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A major cause of increasing obesity is certainly the campaign against it -- as dieting usually makes people FATTER. If there were any sincerity to the obesity warriors, they would ban all diet advertising and otherwise shut up about it. Re-authorizing now-banned school playground activities and school outings would help too. But it is so much easier to blame obesity on the evil "multinationals" than it is to blame it on your own restrictions on the natural activities of kids

NOTE: "No trial has ever demonstrated benefits from reducing dietary saturated fat".

A brief summary of the last 50 years' of research into diet: Everything you can possibly eat or drink is both bad and good for you

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9 February, 2010

Soft drinks boost pancreatic cancer risk (?)

Here we go again. More epidemiological speculation. At least there is one comment below showing an awareness that correlation is not causation

People who drink at least two soft drinks a week nearly double their risk of developing pancreatic cancer, a study has revealed. Researchers collected data on the consumption of soft drinks, juice and other dietary items, as well as lifestyle and environmental factors of 60,524 people who were part of the huge Singapore Chinese Health Study, following up with study participants for up to 14 years.

The research found there was a 87 per cent higher risk of developing pancreatic cancer for those who drank two or more soft drinks per week. No link was found between drinking fruit juice and developing pancreatic cancer, said the study which was published in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention said. "The high levels of sugar in soft drinks may be increasing the level of insulin in the body, which we think contributes to pancreatic cancer cell growth," lead researcher Mark Pereira of the University of Minnesota said. Insulin helps the body metabolise sugar, and is produced in the pancreas.

Pancreatic cancer is one of the most deadly forms of cancer, and only 5 per cent of people who are diagnosed are known to survive five years later, according to the American Cancer Society.

Doctor Pereira says the findings would apply to western countries as well. "Singapore is a wealthy country with excellent healthcare. Favourite pastimes are eating and shopping, so the findings should apply to other western countries," he said. He said that while sugar may be to blame, those who drink sugar-sweetened soft drinks often have other poor health habits.

The Singapore Chinese Health Study enrolled Singapore Chinese people who lived in government housing estates - as nearly nine in 10 people in Singapore do - and looked at their diets, physical activity, reproductive history, occupational exposure and medical history.

SOURCE




Here's a finding I won't criticize!

Drinking beer especially pale ale strengthens your bones and could stop them becoming brittle, a study suggests. Researchers found that the drink contained a substance that boosts bones and could mean they are less likely to suffer from osteoporosis. They discovered that beer, especially pale ales, contains high levels of silicon known to slow down the bone thinning that leads to fractures and boosting the formation of new bone. The finding, published in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, backs up previous research which also showed that the drink was good at fending off brittle bones - especially in women.

"The factors in brewing that influence silicon levels in beer have not been extensively studied", said Dr Charles Bamforth, lead author at the University of California. They found that lighter beers with a greater use of hops had the most silicon. Silicon is present in beer in the soluble form of orthosilicic acid (OSA), up to half of which can be absorbed by the body making beer a major contributor to silicon intake in the Western diet. Based on these findings, some studies suggest moderate beer consumption may help fight osteoporosis, a disease of the skeletal system characterised by low bone mass and deterioration of bone tissue.

The researchers found that the extra heat used in malting darker beers tended to destroy some of the silicon. Beers with more hops naturally had more silicon they found.

Osteoporosis or low bone density is often described as a silent epidemic of the 21st century. In the UK alone it results in more than 200,000 fractures annually and costs the NHS more than œ1 billion a year. Three million Britons are affected by osteoporosis.

The actual biological role of silicon in bone health and formation is not known though it is thought to help manufacture collagen, one of its major components.

"Beers containing high levels of malted barley and hops are richest in silicon," concludes Dr. Bamforth. "Wheat contains less silicon than barley because it is the husk of the barley that is rich in this element. While most of the silicon remains in the husk during brewing, significant quantities of silicon nonetheless are extracted into wort and much of this survives into beer."

Dr Claire Bowring, National Osteoporosis Society, said the research did not mean that people head for the pub. "These findings mirror results from previous studies which concluded that moderate alcohol consumption could be beneficial to bones," she said.

However, while the National Osteoporosis Society welcomes measures to improve bone health we do not recommend anyone increases their alcohol consumption on the basis of these studies. While low quantities of alcohol may appear to have bone density benefits, higher intakes have been show to decrease bone strength, with an alcohol intake of more than two units per day actually increasing the risk of breaking a bone. "There are also many other health concerns linked with alcohol which cannot be ignored."

SOURCE





8 February, 2010

Boredom shortens life expectancy, scientists say

It would be more reasonable to conclude from the findings that less healthy people have fewer options and are hence more likely to be bored

Boredom could be shaving years off your life, scientists have found. Researchers say that people who complain of boredom are more likely to die young, and that those who experienced "high levels" of tedium are more than 2½ times as likely to die from heart disease or stroke than those satisfied with their lot.

More than 7000 civil servants were studied over 25 years – and those who said they were bored were nearly 40 per cent more likely to have died by the end of study than those who did not. The scientists said this could be a result of those unhappy with their lives turning to such unhealthy habits as smoking or drinking, which would cut their life expectancy.

Specialists from the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at University College London looked at data from 7524 civil servants, aged between 35 and 55, interviewed between 1985 and 1988 about their levels of boredom. They then found out whether they had died by April last year. Those who reported feeling a great deal of boredom were 37 per cent more likely to have died by the end of the study.

Researcher Martin Shipley, who co-wrote the report to be published in the International Journal of Epidemiology this week, said: "The findings on heart disease show there was sufficient evidence to say there is a link with boredom."

SOURCE




Forget drugs, a jab of water helps ease birthing pain

This sounds like very good news

INJECTIONS of tiny amounts of water into the lower back are giving women drug-free pain relief during childbirth. Reynieze Petersen Leota, 17, who delivered her first baby Geoita at the Mater Mothers' Hospital in Brisbane yesterday, said an injection of sterile water during labour relieved her back pain for about six hours. "The pain was really bad. I couldn't handle it and then the midwife told me about the water injections," she said. "The pain went away straight away."

The Mater Mothers' Hospital has offered the injections since last year and has launched a study to investigate the most effective technique for delivering them. Midwife Nigel Lee, of the Mater Mothers' Research Centre, said the treatment, involving less than 1 ml of water being injected just under the skin, provided fast relief from back pain to about 85 per cent of women who received it.

He said the injections worked by stimulating nerve transmitters, blocking pain signals being sent to the brain. Mr Lee said they had benefits over traditional drug treatments, such as epidurals and laughing gas, although he stressed the water injections only worked to relieve back pain.

