Health & WellnessS


Pills

Best of the Web: Why Almost Everything You Hear About Medicine Is Wrong

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© Jacob Thomas

If you follow the news about health research, you risk whiplash. First garlic lowers bad cholesterol, then - after more study - it doesn't. Hormone replacement reduces the risk of heart disease in postmenopausal women, until a huge study finds that it doesn't (and that it raises the risk of breast cancer to boot). Eating a big breakfast cuts your total daily calories, or not - as a study released last week finds. Yet even if biomedical research can be a fickle guide, we rely on it.

But what if wrong answers aren't the exception but the rule? More and more scholars who scrutinize health research are now making that claim. It isn't just an individual study here and there that's flawed, they charge. Instead, the very framework of medical investigation may be off-kilter, leading time and again to findings that are at best unproved and at worst dangerously wrong. The result is a system that leads patients and physicians astray - spurring often costly regimens that won't help and may even harm you.

It's a disturbing view, with huge im-plications for doctors, policymakers, and health-conscious consumers. And one of its foremost advocates, Dr. John P.A. Ioannidis, has just ascended to a new, prominent platform after years of crusading against the baseless health and medical claims. As the new chief of Stanford University's Prevention Research Center, Ioannidis is cementing his role as one of medicine's top mythbusters. "People are being hurt and even dying" because of false medical claims, he says: not quackery, but errors in medical research.

Comment: While it is true that being morbidly obese or severely underweight can shorten a lifespan, the jury properly should still be out on smoking. In fact, if Dr. Ioannidis' principles were applied to smoking studies, it's likely that 99% of them would have to be thrown out.

See Let's All Light Up!


Syringe

Johnson & Johnson Recall Watch: 70,000 Syringes of Injectable Antipsychotic Pulled

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Johnson & Johnson is recalling 70,000 syringes preloaded with its Invega injectable anti-psychotic drug, the WSJ reports. Cracks have been found in the syringes that could theoretically lead to infections or under-dosing in users of Invega Sustenna, though the company said that risk is low. (One report of an adverse event in Australia may be linked to the problem.)

We've been keeping tabs on J&J's string of recalls, which cost it about $900 million in sales last year. Here's a running list:

Syringe

60 Lab Studies Confirm Cancer Link to a Vaccine You Probably Had as a Child


Dr. Maurice Hilleman made astounding revelations in an interview that was cut from The Health Century -- the admission that Merck drug company vaccines had been injecting dangerous viruses into people worldwide.

Bear in mind that Dr. Hilleman was the developer of Merck's vaccine program. He developed over three dozen vaccines, more than any other scientist in history. He was a member of the U.S. National Academy of Science, the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. He received a special lifetime achievement award from the World Health Organization. Hilleman was one of the early vaccine pioneers to warn about the possibility that simian viruses might contaminate vaccines.

Sources:
The PPJ Gazette February 6, 2011
Paging Dr. Gupta, CNN Health February 1, 2011
PR Log January 24, 2011

Family

World Bank warns of soaring food price dangers

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© Romeo Gacad/Agence France-Presse/Getty ImagesIncreases in the price of rice – a staple for many of the world's poor – have been moderate, the bank said
A spike in global food prices has pushed millions more into poverty since last summer, said World Bank president Robert Zoellick

The World Bank has given a stark warning of the impact of the rising cost of food, saying an estimated 44 million people had been pushed into poverty since last summer by soaring commodity prices.

Robert Zoellick, the Bank's president, said food prices had risen by almost 30% in the past year and were within striking distance of the record levels reached during 2008.

"Global food prices are rising to dangerous levels and threaten tens of millions of poor people around the world," Zoellick said. "The price hike is already pushing millions of people into poverty, and putting stress on the most vulnerable, who spend more than half of their income on food."

Cow

South Korea fighting uphill battle against foot-and-mouth disease millions of cows and pigs have been culled

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Soldiers and heatlh officials fumigate vehicles entering Jeongchiri with decontaminants on Jan. 19.

Jiongchiri, South Korea-- More than 140 cases of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) have been confirmed nationwide in South Korea and millions of cows and pigs have been culled, but Lim Kang-soo never believed his cows could fall victim to this highly contagious animal disease.

Lim, a resident of Jeongchiri near Gongju in South Chungcheong Province, confidently invested his life savings into a small cow farm, believing in its notoriously strict vaccination policies -- until eight of his cattle tested positive for FMD last month.

"We sterilized ourselves head to toe whenever we stepped in and out of the shed," Lim said."Our village is tucked away deep in the hills, 60 kilometers away from the closest FMD case. How could this have happened?"

