Dr Oz crosses the line

Usually, Oz just dispenses pointless pap and feel-good noise, but now he’s antagonized the agriculture lobby. On a recent show, he claimed that apple juice was loaded with deadly arsenic — a claim he supported by running quick&dirty chemical tests on fruit juices, getting crude estimates of total arsenic, and then going on the air to horrify parents with the thought that they were poisoning their children.

One problem: his tests weren’t measuring what he claimed. The FDA got word of the fear-mongering he was doing, and sent him a warning letter.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is aware that EMSL Analytical, Inc. has obtained and tested 50 samples of retail apple juice for total arsenic content on behalf of Zoco Productions. It is our understanding that, based on these test results, you will assert during an upcoming episode of The Dr. Oz Show that apple juice is unsafe because of the amounts of total arsenic found in the samples.

We appreciate that you have made the results of these tests available to us. As we have previously advised you, the results from total arsenic tests CANNOT be used to determine whether a food is unsafe because of its arsenic content. We have explained to you that arsenic occurs naturally in many foods in both inorganic and organic forms and that only the inorganic forms of arsenic are toxic, depending on the amount. We have advised you that the test for total arsenic DOES NOT distinguish inorganic arsenic from organic arsenic.

The FDA has been aware of the potential for elevated levels of arsenic in fruit juices for many years and has been testing fruit juices for arsenic and other elemental contaminants as part of FDA’s toxic elements in foods program. The FDA typically tests juice samples for total arsenic first, because this test is rapid, accurate and cost effective. When total arsenic testing shows that a fruit juice sample has total arsenic in an amount greater than 23 parts per billion (ppb), we re-test the sample for its inorganic arsenic content. The vast majority of samples we have tested for total arsenic have less than 23 ppb. We consider the test results for inorganic arsenic on a case-by-case basis and take regulatory action as appropriate.

The analytical method for inorganic arsenic is much more complicated than the method for total arsenic. You can find the method that FDA uses to test for inorganic arsenic at this web address:

http://www.fda.gov/Food/ScienceResearch/LaboratoryMethods/ElementalAnalysisManualEAM/ucm219640.htm

The FDA believes that it would be irresponsible and misleading for The Dr. Oz Show to suggest that apple juice contains unsafe amounts of arsenic based solely on tests for total arsenic. Should The Dr. Oz Show choose to suggest that apple juice is unsafe because of the amounts of total arsenic found by EMSL Analytical, Inc.’s testing, the FDA will post this letter on its website.

His show got this letter that clearly explains why his measurements were invalid a week before the show was aired, and Oz ignored it and went ahead and broadcast a misleading and hysterical piece. Some public schools are already yanking apple juice from their lunchrooms on the basis of Oz’s lies.

Maybe somebody should explain to Oz that arsenic is entirely “natural”. Or maybe some orchard owners ought to get together for a big class-action suit.

(Also on FtB)

Michele Bachmann: pseudo-scientist and anti-vaxxer

There was another Republican debate (I skipped it; there are limits to the horrors I can endure), and apparently, many people think Michele Bachmann trumped Rick Perry by jumping on his ‘liberal’ endorsement of using the HPV vaccine to prevent cancers in women. Bachmann ranted about the federal government forcing innocent little girls to get mental retardation injections, and the teabaggers loved it. They loved it almost as much as they loved Rick Perry’s record of executions.

Orac rips her apart. It’s great fun, and informative, too.

As I’ve pointed out time and time again, Gardasil is incredibly safe by any measure. Also by any measure, it’s been very heavily tested and monitored. Of course, there is no evidence at all that the HPV vaccine can cause mental retardation. I’ve also pointed out how the vast majority of the reports of adverse reactions after the HPV vaccine made to the VAERS database were almost certainly not due to Gardasil and have castigated Medscape, of all publications, for buying into anti-vaccine myths about Gardasil. Meanwhile the American Academy of Pediatrics immediately issued a press release to correct Michelle Bachmann’s false statements about Gardasil. What Bachmann is peddling is pure pseudoscience. I suppose I shouldn’t be in the least bit surprised, given how gullible she is when it comes to science in general and how much she allows ideology to trump science.

Once again, the Republicans step forward as the anti-human, anti-science, anti-health party.

(Also on FtB)

A whole new world of quacks

My wife and I have three kids, and while that pregnancy and childbirth thing is way, way back in the past, we did have some strong opinions after our experience. Midwives were wonderful, we had only the best and most positive experiences with them, and they were the indispensable supporters we were glad to have there. The doctors…meh. They didn’t seem to be involved much, and it was rather strange when they’d come by after all the work was done and sign the birth certificate, as if they were taking credit. But my wife had relatively uneventful, uncomplicated deliveries (the second was a bit rough, and she had to stay overnight for observation afterwards; that kid was gigantic), and we knew that the doctors were essential if things went wrong, and we would have been horrified and greatly worried if they hadn’t been there. All our kids were born in clinics, with professionals all around us, because we weren’t going to take any risks. Childbirth is dangerous when things go wrong, and they really can go very, very wrong.

