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In Defense of Demerol; or, Why Woomeisters Shouldn't Jump the Gun

Michael Jackson dies, and the next thing you know, everybody’s speculating that Demerol did the deed. Which leads whackjobs to froth at the mouth over Big Pharma’s complicity in his death, and Orac to deliver a spanking:

Actually, it’s nowhere near certain that this is what happened. In fact, it’s highly unlikely, and, as we all know, Jackson’s doctor ultimately did turn up and cooperate with authorities. Still, I myself did wonder about reports that Michael Jackson was being injected with intramuscular Demerol. It’s something we used to do for pain commonly when I was a resident, but Demerol went out of favor, at least in surgical patients, a long time ago, mainly because it has a lot of side effects, including hallucinations, seizures, and arrhythmias, among others. It’s possible that a mixture of prescription drugs could have triggered Jackson’s cardiac arrest. However, even if Demerol were the cause of Jackson’s death, it would be nothing more than an indication how easily some physicians can enable celebrity drug addicts, not that the pharmaceutical industry caused Jackson’s death.

Now, Demerol’s no daisy. It’s a dangerous drug that must be used wisely. But I’ll tell you something: it’s my favorite painkiller on the entire planet, and so I feel I have to say a word in its defense. Administered sparingly by competent doctors for the treatment of agonizing pain, it’s great stuff. Demerol is a delight when you’re suffering a kidney stone. I know this from experience. One minute, wanting to reach for the nearest scalpel to forcibly remove the offending kidney, but too sick and twisted up with intolerable pain to reach one: the next, sitting up in bed happily reading a book while said kidney stone finishes passing. And for me, it didn’t have the side effects that morphine does.

So look, it’s like any drug: it won’t be a cakewalk for everybody, and abuse is a really bad idea. But used in the right setting for the right reasons with the right patient, it’s damned helpful.

Besides, before demonizing Demerol, it might be a good idea to wait for the autopsy results. For all we know, MJ might’ve been taking some super-spiffy herbal remedy that causes cardiac arrest, and my, won’t the woomeisters’ faces be red then?

Actually, probably not:

Remember one of “Orac’s laws”? Specifically, I’m referring to the observation that, whenever a believer in alternative medicine uses both scientific medicine and alt-med and gets better, inevitably she will attibute her good fortune to the alt-med, not the science-based medicine? There’s a corollary to that law, namely the reverse: If a patient using both alt-med and scientific medicine dies, it’s always the fault of the scientific medicine, particularly if chemotherapy was involved.

Because, you know, herbal remedies can never ever be harmful. Just ask these 100,508 people.

Of course, you’ll have to consult a medium to get in touch with most of them…

In Defense of Demerol; or, Why Woomeisters Shouldn't Jump the Gun

PalMD Gets Mail

It turns out chiropractors are no better than creationists when it comes to intellectual honesty:

A long while back, at the original wordpress incarnation of this blog, I wrote a piece on the reasons that chiropractic is unscientific nonsense. Because it was popular, I moved it over here. Well, a chiropractor has come to bravely defend his field and left us a comment.

A study in the May 2007 issue of the Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics reports health plans that use Chiropractors as Primary Care Providers (PCPs) reduce their health care utilization costs significantly.

The study covers the seven-year period from 1999 to 2005. Researchers compared costs and utilization data from an Independent Physicians Association (IPA) that uses Chiropractors as PCPs and a traditional HMO that doesn’t.

[snip]

Study co-author James Winterstein, D.C. says that patients using Chiropractic PCP health care groups “experienced fewer hospitalizations, underwent fewer surgeries and used considerably fewer pharmaceuticals than HMO patients who received traditional medical care.”

I know what you’re thinking. You don’t even need to read PalMD’s delicious dissection of the study to know where the problem lies, do you? It wouldn’t really even matter if the study had been written up in a respectable medical journal rather than the Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics, which hasn’t the most stellar reputation. No, all you’d have to look at is the fact that patients using chiropractors as their Primary Care Physicians obviously didn’t use as much traditional medical care because their PCP is an alt-med fucktard. Duh-huh.

