October 1, 2012

The same anti-science routines are being used by the majority of the "GMO is evil" crowd.

That was explained in this piece, and has been explained in other pieces, as well.

For example, there is this well-linked piece: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2012/09/are_gmo_foods_safe_opponents_are_skewing_the_science_to_scare_people_.html

October 1, 2012

It's not that simple.

This piece, and this researcher, explains these "problems" quite well.


http://scienceblogs.com/tomorrowstable/2012/09/24/rachel-carsons-dream-of-a-science-based-agriculture-may-come-as-a-surprise-to-those-who-believe-that-sustainability-and-technology-are-incompatible/

October 1, 2012

Antivaccine versus anti-GMO: Different goals, same methods

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/antivaccine-versus-anti-gmo-different-goals-same-methods/#more-23012


"...

There’s a lot in common between anti-GMO activists and antivaccine activists. Perhaps the most prominent similarity is philosophical. Both groups fetishize the naturalistic fallacy, otherwise known as the belief that if it’s “natural” it must be good (or at least better than anything man-made or “artificial”). In the case of antivaccine activists, the immune response caused by vaccines is somehow “unnatural” and therefore harmful and evil, even though the mechanisms by which the immune system responds to vaccines are the same or similar to how it responds to “natural” antigens. That’s the whole idea, to stimulate the immune system to think that you’ve had the disease without actually giving you the disease, thus stimulating long term immunity to the actual disease! In the case of anti-GMO activists, the same idea appears to prevail, namely that, because GMOS are somehow “unnatural,” they must be harmful and evil. That’s not to say that they might not have problems and issues that need to be dealt with, but the apocalyptic language used by many of the anti-GMO activists like Mike Adams and Joe Mercola is so far over-the-top that it is very much like the language of the antivaccine movement. In fact, not surprisingly, antivaccinationists are often anti-GMO as well, and vice-versa, an example of crank magnetism in action. Indeed, Joe Mercola himself is one of the biggest backers of California Proposition 37, which would require the labeling of GMO-based food, having donated $1.1 million so far.

The particular study that has been reverberating through out the anti-GMO community over the last couple of weeks was done by a group in France led by Gilles-Eric Séralini at the University of Caen with a history of opposition to GMOs. Also, as Steve pointed out, Séralini et al did not allow reporters to seek outside comment on their paper before its publication. If there’s a red flag that a study is ideologically motivated crap and that the authors know it’s ideologically motivated crap, I can’t think of one. Even if Séralini et al didn’t know their study was weak and were somehow afraid that the nefarious Monsanto scientists would plant negative sound bites into news stories about the study, I’m sorry, but trying to control initial news reports like this is just not how scientific results should be announced, period. It’s cowardice and an unseemly attempt at spin.

...

So why should we care? As I said before, I detest ideologically-motivated pseudoscience and bad science. It’s the same reason I come down so hard on antivaccine “researchers” like Andrew Wakefield, Mark and David Geier, and various other “researchers” who pump out bad studies that support the long-discredited hypothesis that vaccines cause autism or that vaccines cause a whole host of problems. This bad science has real implications, both politically and in policy. Already, Séralini’s risibly bad study has motivated the French government to order a probe into the results of the study, which could result in the suspension of this strain of genetically modified corn. Moreover, one can’t help but wonder a little bit about the timing of the release of this study, given that Proposal 37, which would require the labeling of GMO-based food, is a big issue in California right now, and a study like this might just influence the election.

When it comes to GMO, I don’t really have a dog in the hunt, so to speak, but brain dead studies like this one certainly prod me towards the view that much of the “science” behind anti-GMO activism just doesn’t hold water, and the easy acceptance of such nonsensical results as valid by those who should know better but apparently don’t is just plain depressing. There might be valid reasons to be wary of the proliferation of GMO-based foods, such as concern over the control that large multinational corporations like Monsanto might exercise over the food supply, but the studies purporting to find horrific dangers of GMO-based food strike me as having the methodological rigor of a typical Andrew Wakefield or Mark Geier study—or an acupuncture study. Perhaps that’s why I wasn’t too surprised when one of my readers pointed out that one of the authors of the study is also a homeopath and acupuncturist; so maybe the better comparison to make to this paper would be papers by homeopaths trying to show that homeopathy works. Either way, this is bad, bad science, and it’s sad to see how many people who should know better (but apparently do not) lap it up so credulously while applying much greater skepticism to science that doesn’t damn GMOs as pure poison.