But now I’ve discovered The Skeptical OB, and it’s all about this crazy kooky weird world of homebirthers — people who, just like anti-vaxxers and HIV denialists, refuse to recognize that modern medicine is actually incredibly powerful and useful, and have these bizarre myths about what is “natural”. So they insist on having their babies at home, away from those horrible doctors, and they end up with dead mothers and dead babies.

That last case is particularly eye-opening. A woman writes into a forum dispensing this quackery, and complains about ditching her OBGYN and going with an unlicensed midwife, and proceeded to go into labor for eight days and delivered a dead baby.

Or this case, where a homebirther is irate because doctors recommend against her desired natural childbirthing experience, because she’s “high risk”. She thinks she isn’t, because her first delivery was easy. But then she mentions that her second delivery had a minor problem: the kid got “stuck” and required resuscitation (!) after delivery, and her third child was born unresponsive and died two days later. And then she wonders why doctors are so worried!

It’s all very disturbing and new to me, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. There are all these strange people around who, for some unfathomable reason, worship pre-18th century medicine and make a fetish of “natural”. Heart attacks are also entirely “natural”, but you won’t catch me suggesting that we skip the doctor if I have one.

(Also on FtB)

What Steve Jobs did really well

Jobs is stepping down from his leadership role at Apple, as has been all over the news for the last several days, and I had to say that he’s someone I’ve really admired. Not just as a fully committed member of the Cult of Mac, but because I’ve really liked his style.

Here’s a video of Jobs addressing a rather insulting question…and answering it amazingly well.

He doesn’t get defensive, he doesn’t defend the details, he just steps back and explains what it means to have the whole picture in his head.

And then his management style was legendarily combative and critical. Jonah Lehrer has an excellent piece on the strengths and weaknesses of in-your-face confrontation. This resonates with me: I find a little strife extremely invigorating, and I know some personalities like to seek it out and wrestle with it.

At first glance, this cultivation of anger and criticism seems like a terrible idea. We assume that group collaboration requires niceties and affirmation, that we should always accentuate the positive. Just look at brainstorming, perhaps the most widely implemented creativity technique in the world. In the late 1940s, Alex Osborn, a founding partner of the advertising firm BBDO, outlined the virtues of brainstorming in a series of best-selling books. (He insisted that brainstorming could double the creative output of a group.) The most important principle, he said, was the total absence of criticism. According to Osborn, if people were worried about negative feedback, if they were concerned that their new ideas might get ridiculed by the group or the boss, then the brainstorming process would fail. “Creativity is so delicate a flower that praise tends to make it bloom, while discouragement often nips it in the bud,” Osborn wrote in Your Creative Power.

But maybe this is a big mistake. Maybe Steve Jobs was on to something when he refused to hide away his disappointment or displeasure. That, at least, is the takeaway of a new paper by Matthijs Baas, Carsten De Dreu, and Bernard Nijstad in The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. Their first experiment was straightforward, demonstrating that anger was better at promoting “unstructured thinking” on a creativity task, at least when compared to sadness or a neutral mood. The second experiment elicited anger directly in the subjects, before asking them to brainstorm on ways to improve the condition of the natural environment. Once again, people who felt angry generated more ideas. These ideas were also deemed more original, as they were thought of by less than 1 percent of the subjects.

You don’t change the world by placidly finding your bliss — you do it by focusing your discontent in productive ways.

(Also on FtB)

It’ll never happen

The pair of psychic frauds, James van Praagh and Allison DuBois, who were featured on Nightline, have been called out by the JREF:

The JREF’s Million Dollar Challenge Director, Banachek, also featured in the episode, said, “We’re issuing a challenge to these fakers: for once, show that you can get this supposedly supernatural knowledge without cheating. If one of you can demonstrate your ‘psychic’ abilities on randomly chosen strangers—not celebrities—under mutually-agreed conditions, without relying on known cold-reading techniques such as fishing around with vague questions, and without just using Google—we will donate our million dollars to you or to the charity of your choice.”

You know Van Praagh and DuBois will never, ever risk exposure of their profitable scams by subjecting themselves to tests.

