Homeopathy: Exposing Pseudoscience on Wikipedia

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Water and Homeopathy: Latest Discoveries at Science’s Cutting Edge

By Dana Ullman, MPH, CCH and Lionel Milgrom, Ph.D., RHom, MARH

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

A major research conference took place at London’s Royal Society of Medicine that confirmed the therapeutic effects of extremely small doses (nanodoses) of homeopathic medicines
Two Nobel Prize-winning scientists and other esteemed researchers from across the world presented compelling evidence that medicinal agents not only persist in water, but they retain therapeutic effects in these nanodoses
Our bodies’ hormones and cell-signaling systems also operate at this super small nanodose level
Professor Vladimir Voeikov asserted Russian scientists had known for decades that tiny doses of medicines have dramatic effects on biological systems
Professor Jerry Pollack of the University of Washington is one of the leading experts on water who reported on his research, which confirms water has the capacity to store huge amounts of medicinal information, enabling homeopathic nanodoses to fully impact a person’s physiology

By Dana Ullman, MPH, CCH and Lionel Milgrom, Ph.D., RHom, MARH

If the common physician, scientist and educated consumer were to believe Wikipedia, they would assume that there is absolutely no research that shows the efficacy of homeopathic medicines in the treatment of any ailment. Furthermore, they would conclude homeopathic medicines are so small in dose, there is literally “nothing” in a homeopathic medicine.

And, if you are this gullible and vulnerable to Big Pharma propaganda, then we’ve got an island to sell you for $24! According to The Washington Post, Wikipedia’s article on homeopathy and Jesus Christ are the two most controversial on that website in four leading languages (English, French, German and Spanish). Click here for more …

Pseudoscience: Monsanto’s ghostwriting and strong-arming threaten sound science—and society

While passing a placard of contemporary protest buttons in New York’s Greenwich Village, my attention was drawn to one that read “Science is Peer Reviewed, Not Politician Approved.”

This short aphorism brought into focus two unfortunate realities. First, there are growing segments of the population who have lost confidence in science and choose to act on un-scientific or pseudo-scientific truth claims. And second, other segments of the population view scientists as just another stakeholder group subject to the same market influences in the competition for producing credible knowledge.

As a generator of truth claims, science stands on its own footing. Unfortunately, many corporations view science not as a generator of truth, but as one of many inputs into production.

The most recent examples of the corporate capture of science can be found in the investigations of discovery documents, released under court mandate, arising from mass tort product liability litigation filed against Monsanto Co. Thousands of people have filed lawsuits claiming they developed cancer after exposure to the company’s Roundup herbicide, and that the company suppressed information about the toxic effects of Roundup.

Thousands of pages of these discovery documents – made up largely of internal Monsanto communications – were analyzed in two peer-reviewed publications. My co-author Carey Gillam and I published our results in the Journal of Public Health Policy. Leemon McHenry, a member of the Philosophy Department at California State University, published his assessment in the International Journal of Risk & Safety in Medicine.

Fake Science: More Questionable Science Than Fake News

How Many Scientists Fabricate and Falsify Research? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Survey Data

Daniele Fanelli

Published: May 29, 2009
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0005738

Abstract

The frequency with which scientists fabricate and falsify data, or commit other forms of scientific misconduct is a matter of controversy. Many surveys have asked scientists directly whether they have committed or know of a colleague who committed research misconduct, but their results appeared difficult to compare and synthesize. This is the first meta-analysis of these surveys.

To standardize outcomes, the number of respondents who recalled at least one incident of misconduct was calculated for each question, and the analysis was limited to behaviours that distort scientific knowledge: fabrication, falsification, “cooking” of data, etc… Survey questions on plagiarism and other forms of professional misconduct were excluded. The final sample consisted of 21 surveys that were included in the systematic review, and 18 in the meta-analysis.

A pooled weighted average of 1.97% (N = 7, 95%CI: 0.86–4.45) of scientists admitted to have fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least once –a serious form of misconduct by any standard– and up to 33.7% admitted other questionable research practices. In surveys asking about the behaviour of colleagues, admission rates were 14.12% (N = 12, 95% CI: 9.91–19.72) for falsification, and up to 72% for other questionable research practices. Meta-regression showed that self reports surveys, surveys using the words “falsification” or “fabrication”, and mailed surveys yielded lower percentages of misconduct. When these factors were controlled for, misconduct was reported more frequently by medical/pharmacological researchers than others.

Considering that these surveys ask sensitive questions and have other limitations, it appears likely that this is a conservative estimate of the true prevalence of scientific misconduct.