Read PalMD’s smackdown anyway, as it is absolutely delectable. I’ll give you a morsel. Now, keep in mind, this poor schmuck emailed PalMD this study to try to defend chiropractic against charges that it’s complete and utter bullshit, full of pseudoscience, and has no place in medicine outside the treatment of minor lower back pain.

Now savor this:

The goal of the study is quite clearly set out:

In this article, we are not taking a position on the efficacy of any CAM treatment. Rather, we are interested in the current use of CAM modalities and cost effects of such use, regardless of treatment outcome. These clinical utilization and cost outcomes are compared with previously published results.

In other words, they are looking at alternative medicine vs. real medicine to see which is cheaper, not whether it actually works.

Ha ha ha ha FAIL.

PalMD Gets Mail

A Skeptic in the Science Section

Going to the bookstore is becoming a painful experience. I have unreasonable expectations. When I browse the science section, I expect to find science. Barnes and Noble, however, insists on including pseudoscience. Gah. After seeing Denyse O’Leary’s atrocity shelved with the biology books, I almost fled.

Here’s a condensed version of the experience:

Crap. Crap. Eh. Whothefuckisthis? Crap. Read it. Read it. Do people really read this shit? Crap. Why are there so many books on God over here? Crap. Read it. Enough with God already! Crap. Where the fuck are they hiding the science?

In that ridiculous all-day training class I suffered through last Tuesday, our supervisor showed a video about MIT’s Media Lab where they’d developed some doodad that would display Amazon reviews of the book you were looking at. I need a doodad that’ll display reviews from ScienceBlogs bloggers. Because the main problem in sorting the wheat from the chaff is not knowing who’s chaff and who’s wheat. I know a few reliable science writers, but I don’t know them all. The frauds don’t always advertise as DIsco fellows – that may hurt their sales. And Amazon’s reviews, while useful, aren’t exactly 100% reliable. It’s not a pure population of scientists writing the things, ye know.

Publishers are no help. They print the endorsements from newspapers and magazines, as if that’s a good indicator of the reliability of the science. What I’d rather see is a crap ton of blurbs from actual scientists. No such luck. And they apparently don’t send advance copies off to peer-reviewed journals. Bastards.

This left me in an agony of indecision. I initially took the safe route and chose Richard Dawkins’s Unweaving the Rainbow, which I’ve meant to read for ages. But I also wanted somebody new. Somebody fun. Somebody informative. I stumbled on Phantoms in the Brain by V.S. Ramachandran and Sandra Blakeslee. Foreward by Oliver Sacks. He probably wouldn’t write a foreward if the book was crap, right? And I could always return the damned thing if I got home and found it widely panned on ScienceBlogs.

It’s not.

And, scanning the Recommended Reading list in the back, I see a reassuring number of books by Dawkins, Dennett, Gleick, Gould, Luria, Pinker, and Sacks – science writers I trust. No trace of Behe, Dembski, or O’Leary. This tells me we’re likely safe on solid scientific ground.

Things weren’t always this way. There was a time I’d have picked up O’Leary’s The Spiritual Brain simply because it talked about neuroscience and souls, something on my mind quite a bit considering I have to invent some sort of semi-plausible science for such things for my fiction writing (no, we can’t get rid of the souls – they’re too integral to the plot, alas). I wouldn’t have known any better. I’d never really learned that when it comes to the science section, you still have to consider the source. It’s the damned science section. You’d think bookstores would care enough for their customers to keep the pseudoscience out.

They don’t.