(Also on FtB)

Quacks everywhere

David Colquhoun has posted an excellent series of posts on the Steiner Waldorf schools, 19th century crackpottery that persists even now, by hiding their fundamentally pseudoscientific basis under a fog of fancy invented terms. He discusses their goofy philosophy of anthroposophistry, their devious efforts to get state funding, and their unfortunate buy unsurprising history of racism. It’s wild and crazy stuff, and it’s been sidling under the radar for a while.

What initially drew me to DC’s site was his article on quackery in retreat: the University of Westminster has discarded some of their previous offerings in naturopathy. There is still a fair amount of junk in their curriculum, but there’s hope that those are waning too.

I needed that bit of solace, because my university’s official listserve sent me a wonderful offer earlier this week.

Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction
As part of our ongoing commitment to provide quality, integrated wellness programs, the University of Minnesota’s Center for Spirituality & Healing is pleased to offer a telephone-based version of the highly successful Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program (tMBSR). The tMBSR begins with an in-person, all-day workshop. The next six sessions are conducted via a web-based conference call. The tMBSR concludes with an in-person, all-day, mostly silent retreat.
tMBSR will teach participants how to intentionally cope with pain, illness, and the stress of modern life. Participants will learn mindfulness meditation skills, and build upon their own personal strengths to offset the adverse effects of stress by responding more effectively.

The program cost of $385 (*$350 for UPlan members) includes: • Guided instruction in mindfulness mediation practices • Web-based group discussions • Gentle stretching & yoga • Daily “homework” to improve skills • Individual, tailored instruction & support • Hand-outs, CDs & Yoga DVD • All-day workshop and all-day retreat.
*UPlan Members: The tMBSR program reimbursement is available to employees who are covered by the UPlan Medical Program. You must participate in both all-day events and 4 of the 6 conference calls to qualify to be reimbursed $200.00 of the registration fees.

All-Day Workshop & Retreat
September 17th, 2011, 9:00 am to 4:30 pm in Oyate
November 19th, 2011, 9:00 to 4:30 pm in Oyate

Oh, man. Our bogus magic medicine place, the Center for Spirituality and Healing, is sponsoring this garbage — oh, wait, “sponsoring”? No, milking the faculty. They want to charge us individually $385 for a day of “mindful meditation”, for which the university may give us partial reimbursement…which just means they’ve found a way to fleece the suckers and also to get our university to endorse it.

I was cranky. I fired back on the listserve.

I am stunned that the university is subsidizing this bunkum and quackery from the Center for Spirituality and Healing. I shouldn’t be surprised; after all, the university has this New Age crapfest called the CSH in the first place.

And then, of course, I was bombarded with rotten vegetables. People were upset: I was hurtful! I was contemptuous! How dare I question the university’s efforts to help us deal with stress? One person sent me this claim that Linehan’s Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) fixes a long laundry list of ailments, from anxiety to fibromyalgia to chronic pain, and that it caused “increased immune system functioning”, one of those common buzz phrases that the quacks often use. So I wrote back, for the last time.

I’ve read some of these studies, and am unimpressed. Most of them assess subjective phenomena (“chronic pain” is notoriously amenable to suggestion, for instance), involve very small subject numbers and small effects, and often seize upon random phenomena as significant — one study found that retention in their program was far greater than in the controls, for instance; their DBT program was offered for free to participants, while the control was paid psychotherapy. Surprise!

I think a university sponsored program to help employees deal with stress is a great idea. However, real programs that are effective are built upon evidence-based medicine, not the frivolous and fuzzy nonsense that we get from the Center for Spirituality and Healing. When our institution endorses “mindful meditation”, a procedure that is pretty much indistinguishable from the placebo response, they are literally doing the very least they can do for us.

Mindful meditation may be relatively innocuous fluff, but where do we draw the line? The CSH also endorses reiki, reflexology, aromatherapy, craniosacral therapy, traditional chinese medicine, and unbelievably, “healing touch” — this is tantamount to peddling magic. Here’s an example of how the CSH describes the mechanism behind ‘healing touch.’

Healing Touch blends the energetic techniques of a number of practices, both ancient and contemporary. It is based on the belief that human beings are composed of fields of energy that are in constant interaction with self, others, and the environment (also see the section on Theories and Principles for more information). The Healing Touch practitioner realigns the energy flow, which reactivates the patient’s mind/body/spirit connection in order to eliminate blockages to self-healing.

The goal of Healing Touch is to restore harmony to the energy system so that the patient is in an optimal state for healing to occur. In other words, the goals are to accelerate the recipient’s own healing process and to facilitate healing at all levels of the body, mind, and spirit.

Healing Touch integrates easily with other modalities a practitioner may already be using. These modalities may include conventional medical practice in hospitals, clinics and in home care, or other body-mind oriented therapies such as massage, guided imagery, music therapy, acupressure, biofeedback, and psychotherapy.

