I don’t write posts very often. In fact, I’ve only ever written one before, and I didn’t even post it under my account. That’s because I’m not a doctor or a scientist, I just babysit the server on a volunteer basis.
Trying to keep a site as popular as SBM running on a non-profit budget is no easy feat. Especially when everyone involved has their own day jobs. I’m constantly amazed at the dedication of the SBM staff. The hours everyone puts in writing these posts is nothing short of monumental.
Well, something happened today, and SBM reader and contributor Dr Andrey Pavlov deserves recognition and gratitude.
The technical details are pretty boring, but the main thrust is that an unknown number of readers were unable to access SBM. Everything was working fine on our end. This was a problem somewhere in the Byzantine mess of a certain national-level ISP who shall remain nameless. Before we even knew what was happening, Dr Pavlov took it upon himself to deal with the ISP and get the whole mess sorted out. He even managed to pull off a really impressive magic trick and got the ISP to admit that it was a technical fault on their end.
Again, we don’t know how many people this affected. But thanks to Dr Pavlov’s efforts, the issue has been resolved without me developing a single tech-support-hotline-induced headache.
Dr Pavlov, on behalf of myself and the entire ScienceBasedMedicine crew, you have our sincerest gratitude.
And now, here’s a picture of a hamster wearing a sweater.
Admit it, that’s just adorable.
The sun is an interesting 2 edged sword, as we spoke in this article. We obviously cannot live without it, but it has many effects on us, including the appearance of our skin. In actuality our skin doesn’t really age as much as it becomes sun damaged. To see this look at the tops of your hands and the tops of your feet or even better the cheeks of your face and the cheeks of your buttocks. They are all the same age, but they don’t look the same.
Look at the carpet in your house by the window and the carpet away from the window. The sun does the same thing to your skin. It is interesting to notice that people who drive on the right side of the road like in the US have older appearing left sides of the face than right and those in UK have older appearing right sides of the face. UVA, which is one of the main components of energy emitted by the sun, penetrates window glass.
Sun-damaged skin appears sallow, has a lot of play on texture and a lot of play on color. Fine lines and wrinkles also appear on the surface. To treat the manifestations of sun damage the most important thing to do is to use sunscreen every morning as part of your daily routine.
SPF 15-30 is certainly sufficient and you will not only help prevent further damage as well as skin cancer, but the appearance of the sun-damaged skin will actually begin to reverse. At night the use of a retinol cream has been shown to improve the appearance of sun-damaged skin as well. It is best to use the retinol at night as the molecule is sensitive to sun and will not be as effective if used during the day.
Standard office treatment consists of chemical peels to reverse the appearance and laser resurfacing can also be of benefit.
The post Your Skin and the Sun: Part Two appeared first on Dr. Melvin Elson - Official Website.
Of all the things that emergency physicians do, rapid sequence induction has to be the most sinister.
To paralyse a man, or a woman, or a child, with a lethal serum – and then bring them back, from the point of death, with seconds to spare! With nothing more than a trusty metal blade, held in the left hand, and air blown through a tube!
It is an amazing magic trick. Surely some sort of voodoo. And frightening, very frightening, when it goes wrong. About 1% of rapid sequence inductions, conducted in the ED, kill the patient within 10 minutes. Which makes RSI about 25 times more dangerous than BASE jumping.
This is why some have suggested that RSI should also stand for Really Stupid Idea.
Now imagine if something came along, a technological breakthrough, a new machine, that transformed RSI. That made it, well, easy. And safe. Actually, a Really Sensible Idea. How would you feel?
And what would you say if this machine were coming very soon, coming at you – from the near future. In fact – it’s just arrived. And that trusty metal blade that you are holding in your left hand – is now scheduled for termination.
What do you do? Give up? Or fight?
I’ll be back.
The post DL Terminated appeared first on LITFL.
It certainly is true that winter is here and it is difficult to continue your exercise routine, but you really don’t have to give up running or walking outside. Just use a few tips to be able to be comfortable and still get in the exercise you need. You can maintain your level of fitness and your weight until Spring will eventually get here and then things will be even more enjoyable.
First and really this is probably the most important. If you are on a road or even a sidewalk exercise going toward the traffic so you can be seen by the driver and you can see the driver and anticipate any movements. It is best if there is any traffic on the road your rout is taking you, not to use an iphone, etc.
If possible run into the wind going out and have the wind at your back coming back so that if you are perspiring the wind won’t blow on wet skin. You must protect your skin from the elements because temperatures even just below freezing can produce frostbite if you are out any length of time.
Be sure to wear gloves—and even better are mittens, since the fingers will keep one another warm. Cover your head to prevent heat loss from the area. To prevent chaffing apply Vaseline to the most vulnerable areas—in between the thighs, the nipples and if your face is exposed and it is very cold, you can even apply a thin film of Vaseline for protection.
Always dress in layers, so that air is trapped in between each layer to increase the degree of warmth. It is possible, even in the winter, to become overheated and if so you can remove a layer or 2.
If the roads are icy or slick simply stay off them that day. There is no way to remain safe if you are sliding or if a car is sliding toward you. If you begin to feel sleepy or sluggish, stop and get to a safe place as soon as you can.
Winter running can be invigorating and just as much fun as it is in the summer, but use not only your legs, use your head!
More on Winter best practices for a healthy skin
The post Winter Excercise: Best Practices and Advices appeared first on Dr. Melvin Elson - Official Website.
One of the most disconcerting things that occurs regarding our appearance is that we begin to notice our hair is thinning—both men and women. As a matter of fact, although everyone is familiar with male pattern baldness, female pattern baldness is actually much more common and is not really manifested as a slick scalp but a thinning of the hair.
To begin to understand what can be done, it must be understood that hair is not alive; it is a product of the skin manufactured just underneath the surface.
There are many causes of thinning hair or baldness from wearing hair in a tight hair-do like a pony tail to hormonal changes. In men, as male hormone levels decrease the scalp hair stops growing in the front and on the vertex and if it is not treated the hair actually dies. To treat male pattern baldness, the ultimate is a hair transplant and hair transplants now have come to the point they look completely natural, not like corn sticking in a field.
