I do a lot of driving as part of my job.  I am the sole Infectious Disease doctor at three hospitals and I can spend an hour or two a day in the car, depending on traffic.  What prevents me from going crazy sitting in traffic is listening to podcasts and audible books.    I especially like reading (and yes, audio books is reading, pedant) multivolume epics.   Currently I am reading Steven King’s Dark Tower series, which occurs in a universe “where the world has moved on.”  In Mid-world there was once a world with science and beauty and art, but something changed, what I do not know yet (I am only on the third volume; no spoilers in the comments), and the world moved on, leaving behind some artifacts of science and technology, but it appears to be an increasingly primitive world.  Being fantasy, there is, unlike the world I live in, magic as well.

I like that phrase: “the world has moved on.” I have an understanding of the world and medicine, based mostly, but not entirely, on science.  My understanding of the natural world is not complete, but mostly consistent and validated by hundreds of years of research.  My undergraduate degree was in physics, and, like all premeds and medical school students, have an extensive education in chemistry, biology, biochemist, physiology, anatomy, biochemistry, etc.  It all ties together nicely, especially in my specialty , where I have the most knowledge.  I consider infections at many levels, from issues of single molecule changes that may confer antibiotic resistance, up through the patient and their family, and sometimes at the level of the entire planet.  Truly wholistic, not the pseudo-wholism of SCAM.

The sciences gives a mostly coherent understanding of the world.  Mostly coherent. It does give an understanding of the possible, the probable, the improbable and the impossible.  Most of the sciences, unlike parts of medical science,  are not concerned with the impossible.  There is not complementary and alternative physics, or chemistry, or biochemistry, or engineering.  These disciplines compare their ideas against reality, and, if the ideas are found wanting, abandoned.   Perpetual motion is not considered seriously by any academic physicist; if perpetual motion were an alternative medicine it would be offered at a Center by a Harvard Professor of Medicine.

Most scientists outside of medicine are aware of how easy it is to fool themselves and, by extension, others. As Richard Feynman said.

“We’ve learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature’s phenomena will agree or they’ll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven’t tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it’s this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science.”

My archetype for scientists fooling themselves, and others, is the story of N-rays, which I have discussed before.

For whatever reason, and I do not pretend to understand why, medical people are occasionally unable to incorporate the simple concept that unless they are very careful, they can be fooled.  The result is complementary and alternative medicine.  It is the place that remains after the world has moved on.

That phase constantly popped into my head as I looked at the Huffington Post sections on Intergratve Medicine. The world of medicine, at least, has moved on and left the Huffington Post behind.  So much on the HuffPo Intergrative medicine site is at odds with reality that I will mention only a few of the more egregious examples of medical nonsense.  HuffPo is giving Natural News a run for their money in the production of fantasy. Most striking was the homeopathic (the facts being seriously deluded; isn’t that an underlying principle of homeopathy?) article by Dana Ulman entitled Homeopathy for Radiation Poisoning.  Water for radiation toxicity.  Seriously.  And not even heavy water, which might catch the extra neutron.  And the reasoning for its use is even more goofy, if possible, than that of oh-so-silly-ococcinum.

“Because one of the basic premises of homeopathic medicine is that small doses of a treatment can help to heal those symptoms that large doses are known to cause, Ludlam suggested to Grubbe that radiation may be a treatment for conditions such as tumors because it also causes them. This incident is but one more example from history in which an insight from a homeopathic perspective has provided an important breakthrough in medical treatment.”

I suppose since smoking causes cancer you should treat lung cancer with cigarettes and since alcohol causes cirrhosis you should treat cirrhosis is with vodka and guns cause acute lead poisoning so maybe we should shoot gunshot victims. That I suppose, would be reasonable conclusions from homeopathic theory derived from metaphor and faulty metaphor that.

What nostrums are recommend for radiation therapy? Cadmium iodatum, Ceanothus, and Cadmium sulphuratum, for which there are no Pubmed references to support treating radiation toxicity, even though the author says they are a well-known remedies for that condition. Not well known to medical science I suppose.  Ah the wisdom of homeopathy, where saying it makes it so.

Then the author suggests

“Calendula (marigold) is a well-known herbal and homeopathic medicine. Highly respected research has found excellent results in using Calendula ointment on people who experienced radiotherapy-induced dermatitis.”

Now why is Calendula a homeopathic medicine? I went to the original reference and it appears from the literature to be a worthwhile agent  for the prevention of radiation term burns. But  I am not so sure I would classify Calendula as a homeopathic preparation. According to the producers site it is “Calendula Fresh Plant 4%” and in the original article it is “is fabricated from a plant of the marigold family, Calendula officinalis. The digest is obtained by incubation at 75°C in petroleum jelly to extract the liposoluble components of the plant.”  The authors  do not use the word homeopathic anywhere in the reference.

Real product came containing real parts of the plant at a measurable concentrations, hardly homeopathic in nature.  Calendula ointment has not been subjected to proving, nor has it been potentiated, as if either are helpful.  It is not a homeopathic preparation  just because a preparation made by a producer of homeopathic nostrums, although that appears to be the reason. It is a new definition of a homeopathic preparation: if it is made by a homoepathic producer it is therefore a homeopathic preparation. By this standard, the effluent of the Boiron toilets would also be considered homeopathic preparations.

When it comes to homeopathy, not only has the world moved on,  rational thought and consistency has moved on.

And there is acupuncture. There is a link to an article entitled As Medical Costs Rise More Americans Turn to Acupuncture. This is an article from AOL linked from the Huffington Post (now owned by AOL). If you want to get the heebie-jeebies take a look at the opening picture on that page. The text says “Practitioners must use needles produced and manufactured according to U.S. Food and Drug Administration standards, which require needles to “be sterile, nontoxic, and labeled for single use by qualified practitioners only.” The needles may be sterile, but what good is a sterile needle used by a bare hand?