They’re trying to sell books. And there’s plenty of people who’ll snap up any bullshit written by someone with M.D. after their name. Like, y’know, Dr. Michael Egnor. Not that he’s written a book yet, but when he does, you can be sure it’ll be prominently shelved in the science section, because he’s ostensibly a neurosurgeon, and that somehow magically transforms pseudoscientific bullshit into something sciencey enough to be shelved alongside the likes of Dawkins.

I feel sorry for the innocent people who want to learn more about science, but haven’t learned enough about it to know when someone’s perpetrating pseudoscience on them. They have no defense. It’s like the most recent version of swine flu, which our immune systems weren’t equipped to recognize as evil shit that would really fuck us up, and therefore allowed in, only later to go “Oops. Oshit.”

The only good thing is, sometimes pseudoscience leads you to good science. Probably not often enough, but in my case, it did. I’m not arrogant enough to think I’m the only one who’s ever experienced this. My road to complete skepticism was paved with Intelligent Design. Seriously. I discovered Pharyngula and from there the rest of the excellent ScienceBlogs stable because one night, half-dead from the flu (non-swine variety) and incapable of creative thought, I started browsing the intertoobz for some science. Figured I might as well find some useful stuff for research. I stumbled across Barbara Forrest’s Creationism’s Trojan Horse. I’d known since The Demon-Haunted World and various dust-ups in the news that religious people had a problem with evolution, but I’d never realized just how sneaky they could be in trying to attack it. It intrigued me. So I started seeking out more information. I discovered Pharyngula and a treasure-trove of other sites for science and skepticism, and I was totally hooked.

Seeing scientists deconstruct pseudoscience has taught me more about science than I’ve ever learned from pure science books. I learned how to think more critically. I became a better skeptic. I learned how to evaluate claims. I found out that a medical degree isn’t a shield against ignorance. And I fell totally in love with biology, a subject that until then had failed to fascinate me. It’s much more interesting when biologists are using their formidable knowledge to beat the ever-living shit out of some poor IDiot. I consider those sessions my gateway drug to evolution, which I can now enjoy without the Creationism-bashing chaser.

Granted, all this has made visiting the bookstore a far more painful experience than previously. It really, really hurts to see so much woo, misinformation, and outright lying hackery shelved alongside legitimate science, as if the two were somehow equal. They had Dembski’s latest crime against science shelved face-out, for fuck’s sake. It makes one weep for a paper shredder and immunity from prosecution. But the pain’s good. It
means I won’t get suckered in by some absolute IDiot. I’m not a
n expert in sorting the wheat from the chaff at a glance, but I’ve now got a plethora of scientists, skeptics and other wise folk assisting, just a Google away.

I’ve got skepticism, damn it. And I’m not afraid to use it.

Now all I need is someone to run interference with the staff while I reshelve O’Leary, Dembski, and Behe’s drivel in the New Age section, where it belongs….

Bonus Video – See, even scientists and skeptics get to enjoy a sixth sense!

A Skeptic in the Science Section

Swine Flu: The Terrarists Diddit

Newest wingnut theory: the swine flu is a terrorist attack:

Larry Klayman and the Worldnutdaily are a perfect match. If Michelle Bachmann is the prom queen at Wingnuttia High School, Klayman is her king. His latest bit of lunacy is in claiming that the outbreak of swine flu is an act of biological warfare. And the Worldnutdaily calls him an “anti-terrorism expert.” No, seriously.

With 40 confirmed cases of swine flu in the U.S., an anti-terrorism expert is questioning whether the outbreak is an act of biological warfare.

Freedom Watch, a public interest watchdog, believes that there is a very good possibility that the precipitous outbreak of the virus in Mexico, which has now spread to the United States and other western countries, is not the result of happenstance – but terrorism.

Anti-terrorism expert? Klayman knows as much about anti-terrorism as I know about the art of Origami. He’s a lawyer. A really bad lawyer who loves filing silly lawsuits. He’s what Larry Fafarman would be if he could get the dosages right. And you’re going to love his “evidence” that swine flu is spreading as an act of terrorism:

“What could be more clever than planting the seed in neighboring Mexico and allowing it to spread to the United States?” Freedom Watch asked.