This is pure gobbledygook. None of this makes sense. None of this has been demonstrated empirically: it can’t be, because it’s all made up.

None of these ‘therapies’ work. Every time they’ve been tested using objective, clinical outcomes, they’ve been found to be completely ineffectual. Our university is selling us New Age snake oil, and I’m deeply embarrassed to see the credulity and the wastefulness demonstrated by an institution that ought to be dedicated to rigor and reason. Can we please use our health care dollars a little more wisely?

Man, I hate the center for spirituality and healing. I’m ashamed and embarrassed every time I get ads from that place — they are trading on the educational and scientific integrity of our institution of higher learning to make money for quacks and to elevate witch doctors and shamans to the status of medical professionals. I’m hurtful? I think frauds selling overpriced stress-reduction magic to our faculty and staff is what really hurts.

No, I’m not signing up for the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction classes. Just their existence has increased my stress, and it’s not worth $385 to show up and watch my blood pressure skyrocket.

(Also on FtB)

Wait, what if idiocy is blood-borne?

Larry Moran is proudly Canadian, so this must have hurt a little bit: Canadian Blood Services is advertising with a load of codswallop about your blood type. This is complete nonsense:

  1. Type A: So, you’re an A. You already know that having type A blood suggests that you are reliable, a team player and may benefit from a vegetarian diet*. Did you also know that anthropologists believe that type A blood originated in Asia or the middle east between 25,000 and 15,000 BC?

  2. Type B: So, you’re a B. You already know that having type B blood suggests that you are independent, a self-starter and may benefit from a wholesome well-balanced diet*. Did you also know that anthropologists believe that type B blood appeared between 15,000 and 10,000 BC in the Himalayas?

  3. Type AB: So, you’re an AB. You already know that having type AB blood suggests that you are organized, friendly and may enjoy a vegetarian or wholesome well-balanced diet*. Did you also know that anthropologists believe that type AB blood did not originate until 900-1000 years ago and came into existence when eastern Mongolian invaders overran the last of European civilization?

  4. Type O: So, you’re an O. You already know that having type O blood suggests that you might be competitive, goal oriented and a real meat eater*. Did you also know that anthropologists believe that type O is the oldest and most common blood type, originating in Southern Africa?

Notice the personality descriptions are vague and always positive: this is classic woo technique. Forget your blood type, just read the descriptions, and if you’re willing to go along, they’ll always fit you. This is the same trick astrologers use, formulating anemic, non-specific ‘predictions’ that the gullible reader can retrofit to their own situation.

But the claims about the origins of these blood types are simply lies! They aren’t even consistent: how can you claim A and B arose over 10,000 years ago, but that the heterozygote AB never occurred until 1000 years ago? Since the ABO blood types are present in other apes, like chimpanzees, it’s obvious that claims of recent origin are bogus. Also, as Larry points out, type O is the null allele — it’s caused by a non-functional transferase enzyme. It’s pretty damned unlikely that it is the oldest type.

The Canadian site does list their sources: they include a weird Japanese blood type cult and a pop diet book from a naturopathic quack. So here’s an organization that offers important medical services, and they are peddling woo of the rankest, stupidest kind. I know that blood from morons is just as good as blood from geniuses, but really…why would you want to miseducate your clients?

(Also on FtB)

Yes, but it’s royal and noble snake oil

Another reason to get rid of the silly monarchy: Prince Charles is a quack.

Professor Edzard Ernst criticised the heir to the throne for lending his support to homeopathic remedies and for promoting the Duchy Herbals detox tincture.

In a briefing with reporters at the Science Media Centre in London, Ernst warned that “snake oil salesmen are ubiquitous and dangerous”, and named the prince as “one of the most outspoken proponents of homeopathy”.

He later told the Guardian: “There are no official criteria for a snake oil salesman, but if they existed, I think Charles would fulfil them.”

What are these Duchy Herbals, you might ask?

Britain’s leading academic expert on complementary medicine has warned that the Duchy Herbals Detox Tincture – a food supplement, which combines artichoke and dandelion and promises to rid the body of toxins while aiding digestion – is based on notions which are “implausible, unproven and dangerous”.

It also doesn’t work.

So, you Brits, when are you going to get rid of these goofy parasites? They seem to get worse and worse every year.

A Skeptical Look at Aliens

OK, I’m feeling guilty: I’m off at The Amaz!ng Meeting enjoying myself, and totally neglecting the blog readers who aren’t lucky enough to be here too. And since I’ve been getting lots of requests to put the full content of my talk online, I figured…yeah, sure, I can do that. So here you go, all of the slides and what I said about them, mostly, below the fold. Criticize and argue and do your usual.

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