"The woman can still walk around. She doesn't have to stay on the bed," he said. "We can repeat it, as needed. There's no side effects because it's effectively just water. There's no effects on the baby at all." He said they had been available for years in Northern Europe, but the Mater Mothers' Hospital was one of the few facilities in Australia offering them on a routine basis to expectant mothers.

SOURCE





7 February, 2010

Exercise 'can fight ageing' (?)

Good to see two commenters express some caution about the direction of causation

Long-term physical activity has an anti-ageing effect at the cellular level, a German study suggests. Researchers focused on telomeres, the protective caps on the chromosomes that keep a cell's DNA stable but shorten with age. They found telomeres shortened less quickly in key immune cells of athletes with a long history of endurance training. The study, by Saarland University, appears in the journal Circulation.

In a separate study of young Swedish men, cardiovascular fitness has been linked to increased intelligence and higher educational achievement.

Telomeres are relatively short sections of specialised DNA that sit at the ends of all our chromosomes. They have been compared to the plastic tips at the ends of shoelaces that prevent the laces from unravelling. Each time a cell divides, its telomeres shorten and the cell becomes more susceptible to dying.

The researchers measured the length of telomeres in blood samples from two groups of professional athletes and two groups of people who were healthy non-smokers, but who did not take regular exercise. One group of professional athletes included members of the German national track and field athletics team, who had an average age of 20. The second group was made up of middle-aged athletes who had regularly run long distances - an average of 80km a week - since their youth.

The researchers found evidence that the physical exercise of the professional athletes led to activation of an enzyme called telomerase, which helped to stabilise telomeres. This reduced the telomere shortening in leukocytes, a type of white blood cell that plays a key role in fighting infection and disease. The most pronounced effect was found in athletes who had been regularly endurance training for several decades.

Lead researcher Dr Ulrich Laufs said: "This is direct evidence of an anti-ageing effect of physical exercise. "Our data improves the molecular understanding of the protective effects of exercise and underlines the potency of physical training in reducing the impact of age-related disease."

Professor Tim Spector, an expert on genetics and ageing at Kings College London, said other studies had suggested more moderate exercise had a beneficial effect on ageing. He said: "It is still difficult to separate cause and effect from these studies - as longer telomeres may still be a marker of fitness. "Nevertheless - this is further evidence that regular exercise may retard aging."

Professor Kay-Tee Khaw, of the University of Cambridge, an expert on ageing, said: "The benefits of physical activity for health are well established from many large long-term population studies. "Even moderate levels of physical activity are related to lower levels of many heart disease risk factors such as blood pressure and cholesterol and lower risk of many chronic diseases associated with ageing such as heart disease, stroke, diabetes and some cancers."

In the second study, published in Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences, a team from the University of Gothenburg analysed data on more than 1.2 million Swedish men born from 1950-1976 who enlisted for military service at age 18. They found that good heart health was linked to higher intelligence, better educational achievement and raised status in society.

By studying twins in the study, the researchers concluded that environmental and lifestyle factors were key, rather than genetics. [An enigmatic statement]

They said the findings suggested that campaigns to promote physical exercise might help to raise standards of educational achievement across the population. Lead researcher Professor Georg Kuhn said cardiovascular exercise increased blood flow to the brain, which in turn might help forge more and stronger connections between nerve cells. However, he said it was also possible that intelligent people tended to do more exercise.

SOURCE




The war on salt is just one battle in a larger war

The war has been going on for thousands of years. It comes up again and again. It manifests itself as a war on drugs, a war on terror, a global warming crisis. It is the war amongst those who would rule everyone else asserting that they know better how to run your life and it is the war against you. The war on salt is just one aspect of this same, tired, ancient, boring, despicable, and horrid war—a war with billions of casualties, a war against human spirit, a war on possibility. It is the war that doesn't give you a walk-on role in the world, only a lead role in a cage.

What I'm talking about is the war on the future we were promised, with flying cars, much longer lives, colonies in space, hotels in the Moon, terraforming of Mars. It is the war which impoverishes nearly everyone, the war which enriches only the cronies of big government, the war which opposes cheap air travel, cheap space travel, food that tastes good, drugs that relieve pain, a free market, free choices, free love, free thought, free people.

It is the same war that sent armies rampaging across Europe to slaughter Protestants and Catholics, the same war that sent Inquisitors to mock Galileo and thwart scientific reason, the same war that imprisons millions of Americans annually for non-violent non-crimes of possessing or selling or making herbs that God granted (Genesis 1:29) to all mankind to be as meat. Plato declared this war in his rotten book "The Republic" and acknowledged that nobility was a lie, that everyone was basically the same, but by diet, training, education, and preferential treatment, perhaps a race of philosopher kings might be bred, he hoped, to savagely rule, rape, and pillage everyone else.

How do I know that Mayor Bloomberg's war on salt is the same war that has been fought time and time again? I remember an album cover from 1972 for the Steeleye Span album Below the Salt. An old and excellent teacher of mine explained that the phrase "below the salt" represented the caste system in England. "At that time the nobility sat at the 'high table' and their commoner servants at lower trestle tables. Salt was placed in the centre of the high table. Only those of rank had access to it. Those less favoured on the lower tables were below (or beneath) the salt," Gary Martin writes. Until the 1600s when salt was mined near Cheshire, the objective of the wealthy classes was to deprive the poor of good tasting food and also deny them an essential nutrient for physical labor.

Why? One would think that better tasting food and necessary nutrients would have motivated more and better work. But it is exactly the same sort of reasoning that one gets from these class system brutes—the "reasoning" applied to depriving people of laudanum, opium, morphine, and other herb derivatives, the "reasoning" used to excuse depriving people of the pain relieving and pleasure giving properties of hemp, the "reasoning" used to claim a false and vindictive "authority" to spy on every telephone conversation in the world simultaneously.

In the death camps in Germany the answer was always the same. "Hier ist kein Warum." Here there is no why.

No, it isn't reasonable for Mayor Bloomberg to announce that restaurants have to cut back on the amount of salt they use in the dishes they serve. It is not reason. It is power madness. He has been told, perhaps, that salt is bad for people. Of course, restaurants use salt, and offer it to their customers on the table, because it makes food taste better. It makes food taste good, just as fat, butter, sugar, and many other ingredients are savory, precisely because the body needs it as an essential nutrient.

Deny salt to people who engage in physical labor, whether gardening, shoveling, walking, running, or "working out" in a gym, and you can kill them. Which is precisely Mayor Bloomberg's objective. He represents the wealthy, the powerful, those above the salt, those who sit at high table. And, of course, he's "educated" by elitists at Johns Hopkins and Harvard to believe that he knows better than everyone else how to live, what to eat, what is good for and bad for others. He's one of the richest men in the world with a net worth of $16 billion.