This is the kind of shit that third-rate hack writers dream up, not terrorists. Guess what the Worldnut Daily’s made up of?

So’s the HuffPo’s “health” section. And the swine flu’s got the woo-meisters swarming like starving cockroaches on a dropped dinner:

Take “Dr” Wegmann at that execrable waste of bytes, the Huffington Post. This guy can’t even write a title without lying: 3 Sure-Fire Strategies to Prevent the Swine Flu.

Hey, fuck face: we don’t know enough about this thing yet to use the hack phrase “sure-fire”. Of course, that doesn’t really matter to you, you lying sack of excrement-filled kishkes. The lies pour out of you like pus from a diabetic foot wound (but less bonum et laudum). You actually go on to recommend fucking glorified massage therapy to prevent the fucking flu! That’s not even wrong! You reason that since chiropractic enhances the immune system (according to some dude–what, did you hear that at the bar?), that it is a “sure-fire” way to prevent the flu.

Now, ignoring (if that is humanly possible) the fact that rubbing someone’s back cannot prevent an infectious disease, and ignoring the vacuously meaningless statement of “boosting immunity”, even if we could “boost immunity”, who’s to say that’s a good thing? One theory for why the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 killed so many young people and spared the very young and elderly (unlike the usual flu) is that their relatively more robust immune systems killed them by over-reacting.

I love watching PalMD beat the woo-meisters to death. It’s awesome. And I’m sure plenty of beatings will follow.

Terrorist plots. Massage for swine flu. I can hardly wait to see what they come up with next.

Swine Flu: The Terrarists Diddit

The Necessity of Knowledge

It’s cliché time at the cantina, my darlings, because I want to talk about a simple truth: knowledge is power.

In observing politics and religion, you soon notice a distinct abundance of stupidity. And I call it stupidity, not ignorance, because refusing knowledge is stupid. Everyone at times refuses knowledge, but some people raise it to an art form. It’s a constant in their lives. They can’t be bothered to think.

I thought of it watching the teabaggers get manipulated by the corporate lobbyists. These people were tools, and they were too stupid to realize it. It’s not that they were ignorant of what was going on – the information was out there in abundance. They had it in their own hands.

There’s a tradition in religion and conservatism that says, “Don’t question authority. Trust received pronouncements.” Therefore, you get people who can be told that Obama’s leading the country into socialism. They know this not because they’ve seen evidence, not because they know what socialism is, but because they’ve been told Obama’s a socialist, socialism is bad, and therefore Obama is bad:


A little bit of knowledge would’ve gone a long way, there. Knowing what these social programs are, how they can work, and why being a selfish stupid git isn’t the best survival strategy would completely disarm GOP attacks.

If people bothered to gain a bit of knowledge, they wouldn’t be snookered by Newtie’s latest “green coal” blabbering. They wouldn’t elect ignorant fools like Michele Bachmann and John Boehner who don’t know the difference between necessary and toxic levels of carbon dioxide, and exactly which greenhouse gas it is that cows emit. Note to Boehner: it’s not CO2.

A little bit of knowledge combined with an ocean of ignorance is a dangerous thing. Michele Bachmann’s statement that carbon dioxide is a vital part of life on earth may sound persuasive if all you know is that CO2 is what plants eat. If you didn’t know other things, such as what happens when too much of a good thing gets into the atmosphere, then you’d think she had a good point. Alas, too many ignorant and willfully stupid people do. And so the planet boils.

Speaking of global warming, Sen. James Inhofe has “a list of 700 prominent scientists who oppose global warming.” Wow! With that many scientists saying global warming doesn’t exist, there must really be doubts, right? Here’s where knowledge gives us the power to resist fake science, though, because knowing who those “scientists” are changes everything:

Like the Discovery Institute’s similar list involving evolution, there are some real laughers on the list. Like this one:

One of the listed prominent scientists is Chris Allen, who holds no college degree, believes in creationism and belongs to a Southern Baptist church.