..."


The "problems" with the latest GMO rat study are so numerous it would be laughable if the propaganda pushing it as legitimate wasn't so loud. Science needs to be the way this is evaluated and discussed, not bad hyperbole "about the end of the world."

Cheers!

September 26, 2012

A fine piece that covers a wider swath of the issue from the science standpoint.

http://scienceblogs.com/tomorrowstable/2012/09/24/rachel-carsons-dream-of-a-science-based-agriculture-may-come-as-a-surprise-to-those-who-believe-that-sustainability-and-technology-are-incompatible/

July 8, 2012

Placebo effects without deception? Well, not exactly…

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/placebo-effects-without-deception-well-not-exactly/

"...


In other words, not only did Kaptchuk et al deceive their subjects to trigger placebo effects, whether they realize or will admit that that’s what they did or not, but they might very well have specifically attracted patients more prone to believing in the power of “mind-body” interactions. Yes, patients were informed that they were receiving a placebo, but it must be emphasized again and again that that knowledge was tainted by what the investigators also told them about what the placebo pills could do. After all, investigators told subjects in the placebo group that science says that the placebo pills they would take were capable of activating some sort of woo-ful “mind-body” healing process.

In fact, I would say that what Kaptchuk et al did was no different than what we know about what is required to induce placebo effects. They were also far more suggestive than the explanations that investigators conducting placebo-controlled clinical trials offer subjects during the recruitment process. Consider: In most clinical trials, investigators tell subjects that they will be randomized to receive either the medicine being tested or a sugar pill (i.e., placebo). This, patients are told, means that they have a 50-50 chance of getting a real medicine and a 50-50 chance of receiving the placebo. In explaining this, investigators in general make no claim that that the placebo pill has any effect whatsoever. In fact, in most clinical trials, subjects are explicitly told that it does not. In contrast, Kaptchuk et al explicitly tried to “optimize the placebo response” for purposes of the study by telling their subjects that the sugar pill activated some sort of mind-body response that would make them feel better — but only if they religiously took the sugar pills. Yes, they did tell the subjects that they didn’t have to believe in mind-body interactions to experience the healing response. But did it matter? I doubt it, because people with authority, whom patients tend to believe (namely doctors) also told subjects that there was strong evidence showing that these placebo pills activated some sort of powerful “mind-body” mechanism. This alone makes proclamations about how the investigators triggered placebo effects without deception — shall we say? — not exactly in line with the reality of the situation. A far better design would have included at least one more group, namely a group receiving the placebo but without all the suggestion about how it would activate “powerful mind-body” effects using a neutral script that simply said it was a sugar pill and wasn’t expected to do anything. Lacking that additional group, this study tells us very little that we didn’t already know.

..."


It's worth reading the full thing, IMO.

July 6, 2012

Testing The “Individualization” Of CAM Treatments Shows No Benefits

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/testing-the-individualization-of-cam-treatments/#more-21725

"...

So what were the results? Well, as is usual in a study looking at a subjective measure like pain, all patients improved. There was, however, no difference between those who received individualized treatment and a random herbal concoction not expected to have any effect on arthritis. This most likely indicates nothing happening here other than nonspecific effects associated with participating in a trial, including placebo, regression to the mean, the Hawthorne effect, and all the usual suspects that fool us in clinical trials, and in real life.

This study nicely illustrates several of the issues associated with supposed individualization of CAM treatment. First, it shows that such treatment is not, in any meaningful sense, any more individualized than good quality science-based medical treatment. Choosing a selection of herbs based on previous experience, historical use, tradition, and the unscientific theories of Traditional Chinese Medicine, and then selecting which of these herbs to give each patient based on the same prior experience and unscientific theory, is still applying generalizations based on groups to individuals. It simply uses generalizations based on unreliable sources of data.

The study also illustrates that individualizing therapy in this way doesn’t add any efficacy to the treatment. Not surprisingly, the study showed, as the others mentioned early have as well, that tailoring treatment to individuals based on generalizations derived from biased and unreliable sources of information leads to a therapy no more effective than randomly picking herbs out of a hat.