Look at the accompanying photograph. That middle finger does not inspire confidence. It is no wonder that acupuncture is associated with outbreaks of hepatitis C, hepatitis B, and MRSA infections. Most the pictures of acupuncture on this website  demonstrate that acupuncturists lack understanding of basic technique. It is hard to infect people with an injection.  Heroin users inject themselves with a rich melange of bacteria every day without getting infections.  It is hard to infect patients in the hospital with blood draws and IV’s.  But if an infection can happen, it will happen. And those fingers, just recently in a nose, or picking a tooth, or scratching a butt, will spread an infection with an acupuncturist’s needle to one unlucky patient. Not only has the world moved on for acupuncture, it took with it an appreciation of germ theory.

The Huffington Post  seems to be immune from advances in understanding of all of so-called intergrative medicines, or even basic anatomy and physiology. They  link to a video entitled The Meridian System in Oriental Medicine. They might have linked to the anatomy of Orcs or the physiology of Dementors, for all the application to reality it represents.   The video is gibberish when compared to nature as we understand it. The world has moved on.

When Huffington Post published absolute nonsense, I have to wonder how good their analysis is on issues like politics, war,  the environment and other important areas. I was always taught to judge a man by the company he keeps. I have the same problem with my local newspaper, the Oregonian, which publishes the occasional nonsense piece in the Living section.  They often get things wrong in Infectious Diseases, the one area I have expertise.  If they are wrong in areas I know,  can I trust their writings on other topics?

When I finish the series, I’ll let you know, metaphorically, what the alt med Dark Tower is.

Editors Note: This is a guest contribution from two medical students, one from Chicago and one from Queensland. If you like their work, we’ll consider having them write more for us.

Authors:

Andrey Pavlov Jr.
UQ-Ochsner
University of Queensland School of Medicine

Igor Irvin Bussel
Chicago Medical School
Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science

In hopes of joining the SBM movement as medical students, we wanted to take aim at a topic that has yet been finely dissected a la Novella or logorrheicly dismembered a la Gorski. Having realized that a fellow medical student, Tim Kreider, is already addressing integrative medicine on campus, we decided that we would attempt to find a controversial topic that has yet to be addressed on SBM. A serendipitous question from a friend sent us on a mission to explore the pseudo-scientific underbelly of the web and science-based rationale of the claim that vitamin C can induce abortion.

The World Wide Web is a stranger place than we can ever imagine. Most users are aware that they can’t believe everything they read on the Internet, yet they often feel like Sherlock Holmes when they find an esoteric and isolated clue to their own unique health puzzle. Recently, we were asked if there was a connection between vitamin C, menstruation and abortion. We were caught off guard by the question, finding it such a strange connection to make. The story, it seems, is that our friend had come down with a cold and taken mega doses of vitamin C to stave it off (another false belief, but not the subject here). A couple of days later her menses began and she was surprised since it was 4 days earlier than normal. She of course turned to Dr. Google and was quickly provided with numerous sources indicating that indeed, vitamin C would induce the start of a menstrual cycle and can even act as a “natural” abortefacient and a substitute for the ‘morning after’ pill. Being a bit more keen than your average Dr. Google user, she was surprised and continued searching, trying to find evidence to contradict these claims. Alas, she found nothingexcept more sites parroting and corroborating the claim. Then she realized she knew a couple of medical students and asked us what we thought. Our literature review turned up a slew of websites using the standard repertoire of trite pseudo-scientific tactics. Any attempt to find a credible source, validated claim, or independent consensus proved futile.

At the time of this writing, Google yielded over 400,000 results when searching for “vitamin C abortion” and around 45,000 results when searching “ascorbic acid abortion.” While both search queries resulted in about 38 entries on PubMed, nothing was found using Up-To-Date or Cochrane Collaboration. However, regardless of query terms, we could find no sites that refuted the claim of vitamin C as an abortefacient.
The top returned website references a Russian article written in 1966 by Samborskaia and Ferdman. This site will be the focus of our piece since it appears the most legitimate having a complete “references cited” section. This gives the illusion of credible research and bears thorough debunking. Sadly, the Russian article is the most relevant and “scholarly” article. The author of the site offers this analysis to support her claim:

The article is in Russian, and finding a copy was a problem… as was the language barrier. I had been corresponding with a lady from Slovak Republic (Slovakia) and mentioned the article. She went out looking for it, and was able to find a copy. She was able to translate it for me, and noted that the author did not specify the doses of ascorbic acid administered to the women, and the author also did not say specify how the women received the ascorbic acid; ie, liquid, injection, tablet.

The scientists who conducted the research, Samborskaia and Ferdman, came to the conclusion that high doses of Ascorbic Acid appeared to increase estrogen levels which contributed to the interruption of an otherwise normal pregnancy. 20 women who approached doctors requesting an abortion participated in the study. Research was conducted by ob/gyn L.I. Ivanyuta. The women ranged from 20 to 40 years of age. The article does not say if a positive pregnancy test was obtained from the participating women. We also don’t know how much ascorbic acid the women were given. They did however measure estrogen levels before and after treatment with ascorbic acid, finding that estrogen levels were higher after taking the ascorbic acid. Of the 20 women, 16 began menstrual type bleeding within 1 to 3 days from administration of ascorbic acid.

So the evidence cited here is from an article the author could not find, in a language she could not understand, translated by some unknown woman in Slovakia, with a sample size of 20, no known dosages or methods of administration, and even an admission that there was no documentation that all 20 women were even pregnant. Already riddled with biases, flaws, and fallacies, the author continues:

Also, in my own personal research, I’ve come into contact with numerous women who did confirm their pregnancies with a test, then used ascorbic acid (sometimes in conjunction with other herbs) to terminate those pregnancies successfully… While it can’t be considered scientific data, it is none-the-less proof that these home remedies do work for some women.