He made his first golden parachute of $10 million being fired from Salomon Brothers, a Wall Street firm where he was involved in equity trading and systems development. Then he developed systems that are used, today, by traders around the globe. Don't suppose that his fortune is a free market one, though, as the sources of data from the markets and the regulatory environment of those markets are part of what makes his business possible. Nor is he a nice guy in business, having been repeatedly accused of sexually harrassing male and female employees. He's been sued over saying "kill it" about a pregnant woman's baby, he's been sued by the EEOC on behalf of three women, and apparently on behalf of 72 plaintiffs who took maternity leave.

He's been a Republican, a Democrat, and an "independent" at various times in his political career. The evidence against his having any libertarian inclinations include his brutal treatment of subordinates in his company, his vicious attacks on out-of-state gun shops, his involvement as head of one of the largest bureaucracies in any city in the world, and his current fetish war on salt. His city government is as involved as any in the war on terror, routinely violating the privacy and civil liberties of individuals in many parts of the world.

But he isn't exactly the poster boy for the worst evil of the war on salt. Remember, the war on salt is the war over who gets to run your life: you or those who claim to know better.

More here





6 February, 2010

Possible cancer cure found in blushwood shrub

Claims like this are a dime a dozen but there is a tiny percentage that does pan out



CANCER patients are offering themselves as human guinea pigs as researchers investigate a possible cure for cancer found in north Queensland rainforests. Scientists have identified a compound in the fruit of the native blushwood shrub that appears to "liquefy and destroy cancer with no side-effects", according to latest research.

Found deep in the remnants of a 130 million-year-old rainforest, the fruit extract may yet hold the secret antidote to Australia's No.1 killer disease. Victoria Gordon, of EcoBiotics, an Atherton Tableland-based company, said they hoped to go to human clinical trials later this year. Dr Gordon said a single dose injection of the extract, known as EBC-46, had been effective in 50 critically ill dogs and about a dozen cats and horses.

"This is proving to be something exceptional," she said. "The tumour literally liquefies. "There is a rapid knock-down of the tumour, it disintegrates within 24 hours and we have a rapid healing response. "The biggest tumour we treated was the size of a Coke can in a dog, and that animal is fully healed and healthy." Dr Gordon said it had worked on skin cancers, such as carcinomas and melanomas, and bone cancer, and was a possible treatment for breast, colon and prostate cancer.

But she warned wannabe human guinea pigs against seeking under-the-table treatment. She said it was "immoral, illegal, and unscientific" to seek to be administered the drug before approval, likely to take up to seven years, by the Therapeutic Goods Administration. "We have been inundated with calls – it shows there is such a need for a breakthrough in anti-cancer treatment," she said. "Most people understand when we explain the situation."

Former breast cancer sufferer Mena Crew, 65, said many dying of cancer would "do anything for a miracle cure". "We would all like a magic cure, that would be wonderful, and I hope in my lifetime we find it," the breast cancer support volunteer said. She has worked with more than 200 sufferers and some victims in her role with the Cancer Council Queensland.

"I don't want to kill the enthusiasm of all the wonderful research, but until it is proven it will do the job, we recommend they go with proven and conventional treatments," she said. "It is good, however, to think the secret antidote may be growing in the jungle above Cairns."

SOURCE




Dangerous recreational use of painkillers

Young people are dosing up on over-the-counter painkillers in a worrying trend that can burn holes in their stomachs and require them to use colostomy bags, health professionals have warned. brisbanetimes.com.au has been told young people regularly walk into chemists, buy "75-packs" of Nurofen Plus - which contain 12.5 grams of the narcotic codeine - and then pop up to 40 tablets with coffee and alcohol over a day.

One inner-city chemist, who did not want to be named, said the practice was quite common among young people. "They come into the shop and you warn them that they [the tablets] can burn through their stomach linings if they take so many, but they just don't believe you," the pharmacist said. "I didn't think it was so bad until I was sitting with my partner recently having a coffee and I saw two young girls go over to a chemist buy a pack of Nurofen Plus and then come back and have four tablets with a cup of coffee. "It is just ridiculous."

Clinical director of the Gold Coast Drug Council Julie Fox said young people taking vast quantities of Nurofen Plus, which also contains ibuprofen, was the "emerging trend" of the Gold Coast drug scene. Ms Fox said some women were taking up to 40 to 50 tablets at a time, getting high from the codeine, completely unaware of the medical implications. "I mean, you end up with young people having colostomy bags," she said.

"It is cheap and it is really easy to get. They are taking very large amounts and the medical consequences are absolutely horrendous." From May 1, tighter controls of the over-the-counter analgesics come into force, meaning people could only buy a maximum of 30 tablets at a time. But Pharmacy Guild of Australia communications director Greg Turnbull said nothing would stop them moving to the next chemist shop and simply buying more over the counter.

Mr Turnbull said the Guild wanted sales of drugs containing codeine, including Nurofen Plus, to be registered in the same way as pseudoephedrine sales. "We think that the technology is there now for the real-time monitoring of products containing codeine, which would alert pharmacists that a person had bought a large packet of these medicines at a pharmacy down the road," he said. Mr Turnbull said they should not be made "prescription only", because it forced the legitimate users of the medicine to go to a doctor to get a prescription for a drug which was safe when taken as directed.

The Royal Brisbane and Womens Hospital's director of addictive psychology, Doctor Mark Daglish, said the trend towards non-prescription drug abuse was frightening. "The two common ones would be paracetamol and codeine - so the Panadeine and Panadeine Forte - and the ibuprofen-based ones, like Nurofen Plus," he said.

Dr Daglish agreed that people had no idea of the consequences of taking 40 tablets. "You would get a reasonable opiate hit and a huge ibuprofen overdose," he said. "And in overdose they are particularly dangerous because they tend to burn a hole through your stomach lining, or they can rot your kidneys." Dr Daglish supported any plan to restrict the sales of the drugs.

SOURCE





5 February, 2010

Fat kids, junk food and emotion

By Luke Malpass

Every time you open a newspaper or watch the news, you find yourself being bombarded with the news that junk food creates fat kids, and for the crime of unleashing a childhood obesity epidemic on innocent parents and children, the fast food industry should be punished or at least have their commercial activities severely curtailed. Individual or parental responsibility plays no role; it is all the evil ‘fast food industry.’

At least this is what the concerned stakeholders (government funded lobby groups) think. However, in the never-ending competition to see who’s more publicly caring, rational discussion often gets tossed aside.