Pseudoscience: How the Sugar Industry Used Fake Science (like the Tobacco Industry)

Life Extension Magazine reported on “The Great Sugar Cover-Up” in the October 2017 issue.

Last year, a grisly discovery uncovered the role of the sugar industry in intentionally covering up the lethal dangers of foods and drinks that spike blood glucose levels.

These new revelations, published online on September 12, 2016, by JAMA Internal Medicine, came to light after Dr. Cristin Kearns made a discovery while digging through old, dusty boxes of correspondence in a Harvard library basement.

Dr. Kearns is a dentist-turned-researcher from the University of California-San Francisco. She found letters between a sugar industry group and two famous Harvard nutritionists, Dr. Fredrick Stare and Dr. D. Mark Hegsted—and the fingerprints of collusion were all over them.

Dr. Stare founded the department of nutrition at Harvard in 1942 and was regularly sought out by the media as the expert on healthy eating. Dr. Hegsted was a member of that department, subsequently holding key positions with the US Department of Agriculture and various top advisory bodies.

Dr. Kearns’s paper exposes how Drs. Stare and Hegsted, both now deceased, worked closely with a trade group called the Sugar Research Foundation, which successfully influenced public understanding of sugar’s role in disease.

Dr. Kearns’ deep dive into archives of that era revealed clear evidence that a sugar industry association did more than merely sponsor key review studies on sugar—they controlled them from beginning to end.

The sugar industry association initiated the studies in the first place and influenced their results with the specific goal of eliminating any evidence of sugar as a major risk for coronary heart disease.

If you are worried about “fake news” you might be worried about “fake data.” Over 50% of medical journal articles cannot be replicated by independent scientists.

Over the past two decades the pharmaceutical industry has moved very far from its original high purpose of discovering and producing useful new drugs. Now primarily a marketing machine to sell drugs of dubious benefit, this industry uses its wealth and power to co-opt every institution that might stand in its way, including the US Congress, the FDA, academic medial centers, and the medical profession itself. (Marcia Angell, former editor the The New England Journal of Medicine)

Autism and Vaccines Researcher for CDC, Indicted for Fraud and Money-Laundering

Autism continues to radically increase in the U.S. population. Conventional authorities assert that there is no known cause and that there is no link to vaccines. Whenever physicians say there is no known cause for anything it means they are either clueless, lying, or just refusing to investigate for political reasons.

One thing is for sure. Something is causing autism rates to increase. Therefore, it is interesting that a CDC researcher that helped to debunk the vaccine data has been indicted for fraud.

Autism and Vaccines Researcher for CDC, Indicted for Fraud and Money-Laundering
Submitted by Lois Rain on April 22, 2011 – 1:30 pm

Remember when the vaccine mercury/autism link was supposedly debunked? Poul Thorsen, a Danish scientist who coordinated the CDC-funded “debunking” studies, was indicted on April 13th for 13 counts of fraud and 9 counts of money-laundering. Charges relate to his work for the CDC to study correlations between thimerosal (mercury-based vaccine preservative) and the increased rates of autism, among other infant and childhood disabilities he studied. He allegedly stole around $1 million from Atlanta’s CDC autism research money. The fraud charges have to do with dozens of invoices he submitted for “expenses.” The invoices falsely claimed laboratory work from the CDC.

SafeMinds group has closely watched vaccine-autism data brought forth since 2001. Read below about the incongruities they discovered in Thorsen’s work and his emails compelling the CDC to compel the journal Pediatrics to publish his work as a “strong piece of evidence that thimerosal is not linked to autism.” Due to Thorsen’s misconduct, SafeMinds and Coalition for Mercury-Free Drugs are calling for independent federal investigation for data manipulation.

~Health Freedoms

Pseudoscience: Most Published Research Cannot be Replicated

Occasionally big pharma provides really useful results. Checking on which studies are valid by trying to replicate them in order to search for new drugs shows most published research is nonsense.

How Reliable Are Cancer Studies?

Atlantic Magazine, Ed Yong, 18 Jan 2017

A project that tried to reproduce the results of 50 landmark papers turned into an arduous slog—and that’s a problem in itself.

In recent years, scientists have been dealing with concerns about a reproducibility crisis—the possibility that many published findings may not actually be true. Psychologists have grappled intensively with this problem, trying to assess its scope and look for solutions. And two reports from pharmaceutical companies have suggested that cancer biologists have to face a similar reckoning.

In 2011, Bayer Healthcare said that its in-house scientists could only validate 25 percent of basic studies in cancer and other conditions. (Drug companies routinely do such checks so they can use the information in those studies as a starting point for developing new drugs.) A year later, Glenn Begley and Lee Ellis from Amgen said that the firm could only confirm the findings in 6 out of 53 landmark cancer papers—just 11 percent. Perhaps, they wrote, that might explain why “our ability to translate cancer research to clinical success has been remarkably low.”