But before that approach is taken, there are a number of things that are available. Rogaine® is available without a prescription and is effective especially in early stages of loss. It works better if used in conjunction with a retinol product, which can also be obtained over the counter. There is also a drug (Finasteride) that can be taken by mouth if prescribed by a physician. This drug does work and is used mainly for prostate enlargement and does have some side-effects.
The most common cause of hair loss in women is pregnancy. Hair grows in phases and in some areas the resting phase is long and the growing short (e.g. eyelashes), but in some the growing phase is longer and on the scalp at any time about 70% is growing and 30% resting.
During pregnancy the percentage growing is above 90% and then when the pregnancy ends it reverts back and there is a noticeable loss of hair. It is important to understand that this is temporary and is normal and the hair almost always comes back. This may also occur with the discontinuation of birth control pills.
Women also begin to have thinning hair as they age due to changes in hormones of various types and Rogaine actually works better for them than it does for men. Hair transplants are also done for women when necessary and desirable and work very well.
The main thing to remember is that if you are experiencing thinning hair, there is treatment available!
The post Hair Loss: Treatments, Prevention and Causes appeared first on Dr. Melvin Elson - Official Website.
Although there are a variety of types of Migraine headaches, they all have one thing in common. They are very painful. There have been many treatments tried from pain medications to hypnosis to positive feedback and they all fall short of relieving the problem.
Recently, the FDA has approved the use of Botox® for the treatment of migraine headaches and I have used it a number of times for patients and they have all obtained great relief. One patient had a migraine every morning when she woke up for years and nothing really worked. I injected her with Botox and she awoke the next morning headache free for the first time in a long time.
I have had great success in treating migraine headaches as well as tension and other types of headaches. It is, however, very important to see a doctor who is experienced in this technique, because if injected too far down on the neck, it can lead to difficulty holding up the head.
Cost will vary depending on how much toxin is necessary to obtain relief but generally a few hundred dollars is adequate. Although, it is effective in virtually everyone, there is a significant variety in how long the relief will last—generally a few months, but some patients have gotten relief for over a year.
There is no longer any reason to continue to suffer with this painful problem, as the treatment does work!
Contact Dr. Melvin Elson by Clicking here!
The post Does Botox Help Coping with Migraine Headaches? appeared first on Dr. Melvin Elson - Official Website.
I don’t write posts very often. In fact, I’ve only ever written one before, and I didn’t even post it under my account. That’s because I’m not a doctor or a scientist, I just babysit the server on a volunteer basis.
Trying to keep a site as popular as SBM running on a non-profit budget is no easy feat. Especially when everyone involved has their own day jobs. I’m constantly amazed at the dedication of the SBM staff. The hours everyone puts in writing these posts is nothing short of monumental.
Well, something happened today, and SBM reader and contributor Dr Andrey Pavlov deserves recognition and gratitude.
The technical details are pretty boring, but the main thrust is that an unknown number of readers were unable to access SBM. Everything was working fine on our end. This was a problem somewhere in the Byzantine mess of a certain national-level ISP who shall remain nameless. Before we even knew what was happening, Dr Pavlov took it upon himself to deal with the ISP and get the whole mess sorted out. He even managed to pull off a really impressive magic trick and got the ISP to admit that it was a technical fault on their end.
Again, we don’t know how many people this affected. But thanks to Dr Pavlov’s efforts, the issue has been resolved without me developing a single tech-support-hotline-induced headache.
Dr Pavlov, on behalf of myself and the entire ScienceBasedMedicine crew, you have our sincerest gratitude.
And now, here’s a picture of a hamster wearing a sweater.
Admit it, that’s just adorable.
Of all the things that emergency physicians do, rapid sequence induction has to be the most sinister.
To paralyse a man, or a woman, or a child, with a lethal serum – and then bring them back, from the point of death, with seconds to spare! With nothing more than a trusty metal blade, held in the left hand, and air blown through a tube!
It is an amazing magic trick. Surely some sort of voodoo. And frightening, very frightening, when it goes wrong. About 1% of rapid sequence inductions, conducted in the ED, kill the patient within 10 minutes. Which makes RSI about 25 times more dangerous than BASE jumping.
This is why some have suggested that RSI should also stand for Really Stupid Idea.
Now imagine if something came along, a technological breakthrough, a new machine, that transformed RSI. That made it, well, easy. And safe. Actually, a Really Sensible Idea. How would you feel?
And what would you say if this machine were coming very soon, coming at you – from the near future. In fact – it’s just arrived. And that trusty metal blade that you are holding in your left hand – is now scheduled for termination.
What do you do? Give up? Or fight?
I’ll be back.
The post DL Terminated appeared first on LITFL.
This is a screenshot from the website of the Hippocrates Health Institute, showing how high end its grounds and facilities are.
I first came across Brian Clement, the proprietor of the Hippocrates Health Institute in West Palm Beach, Florida, a little more than a year ago based on the story of Stephanie O’Halloran. Ms. O’Halloran was—word choice unfortunately intentional—a 23-year-old mother of an 18 month old child from Ireland who was diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer in 2013, with metastases to her lymph nodes, liver, lung, and leg. Unfortunately for her, she found Brian Clement at the Hippocrates Health Institute, who gave her false hope with his claims that a raw vegan diet and wheatgrass can treat just about everything. Unfortunately, but not unexpectedly, Ms. O’Halloran died in June 2014, Less than nine months after having been diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer.
I didn’t write about Stephanie O’Halloran at the time (at least not here), but I did write about Brian Clement and the Hippocrates Health Institute (HHI) twice over the last several months in the context of the case of two 11-year-old aboriginal girls in Canada with cancer, specifically lymphoblastic leukemia, one named Makayla Sault the other referred to as “JJ” to protect her privacy in her parents’ legal proceedings to assert their right to use traditional medicine to treat their daughter’s cancer rather than curative chemotherapy, which was estimated to have a 75% chance of curing Makayla Sault and an 85% to 90% chance of curing JJ. Unfortunately, both girls and their parents fell under the spell of Brian Clement and his cancer quackery. The result was one unnecessarily dead girl (Makayla Sault, who died last month) and one likely to be dead by the end of this year or not much longer (JJ). Such is the price of cancer quackery. In this case, even more puzzlingly, these girls’ parents seemed quite content to conflate the quackery of Brian Clement, a white man practicing in Florida, with “traditional aboriginal medicine,” the sort of practices they were claiming to have a right to.