Takeaways are labelled as ‘bad,’ ipso facto those who sell them are also ‘bad.’ Disagreeing with this lands any dissenter ‘on their side’ and sees them denounced as ‘uncaring’ about poor, innocent fat, diabetic kids.

In Crikey (4 February 2010), Jane Martin from the Obesity Policy Coalition wrote an article bemoaning self regulation in ‘the fast food industry.’ She cites an advertisement for chicken nuggets/soft drink/free toy combo that Hungry Jack’s has been offering as an example of ‘the fox looking after the henhouse.’

The advertised meal may not be the healthy option. But does it make fast food chains somehow predatory and evil? No. Does it mean fast food chains are responsible for childhood obesity rates? No. Does it somehow mean parents hold less responsibility to feed their children a balanced diet? No.

The power of claims about the inherent ‘badness’ of the fast food industry lies not in the assertion but in the appeal to emotion, to good and evil, to right and wrong, of some cosmic battle between money hungry capitalists and fearless defenders of the poor downtrodden, burger-loving proles.

This plays to emotions such as compassion and fear, and it is as professional as it is effective. In both New Zealand and Australia, the heads of major obesity action groups are professionals many of whom formerly led anti-smoking groups: another good versus evil campaign.

With the ‘sin’ of smoking now largely purged from public sight, it makes you wonder which is more important: the cause or the battle against some invented goliath?

The above is a press release from the Centre for Independent Studies, dated February 5. Enquiries to cis@cis.org.au. Snail mail: PO Box 92, St Leonards, NSW, Australia 1590.




Aerobic exercise can be 'a waste of time'

Once again, it all depends on your genes

MILLIONS of people who try to keep fit by jogging, cycling or going to the gym could be wasting their time, a study revealed today. The international research, led by the University of London, found that aerobic exercise does not benefit everyone in equal measures, and its usefulness is determined by a person's genes. According to the results, published in the Journal of Applied Physiology today, 20 per cent of people do not receive any health benefits from aerobic exercise.

The study, which stretched from London to Ontario, saw an international team of researchers from 14 institutions examine the human genome to find a way of predicting who would benefit the most from exercise. The work built on the belief among researchers that one of the best predictors of health was a body’s ability to take in and use oxygen during maximum exercise. In theory the more blood a heart can pump, and the more oxygen muscles use, the less risk there would be of early disease and death.

James Timmons of the Royal Veterinary College at the University of London, who headed the study, said aerobic exercise would not help certain people ward off heart disease, diabetes and other potential ailments.

Mr Timmons argued this new research could help advance and improve healthcare. “If a patient is not likely to benefit much from aerobic exercise, the physician could turn to other types of exercise or alternative therapies. This would be one of the first examples of personalised, genomic-based medicine,” he said. Alternative types of exercise include anaerobic pursuits such as weightlifting, push-ups and pull-ups.

Participants in the study were asked to undergo rigorous aerobic training, while researchers took muscle tissue samples before and after. Using new procedures the team then identified a set of about 30 genes that predicted the increase of oxygen their body consumed. By the end of the study 20 per cent saw their maximum oxygen increase by less than five per cent. About 30 per cent showed no increase in insulin sensitivity, meaning that the exercise did not reduce their risk of diabetes.

“We know that low maximal oxygen consumption is a strong risk factor for premature illness and death, so the tendency is for physicians and public health experts to automatically prescribe aerobic exercise to increase oxygen capacity," Mr Timmons said. "Our hope is that before too long, they will be able to target that prescription just to those who may stand a greater chance of benefiting, and prescribe more effective preventive or therapeutic measures to the others,” he added.

SOURCE





4 February, 2010

Study links excessive internet use to depression

Good to see some skepticism about the direction of causation

PEOPLE who spend a lot of time surfing the internet are more likely to show signs of depression, British scientists said today. But it is not clear whether the internet causes depression or whether depressed people are drawn to it.

Psychologists from Leeds University found what they said was "striking" evidence that some avid net users develop compulsive internet habits in which they replace real-life social interaction with online chat rooms and social networking sites. "This study reinforces the public speculation that over-engaging in websites that serve to replace normal social function might be linked to psychological disorders like depression and addiction," the study's lead author, Catriona Morrison, wrote in the journal Psychopathology. "This type of addictive surfing can have a serious impact on mental health."

In the first large-scale study of Western young people to look at this issue, the researchers analysed internet use and depression levels of 1,319 Britons aged between 16 and 51. Of these, 1.2 percent were "internet addicted", they concluded. These "internet addicts" spent proportionately more time browsing sexually gratifying websites, online gaming sites and online communities, Morrison said. They also had a higher incidence of moderate to severe depression than normal users.

"Excessive internet use is associated with depression, but what we don't know is which comes first -- are depressed people drawn to the internet or does the internet cause depression?," Morrison said. "What is clear is that for a small subset of people, excessive use of the internet could be a warning signal for depressive tendencies."

Morrison noted that while the 1.2 percent figure for those classed as "addicts" was small, it was larger than the incidence of gambling in Britain, which is around 0.6 percent.

SOURCE




Laser zaps fat instantly without scars: "Scientists have invented a laser which zaps away fat cells instantly. The Sun reports patients using the technique can drop two dress sizes in just two weeks - without having to exercise or diet. The painless Zerona treatment costs $1500 for six 40-minute sessions. It works via a laser that passes over the skin and ruptures fat cells, which are expelled from the body. The procedure has been used by US stars to quickly slim for upcoming events as no recovery time is needed and there are no scars. "It's the invention every woman has been waiting for," Tatiana Karelina, who runs the Laser Lounge in Kensington, West London, said. US safety regulator the Food and Drug Administration found the average patient lost nine centimetres from the waist, hips, and thighs. Some lost 23cm. However, the laser doesn't work on obese people - as it can't cut through the layers of fat." [Sounds dubious]





3 February, 2010

Too little too late: Irresponsible medical journal retracts MMR scare paper

Peer review? What peer review? The tiny sample size -- if you can call it a sample -- made the purported observations no more than anecdotal

A leading medical journal has officially retracted the discredited study which sparked a health scare over the MMR vaccine. The Lancet said it now accepted claims made by the researchers which linked MMR to bowel disorders and autism, were "false". It comes after Andrew Wakefield, the lead researcher in the 1998 paper, was ruled last week to have been irresponsible and dishonest in carrying out the original study on 12 children.

MMR is the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine which was introduced in 1988. The fall-out from the research, first published in February 1998, caused vaccination rates to plummet and has been blamed for a resurgence of measles in Britain.