That which can’t be considered scientific data can’t be asserted as proof. This is a common failing in pseudo-scientific writings – an appeal to some other form of proof or “other ways of knowing.” The author continues with the empiric discussion:

It is said that on average 1 in every 4 pregnancies end in miscarriage. This would be 25% of all pregnancies. Statistics vary somewhat, and age is a factor, some say as few as 16% up to as much as 30% of all pregnancies end in miscarriage. A government website says 50% of all fertilized eggs die or are lost spontaneously – usually prior to the woman knowing she is pregnant, many of which do not implant in the uterine wall. In known pregnancies, they say that about 10% miscarry naturally and this normally happens between the 7th and 12th week of pregnancy. With this in mind, observations from my own research and data collection, about 45% of women with confirmed pregnancies are successful when using vitamin c (ascorbic acid) with the intention to end a pregnancy at home. This is well above the estimated rate of natural miscarriages (non-induced), so even if some of these women would of miscarried on their own without the steps they took to induce miscarriage at home (10% of known pregnancies miscarrying naturally or 1 in 4 pregnancies (known or unknown) ending naturally) these figures do not account for the increased rate of spontaneous abortion that I’m seeing through the data these women voluntarily provide.

The author cites a wide range of data on spontaneous abortion rates and concludes that “up to 30%” of all pregnancies end in miscarriage, though “a government website says 50% of all fertilized eggs die or are lost spontaneously”. From her own personal anecdotal “data” she finds that “45% of women with confirmed pregnancies are successful when using vitamin C… with the intention to end pregnancy at home.” For her, this is “well above” the estimated rate of “natural miscarriages” and therefore evidence that vitamin C works for this purpose. She further states that if the attempted vitamin C abortion does not work, it is important to go ahead and obtain a clinical abortion since even though the USDA does not list vitamin C as teratogenic, such a mega dose in an embryo has “too many unknowns” and one should not risk “having a messed up kid.” How can we ignore such sage medical advice and dutiful statistical analyses?

At least she can admit that “[n]atural or do-it-yourself does NOT mean it is SAFE [her emphasis].” That is about the only redeeming part to this travesty of medical advice. However, even the author’s own “statistics” indicate that, at best, there is only a very slight increase in the rate of abortion with vitamin C over spontaneous miscarriage. Considering the very small sample size, poor data quality, and complete lack of rigor it is safe to say this is either just completely false or normal noise with no statistical significance at all – not that we could even run a statistical analysis with the “data” we are given. Once again, the common pseudo-science tactic of asserting a statistical conclusion with no actual analysis rears its head.

Although we focus here on only one site devoted to this “naturalistic” nostrum, the remaining sites we found either reference this one, the original Russian article, or simply parrot the same piffle with no references at all. For example, NaturalMiscarriage.org has similar preposterous claims to the efficacy of many herbal abortefacients, including vitamin C, and even claims that in their respondent survey that 171 of 235 women (73%) who tried vitamin C had successful miscarriages. A few lines down we find that 93 of 118 women (79%) who tried “visualization and prayer” had a successful miscarriage. And apparently 38 of 46 women (83%) who tried avocados had a successful miscarriage – so we should clearly suggest avoiding guacamole at your church social if you are pregnant.

This pseudo-scientific claim has already failed from an evidence-based medicine perspective, but how about throwing a little science in the mix and conjecturing a prior probability? From the only article cited as reference to a human population, the mechanism is described as both “elevating estrogen levels to interrupt a normal pregnancy” and the “acid” of ascorbic acid (vitamin C) acting to disrupt the endometrium directly leading to the sloughing of menses. A quick PubMed search reveals four articles relating in at least some way to “vitamin C and abortion” in humans. One is a 2005 Cochrane review that examines multi-vitamin prenatal treatment as a prevention of miscarriage and stillbirth (not specifically vitamin C) and finds no relation between miscarriage and prenatal vitamin consumption. A 2011 update to the review holds the same conclusions. Two have no article or abstract available (one is in Polish from 1987 and the other in the Lancet from 1974). The last one is also a very small study (n=50) and found no causal relationship between vitamin C and spontaneous abortion. Furthermore, any biology undergraduate who passed physiology would know it is the drop in hormonal levels (including estrogen) that triggers the start of menses. Additionally, from a simple physiological point of view, the notion that ingesting a large amount of “acid” can alter the pH balance of the endometrium significantly enough for a physiological response is ludicrous. There is no mechanism by which vitamin C would be preferentially localized to the uterine wall and if the blood pH was changed enough to cause an endometrial sloughing, late menses would be the last of your worries.

In today’s political climate in America, especially in light of the recent vote to remove the federal funding for Planned Parenthood, having access to accurate medical advice based in science is important, regardless of your personal stance on the issue. Notably, based on a 2011 study in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 1.4% of 9,493 women surveyed, reported using vitamin C or herbal products to attempt to end a pregnancy. Though this is not an urgent danger to public health, others on the web have snagged onto this idea and have begun posting this same advice on forums such as eHow and women are actually seeking advice since these authors give the impression of authority on the matter. The startling thing is that there are simply no sources out there that say anything else about vitamin C and abortion – every searched source claimed efficacy of the method. The echo chamber of the Internet repeats the original assertion without any information to the contrary. For a person like our friend, there is little recourse except to assume that there must be some truth to this farcical claim. She had us to ask and it is our hope that this piece will give others a credible source to refute the claim that vitamin C induced abortion is legitimate.