Because I’ve adequately discussed the issues involving JJ and Makayla for now (that is, unless something new happens with respect to these girls’ stories), what I want to do now is to focus my attention more on Brian Clement himself and his practices. Over the last three years, I’ve spent considerable time and effort trying to pull the cover off of the machinations and abuse of clinical trial ethics by Stanislaw Burzynski. There’s been a growing thought in my mind that a similar effort should be directed at Brian Clement, because, although he doesn’t even make a pretense of doing clinical trials, he sells his cancer quackery the same way that Burzynski does: Through testimonials. Indeed, if there is one “good” thing that’s come out of the stories of Makayla Sault and JJ, it’s been increased scrutiny of Brian Clement and the HHI.
Most recently, this increased scrutiny has come in the form of news stories that have been appearing in the Canadian Press, two just over this weekend:
After having spent so much verbiage last week criticizing the Star for its execrable “expose” on Gardasil (an expose that the editors of the Star finally saw fit to withdraw under a barrage of well-justified criticism, although they clearly still don’t get it), I feel that in fairness I have to note that Alamenciak goes part of the way towards redeeming the Star after that journalistic debacle by actually traveling down to West Palm Beach and interviewing Clement, although Clement wouldn’t say anything on camera for this report:
What Alamenciak was allowed to see included several classrooms, the wheatgrass juicing room, and a greenhouse. Pointedly, they weren’t allowed into the Vida Building, where many of the alternative treatments are administered. (I wonder why.) Even more pointedly, Alamenciak was accompanied everywhere by HHI’s lawyer and PR person, as well as Clement himself. As you’ll note, Alamenciak and crew do a good job of putting the lie to Clement’s claims that he doesn’t promise he can cure cancer, using, conveniently enough, clips from Clement’s own talks in which he—you guessed it—tells his audience his raw vegan diet and wheatgrass can cure cancer.
Similarly, Tom Blackwell’s story quotes Clement as saying in one of his videos:
The appeal is powerful. Though he often insists he does not “cure” or heal anyone, Mr. Clement has repeatedly claimed impressive results.
“We have … the longest history on the planet earth, the highest success rate on the planet earth of people healing cancer,” he said in a Hamilton, Ont., talk, recorded and uploaded to YouTube in 2010. “We have dealt with mostly stage-three, stage-four catastrophic cancers — a big percentage of them, probably 25%, have been told they’re going to die. We have seen thousands and thousands of those people recover.”
Of course, Clement never manages to present anything resembling credible evidence to back up this claim.
There’s another segment as well with Steven Pugh, former Director of Nursing, HHI, who relates stories of Clement ordering blood work without a doctor and telling Pugh that he would review the results himself. This is what led Pugh to quit and sue. Because he is a registered nurse, he can’t take orders for lab tests or other medical interventions from non-physicians. If Pugh’s allegations are true (and I personally have little doubt myself that they likely are), that is most definitely practicing medicine without a license:
“Almost every single patient there, the majority of patients, got an appointment with Anna Maria and/or Brian to go over their medical history, their labs, blood work, their disease process or just their wellness process and they would recommend treatment,” alleges Steven Pugh, Hippocrates’ former director of nursing and one of the ex-employees suing the facility.
Johnson offered a written response on Thursday to Pugh’s statement: “All blood tests are administered by a medical professional and reviewed by the medical director. As nutritionists, the Clements review the guests’ entire health history, which includes the blood tests, with a view toward nutritional recommendations. . . . The medical director is responsible for all medical decisions of any kind.”
Hippocrates, which houses as many as 100 people at a time, has one licensed medical doctor working for the facility — Dr. Paul Kotturan.
I had never heard of Dr. Paul Kotturan before; not surprisingly, I wondered what kind of physician would associate himself with an institute like the HHI. So I did some Googling. Dr. Kotturan appears to run an urgent care center, Hillsboro Urgent Care in Deerfield Beach, Florida. His role at HHI is described on its website thusly:
Under the supervision of Dr. Paul Kotturan, Hippocrates’ specialized therapies include hyperbaric oxygen therapy, cranial electrotherapy stimulation, IV nutrition and antioxidants, Aqua Chi detoxification therapy, advanced diagnostics, bio-frequency research, targeted supplementation, thermography and more.
What does that “more” include? According to Alamenciak’s report, it includes quackery such as:
One of the treatments often mentioned by Clement in videos is Cyber Scan — a machine that claims to read your “bio-frequency” and tells which diseases you have or are at risk for. The machine then spits out a magnetized card — similar to a debit card — that contains the “morphogenetic footprint” of whoever put their hand on the device.
For Pugh, the most surreal treatment moment came when he saw a man blowing a long alpenhorn on the feet of a guest at the centre. The man claimed to be removing “toxins,” Pugh said.
And, of course, supplements:
The institute also sells its own line of supplements, called LifeGive, as well as a store stocked with everything from $400 amulets that claim to block electromagnetic waves to a stool designed to angle one’s feet while on the toilet that is said to promote “more complete bowel evacuation.”
And, of course, there are stem cell treatments. Given that on the surface, the South Florida Bone Marrow/Stem Cell Transplant Institute looks relatively straightforward, treating hematologic malignancies with what sound like fairly standard-of-care treatments. Why Dr. Dipnarine Maharaj would affiliate himself with an entity like the HHI is the first question I asked. Surely it does not speak well of him to be featured on the HHI website.
But back to Dr. Kotturan. I was actually rather amazed that it was difficult to find out much about him. He seems to have kept a relatively low profile compared to other doctors administering dubious therapies, at least with respect to the ability of Google searches to reveal much other than his clinic. (And, make no mistake, the medical therapies administered at HHI are highly dubious, ranging from wheatgrass enemas, to the “Cyber Scan” test, to the most unbelievably quacky treatments like Aqua Chi “detox footbaths.”) One thing I was able to find out is that he was a site principle investigator of TACT.