The General Medical Council (GMC) ruled last week that Wakefield showed a "callous disregard" for the suffering of children and that two fellow authors of the paper also "failed in their duties" as responsible doctors in carrying out the study. Invasive procedures were carried out on the 12 children without proper ethics committee approval and without due regard to their clinical needs, the GMC found.

Wakefield was also found to have received 50,000 pounds from the Legal Aid Board to carry out the research on behalf of parents who believed their children had already been harmed by MMR. Wakefield and two former colleagues, John Walker-Smith and Simon Murch, now face being struck off the medical register if they are found guilty of a further charge of serious professional misconduct later this year.

The three doctors deny any wrongdoing. The Lancet had already issued a partial retraction of the paper in 2004, rejecting the interpretation that the vaccine could be linked to health problems. This was signed by ten of the 13 original authors of the study, including Professors Walker-Smith and Murch. At the time, The Lancet argued it had been right to publlish the study as the journal was there to "raise new ideas".

But it said yesterday that in light of the conflict of interest and other charges found proved by the GMC: "We fully retract this paper from the published record." Leading doctors welcomed the decision, although some complained it was ten years too late. Professor Adam Finn, Professor Of Paediatrics at University of Bristol Medical School, added: "This is not before time. Let's hope this will do something to re-establish the good reputation of this excellent vaccine. And I hope the country can now draw a line under this particular health scare and move onto new opportunities for vaccination."

SOURCE




Report: cancer studies used wrong cells

Another reason to be skeptical about in vitro findings

More than 100 published studies and two clinical trials involving esophageal cancer are based partly or wholly on research that mistakenly used cells from other types of cancer, a report claims. Its authors suggest the findings may reflect a wider problem in cancer research -- that cells thought to be from one type of cancer actually come from a totally different type.

The report, by Winand N.M. Dinjens of Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands and colleagues, appears Jan. 14 online in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. In the case of esophageal cancer, the authors said, their investigation revealed that three often-used cell lineages were actually from colon, lung or gastric cancer. The lineages were thought to be tumor cells from esophageal adenocarcinoma, one of two main types of esophageal cancer. More generally, among lineages of tumor cells used in basic cancer research, "it has been estimated that up to one-third. have an origin other than that supposed," they wrote.

The report appears Jan. 14 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. "In the past, the scientific community has recognized this problem, but decisive action has not been taken," they continued. The report attributed the mistakes to "cross-contamination between cell lines and mislabeling of cultures." "Widespread use of contaminated cell lines threatens the development of treatment strategies for [esophageal adenocarcinoma]," the authors wrote.

They also noted that 11 patents to date are based on the erroneous studies. Two clinical trials in the United States are partly or wholly thrown into question by the findings, they added. The first, a University of Chicago trial entitled The Effects of Sorafenib on Molecular Barrett's Esophagus Cancer, is currently recruiting patients, with a goal of obtaining 15 volunteers. The second seeks to enroll 85 patients, but other types of cancer are also included. The study, sponsored by Geron Corp., is entitled Safety and Dose Study of GRN163L Administered to Patients With Refractory or Relapsed Solid Tumor Malignancies.

The first of these trials should be "reconsidered," Dinjens and colleagues wrote. But Robert Shoemaker, a scientist at the National Cancer Institute at Frederick, Md., disagreed. He said that the rationale behind the University of Chicago study is based on a chemical pathway common to many tumor types. Thus it doesn't necessarily depend on a specific type of cancer cell having been used in the original studies. Moreover, because even a single tumor contains different cell types, "one might question the rationale for any therapeutic maneuver that is based on studies conducted on a single cell line," he wrote, in an editorial accompanying Dinjens' report in the journal.

SOURCE





2 February, 2010

Fat parents to blame for childhood obesity epidemic by over-feeding under-fives, British study claims

Complete and utter garbage. The most obvious conclusion from the findings is in fact that weight is genetically determined -- which we already know to be so

Overweight parents who simply feed their children too much at a young age are to largely blame for Britain’s childhood obesity crisis, a report will warn this week. The study claims that the Government may be misguided in its policy of trying to tackle the problem through expensive projects aimed at persuading children in primary school to eat healthily and exercise mored. Instead, the report suggests, they should focus on educating new parents and parents-to-be to feed their children less before they start school, so they do not become overweight in the first place. Parents must learn to reduce portion sizes it suggests.

The findings from one of the few long-term studies on childhood obesity in Britain show that daughters of overweight mothers are 10 times more likely to be obese by the time they reach the age of eight than a daughter born to a slim mother. [Which is entirely to be expected given the highly heredity determination of weight] Sons of obese fathers are six times more likely to be overweight, according to the research from scientists working on the EarlyBird Diabetes Project at the medical school in Plymouth.

Children of fat parents tended to be over-fed and under-exercised, setting them on a trajectory towards obesity, it found. The chief cause of weight gain, the report said, was “over-nutrition” of children by their parents.

One of the report’s co-authors, Terry Wilkin, Professor of Endocrinology and Metabolism at Peninsula Medical School, told The Daily Telegraph that the results showed "physical activity will help a child’s fitness but not his or her fatness”. Prof Wilkin, together with Dr Linda Voss from the school, said in the report: “We have found no evidence that physical inactivity precedes obesity, but good evidence that obesity precedes inactivity. “A picture is emerging from the EarlyBird study to suggest that weight gain trajectories are set early in life, perhaps very early, by some behavioural sympathy between obese parents and their same-sex offspring.”

More than 2.3million children in Britain are estimated to be overweight or obese and many under-12s already show signs of high blood pressure and cholesterol, diabetes and liver disease. The Government has spent nearly £2billion over the past decade tackling obesity levels, with a large part of the money being spent on encouraging children to lead healthier lives. The figures include £733million on school sport, £650million on school food and £235million on play facilities.

However, the scientists said “the implications are clear [from the research] - strategies aimed at increasing physical activity, even if they ever achieved the increase, are unlikely to reduce BMI [Body Mass Index]. “The observation is important, because it may turn the causality of childhood obesity on its head. A large amount of money and effort has been directed at children in the belief that the prevention of childhood obesity would reduce adult obesity.

“Importantly the factors popularly associated with childhood obesity - poor school meals, lack of playing fields, insufficient PE at school, too much screen watching - appear to have little impact, at least at primary school age.”

The report said that while eight out of 10 obese adults were not overweight as children, “a high proportion of obese children are the offspring of overweight/obese adults. Maybe the focus of childhood obesity prevention should be on parents-to-be”.

