Continuing the assault on anti-scientific beliefs and quackery that he thoroughly eviscerated in his previous book, Do You Believe in Magic-The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine, Dr. Paul Offit, the chief of the division of infectious diseases at Children s Hospital of Philadelphia, has now set his sights on another appalling practice the substitution of prayer for proper medical care.
quackery
Today we give a mega-shoutout to Alex Berezow over at RealClearScience for his brilliant letter to Dr.Oz.
We have written numerous times about the folly of the supplements industry, the latest incident (see the original report by the Times Anahad O'Connor) where GNC, Target, Walmart and Walgreens were forced to pull supplement products from their shelves by New York state attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman.
Let s give a big shoutout to Gawker today. They really stuck it to the Times by pointing out that their columnist Nick Bilton, who writes about style (and should obviously not venture beyond this) had some questions about potential health hazards from the new Apple Watch.
InScreen Shot 2015-03-11 at 2.01.10 PM the end, it was a complete waste of time and money. Yet, the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), Australia's top agency for medical research has concluded that
In the neverending world of alternative medicine, it s always something. The non-medical roulette wheel from hell has a far greater number of wrong choices (37 on a standard roulette wheel ) than you ll find in a casino. And the wheel keeps spinning.
It just landed on 16 (the atomic weight of oxygen), and it is unlikely that there were any winners.
When Dr. Oz eventually goes to the magic fat burner in the sky, he may reflect upon the past few months and conclude that there may have been better times in his professional life.
And the beat goes on: Chronic Lyme Disease quacks and scammers exploit minimal knowledge and maximal greed to treat ingenuous patients indefinitely for a condition they do not have, and likely does not exist.
As we have done repeatedly, fellow debunker Michael Shaw has some things to say about Dr. Oz on his web page Shaw s Eco-Logic.
Here are a couple of examples from his piece The Merry Old Land of Oz, which appeared on the HealthNewsDigest site:
Last week, we took Senator Claire McCaskill to task for what seemed to be a plan to use Dr. Mehmet Oz (henceforth The Lizard of Oz) as a witness to testify in front of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee about fraudulent diet claims.
We had plenty to say, as did journalist extraordinaire and ACSH friend Trevor Butterworth, who noted Dr. Oz testifying about weight loss scams? That s like asking Al Capone to testify about U.S. tax policy.
At ACSH we've pretty much seen it all. We deal with the loonies and their beliefs constantly: the fluoride conspiracy, big pharma withholding a cure for cancer, AIDS made by the US government to wipe out Africa, and of course the Jason of all scares the vaccine-autism link that persists despite a series of investigative reports proving that this link was not only wrong, but intentionally made up for monetary purposes. And so much more.
As if parents with autistic children don t have enough to worry about, there are a number of vultures out there who are all too willing to take advantage of these parents by selling treatments that are ineffective and dangerous, according to a report by the FDA.