For those who don’t remember, TACT stands for Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy; it was a $30 million unethical boondoggle of a multiinstitutional study designed to assess whether chelation therapy has any value for treating cardiovascular disease. It was basically a negative study, but its principal investigator, Gervasio Lamas, has been spinning it furiously as showing that chelation very well might for cardiovascular disease and that, of course, “more study is needed” (preferably in the form of another large NIH grant to do a followup multiinstitutional study. In this publication, Kotturan is listed as one of the investigators, which means he must have been administering chelation therapy during the timeframe of the study, which was several years. Certainly, Kotturan’s name comes up as offering chelation therapy and IV vitamin therapy for at least one “holistic retreat.” His name also pops up in this TACT Talk newsletter as one of the site investigators as one of the winners the Persistence Award in the 2005 TACT Derby for enrolling five patients over three months. He’s also a member of the American College for Advancement in Medicine (ACAM), a leading proponent of chelation therapy and what Dr. Kimball Atwood likes to refer to as a pseudomedical pseudoprofessional organization. His ACAM entry lists him as providing “Allergy, Chelation Therapy, Cosmetic Laser Surgery, Family Practice, Gynecology, Holistic Medicine, IV Therapies.” One wonders what else is covered in the “holistic medicine” part. Does he offer the same sorts of quackery at his own practice as he does at HHI? Inquiring minds want to know!
Alamenciak’s story adds more detail to a story carried by the local NBC affiliate WPTV affiliate a couple of weeks ago. Here is the story:
Overall, it’s not a bad start to uncovering HHI’s cancer quackery. Note how posh the HHI campus is, as well. I’ve described the “treatments” offered by Brian Clement as part of HHI’s “Life Transformation Program” before. They include almost every imaginable form of cancer quackery, including “detoxification,” colonics, wheatgrass, ozone pools, “bio-energy treatments,” the aforementioned “Cyber Scan,” and, of course, the Aqua Chi “detox footbaths.” One particularly silly treatment offered by HHI is called a “wheatgrass implant.” For those of you who don’t remember what “implants” are. It turns out that wheatgrass “implants” are, in actuality, wheatgrass juice enemas. Indeed, if you believe the hype on the HHI website, there’s nothing that wheatgrass can’t do. If the HHI is to be believed, wheatgrass can increase red blood cell count, decrease blood pressure, cleanse the blood, organs and GI tract of “debris,” stimulate the thyroid gland, “restore alkalinity” to the blood, “detoxify” the blood, fight tumors and neutralize toxins, and many other fantastically beneficial alleged effects. Basically, combine a raw vegan diet with a veritable cornucopia of other kinds of quackery, and you have the HHI.
Elsewhere, a little Googling reveals this woman’s account of what HHI offers:
The list of therapy options was impressive: hyperbaric therapy, cranial stimulation, hydrocolon therapy, IV Vitamin C and other IV therapies, complete blood analysis upon arrival, hormone therapy, and thermography.
There were several other therapies that I was not familiar with that are also included in your stay with HHI such as Ceregam-RH, H-Wave Therapy, Lymphatic Drainage Bed, Migun, MRS 2000, Ondamed Biofeedback Treatment, Q1000 Laser, Soft Laser, Theragem, Turbosonic Therapy, and Viofor.
Amazingly, I haven’t heard of some of these things, which led me to add them to my “to-do” list for SBM posts. I can’t help but note that it was touted that Coretta Scott King had visited HHI. She died of her cancer in a Tijuana clinic.
Lately, it seems, Clement is getting into “vibration” and “quantum.” For instance, get a load of this video on Quantum Biology:
I admit that I didn’t watch the whole thing. Not even close. It was just too darned painful, given how much pseudoscience is packed into nearly two hours. Nor do I expect you to watch the whole thing; that is, unless you’re a total glutton for punishment. (Seriously, physicists and chemists viewing this video will feel a near-irresistible urge to claw their eyes out.) One brief example occurs at 1:11:30 or so, when he shows a highly simplified version of the cell followed by pure vitalism, where he talks about the “life force” gathered through nutrients. The cell is surrounded by words representing vitamins, protein, water, minerals, essential fatty acids, and oxygen (to which he verbally adds “electromagnetic frequencies”). After this, there is this text:
These elements with their varied frequencies are attracted to the magnetic energy of the cell. This allows building and life maintaining processes. It also expels exhausted and used matter from the cell.
Clement “translates” this to mean that if you have the life force in the cell and the life force in the nutrients, they’re attracted to each other.
Elsewhere, he describes quantum biology thusly:
Painting a picture to describe this fruitful exploration begins with yourself. Beyond the protein that holds your body together, the vitamin and mineral sheathing that covers it, the essential fats that fuel it and the water and oxygen that shape it, the underlying purpose for your body’s existence is the electricity that it takes in and creates. There is a continual and perfect communication from cell to cell and from gathering of cells (organs and / or skeletal) to gathering of cells. This communication also reaches beyond your body to all other life outside.
This rhythmic and energetic process is strong, yet fragile. It can be thrown off by a weakening of the anatomical integrity of the cells or their central electrical frequencies. This weakening can occur via poor nutrition, dehydration and / or polluted hydration, lack of oxygen, intake of heavy metals or chemicals or renegade electromagnetic fields such as cell phones, Wi-Fi, etc.
All abnormalities that have been labeled as diseases stem from the negative energies that are endured from the poor lifestyle choices and unsustainable environment that we have created on planet earth today.
Our core vulnerability stems from the reduction of bio-frequency that occurs in the cell, which heightens its fragility to make it ineffective in communication and contribution. When these disturbances are critical, they can even cause a cell to mutate.
When you ingest ionized, rich, raw plant-based foods, it provides foundational energy. You then have to consider avoiding negative energy fields or at least protecting yourself from them with electromagnetic field interrupting devices or tools.
What is more difficult to avoid and personally restrain from is the negative energy that we absorb or spew from discontented emotional states. Most of you have seen this and experienced it. Certain people, places or environments can make you feel uncomfortable, on edge and literally drained.
I couldn’t take any more! Not only is Clement spewing total and utter BS about quantum theory and science a la Deepak Chopra, but he explicitly embraces a “Secret”-like concept that “negative energy” from people’s “discontented emotional states” causes disease. Oh, and let’s not forget “toxins” needing “detoxification.” You get the idea. Clement understands neither physics, chemistry, nor biology. He thinks wheatgrass, either eaten or administered as enemas, is a cure-all. He treats cancer with a raw vegan diet plus a wide variety of quackery, even detox foot baths. He blathers spiritual nonsense about god, “energy” and consciousness.