Allen is a weatherman at the FOX-affiliated TV station in Bowling Green, Ky.

[snip]

The list also includes a retired professor with no training in climate science who says that the earth “couldn’t be more than 10,000 years old.” And these names were listed as “prominent scientists” in an actual Senate report.

Outrageous fucktards can get away with this shit only because people don’t know any better. They haven’t bothered to learn. They don’t know how to verify claims. They don’t know how to think critically. If all of us had knowledge and knew how to apply it, the Senate wouldn’t be disgraced by idiots like Inhofe, because they wouldn’t get voted in there in the first place.

Given enough knowledge, people wouldn’t fall prey to vitamin pushers. They wouldn’t get taken in by fake medicine. And they sure as shit wouldn’t get snookered by priests trying to use science to shore up their homophobia. No wonder the powerful religious, political and corporate interests hate knowledge so.

Knowledge is necessary to keep us from falling prey. Knowledge is our power. I suggest that as Elitist Bastards, we teach a lot more folks how to use it.

The Necessity of Knowledge

Taking the Naturopaths Out to the Woodshed

Several days ago, PalMD threw a challenge in the naturopaths’ teeth: what would they do as the primary care provider for a patient with a specific set of symptoms? Several responded, trying to defend the woo. They failed rather spectacularly.

PalMD takes them apart in a concluding post. And I think that what he says goes a long way to explaining why medical doctors are rather hostile to naturopaths as a whole. It’s not because they’re competition. It’s because they’re dangerous:

You see, one of the problems with naturopaths, as opposed to other “alternative” healers, is that their education allows them to sound like they know what they’re doing. They are a lot like 2nd-year medical students—they know a lot, but they don’t yet know the extent of their own ignorance (and I think most doctors can tell you how humbling it is to move on from the pre-clinical to the clinical years). This also allows them to get it partly right, which in medicine can be mostly deadly.

The whole post’s worth reading. And if you do, you’ll understand exactly why doctors shudder when patients start to burble about “natural” medicine.

Taking the Naturopaths Out to the Woodshed

Science on Teevee Redux: Helping "Understanding" Understand a Few Things

Ohforfuck’ssake.

So I had Understanding on in the background. It’s an episode about archaeology. I loves me some archaeology. I’d been looking forward to this one. But I deleted it twenty minutes in.

One can only take so much omigod those rocks were heavy how could primitive people possibly move them?!11!!!???!1!! before one gives up. Especially when not once, but twice, they suggest that supernatural explanations can’t be discounted.

You only wish I was kidding. First, they said that scientists couldn’t rule out a myth about wizards flying rocks through the air to build some temple. I hadn’t been paying close attention. Maybe they were being tongue-in-cheek, I told myself.

Then they suggested, in all seriousness, that the pyramids, the statues of Easter Island, and Stonehenge had been built by magic. Magic.

That’s when I lunged for the remote and hit “Delete.” I can only take so much.

Allow me to help Understanding achieve some understanding.

The pyramids:

Construction Techniques

Drawing of what a straight ramp might have looked like.
A major problem facing the builders of the Ancient Egyptian Pyramids, was that of getting the Large stone blocks to the height they required. the method shown at left, is the only one proven to have been used. The ramps were built on inclined planes of mud brick and rubble. They then dragged the blocks on sledges to the needed height. As the pyramid grew taller, the ramp had to be extended in length, and its base was widened, else it would collapse. It is likely that for the construction of each pyramid, several ramps were probably used.

Drawing showing ramps built around a pyramid
The arrangement of the ramps used for building is in much dispute. Assuming that the step pyramid was built before the outer structure, and then the packing blocks were laid on top, the ramps could have run from one step to another rather than approaching the pyramid face at right angles.

