Category Health & fitness

Detox quackery

Prince Charles detox ‘quack­ery’, BBC

Noth­ing would, of course, be easier than to demon­strate that detox products work. All one needed to do is to take a few blood samples from volun­teers and test whether this or that toxin is elim­in­ated from the body faster than nor­mal,” [Pro­fessor Ernst] said.

But where are the stud­ies that demon­strate effic­acy? They do not exist, and the reason is simple: these products have no real detox­i­fic­a­tion effects.”

Earlier this year the char­it­able trust Sense About Sci­ence pro­duced a report seek­ing to debunk claims made about detox products.
Its research­ers reviewed a series of products, from bottled water to face scrub, and found the detox asser­tions to be over­whelm­ingly meaningless.

It seems out­rageous for com­pan­ies to be mak­ing money selling mean­ing­less products but for the heir to the throne to be doing so, at £10 a pop, is even more inap­pro­pri­ate,” said Tom Wells, who helped carry out the ori­ginal research.

We must break link between green issues and altern­at­ive medi­cine, The Guard­ian, George Monbiot

Envir­on­ment­al­ism is, or should be, a move­ment led by sci­entific find­ings. I see the role of envir­on­ment­al­ists as being to explore and explain the implic­a­tions of what the sci­ence – whether on cli­mate change, hab­itat loss, biod­iversity, fish­er­ies, pol­lu­tion or resource deple­tion — is say­ing, and how this should trans­late into pub­lic policy.

Inside the vaccine-and-autism scare

A pedi­at­ri­cian traces the rise of the anti-vaccine move­ment that falsely linked thi­merosal with aut­ism and turned par­ents away from the most lifesav­ing medi­cine in history.

Wakefield’s research was secretly bank­rolled by a per­sonal injury law­yer whose cli­ents were suing MMR makers. Wake­field him­self was given close to a mil­lion dol­lars to prove that the MMR caused aut­ism. He had filed a pat­ent for a new MMR vac­cine at the same time he was doing his research. Upon learn­ing this, Lan­cet retrac­ted his paper, and he was charged with pro­fes­sional mis­con­duct in 2005. If he is found guilty of mis­con­duct, he will never prac­tice medi­cine in the U.K. again.

The last nail in the coffin came in 2007 … Wakefield’s former research assist­ant test­i­fied that his dis­cov­ery about the MMR vac­cine was, in real­ity, the res­ult of con­tam­in­ated lab equip­ment and that Wake­field knew this about but ignored it. In other words, as Offit writes, “Wake­field had crossed the line from ill-conceived, poorly per­formed sci­ence to fraud.”

Eleven stud­ies now show that the MMR vac­cine doesn’t cause aut­ism (the most recent just came out). Six have shown that thi­merosal doesn’t cause aut­ism; three have shown thi­merosal doesn’t cause neur­o­lo­gical prob­lems. Stud­ies show­ing the oppos­ite, like Wakefield’s, use flawed meth­ods, have ser­i­ous con­flicts of interest or have been con­duc­ted in anim­als whose res­ults can’t be extra­pol­ated to humans.