Particularly galling was his response to a breast cancer surgeon who, even though she appeared to buy into some of what Clement was selling, did challenge him about surgery for cancer. One thing I learned in his response is that Clement clearly does not understand cancer stem cell theory, stating categorically that no cancer comes from anything other than stem cells. That is not true; some cancers have been strongly linked to cancer stem cells. Others have not. It’s not as though cancer stem cell theory is settled science. It’s an area of active investigation and, yes, controversy. Based on his misunderstanding and his claim that he might not be able to “activate” the immune system fast enough with the raw vegan diet and wheatgrass, he then launches into a spiel about how he brings in “advanced therapies” such as cold laser, electromagnetic therapies, that, he claims, fire up the stem cells with a “higher frequency.”
He then denigrates the claim that cancer surgeons can produce 90% survival with stage I breast cancer. I must admit that I chuckled when Clement states, “The only disease in history that they put a five year survival criteria on is cancer.” No, it’s not. We do it for heart disease. We do it for stroke. We do it for renal failure. What’s the difference? In many cancers, if you survive five years, for all intents and purposes you can be considered “cured,” because the disease is very unlikely to recur after five years. Breast cancer, unfortunately, is one cancer that is an exception to that rule, with recurrences at ten years and beyond being not as uncommon as we would like, particularly for estrogen-sensitive breast cancer. Be that as it may, contrary to what Clement claims, we didn’t choose five year survivals as a surrogate for cancer cure arbitrarily. Indeed, the difference between diseases like diabetes compared to cancer is that if you survive five years after cancer, depending on the cancer, you probably are “cured.” If you survive five years after being diagnosed with diabetes or heart failure, you still have diabetes or heart failure.
If there’s one thing all three stories show, it’s that Clement makes a lot of money running HHI. Blackwell’s story, for instance, reports that filings to the IRS indicate that Brian Clement and his wife Anna Maria Gahns-Clement, the latter of whom serves as HHI vice-president, earned almost $1 million between them in 2013, even though the HHI is classified as a non-profit institute and therefore tax-exempt. Almenciak reports that Clement and his wife were paid $529,363 and $432,291 in income and benefits that same year and that the HHI reported receiving $15.1 million in fees for its “services.” Given that HHI has been operating in West Palm Beach since 1987, one can imagine how much wealth the Clements have amassed from its operations and their evangelizing speeches all over the world. It’s also not hard to see where he might “earn” such money, given that he charged JJ and Makayla $18,000 each for their “treatment.” All three stories feature photos and video showing just how large and fancy the grounds and facilities of HHI are.
Like Stanislaw Burzynski, a key element of the Clements’ marketing campaign includes patient testimonials. They can be found on the HHI website and YouTube channel. I very well might analyze several of these testimonials, either here or at my not-so-super-secret other blog, but for now, given the length of this post, I’ll just look at two.
First, there is this testimonial from Dr. Jackie Campisi:
Jacki Campisi’s story is horrifying. Basically, she started out by denying herself her one best shot at survival after her diagnosis. My observations on the brief video include:
Basically, here we have a woman who underwent surgery alone for a stage III cancer, apparently refused radiation and chemotherapy in favor of a raw vegan diet and other “alternative” treatments, recurred in the spine, found Brian Clement, and is continuing to make the same mistakes. I’m glad she seems to be doing better, but, sadly, Clement is not going to save her. Nothing can. Fortunately, she might still live several more years because of the seemingly favorable biology of her tumor. Unfortunately, she might have done even better if she had accepted standard-of-care palliative therapy. Also, she will likely credit Clement for how well she does.
Another testimonial, mentioned in Blackwell’s article, is Samantha Young:
One Canadian woman, Samantha Young, says she was given just months to live after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and maintains she was rid of the frightening disease after visits to Hippocrates.
Young’s testimonial can be found on the HHI website as well, oddly enough, filed under “Depression,” rather than cancer:
Back in the late nineties I found myself suffering unimaginable fatigue, nausea and constant interrupted sleep brought on by the excruciating pain in my stomach. My physician conducted some investigative blood work which appeared completely normal. Finally, upon my insistence, she suggested an ultrasound. That revealed a ten centimeter mass in the tail of my pancreas.
The doctor explained that if I were older, she would believe that the tumor was benign. However, because I was young she suspected it might be cancer. Just that word instilled so much fear in my heart. My mind started to race, ruminating on all the medical statistics about the increase of cancer and how treatments most often are more harmful than helpful. Of course the doctor advised that my options were surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation.
What could that benign diagnosis have been? If there are any general surgeons or gastroenterologists reading, I bet they know. I’ll get to it momentarily. In the meantime:
Finally, my physician suggested that I see a specialist, Dr. Taylor, who supported the pancreatic cancer diagnosis with finality. Thank God my five daughters came and nurtured me. They adjusted their schedules and stayed with me at the onset of this sad period of my life. They described my color as gray green. Every day seemed insurmountable. On top of all of this the doctors finally admitted that although chemotherapy and radiation treatment were suggested, they ultimately would not make any difference in my case, nor would they prolong my life. They told me, “I am sorry, Samantha, get your house in order.”
We’ve heard this story before. Of course, a 10 cm mass in the tail of the pancreas would make me consider something other than pancreatic cancer in the diagnosis. Run-of-the-mill pancreatic cancer, the kind that kills most patients within a couple of years of diagnosis even if operable and successfully resected (expected five year survival after a Whipple operation, for instance, for pancreatic cancer is only on the order of 25%, generally doesn’t grow to 10 cm without metastasizing. That this one did implies that it’s either a less aggressive form of pancreatic cancer or not pancreatic cancer at all. Notice, in any case, that nowhere is there a report of a biopsy confirming the diagnosis. (Actually, rereading the testimonial, I don’t see any evidence that Young ever had even a CT scan, which is considered mandatory for determining whether a pancreatic cancer might be resectable.) Of course, if pancreatic cancer has already metastasized, then expected survival is measured in months. So what happened? Young found Dr. Clement, of course, and this happened:
I slowly adopted the program and was so impressed when I microscopically viewed cancer cells thriving on cooked food. This wrenched me into the full adoption of the living food diet. Slowly but surely, my color returned to a more acceptable yellow pallor, and as time passed my normal complexion prevailed.