An independent investigation, commissioned by the Icheon municipality west of Seoul and released last week, gave weight to the argument that transmission by air and not direct contact might have been the primary force behind the rapid spread of the lethal airborne virus.

Health

US study links pesticides to Parkinson's disease

Parkinson's brain
© Agence France-PresseA computer image mapping parts of the brain. US researchers said Friday they have found that people who used two specific varieties of pesticide were 2.5 times as likely to develop Parkinson's disease.
US researchers said Friday they have found that people who used two specific varieties of pesticide were 2.5 times as likely to develop Parkinson's disease.

The pesticides, paraquat and rotenone, are not approved for house and garden use. Previous research on animals has linked paraquat to Parkinson's disease, so it is restricted to use by certified applicators.

Rotenone is approved only for use in killing invasive fish species.

"Rotenone directly inhibits the function of the mitochondria, the structure responsible for making energy in the cell," said study co-author Freya Kamel, a researcher at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

Heart

You Bet Your Life: An Epilogue to the Cholesterol Story

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© Time MagazinePropaganda!
The first Dietary Goals for the United States (DGUS) were released in 1977 to not a lot of fanfare. At that time, the great unwashed masses hadn't really heard much about the word cholesterol, a substance the DGUS recommended that we should limit to 300 mg per day. Doctors didn't routinely screen for it, and if they did, they didn't pay much attention to it. In fact, at that time - as I recall, anyway - the upper limit of normal for total cholesterol was 240 mg/dl. I was in medical school back then, and I don't really remember any emphasis on cholesterol or blood lipids. I think we had one lecture on it in biochemistry, given by a nebbish little professor we called Mighty Manford (his first name was Manford), who labored away in the obscurity of the biochemistry department. It's hard to believe in today's world of lipophobia that as little as 30 years ago, no one much cared about cholesterol.

One of the major players in bringing cholesterol to the public's awareness was Time magazine. Its piece on cholesterol in the March 26, 1984 issue was a devastating hit piece on both dietary cholesterol and dietary fat. Both - the article explained - were a main driving force behind the development of heart disease.

Reading this article today, it's amazing how it drips with misinformation. At the time, however, most people - physicians included - accepted it as gospel. Sadly, even today, many physicians who should know better believe in and act in accordance to the bountiful misinformation contained in this piece.

I could write a blog longer than the article (and it's a long article) describing and dissecting all the many errors, but I'm going to go over just one. And that one just briefly. But before I get to that, let me show you just a few of interesting small parts of the article beginning with the very first sentence:

Alarm Clock

Cancer fear over cola colourings: Call to ban ingredient used in Coke and Pepsi

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© Mark Large
A health risk? America's National Toxicology Program says both 2-MI and 4-MI found in Coke are animal carcinogens

An ingredient used in Coca-Cola and Pepsi is a cancer risk and should be banned, an influential lobby group has claimed.

The concerns relate to an artificial brown colouring agent that the researchers say could be causing thousands of cancers.

'The caramel colouring used in Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and other foods is contaminated with two cancer-causing chemicals and should be banned,' said the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), a health lobby group based in Washington, DC.

MIB

Beware: The Hidden Dangers Lurking in Your Fruit and Veg...

In a time when alternative medicine is fighting for all it is worth to be recognised as an effective form of medicine, it doesn't help when mainstream medicine continues to slate natural healthcare. I wish they'd at least do their homework before they launch their one-sided, misinformed attacks.

The truth is, if Big Pharma, the media and mainstream medicine had their way, we'd all be taking a daily statin with our breakfast... we all know where that would land us - riddled with side effects such as muscle weakness and liver damage.

Clock

Waking up is hard to do: Daily rhythms of the sleep-wake cycle

Scientists identify a gene important for the daily rhythms of the sleep-wake cycle.

Northwestern University scientists have discovered a new mechanism in the core gears of the circadian clock. They found the loss of a certain gene, dubbed "twenty-four," messes up the rhythm of the common fruit fly's sleep-wake cycle, making it harder for the flies to awaken.

The circadian clock drives, among other things, when an organism wakes up and when it sleeps. While the Northwestern study was done using the fly Drosophila melanogaster, the findings have implications for humans.

The research will be published Feb. 17 in the journal Nature.

"The function of a clock is to tell your system to be prepared, that the sun is rising, and it's time to get up," said Ravi Allada, M.D., who led the research at Northwestern. "The flies without the twenty-four gene did not become much more active before dawn. The equivalent in humans would be someone who has trouble getting out of bed in the morning."

Allada is professor of neurobiology and physiology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and associate director for the Center for Sleep and Circadian Biology.