The findings have been drawn from the EarlyBird research project, which has been taking blood tests, weight measurements and low level X-rays of the same group of 300 children for the past 10 years. This week's new "pointers" report, which is being published on the medical school's website, is the first time the scientists have started to draw conclusions from the long term study. Earlier research published in 2008 by the same scientists showed that more than 90 per cent of excess weight gained by girls before puberty is before they are five years old. The figure is 70 per cent for boys.

The project is due to complete in 2013 but there are now fears that the project could end this September because of lack of funds. Prof Wilkin said he had applied for further funding from the Government, but was turned down because EarlyBird is an observational project, rather than interventionist scheme.

A Department for Health spokesman said: "Our Change4Life campaign is aimed at families - parents and their children. Supporting them to eat better and move more to live longer and healthier lives. "As part of this, our Start4Life campaign launched in December, will support pregnant women and parents of babies give their families a 'good start for a healthier life'."

SOURCE




Stress may cause cancer in fruit-flies, study suggests

Stress may cause cells to become cancerous, Yale University scientists have found, in a study that also suggests new ways to attack the deadly disease

Until now, most researchers thought more than one cancer-causing mutation had to occur in the same cell to make tumors grow. But the Yale team, led by geneticist Tian Xu, found this can occur even if the mutations arise in different, nearby cells. "The bad news is that it is much easier for a tissue to accumulate mutations in different cells than in the same cell," said Tian, whose research was published online Jan. 13 in the journal Nature.

His team worked with fruit flies to study the activity of two genes involved in cancer: a gene called RAS that has been implicated in 30 percent of cancers, and a tumor-suppressing gene called scribble, which contributes to tumor development when mutated. Neither defective gene alone can cause cancer. Researchers in the Xu lab previously showed that a combination of the two within the same cell could trigger malignant tumors. The Yale team has now found these mutations need not coexist in one cell to cause tumors. A cell with only mutant RAS can develop into a malignant tumor if helped by a nearby cell with defective scribble.

The group also found stress conditions such as a wound could trigger cancer formation. For instance, RAS cells developed into tumors when a wound was induced in the tissue. The culprit underlying both phenomena turned out to be a chemical signaling process called JNK, which is activated by environmental stress conditions, Xu explained. "A lot of different conditions can trigger stress signaling: physical stress, emotional stress, infections, inflammation," Xu said. It's more "bad news for cancer," he added.

But the good news is that the research also identifies new targets to prevent and treat one of the deadliest diseases in the developed world, Xu said. The Yale team found that the JNK stress signaling travels from one cell to the next, but that the propagation can be blocked. "Better understanding of the underlying mechanism causing cancer always offers new tools to battle the disease," Xu said.

SOURCE





1 February, 2010

After the war on salt, the battle against butter

Healthy-living killjoys now even want to ban the yellow creamy stuff that makes food so tasty and enjoyable. ‘By banning butter and replacing it with a healthy spread, the average daily sat-fat intake would be reduced by eight grams. This would save thousands of lives each year and help to protect them from cardiovascular disease - the UK’s biggest killer.’

So said London-based heart surgeon Shyam Kolvekar last week. He, along with many others, is offering us out-of-date advice that would rob us of one of life’s great pleasures.

The theory is that a diet high in saturated fats will lead to atherosclerosis - so-called ‘furry’ arteries. This narrowing and hardening of the arteries in turn is thought to make it more likely that we will suffer a clot in one of the blood vessels leading to the heart, causing a ‘heart attack’ as that vital organ is deprived of oxygen.

It’s the story we’ve been told for decades now. Rich, animal-derived foods like butter and other dairy products, eggs and meat are little more than a ‘heart attack on a plate’. Butter - with a saturated fat content of 50 per cent - is a prime target for health campaigners, and manufacturers of spreads with low levels of saturated fats make great play on how they are heart-healthy.

It certainly seems to be the case that eating more saturated fat increases the amount of cholesterol in your blood. It’s the cholesterol - or more particularly these days, the so-called bad cholesterol - which is deemed to cause those furry arteries. The trouble is that intervening in diet doesn’t seem to make a great deal of difference. In the early Eighties, a massive intervention trial called MRFIT reduced cholesterol and saturated fat intake for a large group of Americans. If the theory was right, the result should have been a sharp drop in heart attacks. The actual result? No change. The kind of dietary changes that people are constantly told to make had no effect on the risk of having a coronary. Incredibly, however, this negative result had no effect on the popularity of the diet-causes-heart-attacks thesis, either.

In 1998, the Danish doctor and cholesterol sceptic Uffe Ravnskov noted: ‘The crucial test is the controlled, randomised trial. Eight such trials using diet as the only treatment have been performed but neither the number of fatal or non-fatal heart attacks was reduced.’ Indeed, as Gary Taubes notes in his book The Diet Delusion, there was initially a lot of scepticism about the idea that cholesterol was a killer and it was only when the idea got the official stamp of approval from the US government in the 1960s that it became regarded as common sense; as Taubes shows, the epidemiological evidence for the theory was full of holes. (For a review of the book, see The Copernicus of the diet debate? by Rob Lyons.)

Kolvekar’s comments last week represent just the latest in a long line of attacks on the basic pleasures of food. If it’s not butter that’s going to kill us, apparently it will be salt or bacon or anything else that actually tastes of something. Time and again the evidence for these assertions turns out to be as feeble as the flavour of the salad we’re supposed to be munching instead. It’s all reminiscent of an old joke. A doctor advises his patient to stop smoking, drinking or eating rich foods. ‘Will this mean I’ll live longer?’, asks the patient. ‘No, but it’ll seem longer’, came the reply.

Even if there were some risk attached to eating butter, would we really want to do without it? In Kitchen Confidential, the American chef and writer Anthony Bourdain is forthright in his defence of butter: ‘I don’t care what they tell you they’re putting or not putting in your food at your favourite restaurant, chances are you’re eating a ton of butter. In a professional kitchen, it’s almost always the first and last thing in the pan… Margarine? That’s not food. I Can’t Believe it’s Not Butter? I can.’ Even the Italians, says Bourdain, famed for their olive-oil heavy diets, are in fact whacking loads of that yellowy, creamy nectar into the pasta, risotto and veal chop.

Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, known as much for his health crusades as his cooking, knows which side his bread is buttered on. A spokesman told the Daily Mail: ‘He is completely against a ban on butter. He uses butter in his recipes, for example for roasting potatoes in his Christmas programme. He doesn’t like the whole kind of food police, we must ban everything, point of view.’ That last statement is a little hard to swallow, given some of the claims made in Oliver’s own TV shows, but he’s not so stupid that he thinks you can cook good food without butter.