In addition to the diet I also used far infrared therapy to gently heat my body up to 40 degrees Celsius. I also made sure to include lots of massage and reflexology, as well as continuing my medication and creative visualization, along with copious amounts of wheatgrass.
After two years the tumors had shrunk from 10 centimeters to 4.5 centimeters.
Before I knew it, I was in remission. Now I understood fully that cancer can be beaten.
In other words, she did nothing to treat her presumed cancer. Of course, I doubt that she ever had cancer in the first place. Given her clinical history, what I rather suspect (and, I bet, any general surgeons out there suspected) is that she really had was a pancreatic pseudocyst. Pseudocysts often arise after a bout of pancreatitis. Early in her testimonial, Young describes herself “suffering unimaginable fatigue, nausea and constant interrupted sleep brought on by the excruciating pain in my stomach,” all of which can be symptoms of pancreatitis. Not knowing more of her clinical course, I find it not hard to envision that Young suffered pancreatitis and developed a large pancreatic pseudocyst, which slowly resolved spontaneously, as many pancreatic pseudocysts, even ones larger than 5 cm, do. Moreover, pancreatic pseudocysts are sometimes misdiagnosed as cancer and vice-versa, but less commonly these days given that virtually any large pancreatic mass can be biopsied pre-operatively, something that wasn’t necessarily true 20 years ago when I trained. Again, we have no evidence of a tissue diagnosis anywhere to help guide us, and, given that, I rather suspect that this was indeed a pancreatic pseudocyst that resolved.
In Blackwell’s story, we learn:
Mr. Pugh said it is quite possible that some of the cancer patients at Hippocrates are cured, but in the little over a year that he worked there, he was not personally aware of any such successes.
“I would get emails occasionally from a family member saying a patient had succumbed to cancer,” he said.
I’d be willing to bet that no one at HHI survives cancer due to anything done for them at HHI. Indeed, as Alamenciak reports, there are testimonials on the HHI website whose stories have not been updated to report that the patient died, patients like Annalisa Cummings, who died in 2009.
The more I learn about Brian Clement, the more I wonder: How on earth has this guy been operating for three decades in Florida? Clearly, the State of Florida has utterly failed to protect its citizens from quackery. In fact, given how many people, such as Makayla Sault, come from all over the world, Florida has failed to protect everyone. Clement and his wife are both registered as nutrition counselors. Clement’s PhD in nutrition comes from the University of Sciences, Arts and Technology, a school licensed by the government of Montserrat, an island in the Caribbean with a population of about 5,000. It’s widely viewed as a diploma mill. Yet, thanks to a loophole in Florida law (see below), the Clements continue to get away with making promises they can’t fulfill, all the while with a “wink-wink, nudge-nudge” disclaimer that they “don’t promise cures,” even though everything they say in their promotional literature and talks would lead one to think that they can cure stage III and IV cancers where scientific medicine can’t.
The scam is so obvious, too. The Hippocrates Health Clinic has a Massage Establishment license, issued by the Florida Board of Massage Therapy. Also, the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) licenses health care facilities, such as health care clinics and hospitals, and processes complaints about the quality of care in these facilities. Further, it is known that a complaint was filed with ACHA against the HHI for operating a health clinic without the proper state license. However, as our resident Florida lawyer and SBM regular contributor Jann Bellamy informed me when I asked her about it, under state law, only clinics receiving reimbursement from third-parties, such as public or private insurers, are required to have an AHCA-issued license. Because Hippocrates is a cash-only business, AHCA was apparently without jurisdiction to take action. The result of this gap in state law is that clinics offering only unproven treatments, which aren’t reimbursed by insurance, are the very ones who are outside the reach of state supervision. Meanwhile the FTC won’t say whether it’s investigating or not.
In both the WPTV report and Tim Alamenciak’s report, Clement is asked about accusations that he gives cancer patients false hope. He immediately replies, “There is no such thing as false hope.”
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Hope is important, but cancer patients need that hope to be tempered with a realistic assessment of their prognosis. Clement takes that away from them, and he’s damned callous about it too, as his answer to Alamenciak’s same question reveals:
When confronted with the testimonials people wrote — testimonials full of hope, that have not been updated to indicate those who later died — Clement says:
“That’s not false hope. I’m going to die. Do you realize that? You’re going to die,” he says. “I have hope that I’ll become a multi-billionaire some day and be able to change the world. Is it going to happen?
“I would never tell somebody don’t do chemotherapy. I’m not a medical doctor, nor do I believe I should tell them to do that … I’m going to die; they’re going to die. Does it mean that I did something wrong because they came here? Maybe they were very, very sick at some point and they went home and eventually died? What do I have to do with that? Explain, what does Hippocrates have to do with that?” said Clement.
In response to questions about Stephanie O’Halloran, Clement is quoted thusly:
“ … From a one-hour lecture in Dublin, this woman decided that I could heal her? That’s not even realistic when you think about that,” said Clement said in an interview in his Florida office.
These are, of course, the sorts of questions that a con man asks when confronted to deflect responsibility from himself to his marks. It’s not his fault they believed him! Unfortunately, Florida law lets the Clements continue to offer false hope at a high price with impunity. Until the HHI is shut down, there will be more patients like Makayla Sault, Stephanie O’Halloran, and Annalisa Cummings spending tens of thousands of dollars to chase the false hope that Brian Clement offers.
Excessive perspiration can be a terribly frustrating problem, both socially and emotionally. In addition, it can become very expensive as it can ruin clothing when the main problem is underarm sweating. It can ruin clothes in addition to being very embarrassing when in social situations.
Over the years, dermatologists have tried many things in an attempt to control this problem from prescription compounded anti-perspirants to tranquilizers to medicine by mouth to attempt to block sweating.
Since there are certain areas of the body where sweating is control by a different chemical than the rest—palms, soles, a circle on the forehead and under the arms, the best treatment that has been developed for this problem is the injection of botulinum toxin.
First a test is done by applying iodine to the underarm and then tincture of iodine. The areas that are producing excess sweat turn black as coal. This test is not only important to determine how severe the problem is, but also is used in the future to observe the results and determine how much more needs to be done.