The difference between effective science-based medicine and ineffective medicine of any kind, conventional or alternative, is that the general principles used to guide therapy are derived from formal, controlled research that compensates for the weaknesses in our individual, informal, and unstructured judgment. If individualized medicine is just a code for using informal group observations instead of structured scientific ones to guide therapy, than it is not surprising that it doesn’t work any better than just making up a treatment haphazardly with no guiding principles at all."


------------------------


A good piece worth reading, IMO.

June 30, 2012

Fine Piece On The Importance Of Ensuring The Imperfect ACA Moves Forward

http://scienceblogs.com/denialism/2012/06/29/atul-gawande-on-resisting-health-care-reform-he-misses-a-tactic-lying/

"Even inexperienced physicians like me, still in my residency, have these kinds of stories to tell. They’re tragic. But worse, they’re just so stupid. Notice how, in each instance, the problem still ends up being taken care of, only now it’s emergent, farther along, more risky, and of course, more expensive to treat. This is part of the ludicrous nature of the opposition to health care reform. There is no way to get out of paying for these things. All we do by denying people coverage for necessary medical treatment is guarantee that in a few days, months, or years, they’ll be in the emergency room, only now it will cost ten times as much to fix, at greater risk to the patient. This is also backed up by the international experience of health care. Every other industrialized country has universal coverage, many have far superior care, not to mention superior service (France anyone?) to the United States. Yet every one of the countries pays far less per capita (most less than half) than we do on health care. Data from studies within our own country show it’s cheaper for the state to cover the uninsured than to let them stay uninsured. Because of EMTALA, passed by that notorious socialist Ronald Reagan, everybody gets emergency care whether they are insured or not, and fully 50% of emergency care is uncompensated, costs which get transferred to the insured and the tax payers.

For most of us in the healthcare system we see that universal coverage is necessary (unless you reverse EMTALA which will never happen), although we may disagree on how to accomplish it. If anything, the ACA/Obamacare is more of a free-market reform than many physicians would like. Many in my generation (though certainly not in the older generation) would have preferred single-payer, but for reasons I discussed yesterday this is actually not as important as merely guaranteeing universality. Mixed private/public and government payer/private insurance schemes are, if anything, the norm around the world and they work well while still costing less than 50% of what we pay per capita.

So why so much resistance to what should be obvious? There is no way to avoid paying for this stuff, so why don’t we do it more sensibly? Why don’t we move primary care out of the ER? Why not pay for problems when they’re cheap and not emergent?

...

In order to oppose a reform so obviously needed, so completely supported by the data from international experience and studies from within our own country, and in the face of the obvious gob-smacking experience of every physician in the country, one ultimately must rely on just lying. Politifact, both before and after the Supreme Court decision, has demonstrated this phenomenon. Many of the claims against the ACA have been so rabidly false as to deserve their “pants-on-fire” designation, including the fully debunked death panels nonsense (2009 lie of the year!), that it’s the largest tax increase ever, it’s rationing, or that it is some kind of Obama socialist plot. See the top five lies here. Immediately after the ruling Romney was apparently tripping over his own feet in order to be the first to lie about his own reform package saying it would increase the deficit by trillions, another lie, and Limbaugh reiterated the lie that it was the largest tax increase ever.

..."


This piece contains some great links that support why reform is needed, why it would save everyone money, why it would be positive for the economy, as well as being the right thing to do (even if there are better solutions that we should have pursued). It also offers links debunking GOP BS on ACA.

I offer this up as a hope that we will fight to keep this moving forward.

June 12, 2012

Anti-Vaccine Rhetoric: When Pro-Safe Is Pro-Misinformation

http://www.science20.com/countering_tackling_woo_and_science_asds/antivaccine_rhetoric_when_prosafe_promisinformation-77038

June 10, 2012

The Problem With Dr Bob's Alternative Vaccine Schedule

http://www.immunize.org/concerns/offit_moser2009.pdf

Yes, not directly on topic, but it addresses many of the concerns.

June 9, 2012

So your friends add anecdotal evidence to the study's outcomes.

PhDs are meaningless when people can't make an actual risk - benefit analysis.

PS:

Vaccines – Too Few, Too Late
http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/vaccines-too-few-too-late/