Science Daily has a good one on this, too:

Teams of oxen or manpower were used to drag the stones on a prepared slipway that was lubricated with oil. Said Redford, a scene from a 19th century B.C. tomb in Middle Egypt depicts “an alabaster statue 20 feet high pulled by 173 men on four ropes with a man lubricating the slipway as the pulling went on.”

Once the stones were at the construction site, ramps were built to get them into place on the pyramid, said Redford. These ramps were made of mud brick and coated with chips of plaster to harden the surface. “If they consistently raised the ramp course by course as the teams dragged their blocks up, they could have gotten them into place fairly easily,” he noted. At least one such ramp still exists, he said.

When answering to skepticism about how such heavy stones could have been moved without machinery, Redford says, “I usually show the skeptic a picture of 20 of my workers at an archaeological dig site pulling up a two-and-a-half ton granite block.” He added, “I know it’s possible because I was on the ropes too.”

Look, Ma, no magic!

Stonehenge:

That may or may not have been how they built it, but if one middle-aged dude can move 19,000 pound chunks of concrete with a few boards, some rope, some weights, and a couple of smaller rocks, I think the ancients could’ve figured out how to do this with several dudes. Oh, and even the guy from Spinal Tap knows a few ways.

As for Easter Island’s statues, let’s just say it’s been done. In many ways. None of them involving magicians. Just because we don’t know the precise technique employed just yet doesn’t mean it’s fucking magic.

I’m starting to think that the Science Channel is tragically misnamed.

Science on Teevee Redux: Helping "Understanding" Understand a Few Things

So This is What Passes for "Science"

As most of my regulars know by now, I’ve been enjoying have sole custody of my teevee. And it’s been nice – lots o’ pretty pictures, some interesting stuff, and I get to catch up on Batman: the Animated Series.

However. Comma.

They call this shit “science“?

I haven’t been keeping a list of all the science errors, because frankly I don’t have that kind of spare time, and I’d have to expand the memory on my computer. But let’s just take a few pertinent examples.

On Discover Magazine, they dedicated a whole episode to the discovery of a Homo sapiens skeleton that showed some traits usually associated with the Neanderthal – heavy brow ridge, shorter legs, heavier body. It was dated to several thousand years after the Neanderthal died out. Here’s their conclusion in a nutshell: one set of bones that sorta resemble a Neanderthal a little bit = ZOMG HUMANS AND NEANDERTHALS HYBRIDIZED!!! Seriously. They ended the episode by baldly stating this as a fact.

One small problem: never happened. In fact, in one of those delightful examples of synchronicity, I came across this unequivocal debunking in Endless Forms Most Beautiful just a few hours after watching the episode:

H. neanderthalensis did not contribute to the H. sapiens gene pool. This was demonstrated conclusively in a remarkable study, one of the really great contributions of genetics to paleoanthropology.Svante Paabo and his colleagues, then at the University of Munich, managed to sequence DNA extracted from a bone of a Neanderthal specimen, and this sequence proved that Neanderthals are a dead twig on the human evolutionary tree.

The only people who now believe that Neanderthal-human hybrids exist are Discover Magazine and the Young-Earth Creationists. So much for that.

In another example of synchronicity, I’m currently reading Life by Richard Fortey, wherein I’m reminded of the whackaloon theories of the origin of life proposed by steady-staters:

At this meeting, Professor Hans Phlug was to announce direct evidence of life from meteorites – and from te oldest (if somewhat altered) sedimentary rocks from Isua, Greenland. Phlug’s host was Professor Wickramasinghe, professor of mathematical astronomy at the Univerity of Wales in Cardiff. “Wickram” is himself a protoge of Sir Fred Hoyle, who had a long and mostly distinguished career as an astronomer, and a second one as a science fiction writer…. But the real business of the meeting was a lecure detailing alleged evidence of extraterrestrial life – including spheres from carbonaceous chondrites, which were, it was claimed, obviously organic. Bacteria came direct from outer space! Life, far from being a singular phenomenon and Earth-bound, the product of our position in the solar system and all the rest, was reported to be almost commonplace – distributed through the Universe and dusted through the stars. Life could be seeded here and there as chance ordained: comets which passed close to planets, including our own, were a favoured source for this cosmic interaction with the terrestrial world.