The Botox is then injected into the areas of the sweating throughout the underarm. It is not painful and has minimal side-effects. It is effective in a day or so and can last up to a year.
This is one of the most gratifying of all procedures performed with Botox as it is 100% effective and these patients are extremely grateful. The same procedure can be used on the palms and soles with just as good result to stop the problem of shaking hands with a soaking wet hand or feet that ruin shoes.
It is done in the dermatologist’s office and only takes a short period of time. There is no down time.
If you want to call Dr. Melvin Elson for an Appointment you can do so by using the details below:
The post Botox Injections to Avoid Excesive Sweating appeared first on Dr. Melvin Elson - Official Website.
Stick-and-ball model of the glucosamine molecule (from the Wikimedia Commons, image by Benjah-bmm27)
Osteoarthritis, the “wear-and-tear” type of arthritis, affects a great many of us as we grow older. Knee pain is a common symptom. The diet supplements glucosamine and chondroitin have been proposed as a more “natural” treatment than pharmaceuticals, and they are components of a number of proprietary “joint health” formulations like Osteo Bi-Flex. The GAIT study (Glucosamine/Chondroitin Arthritis Intervention Trial), compared glucosamine, chondroitin, a combination of the two, and a pharmaceutical (celecoxib) to a placebo in patients with knee pain from osteoarthritis. The only one that worked better than placebo was celecoxib. I wrote about the GAIT trial in 2008. The study was reported in the media as both negative and positive. The positive reports emphasized the subgroup analysis: in one of ten subgroups, patients with moderate to severe pain, the combination of glucosamine and chondroitin outperformed placebo. But in the subgroup of patients with mild to moderate pain, it did not. The authors themselves commented that their study was not powered to draw any conclusions from subgroups and that further studies would be required. (The “power” of a study is a measure of its ability to show an association or relationship between two variables if such a relationship exists.) Now a further study with sufficient power claims to have confirmed the subgroup findings. This may encourage some people to try glucosamine/chondroitin, but I remain skeptical.
Following the GAIT trial, there were several other studies showing that glucosamine was ineffective for osteoarthritis. There are other studies showing it is effective. There are a lot of studies out there, with varying quality. I think it’s fair to say the evidence is mixed and still questionable even when the new study is added into the mix. I was particularly impressed by a 2004 discontinuation study that followed-up on a group of patients who had had a positive response to glucosamine. It compared continuance of glucosamine with one half of the group to substitution with a placebo in the other; it found no difference in disease flares or any of the secondary outcomes they looked at. Pain is particularly susceptible to placebo responses, and studies of pain must be interpreted with more caution than studies with more objective outcomes. The American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons reviewed the evidence and recommended against the use of glucosamine, chondroitin, and the combination. They said:
Glucosamine and chondroitin sulfate have been extensively studied. Despite the availability of the literature, there is essentially no evidence that minimum clinically important outcomes have been achieved compared to placebo, whether evaluated alone or in combination.
The new study, “Combined chondroitin sulfate and glucosamine for painful knee osteoarthritis“, was published in the Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases on Jan 14, 2015. The full text is available online. It was a randomized double-blind study of patients with moderate to severe knee pain from osteoarthritis. 264 patients were given a prescription drug sold in Europe that contains 400 mg chondroitin sulfate plus 500 mg glucosamine (taken 3 times daily) and 258 were given celecoxib, a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID), in a dose of 200mg once daily, plus placebo capsules to provide the same number of pills. Celecoxib outperformed glucosamine/chondroitin for the first four months of treatment, but by 6 months there was no difference. They concluded that glucosamine/chondroitin was equivalent to celecoxib. The authors recognize that current evidence-based guidelines advise against glucosamine/chondroitin, but think their study supports its use in patients with cardiovascular or gastrointestinal conditions where NSAIDs are inadvisable.
A Medscape reporter contacted me about the new study because I had written a letter to the editor that was published in American Family Physician where I identified misconceptions about the GAIT trial. She asked me several questions, and in the resulting article she devoted two paragraphs to my answers. I expressed my reservations and said I would withhold judgment until the weight of evidence falls more clearly on one side or the other. In the comments to the Medscape article, a pathologist said:
I doubt that dietary glucosamine or chondroitin sulfate are absorbed from the gut as such. Further, human cartilage contains N-acetyl galactosamine, not glucosamine. Depending on source, the dietary CS may have a different structure than human CS. Finally, the cartilaginous glycosaminoglycan matrix is synthesized by the chondrocytes, and it is naive to assume that dietary supplements will “home” to that avascular tissue. It is all placebo effect, making lots of money for manufacturers.
I don’t know enough about that to comment on it, but I remain skeptical for several reasons of my own:
Glucosamine/chondroitin might work for osteoarthritis, and might be worth trying in patients who can’t take NSAIDs, but the evidence is still far from clear. Based on the currently available evidence, I wouldn’t feel comfortable prescribing it or telling patients “it works;” but if a patient wanted to try it, I wouldn’t have any objections to a therapeutic trial. There don’t appear to be any worrisome side effects, and even if patients only had a placebo response, they might feel better.
It certainly is true that winter is here and it is difficult to continue your exercise routine, but you really don’t have to give up running or walking outside. Just use a few tips to be able to be comfortable and still get in the exercise you need. You can maintain your level of fitness and your weight until Spring will eventually get here and then things will be even more enjoyable.
First and really this is probably the most important. If you are on a road or even a sidewalk exercise going toward the traffic so you can be seen by the driver and you can see the driver and anticipate any movements. It is best if there is any traffic on the road your rout is taking you, not to use an iphone, etc.
If possible run into the wind going out and have the wind at your back coming back so that if you are perspiring the wind won’t blow on wet skin. You must protect your skin from the elements because temperatures even just below freezing can produce frostbite if you are out any length of time.
Be sure to wear gloves—and even better are mittens, since the fingers will keep one another warm. Cover your head to prevent heat loss from the area. To prevent chaffing apply Vaseline to the most vulnerable areas—in between the thighs, the nipples and if your face is exposed and it is very cold, you can even apply a thin film of Vaseline for protection.