Science is a philosophy, a technology, and an institution. It is a human endeavor- our collective attempt to understand the world around us,  not something that exists solely in the abstract. All of these aspects of science have be progressing over the past decades and centuries, as we refine our concepts of what science is and how it works, as we develop better techniques, and organize and police scientific activities more effectively. The practice of science is not relentlessly progressive, however, and there are many regressive forces causing pockets of backsliding, and even aggressive campaigns against scientific progress.

So-called complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is one such regressive force. It seeks to undermine the concepts, execution, and institutions of medical science in order to promote sectarian practices and ideological beliefs. Examples of this are legion, exposed within the pages of this blog alone. I would like to add another example to the pile – the recent defense of homeopathy by Dana Ullman in the Huffington Post (names which are already infamous among supporters of SBM).

In a piece titled: Homeopathy for Radiation Poisoning, Ullman demonstrates yet again the pseudoscientific aspects of homeopathy and its proponents. The primary principle that is abused by Ullman this time is the need for scientists to carefully define their terms and concepts. Scientific concepts should be defined as carefully, precisely, and consistently as possible. Squishy concepts are very difficult to deal with in science – but are the bread and butter of pseudoscience.

The fuzzy concept is particularly useful to the pseudoscientist (someone pretending to do real science, but whose activity is devoid of genuine scientific exploration or rigor). Pseudoscientists generally start with a desired answer and then work backwards to their logic and evidence. Whereas genuine science endeavors to follow logic and evidence wherever it leads. Having a poorly defined term or concept allows pseudoscientists to better shoehorn in evidence and logic – to create the appearance of support for their beliefs where none exists.

Ullman’s article is typically full of anecdotes, cherry picked evidence, and tortured logic. There is far too much there to pick apart in detail, so I want to focus on his exploitation of poorly defined concepts. He writes:

Grubbe got the idea of using radiation as a treatment for Lee’s breast cancer from Reuben Ludlam, M.D., a professor at the homeopathic medical school. Ludlam knew that Grubbe had previously experimented with X-ray as a diagnostic procedure so much that he developed blisters and tumors on his hand and neck as a result of overexposure to this new technology.

Because one of the basic premises of homeopathic medicine is that small doses of a treatment can help to heal those symptoms that large doses are known to cause, Ludlam suggested to Grubbe that radiation may be a treatment for conditions such as tumors because it also causes them.

The toxicity and medical uses of radiation have absolutely nothing to do with any concept that can reasonably be considered part of homeopathy. But Ullman exploits superficial similarities to twist it into support for the deliberately squishy concept of homeopathy. Radiation is toxic to cells – high energy particles impart their energy to cell structures, breaking chemical bonds, killing cells outright in some cases or damaging their DNA. Radioactivity has greater toxicity to cells that rapidly reproduce, because they are more sensitive to DNA damage (partly because they have less time to repair DNA damage).

Low levels of radiation exposure carry a low risk because the repair mechanisms of cells can largely handle any damage done, and the number of lost cells is insignificant. It is not clear if low levels of radiation (such as the background radiation in which we all live) conveys zero risk or simply a very low risk – that type of distinction is inherently difficult to make with empirical studies.

But at all levels of exposure the effect of radiation is a toxic one – to do damage to cell structures. In this way radiation is very much like a drug. All drugs cause biological changes to the body. But those used as pharmaceutical agents have a dose range in which their effects can be exploited while the risk of negative effects is minimal. There are threshold at which certain toxic effects  become significant, but at lower doses they are still present, just tolerable or insignificant. Some effects may display a threshold effect because of compensatory mechanisms, or because there are certain levels at which metabolic processes are overwhelmed.

Radiation damages and kills cells. Rapidly dividing cells are more susceptible to damage. There is therefore a dose range in which radioactivity can kill rapidly dividing tumor cells significantly more than surrounding healthy tissue. But in order to exploit this effect techniques must be use to focus the radiation on the tumor while minimizing exposure to surrounding tissue. And a certain level of damage to surrounding tissue is unavoidable. There is even the risk of later damage, and even cancer, from therapeutic radiation exposure. The use of radiation, like the use of drugs, is about risk vs benefit, or beneficial effects vs side effects. Given that the condition being treated is a potentially fatal cancer, a high level of side effects and risk are considered reasonable.

Ullman, however, would have you believe that what I described above is analogous to homeopathy, in which tiny or (more commonly) non-existent doses of a substance that causes certain symptoms in a healthy individual will treat those symptoms in an unhealthy person. This is not analogous to exploiting different levels of toxicity for a therapeutic effect. There is a superficial similarity in that different doses cause different effects – but with drugs and radiation there are specific mechanisms for this dose-response effect. Homeopathy does not display a dose-response effect – even as homeopaths understand it.

Science and evidence dictates that homeopathy shows no effect at all, but even within the belief system of homeopaths there is no consistent dose-response curve for their potions. There is, if anything, a mysterious and inconsistent relationship between dose and effect, without any plausible mechanism at all. This bizarre relationship between dose and effect claimed by homeopaths is such that dilutions where not even a single molecule of original ingredient is likely to remain behind are often claimed by homeopaths to be the most potent.

Further, while there are specific mechanisms for toxicity and therapeutic effects for interventions like radiation and drugs (although certainly we do not fully understand the precise mechanisms of every drug), there is no plausible mechanism behind the claims of homeopathy. The best that they can come up with is false analogies to vaccines, the speculative concept of hormesis, and now the dose-response effect of standard treatments. When pushed they speak vaguely about the “essence” of the drug, and restoring “balance”. But this is no closer to an actual explanation of how homeopathy might work than saying that it is “magic”, “witchcraft”, or “faith healing.”