Pseudoscience Solution: Fix Science!

John Arnold Made a Fortune at Enron. Now He’s Declared War on Bad Science

Wired. SAM APPLE, SCIENCE 01.22.17

Like a number of up-and-coming researchers in his generation, Nosek was troubled by mounting evidence that science itself—through its systems of publication, funding, and advancement—had become biased toward generating a certain kind of finding: novel, attention grabbing, but ultimately unreliable. The incentives to produce positive results were so great, Nosek and others worried, that some scientists were simply locking their inconvenient data away.

The problem even had a name: the file drawer effect. And Nosek’s project was an attempt to head it off at the pass. He and a graduate student were developing an online system that would allow researchers to keep a public log of the experiments they were running, where they could register their hypotheses, methods, workflows, and data as they worked. That way, it would be harder for them to go back and cherry-pick their sexiest data after the fact—and easier for other researchers to come in and replicate the experiment later.

Nosek was so taken with the importance of redoing old experiments that he had also rallied more than 50 like-minded researchers across the country to participate in something he called the Reproducibility Project. The aim was to redo about 50 studies from three prominent psychology journals, to establish an estimate of how often modern psychology turns up false positive results.

…in July 2012, Nosek received an email from an institution whose name he didn’t recognize: the Laura and John Arnold Foundation.

Pseudoscience: The Anti-Vitamin Paper That Never Existed

Jessica Burger, CBS News, 15 April 2015

As Michael McBurney writes on the TalkingNutrition blog of supplement manufacturer DSM, a variety of media outlets (Sunday Express, The Guardian, Daily Mail, CBS News) reported on a study supposedly presented at the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting by Dr. Tim Byers of the Colorado Cancer Center.

McBurney is not too happy about it.

Byers is reported to have presented evidence, after studying thousands of patients for ten years, that some people get more cancer while on vitamins. My problem is the apparent lack of peer-reviewed evidence with hazard ratios (HR) or odds ratios (OR), or even an abstract to partially substantiate the claim.

A session entitled “Dietary Supplements and Cancer Risk and Prognosis” was apparently held Monday, April 20 from 5-6:30pm. Dr Tim E Byers is listed as an invited speaker but there is no abstract for his presentation. The University of Colorado Cancer Center has promoted his research but an abstract, peer-reviewed paper, or supplemental data cannot be found. The question is, did journalists ask to see the scientific evidence? Certainly, I cannot make an evaluation without some scientific evidence beyond expert opinion.

In a follow-up post, McBurney wrote that there was, in fact, no presentation of new study data by Byers at the AACR meeting, and that “The entire news cycle linking multivitamin/mineral supplements with cancer risk seems to have been stimulated by the university press release alluding to a commentary published in 2012.”

—

It is horrifying that my Alma Mater allows colleagues to blog about fake studies. They must be paid a lot by drug companies to slam the competition. Another example of Fake News!

Pseudoscience: Flouride is Good for You!

Neurobehavioural effects of developmental toxicity Dr Philippe Grandjean, MDcorrespondenceemail, Philip J Landrigan, MD
Published Online: 14 February 2014

Summary

Neurodevelopmental disabilities, including autism, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, dyslexia, and other cognitive impairments, affect millions of children worldwide, and some diagnoses seem to be increasing in frequency. Industrial chemicals that injure the developing brain are among the known causes for this rise in prevalence. In 2006, we did a systematic review and identified five industrial chemicals as developmental neurotoxicants: lead, methylmercury, polychlorinated biphenyls, arsenic, and toluene. Since 2006, epidemiological studies have documented six additional developmental neurotoxicants—manganese, fluoride, chlorpyrifos, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, tetrachloroethylene, and the polybrominated diphenyl ethers. We postulate that even more neurotoxicants remain undiscovered. To control the pandemic of developmental neurotoxicity, we propose a global prevention strategy. Untested chemicals should not be presumed to be safe to brain development, and chemicals in existing use and all new chemicals must therefore be tested for developmental neurotoxicity. To coordinate these efforts and to accelerate translation of science into prevention, we propose the urgent formation of a new international clearinghouse.

PseudoScience: Is Evidenced Based Medicine Manipulated Evidence to Sell Bad Drugs?

Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science

Much of what medical researchers conclude in their studies is misleading, exaggerated, or flat-out wrong. So why are doctors—to a striking extent—still drawing upon misinformation in their everyday practice? Dr. John Ioannidis has spent his career challenging his peers by exposing their bad science.

Read all about it!