It’s not even the case that butter is all that important as a source of fat in our diets. As Felicity Lawrence points out in the Guardian, ‘Butter and fat spreads between them make up just one-eighth of our total fat intake’, with meat, dairy products and even cereal products like bread and biscuits being more important. Unfortunately, Lawrence can’t help but see the whole affair as a scam on the part of food manufacturers who produce those ‘heart-healthy’ spreads, insinuating that the tentative links between the heart surgeon Kolvekar and food giant Unilever amount to a conflict of interest. But while manufacturers have undoubtedly pumped up advice in order to flog their products - and some cholesterol-lowering products come at a 300 per cent mark-up - the real source of confusion has been the willingness of some noisy doctors and health authorities to overstate the case against certain foods in order to influence how we live.

This has produced some notable ironies. For example, polyunsaturated fats have in the past proven difficult to use in certain situations like baking and high-temperature frying. The furore over saturated fats three decades ago led many manufacturers, particularly in the US, to replace products rich in saturated fat, like butter and lard, with partially-hydrogenated vegetable fats. In recent years, however, these new fats - which contain so-called ‘trans fats’ - have been claimed to be even worse than saturated fat for causing heart disease. It may well be that the case against trans fats is as ropey as the evidence linking butter with heart disease has proven to be. But whatever the truth is, a little more scepticism and careful evaluation of the evidence, rather than a hysterical leaping from one killer food to another, would make more sense.

Those who claim that our food is killing us are not averse to laying it on a bit thick when it comes to scare stories. But the only thing we should be laying on thick is that lovely, creamy butter.

SOURCE




Neuron breakthrough offers hope on Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s

Neurons have been created directly from skin cells for the first time, in a remarkable study that suggests that our biological makeup is far more versatile than previously thought.

If confirmed, the discovery that one tissue type can be genetically reprogrammed to become another, could revolutionise treatments for conditions such as Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s, opening up the possibility of turning a patient’s own skin cells into the neurons that they need.

The study by scientists from Stanford University, California, also suggests that skin cells could be reprogrammed to provide a limitless supply of blood or bone marrow for personalised transfusions.

Until now, the consensus was that only master cells from embryos, or adult cells that have been ‘rewound’ into an embryo-like state — a process that takes several weeks — have the ability to form all the different types of tissue in the body.

The latest study, carried out in mice, reveals that while cells choose and maintain their speciality during the earliest phase of development, they retain an underlying flexibility. Provided that the correct genes are turned on or off they could potentially be turned into any other variety of tissue in the body.

The work has been hailed as a huge conceptual leap forward in fundamental biology. “The possibility that cells could be directly reprogrammed is something that people had thought about, but to see it in black and white is still slightly shocking,” said Professor Jack Price, a neurobiologist at King’s College London. “This suggests that there are no great rules — you can reprogramme anything into anything else.”

The finding will address some of the ethical objections of groups who oppose embryonic stem-cell research, in which the embryo is destroyed. And the new process is much quicker than the alternative method, where adult cells are “rewound” to create versatile master cells, known as induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells.

In the study, published in the journal Nature, skin cells were infected with a genetically modified virus that inserted genes into the cells’ DNA. The researchers began by introducing 19 genes that are known to be switched on when mice stem cells first differentiate into neurons during embryonic development.

Using a mix-and-match approach, the researchers found that of the 19 genes initially tested, only three were truly necessary to get the skin cells to develop into neurons. When these three genes were switched on, 20 per cent of the skin cells had turned into fully functioning neurons in less than a week. The neurons were able to make connections with and signal to other nerve cells — critical functions if the cells are eventually to be used as therapy for Parkinson’s disease or other disorders.

“We were very surprised by both the timing and the efficiency,” said Irving Weissman, a stem cell expert at Stanford University in California, who led the research. "This is much more straightforward than going through iPS cells, and it’s likely to be a very viable alternative.”

In terms of clinical applications, a further advantage of skipping out the intermediate iPS state is that it is known that iPS cells promote cancers. Many researchers believe it would be difficult to obtain a license for the use of cells that are grown from iPS cells.

“People have been saying that iPS cells could be used therapeutically in the near future, but frankly they’ve been lying,” said Professor Price. “These cells don’t go through a tumourigenic phase, which means it would be much easier to get a licence to use them.”

The Stanford group are now working to reproduce the finding using human cells, but say that there is no reason to expect it should not apply to most species.

A further question is why, if cells retain an underlying versatility, they don’t switch between cell types throughout our life. One possible explanation is that genes interact via “see-saw” mechanisms, whereby when one set of genes are switched on, they automatically keep other genes switched off unless an artificial intervention is made.

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SITE MOTTO: "Epidemiology is mostly bunk"

Where it is not bunk is when it shows that some treatment or influence has no effect on lifespan or disease incidence. It is as convincing as disproof as it is unconvincing as proof. Think about it. As Einstein said: No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.

Epidemiological studies are useful for hypothesis-generating or for hypothesis-testing of theories already examined in experimental work but they do not enable causative inferences by themselves

The standard of reasoning that one commonly finds in epidemiological journal articles is akin to the following false syllogism:
Chairs have legs
You have legs
So therefore you are a chair


"To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact" -- Charles Darwin


"Most men die of their remedies, not of their diseases", said Moliere. That may no longer be true but there is still a lot of false medical "wisdom" around that does harm to various degrees. And showing its falsity is rarely the problem. The problem is getting people -- medical researchers in particular -- to abandon their preconceptions


Bertrand Russell could have been talking about today's conventional dietary "wisdom" when he said: "The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd; indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.”


"Obesity" is 77% genetic. So trying to make fatties slim is punishing them for the way they were born. That sort of thing is furiously condemned in relation to homosexuals so why is it OK for fatties?


****************

Some more problems with the "Obesity" war:

1). It tries to impose behavior change on everybody -- when most of those targeted are not obese and hence have no reason to change their behaviour. It is a form of punishing the innocent and the guilty alike. (It is also typical of Leftist thinking: Scorning the individual and capable of dealing with large groups only).

2). The longevity research all leads to the conclusion that it is people of MIDDLING weight who live longest -- not slim people. So the "epidemic" of obesity is in fact largely an "epidemic" of living longer.

3). It is total calorie intake that makes you fat -- not where you get your calories. Policies that attack only the source of the calories (e.g. "junk food") without addressing total calorie intake are hence pissing into the wind. People involuntarily deprived of their preferred calorie intake from one source are highly likely to seek and find their calories elsewhere.

4). So-called junk food is perfectly nutritious. A big Mac meal comprises meat, bread, salad and potatoes -- which is a mainstream Western diet. If that is bad then we are all in big trouble.