Conclusion

The exploitation of poorly defined concepts is a hallmark of CAM. We see it in homeopathy, as above, with strained analogies and fallacious logic. We see it with acupuncture, for example, when “placebo acupuncture” (where there is no needle penetration and no acupuncture points) and electroacupuncture (where electrical stimulation is given) are used as support for acupuncture. This leads to the question – what is acupuncture? What is it that is specific an unique to acupuncture?  Nothing, apparently – but this allows for a wide range of non-specific and other effects to be used as support for the vague concept of “acupuncture.”

And we can ask – what is homeopathy? What scientific concept that has been validated by experimentation constitutes the body of knowledge that is homeopathy? The answer is – nothing. There is no law of similars, nor a law of infinitessimals. There is no plausible mechanism to explain homeopathic potions. So instead we are given invalid analogies, innuendo, and a desperate attempt to confuse the public as to what homeopathy actually is.

The word “frequency” ranks right up there with “quantum” and “energy” as a pseudoscientific buzzword. It is increasingly prevalent in product advertisements and in CAM claims about human biofields and energy medicine. It doesn’t mean what they think it means.

I have written about Power Balance products, the wristbands and cards that allegedly improve sports performance through frequencies embedded in a hologram. They amount to nothing but a new version of the old rabbit’s foot carried for superstition and their sales demonstrations fool people with simple musculoskeletal tricks. I addressed their ridiculous claims (including “We are a frequency”). I pointed out that

The definition of frequency is “the number of repetitions of a periodic process in a unit of time.” A frequency can’t exist in isolation. There has to be a periodic process, like a sound wave, a radio wave, a clock pendulum, or a train passing by at the rate of x boxcars per minute. The phrase “33? per minute” is meaningless: you can’t have an rpm without an r. A periodic process can have a frequency, but an armadillo and a tomato can’t. Neither a periodic process nor a person can “be” a frequency.

There are a number of similar embedded frequency products with different names. I got an e-mail from a man who thought he had found the best one yet: Ancestor Bands that promised to put him in contact with his forebears and allow him to benefit from their wisdom.

I thought he was pulling my leg, but he insisted he wasn’t. I asked him to wonder how they might have determined which frequencies the ancestors use. I asked him to question how he would know that any messages he got were really from his ancestors rather than from Pol Pot, from Hitler, from Jeffrey Dahmer, from an ignorant Stone Age caveman, or from some random village idiot. He said I had given him some things to think about, but he was trying to keep an open mind and really wanted to believe they worked. The website says

We are all uniquely connected to our ancestors genetically. The bands you see here will help you tap into the proper frequencies that your Ancestors transmit throughout the Cosmos. They are desperately trying to connect with you and impart their Newfound Universal knowledge of the Universe. The bands are designed to increase your mental power, physical strength, and reverse the effects of aging. Try it today, feel the difference tomorrow.

They start with the idea that all living things are interconnected and produce energy waves that we can tap into, apparently even after they have stopped living! The Ancestor Band uses “energetic therapy and informational balancing” to

directly address the energetic level using light, sound, electricity and magnetism as carriers of client- and condition-specific information… to remove tiredness, weakness, reduce pain, and eliminate stress… a group of spiritual advisors have transformed each piece into a Unique Genetic Communications link to the Past, Present, future, and beyond.

That’s about as silly a piece of gobbledygook as I have ever read. It would be impossible to test their claims because you can’t even figure out what they are claiming. For starters, I can’t begin to guess what “beyond the future” means.

Recently I’ve been getting e-mails advertising Philip Stein watches. They use “natural frequency technology” to embed frequencies in watches. This provides improved sleep. And they even have a published double blind randomized placebo controlled study that proves it. Only it doesn’t. It did not give statistically significant results, but they interpreted it as positive because 96% of subjects reported improvement on at least one variable. That is not a meaningful scientific finding. In fact, it reminds me of a clever ploy that is taught to chiropractors: instead of asking whether the patient’s back pain got better after the last spinal adjustment, they are supposed to ask “What’s better?” until the patient admits that something is better (he slept better last night, or his appetite has improved, or his ingrown toenail hasn’t been hurting as much, or whatever). Then they can say “See, the treatment is helping you.”

The frequencies they are talking about are electromagnetic frequencies, and several of these were somehow embedded in a disc in the watch. It is a metal disk that has been “infused with key frequencies.” One of the key frequencies is 7.83 Hz, the Schumann Resonant Frequency. (Actually, there are several Schumann frequencies, which are observed peaks in the Earth’s electromagnetic spectrum.)  It doesn’t make sense that they could embed electromagnetic frequencies without embedding something that produced those frequencies, with a power source. Or do they mean they are embedding something that will vibrate in resonance with those frequencies? It’s far from clear, and of course they won’t try to explain because of proprietary secrets.

They’re really proud of these watches. They charge anywhere from $1400 to $23,000 for them. Soon the company will launch a new product that, when combined with the frequencies found in Philip Stein watches, delivers even greater benefits in improved sleep. I can’t wait.

I’d love to see these products taken apart by engineers who are competent to analyze what is in them. Even if these products did contain something that generates electromagnetic frequencies or that resonates in response to certain outside frequencies, it would take a big leap of faith to imagine that process would have specific beneficial effects on health. You would first have to accept the concept of a human “bioenergy” field that can’t be measured. Then you would have to accept that the field changes in response to a specific frequency and that those field changes somehow produce a specific physiologic effect. Not only is there no plausible mechanism, but there are no studies showing evidence of benefit. It might work; but in the absence of evidence, believing it does work would require you to have such an open mind that your brain would be in grave danger of falling out.

Perhaps we should monitor the frequency of pseudoscientific claims about frequencies: it might serve to track the degree of idiocy in public misunderstanding of science.

Note: My spell checker didn’t like the word bioenergy any better than I do. (There is a legitimate use for the word, but this is not it.) The spell checker suggested I might want to substitute “beanery” or “baboonery.” I confess to being sorely tempted by the latter.