This notion of “Panspermia” has had a long tradition, and this was its latest incarnation. The subtext was that the Universe had a constant diameter, the “steady state” theory, as opposed to the expanding Universe proposed under the “big bang” – the theory which gained ascendancy in the latter half of the twentieth century….

Needless to say, the steady state theory is dead, Jim, and reports of life in meteorites is problematic at best. Richard Fortey went on to give Hoyle a thorough yet genteel spanking, rather too long to reproduce here (as the entire book is pretty much the debunk). Wickram and Hoyle have about zero credibility when it comes to origin of life theories. Yet what do I find in Naked Science’s “Birth of Life” episode? Whackaloon theories of the origin of life courtesy of none other than Wickram himself. Puh-leeze.

There’s some good science out there, mind. Watching these programs is a fine compliment to science reading, as long as you watch out for the misinformation salted through them. And the visuals are truly stunning. Those wonderful images have been a great help in my reading. It would just be a lot nicer if they actually got the science right more often.

Oh, and as for Batman…. Look, I know it’s a cartoon. And I know there’s no chance of such a creature as a Man-bat. But for fuck’s sake, how hard would it have been for the animators to notice that actual bats have their wings attached to their ankles and draw accordingly? Help out my willing suspension of disbelief, here!


Also, if someone went through a shapeshifting episode that destroyed their shirt… why the hell are their pants still on?

So This is What Passes for "Science"

PBS: Wowing Us With Woo

The infomercials have invaded publicly-funded teevee in the guise of “medical programming.” How fucking wonderful.

Robert Burton appears less than impressed:

Last week, I turned to my local PBS station, KQED, and ran headlong into yet another program of medical self-promotion. Mark Hyman, M.D., a family physician, was talking about “brain fog” and “broken minds” and how such “conditions” could be cured or prevented by using “The UltraMind Solution” — a combination of books, DVDs and home questionnaires.

Before I could change the channel, I heard Dr. Hyman make the following comments: “The way we think about disease, mental illness, and our brain aging, actually has nothing, nothing to do with how our body actually works … The way we think about disease is all wrong … the name of the disease tells us nothing about the real reason or the causes of them. Diseases don’t exist.”


Looks to me like they do.

If Dr. Hyman is correct, then we should disregard present medical knowledge and research. And yet, to justify his pet theories, Dr. Hyman cherry-picks from the very medical literature that he thinks approaches disease from the wrong perspective. Take, for example, his opinion that “the most remarkable scientific finding of the last decade is that you can have an inflamed, sore and swollen brain.” And from his blog site: “New research proves that almost all brain problems are connected to or caused by inflammation.” Indeed, Dr. Hyman opines that “if you treat the inflammation, the symptoms go away.”

Wow, that’s brilliant. And I suppose next he’s going to tell us that since hemophilia, traumatic amputations and Ebola all involve bleeding, Bandaids will cure all.

An appropriate analogy would be a bacterial sore throat. The streptococcus organism causes the sore throat; what we see on examination of the throat is inflammation of the underlying tissues. But it wouldn’t make sense to say that the inflammation caused strep throat; rather it would be a response to the strep. In order to blame inflammation as the primary cause, one has to abandon the traditional disease model — the position that Dr. Hyman takes at the start of his program.

Note to Dr. Hyman: Association is not causation.

Although associating Dr. Hyman with PBS has apparently caused a precipitous decline in the quality of their science programming.

PBS: Wowing Us With Woo