5). Food warriors demonize salt and fat. But we need a daily salt intake to counter salt-loss through perspiration and the research shows that people on salt-restricted diets die SOONER. And Eskimos eat huge amounts of fat with no apparent ill-effects. And the average home-cooked roast dinner has LOTS of fat. Will we ban roast dinners?

6). The foods restricted are often no more calorific than those permitted -- such as milk and fruit-juice drinks.

7). Tendency to weight is mostly genetic and is therefore not readily susceptible to voluntary behaviour change.

8). And when are we going to ban cheese? Cheese is a concentrated calorie bomb and has lots of that wicked animal fat in it too. Wouldn't we all be better off without it? And what about butter and margarine? They are just about pure fat. Surely they should be treated as contraband in kids' lunchboxes! [/sarcasm].

9). And how odd it is that we never hear of the huge American study which showed that women who eat lots of veggies have an INCREASED risk of stomach cancer? So the official recommendation to eat five lots of veggies every day might just be creating lots of cancer for the future! It's as plausible (i.e. not very) as all the other dietary "wisdom" we read about fat etc.

10). And will "this generation of Western children be the first in history to lead shorter lives than their parents did"? This is another anti-fat scare that emanates from a much-cited editorial in a prominent medical journal that said so. Yet this editorial offered no statistical basis for its opinion -- an opinion that flies directly in the face of the available evidence.

11). A major cause of increasing obesity is certainly the campaign against it -- as dieting usually makes people FATTER. If there were any sincerity to the obesity warriors, they would ban all diet advertising and otherwise shut up about it. Re-authorizing now-banned school playground activities and school outings would help too. But it is so much easier to blame obesity on the evil "multinationals" than it is to blame it on your own restrictions on the natural activities of kids

12. Fascism: "What we should be doing is monitoring children from birth so we can detect any deviations from the norm at an early stage and action can be taken". Who said that? Joe Stalin? Adolf Hitler? Orwell's "Big Brother"? The Spanish Inquisition? Generalissimo Francisco Franco Bahamonde? None of those. It was Dr Colin Waine, chairman of Britain's National Obesity Forum. What a fine fellow!

*********************


More on salt (See point 5 above): Salt is a major source of iodine, which is why salt is normally "iodized" by official decree. Cutting back salt consumption runs the risk of iodine deficiency, with its huge adverse health impacts -- goiter, mental retardation etc. GIVE YOUR BABY PLENTY OF SALTY FOODS -- unless you want to turn it into a cretin


Trans fats: For one summary of the weak science behind the "trans-fat" hysteria, see here. Trans fats have only a temporary effect on blood chemistry and the evidence of lasting harm from them is dubious. By taking extreme groups in trans fats intake, some weak association with coronary heart disease has at times been shown in some sub-populations but extreme group studies are inherently at risk of confounding with other factors and are intrinsically of little interest to the average person.


The "antioxidant" religion: The experimental evidence is that antioxidants SHORTEN your life, if anything. Studies here and here and here and here and here and here and here, for instance. That they are of benefit is a great theory but it is one that has been coshed by reality plenty of times.


The medical consensus is often wrong. The best known wrongheaded medical orthodoxy is that stomach ulcers could not be caused by bacteria because the stomach is so acidic. Disproof of that view first appeared in 1875 (Yes. 1875) but the falsity of the view was not widely recognized until 1990. Only heroic efforts finally overturned the consensus and led to a cure for stomach ulcers. See here and here and here.


NOTE: "No trial has ever demonstrated benefits from reducing dietary saturated fat".


Huge ($400 million) clinical trial shows that a low fat diet is useless . See also here and here


Dieticians are just modern-day witch-doctors. There is no undergirding for their usual recommendations in double-blind studies.


The fragility of current medical wisdom: Would you believe that even Old Testament wisdom can sometimes trump medical wisdom? Note this quote: "Spiess discussed Swedish research on cardiac patients that compared Jehovah's Witnesses who refused blood transfusions to patients with similar disease progression during open-heart surgery. The research found those who refused transfusions had noticeably better survival rates.


Relying on the popular wisdom can certainly hurt you personally: "The scientific consensus of a quarter-century ago turned into the arthritic nightmare of today."


Since many of my posts here make severe criticisms of medical research, I should perhaps point out that I am also a severe critic of much research in my own field of psychology. See here and here


This is NOT an "alternative medicine" site. Perhaps the only (weak) excuse for the poorly substantiated claims that often appear in the medical literature is the even poorer level of substantiation offered in the "alternative" literature.


I used to teach social statistics in a major Australian university and I find medical statistics pretty obfuscatory. They seem uniformly designed to make mountains out of molehills. Many times in the academic literature I have excoriated my colleagues in psychology and sociology for going ga-ga over very weak correlations but what I find in the medical literature makes the findings in the social sciences look positively muscular. In fact, medical findings are almost never reported as correlations -- because to do so would exhibit how laughably trivial they generally are. If (say) 3 individuals in a thousand in a control group had some sort of an adverse outcome versus 4 out of a thousand in a group undergoing some treatment, the difference will be published in the medical literature with great excitement and intimations of its importance. In fact, of course, such small differences are almost certainly random noise and are in any rational calculus unimportant. And statistical significance is little help in determining the importance of a finding. Statistical significance simply tells you that the result was unlikely to be an effect of small sample size. But a statistically significant difference could have been due to any number of other randomly-present factors.


Even statistical correlations far stronger than anything found in medical research may disappear if more data is used. A remarkable example from Sociology: below:

"The modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an acre's yield of cotton. He calculated the correlation coefficient between the two series at -0.532. In other words, when the economy was doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green, Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished the alleged connection between economic conditions and lynchings in Raper's data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his analysis in 1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and economic conditions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."

So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. But in medical research, data selectivity and the "overlooking" of discordant research findings is epidemic.


The intellectual Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180) could have been speaking of the prevailing health "wisdom" of today when he said: "The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."


The Federal Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence, Second Edition says (p. 384): "the threshold for concluding that an agent was more likely than not the cause of an individual's disease is a relative risk greater than 2.0." Very few of the studies criticized on this blog meet that criterion.


Improbable events do happen at random -- as mathematician John Brignell notes rather tartly:
"Consider, instead, my experiences in the village pub swindle. It is based on the weekly bonus ball in the National Lottery. It so happens that my birth date is 13, so that is the number I always choose. With a few occasional absences abroad I have paid my pound every week for a year and a half, but have never won. Some of my neighbours win frequently; one in three consecutive weeks. Furthermore, I always put in a pound for my wife for her birth date, which is 11. She has never won either. The probability of neither of these numbers coming up in that period is less than 5%, which for an epidemiologist is significant enough to publish a paper.