Another note: my title is a reference to Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes’ classic 1842 article“Homeopathy and Its Kindred Delusions.”

NOTE: This post was taken down and reposted as a new and different post. For some reason, comments were disabled in the original and I couldn’t figure out how to re-enable them. I suspect a glitch in WordPress. Very annoying. Sorry about that. Comments should be open now.

I’m not infrequently asked why the myth that vaccines cause autism and other anti-vaccine myths are so stubbornly resistant to the science that time and time again fails to support them. Certainly useful celebrity idiots like Jenny McCarthy are one reason. So, too, are anti-vaccine propaganda websites and blogs such as Age of Autism and anti-vaccine organizations like Generation Rescue, the National Vaccine Information Center, and SafeMinds and the organizations that publish them. However, these are clearly not the only reason. Alone, these people and organizations are in general quite rightly viewed as fringe, although they are very popular among the anti-vaccine movement. It is when such groups find a willing conduit for their pseudoscience in the “mainstream media” that they see the opportunity to attain a degree of seeming respectability that they can’t achieve on their own based on science. Worse, when mainstream news organizations or reporters fall for the pseudoscience claiming that vaccines cause autism, they contribute to the persistence of this myth outside the activist core of the anti-vaccine movement in the public at large.

In the past, anti-vaccine activists tried to accomplish this with the help of formerly respectable journalists such as David Kirby and Dan Olmsted, the former of whom wrote Evidence of Harm: Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic: A Medical Mystery and the latter of whom wrote and promoted the Age of Autism series when he was an editor at UPI. However, although Kirby was never really that prominent or trusted, Olmsted was an editor of UPI. Now that he’s given up his UPI gig to become full time editor of AoA and to team up with Mark Blaxill to write a book (Age of Autism: Mercury, Medicine and a Manmade Epidemic) that regurgitated all the old misinformation about thimerosal and autism in a way that’s so 2005, Olmsted’s lost all credibility as a serious reporter. That’s a good thing.

The bad thing is that he has a replacement. Or at least so it would appear.

THERE’S A NEW ANTI-VACCINE REPORTER IN TOWN, AND SHE’S PUSHING SOME PSEUDOSCIENCE

Unfortunately, at CBS News, there now appears to be a woman who was willing to take over the role of mainstream media propagandist for the anti-vaccine movement. Her name is Sharyl Attkisson, and, oops, she did it again just this Thursday with an article entitled Vaccines and autism: a new scientific review, in which she pimps a truly horrible “review” of the evidence base regarding whether vaccines cause or predispose to autism. Interestingly, she’s quite late. AoA was promoting this article two months ago. On the other hand, April is Autism Awareness Month, and I can always count on the anti-vaccine movement to lay down some vaccine pseudoscience on or around April 1 every year (I leave it to the reader to judge the appropriateness of that date); so perhaps this latest from Attkisson is the opening salvo for this year’s campaign. Her article opens:

For all those who’ve declared the autism-vaccine debate over – a new scientific review begs to differ. It considers a host of peer-reviewed, published theories that show possible connections between vaccines and autism.

The article in the Journal of Immunotoxicology is entitled “Theoretical aspects of autism: Causes–A review.” The author is Helen Ratajczak, surprisingly herself a former senior scientist at a pharmaceutical firm. Ratajczak did what nobody else apparently has bothered to do: she reviewed the body of published science since autism was first described in 1943. Not just one theory suggested by research such as the role of MMR shots, or the mercury preservative thimerosal; but all of them.

Ratajczak’s article states, in part, that “Documented causes of autism include genetic mutations and/or deletions, viral infections, and encephalitis [brain damage] following vaccination [emphasis added]. Therefore, autism is the result of genetic defects and/or inflammation of the brain.”

Note the classic crank technique of trying to convince the reader that the “debate is not over,” that the hypothesis that vaccines cause autism is, in fact, “pining for the fjords” when in fact, on a strictly scientific basis, the hypothesis is at least as dead as that famous parrot, with Attkisson playing the role of the shopkeeper trying to convince his customer that “‘E’s resting” while raving about the parrot’s “beautiful plumage.”

Attkisson then goes on to write:

Ratajczak also looks at a factor that hasn’t been widely discussed: human DNA contained in vaccines. That’s right, human DNA. Ratajczak reports that about the same time vaccine makers took most thimerosal out of most vaccines (with the exception of flu shots which still widely contain thimerosal), they began making some vaccines using human tissue. Ratajczak says human tissue is currently used in 23 vaccines. She discusses the increase in autism incidences corresponding with the introduction of human DNA to MMR vaccine, and suggests the two could be linked. Ratajczak also says an additional increased spike in autism occurred in 1995 when chicken pox vaccine was grown in human fetal tissue.

Why could human DNA potentially cause brain damage? The way Ratajczak explained it to me: “Because it’s human DNA and recipients are humans, there’s homologous recombinaltion tiniker. That DNA is incorporated into the host DNA. Now it’s changed, altered self and body kills it. Where is this most expressed? The neurons of the brain. Now you have body killing the brain cells and it’s an ongoing inflammation. It doesn’t stop, it continues through the life of that individual.”

Dear readers, I apologize to those of you who don’t like my “tone” (well, no I don’t, at least not in this case), but those two paragraphs almost made me spit the iced tea I was drinking as I composed this all over the keyboard of my precious MacBook Air. The reason is that I have experience with working with DNA, human, mouse, and otherwise, including injecting it into tissues and trying to get it to express the protein for which it encodes. This is not a trivial matter. Think of it this way. If it were, gene therapy would be an almost trivial matter. But it’s not. In general, it’s difficult to induce human cells to take up foreign DNA in tissue. Even with viral vectors, it’s hard to get more than a small percentage of cells not only to take up the DNA but to express detectable levels of protein. Muscle is one tissue that can take up naked plasmid DNA and actually express it. Indeed, this technique has been used to generate cancer vaccines, where plasmid DNA is injected into the muscle in order to cause it to make a certain protein, which then provokes an immune response. But doing this is not easy, and the DNA is not detectably incorporated into the DNA of the muscle cells. Its gene expression is extranuclear (outside the nucleus).

