1. The Indianapolis Star has a profile on former Colts wide receiver Austin Collie, who went from receiving concussions to being a test subject at CognitiveFX, which claims to be the most advanced concussion treatment center in the world.
Can a New Age clinic cure the brain trauma that comes from being slammed around on a football field? We'll have to see. Obviously when alternative medicine survives double-blind clinical trials it becomes real medicine and the journalist notes the Council's skepticism about treating the brain like people treat their stomachs with probiotic yogurt. For now, their functional NeuroCognitive Image (fCNI) machine may see brain scans a little better than fMRI but interpreting what they are seeing is pretty subjective. It can't hurt but it can be an expensive way to learn it can't help.
If you want to read the latest on concussions, you can check out our peer-reviewed document here.
2. A minor gripe from someone who has celiac disease and says that she reacts to vodka even if it doesn't have gluten, so doesn't like our video. It's Huffington Post, so it's nice they link to science at all, and in the vast mysteries of human existence it is possible someone can get an effect from a product that isn't there, but that does not explain why 20 percent of America claims to be worried about gluten. What does explain it is clever marketing.
The upside to the gluten-free fad is that actual celiac sufferers have a lot more choices than in the old days, when everything was mail order and was more like cardboard than food.
3. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has a career resources page and lists opportunities at the Council for scientists who might like the non-profit world and have their critical thinking filters set to 10. If you believe the science that comes out of political sites like Mother Jones or SourceWatch, you will probably not be a good fit. We want to separate health scares from health threats, not promote the latest thing food corporations are paying to have promoted.
Even if you are at a position now, we invite you to apply to our Board of Scientific Advisors, which is where we get context, articles and peer-review for our books and papers. If you rationalize your own "industry ties" while thinking that corporations are evil, you are probably not a good fit, because we have no cultural litmus test - good science comes from good scientists and we don't care if they are at a corporation or in government. And you shouldn't either, but you probably know that or you wouldn't have read this far.
4. In the International Business Times, our criticism of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the American Diabetes Association is efforts to foist off even more unnecessary medication on the public by promoting "pre-diabetes, which has no clinical relevance, gets center stage. Glucose tolerance remains how we can predict someone will get diabetes, not an average hemoglobin hemoglobin A1c - or else half of China has a new medical condition and even more Africans, even though they are healthier than Americans.