Tetyana Obukhanych. Further, her connection to Harvard seems tenuous and it’s not even clear what her current academic status is. And most importantly, she uses cherry picked, irrelevant, and incorrect information to make her case.

But she appears to be the new darling of the anti-vaccine movement, so let’s take a deeper look. Continue Reading »

One of the basic skills of critical thinking in our modern society is, first, the realization that not all scientific studies are created equal. Studies range from worthless to rigorous, and not all “studies” are even actual studies, but rather just surveys or reviews of prior research.

Further, it’s helpful to be able to look at a study and evaluate it for basic issues of quality. There will often be technical details that only an expert in the field will recognize, and statistical analysis is a specialty unto itself. But basic research concepts could apply to any study and give you at least an idea of how reliable it is. There are other generic factors as well, such as the quality of the journal in which it was published, the funding source, the history of the researchers, and whether or not the paper was ever retracted. Finally, any individual study needs to be put into the context of the overall literature, and not just cherry-picked.

Vaccinated vs Unvaccinated Study

Recently the anti-vaccine community has been sending around a study on social media that purports to show that vaccinated children have a higher rate of neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD) than unvaccinated children. This contradicts a wealth of prior studies that show that the only health difference between vaccinated and less vaccinated (fewer vaccines and/or given later) is that the less vaccinated children have more infections, especially vaccine-preventable diseases.  Continue Reading »

A recent article in Principia Scientific International summarizes 20 recent studies showing that solar activity correlates with long term trends in climate change. This is an excellent example of how misinformation campaigns meant to sow doubt and confusion work.

First, we need to consider the source. PSI is not a scientific organization or publication, it is a propaganda front group trying to appear as a scientific organization. This is very common – giving an organization a neutral sounding scientific name that does not reflect its true agenda.

PSI claims, completely contrary to the scientific consensus, that CO2 is not even a greenhouse gas. They actually argue that it causes no warming at all, and in fact may have a cooling effect on the environment. They further argue that wind turbines cause illness, a claim that is demonstrably false.

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Free speech has been a hot issue recently, and probably always will be to some extent. This is likely because the stakes are high – free speech is a core liberty essential to any functional democracy. But in a society where you have to live with other people, liberty cannot be unlimited, because it will bump up against the liberty of others. So there needs to be some well-thought-out rules for how to resolve conflicts.

How a society balances the need for free speech with the need to protect people from defamation, fraud, oppression, and harassment says a lot about the character of that society. In the US we have constitutionally chosen to err on the side of free speech, and I think this is appropriate. The courts give people a wide berth to have freedom of expression, and understands that the very speech that needs defending is speech that someone finds offensive.

At the same time, freedom from having your public speech repressed does not translate into a right to access to any venue at any time. The New York Times is not obligated to publish your 10-page manifesto.

The real purpose of this post, however, is not to delve into the nuances of free speech but to discuss how individual people decide on those nuances. This was illuminated by a recent study, the results of which I find entirely unsurprising. This is in line with the general findings of psychological studies.

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You should be skeptical – in general, but certainly of this specific claim.

First I should point out that such a procedure would be a body transplant, not a head transplant. The head would get a new body, because the head is the person.

This story has all the red flags of scam and pseudoscience. I am having a hard time figuring out exactly what the scam is. It may just be an exceptionally self-deluded surgeon, but it is instructive to identify all the reasons this claims is almost certainly nonsense.

Italian neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero has announced that he plans to perform the first “head transplant” by the end of 2017 in China on a Chinese national (as yet unnamed). He has been working with Russian patient, Valery Spiridonov, who has a muscle-wasting disease, but for some reason he is now moving his operation to China.

The primary reason for skepticism is that we simply do not have the technology to pull off this kind of operation. I have previously reviewed the history of head transplant research. I also wrote about Canavero in 2013 when he first started making such claims. Continue Reading »