But that’s not all. Even human cells that can take up random bits of extracellular DNA at very low efficiency (like muscle) do not integrate that DNA into their genome. Even if the DNA did reach the nucleus, recombination into the host genome would be both random and rare. Each cell would incorporate different bits of DNA into different locations in its genome. Does Dr. Ratajczak even know basic molecular biology?

But that’s still not all.

Dr. Ratajczak states that the DNA from vaccines is human DNA. Even if that human DNA did undergo homologous recombination, it would still be human DNA making human proteins. Yet Dr. Ratajczak claims that homologous recombination turns that cell into “altered self.” However, the body recognizes a cell as foreign or “altered” through the expression of its cell surface proteins. Consequently, the only likely currently known mechanism by which homologous recombination of human DNA from vaccines might conceivably result in such an autoimmunity phenomenon would be if the DNA from the vaccine somehow resulted in the expression of a foreign or altered protein on the cell surface that the immune system could recognize as foreign. That would mean either integrating into the gene for a cell surface protein or producing a cell surface protein itself. While not impossible, that’s pretty darned unlikely to happen on a scale that would affect more than a single cell, a few at most. To recap: To do what Dr. Ratajczak claims, human DNA from vaccines would have to:

• Find its way to the brain in significant quantities.
• Make it into the neurons in the brain in significant quantities.
• Make it into the nucleus of the neurons in significant quantities.
• Undergo homologous recombination at a detectable level, resulting in either the alteration of a cell surface protein or the expression of a foreign cell surface protein that the immune system can recognize.
• Undergo homologous recombination in many neurons in such a way that results in the neurons having cell surface protein(s) altered sufficiently to be recognized as foreign.

That’s leaving aside the issue of whether autoimmunity in the brain or chronic brain inflammation is even a cause of autism, which is by no means settled by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, quite the opposite. It’s not at all clear whether the markers of inflammation sometimes reported in the brains of autistic children are a cause, a consequence, or merely an epiphenomenon of autism.

In other words, Dr. Ratajczak’s hypothesis is incredibly implausible on the basis of what we know about molecular biology and human biology. It’s not quite homeopathy-level implausible, but nonetheless quite implausible. Even so, I’m willing to have my mind changed for me, but there’s only one thing that can possibly do that: Scientific data. Experiments. Clinical trials. Good ones. So I “went to the source,” so to speak, and actually looked at Dr. Ratajczak’s review article being touted by Attkisson to see what she actually said about homologous recombination of human DNA in vaccines as one cause of autism. Here is the sum total of what she said:

Data from a worldwide composite of studies show that an increase in cumulative incidence began about 1988–1990 (McDonald and Paul, 2010). The new version of the measles, mumps, rubella vaccine (i.e., MMR II) that did not contain Thimerosal was introduced in 1979. By 1983, only the new version was available. Autism in the United States spiked dramatically between 1983 and 1990 from 4–5/10,000 to 1/500. In 1988, two doses of MMR II were recommended to immunize those individuals who did not respond to the first injection. A spike of incidence of autism accompanied the addition of the second dose of MMR II. Also, in 1988, MMR II was used in the United Kingdom, which reported a dramatic increase in prevalence of autism to 1/64 (noted above). Canada, Denmark, and Japan also reported dramatic increases in prevalence of autism. It is important to note that unlike the former MMR, the rubella component of MMR II was propagated in a human cell line derived from embryonic lung tissue (Merck and Co., Inc., 2010). The MMR II vaccine is contaminated with human DNA from the cell line. This human DNA could be the cause of the spikes in incidence. An additional increased spike in incidence of autism occurred in 1995 when the chicken pox vaccine was grown in human fetal tissue (Merck and Co., Inc., 2001; Breuer, 2003). The current incidence of autism in the United States, noted above, is approximately 1/100.

The human DNA from the vaccine can be randomly inserted into the recipient’s genes by homologous recombination, a process that occurs spontaneously only within a species. Hot spots for DNA insertion are found on the X chromosome in eight autism-associated genes involved in nerve cell synapse formation, central nervous system development, and mitochondrial function (Deisher, 2010). This could provide some explanation of why autism is predominantly a disease of boys. Taken together, these data support the hypothesis that residual human DNA in some vaccines might cause autism.

Later, she writes:

Other reports have also used prevalence data that support an association of the MMR vaccine with an increased prevalence of autism. Furthermore, an examination of the continuing increase in prevalence in autism in the context of the dates of spikes in increase in prevalence which point to the MMR II vaccine (which did not contain Thimerosal) suggests that something “new” caused the increase in incidence of autism. Changes in vaccine schedule occurred over the years such as changes in the age at which vaccines were given (Ramsay et al., 1991). These changes could contribute to the increases in incidence of autism. Another change was how some vaccines were propagated. The “new” component could be the human DNA from the preparation of the rubella component of the MMR II vaccine and the chicken pox vaccine. See “Changes in Rates of Autism Incidence” above. The United States Government and Dr. Geberding, Director of Vaccines at Merck & Co., Inc. say that autistic conditions can result from encephalopathy following vaccination (Child Health Safety, 2010).

I’m the sort of guy who’s data-driven. If there were scientific data that convincingly suggested a hypothesis, even one as implausible as the one above, I’d think about it and possibly even conclude that this is an area worthy of investigation. There were no data presented. There weren’t even studies cited that convincingly supported Ratajczak’s assertions. That’s it? I was thinking as I read her article. That’s all she’s got? Seriously? I thought it was a joke; so I read the entire article again. Yes, that is all that she has got: Implying that correlation equals causation, combined with an observation that there are “hot spots” for DNA insertion in the X chromosome in some autism-associated genes. From that, she concludes that the existing data support the hypothesis that human DNA in MMR II could be at least responsible for the “autism epidemic” through homologous recombination in the brain resulting in autoimmunity and chronic inflammation? And she cites the anti-vaccine blog Child Health Safety as one of her references? The date of the CHS entry cited is June 30, 2010. All I could find was this entry, which purports to argue that both Merck’s Director of Vaccines and the U.S. government have admitted that vaccines cause autism all based on the long known science showing that a maternal case of rubella while carrying a fetus can result in autism in the child, something that’s been known for several decades and is in fact one reason why vaccination against rubella is so important. How on earth did this get through peer review. Obviously, the peer reviewers of Dr. Ratajczak’s article were either completely ignorant of the background science (and therefore unqualified) or asleep at the switch.

The rest of Dr. Ratajczak’s article is a greatest hits collection of anti-vaccine hypotheses, speculations, ideas, and brain farts mixed with the occasional–and I do mean occasional–grain of scientifically supportable hypotheses regarding autism. The vast majority of what is discussed, however, is pure vaccine pseudoscience. The scientifically unsupported idea that mercury in vaccines causes autism? It’s there. The work of the tag team of Geier père et fils, the same team who came up with the idea of chemical castration as a treatment of autism that “works” because according to them testosterone binds mercury, making it easier to chelate? Copiously cited. True, Ratajczak doesn’t specifically cite the Geiers’ unethical clinical trial testing Lupron as a treatment for “precocious puberty” and autism, but she does cite the “scientific” basis that the Geiers used to justify that trial, as well as a lot of the Geiers’ usual execrable studies linking mercury in vaccines with autism. Mitochondrial dysfunction, which has been co-opted by the anti-vaccine movement as an “explanation” for how vaccines supposedly cause autism? It’s there too. She even cites David Ayoub, who is known for thinking that black helicopters are watching him. In other words, her review is 95% pseudoscientific garbage, maybe 5% reasonable science. On second thought, I’m clearly being generous.

Remember that Sharyl Attkisson is taking advantage of the start of National Autism Awareness Month to promote this nonsense.

SHARYL ATTKISSON: THE ANTI-VACCINE REPORTER FOR CBS NEWS

This is not the first time that Sharyl Attkisson has demonstrated herself to be biased in favor of the anti-vaccine movement. Indeed, I’ve known about her activities in this regard going back nearly four years. One particularly prominent example that sticks out in my mind is an article she published on the CBS News website back in 2007 entitled Autism: Why the debate rages, in which she made assertions and arguments of these sorts:

• Science has been wrong before. She used Vioxx and Thalidomide as examples. Never mind that Thalidomide was never approved in the U.S. at the time of all the birth defects (it’s approved now to treat multiple myeloma), and in fact was an example of the FDA doing its job. In classic crank fashion, Attkisson used these examples to argue that science must be wrong now about thimerosal in vaccines. She even pulls out the hoary “refrigerator mother” gambit, implying that because there was a time that scientists speculated that cold, uncaring mothers contributed to or triggered autism and were clearly wrong about that, they must be wrong about vaccines now.
• The classic “pharma shill gambit.” Attkisson ranted on about how scientists do research for vaccine companies, linking the pro-vaccine group Every Child By Two to pharmaceutical companies.
• Science doesn’t know everything. Sample quote: “There is no definitive research proving a link between vaccines and autism or ADD, but there is also no definitive research ruling it out.” Well, there is no definitive research ruling out a link between autism and pixies, either.
• Because scientists don’t know what is causing the “autism epidemic,” vaccines are a plausible cause.

Truly, Attkisson’s 2007 article was a crank trifecta plus one!

Then, in 2008, Sharyl Attkisson appeared to have been caught almost red-handed taking a letter of protest from a pro-vaccine group called Voices for Vaccines complaining about her reporting to the anti-vaccine group blog Age of Autism, an incident that led Liz Ditz to ask, “How much of Attkisson’s “investigating” consists of rewriting and rewording statements from principals at the advocacy–even propaganda–organization, Age of Autism?” I don’t know the answer to that question, but I do know that Attkisson’s reporting on vaccines is nearly indistinguishable from the message put forth by anti-vaccine groups like Generation Rescue, SafeMinds, and the NVIC. Attkisson even falls for bad science in other areas, such as breast cancer research. In fact, you could say that her science reporting when it comes to breast cancer causation is of the same quality as her reporting on vaccines and autism, and I don’t mean that as a compliment.

Nor do I mean it as a compliment when I say that, in the wake of Wakefield’s infamous “monkey business study” in 2009, Attkisson inserted her nose farther up Andrew Wakefield’s posterior than even the crew at AoA has yet managed:

After all of Attkisson’s pandering to the anti-vaccine movement and promoting its message, one huge question remains. Why does CBS News tolerate Attkisson’s horrible reporting on vaccines and other scientific issues? I can’t speak about her other reporting, but when it comes to science, Sharyl Attkisson is a crank par excellence. She has an agenda; and she tortures the evidence to make it seem to agree with her biases. All of this wouldn’t matter so much if she weren’t a national correspondent for CBS. Unfortunately, there her crank magnetism allows her to engage in fear mongering on a national level.

I also wonder how long it will be before Attkisson joins Dan Olmsted as a writer for AoA. My only surprise is that, nearly four years since I first noticed her, she hasn’t made that move already. I suppose I can always hope that CBS News wises up to the anti-vaccine propagandist working as one of its correspondents and forces Attkisson finally to make that move.