Always dress in layers, so that air is trapped in between each layer to increase the degree of warmth. It is possible, even in the winter, to become overheated and if so you can remove a layer or 2.
If the roads are icy or slick simply stay off them that day. There is no way to remain safe if you are sliding or if a car is sliding toward you. If you begin to feel sleepy or sluggish, stop and get to a safe place as soon as you can.
Winter running can be invigorating and just as much fun as it is in the summer, but use not only your legs, use your head!
More on Winter best practices for a healthy skin
The post Winter Excercise: Best Practices and Advices appeared first on Dr. Melvin Elson - Official Website.
This is the original headline of the Toronto Star‘s scientifically incompetent and fear mongering Gardasil story. It was later changed to “Families seek more transparency on HPV vaccine.”
I remember it well, because several of my readers forwarded it to me not long after it appeared on the website of the Toronto Star: An eye-catching headline proclaiming a “wonder drug’s dark side,” that “wonder drug” being Gardasil, one of two vaccines against the human papilloma virus (HPV) designed to prevent cervical cancer by preventing infection with the HPV virus. The story’s caption blared:
Hundreds of thousands of teen girls in Canada have safely taken Gardasil, a vaccine shown to prevent HPV. But a Star investigation has found that since 2008 at least 60 Canadians have experienced debilitating illnesses after inoculation. Patients and parents say the incidents point to the importance of full disclosure of risks.
There was even a video that would have been right at home on a variety of antivaccine websites, such as Age of Autism, SafeMinds, or VaxTruth:
Indeed, the video above reminded me more than anything else, of a segment from the antivaccine “documentary” that functions as antivaccine propaganda, The Greater Good , which portrays as one of its vaccine “victims” Gabi Swank, a girl whose story is not unlike that of Kaitlyn Armstrong, the teen profiled by the Star. Both girls had a deterioration of their health that appears to have happened sometime after receiving Gardasil. Both attribute their health issues to Gardasil. Neither story was examined with even a modicum of skepticism or critical thinking. In fact, part of the reason I recognized immediately how bad the Star story was derives from my previous experience examining similar stories promoted by the particularly vociferous wing of the antivaccine movement that focuses on the perceived “evils” of Gardasil. That’s something we expect from an antivaccine propaganda film like The Greater Good. We expect better from investigative journalists like David Bruser and Jesse McLean. We don’t get it.
I had meant to blog about this incident because the Star story was such a horrendously bad story from a scientific perspective, but, blogging being what it is, other topics intruded and for some reason I never got back to this topic. Over the last 11 days, however, the criticism and inept responses kept percolating along, as you will see, involving a clueless editor who lashed out at critics, a public editor who just didn’t “get it,” and a newspaper that took far too long to admit that it had screwed up epically and only then after sliming its critics. Fortunately, an excellent analysis in the Los Angeles Times by Michael Hiltzik provided me with an “in” to do the post I had wanted to do before. How the Toronto Star wrote the story is an object lesson in how not to do a vaccine safety story, and how it responded to reasonable criticism was an even more pointed lesson in how not to deal with scientific critics.
As I read the Star report and then watched the video, I was appalled at how any reputable newspaper could fall into the obvious traps that David Bruser and Jesse McLean clearly stumbled blindly into when they were researching the story. Their first and biggest mistake was to take anecdotes like Kaitlyn Armstrong’s at face value:
By the time Kaitlyn Armstrong received her third and final injection of the popular HPV vaccine Gardasil, pain had spread through the Whitby teen’s body, migrating from her back to her knees to her hips.
After her first dose, Natalie Kenzie of London developed egg-size lumps on the soles of her feet, her joints swelled and her limbs twitched uncontrollably.
Before getting the shots, both 13-year-old girls were told the vaccine had no significant risks. And as they struggled to learn what ailed them, and began to believe Gardasil played a role, doctors dismissed their concerns.
And:
Kaitlyn Armstrong said she and her fellow eighth graders heard about Gardasil from a guidance counsellor during a short information session given at her Whitby school in September or October of 2009.
“She told us it was going to protect us from cervical cancer, it’s a really good idea to get it. She was pushing it. She didn’t talk about any complications or any of that stuff,” recalled Armstrong, who is now 17 and wants to be a pediatric nurse. “My grandpa had died a few months before from cancer, so of course I was right on board.”
At the time, Armstrong danced 20 hours a week, played soccer and ran track. After the first Gardasil shot, the pain started in her back. After the second and third shot, it spread to other joints, her knees and hips. Amanda Dubreuil, who taught Kaitlyn at her Oshawa dance studio, remembers what happened next.
“It was one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen. When I first started teaching her, she was so incredibly strong, one of the most physically gifted girls I had seen in a while. Over the course of three months she started deteriorating.”
The video features Armstrong, an articulate and appealing young woman, telling her story, which could not help but evoke sympathy for her. One thing she says that is particularly revealing is that it “took a few weeks after I got the shot” for the pain to begin. This, of course, is the classic fallacy in these stories of confusing correlation with causation. I’d have to have a cold heart indeed not to be moved by her story, and I was as I watched. Here is a formerly vibrant and energetic girl who loved to dance and was good at it. Over the course of a few months, this girl found herself developing chronic pain to the point where she could no longer dance. Her description of how in dance class she could no longer warm up and had to sit in the class watching her friends dance while she could not is heartbreaking. That being said, her story as presented in the Star is not convincing evidence that Gardasil had anything to do with the deterioration in her health.
Ultimately she was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, a chronic pain disorder thought to be due to abnormalities in how pain signals are processed in the central nervous system. It’s a tricky condition that’s only recently become accepted as a diagnosis, and it tends to be a diagnosis of exclusion. As I’ve described before, fibromyalgia is also a frustrating condition because not only is it frequently misdiagnosed, but its symptoms often wax and wane and it is poorly understood. In any event, having pain that develops over several months is not an atypical presentation of this condition. Again, correlation does not equal causation.
A quick Googling of Kaitlyn Armstrong’s name plus the word “Gardasil” revealed quite a few articles about her and her problems with chronic pain that she linked to the Gardasil vaccine. For instance, I found a particularly telling statement in this article:
Kaitlyn didn’t know at the time that her suffering would later be linked to the vaccine.
And who linked her suffering to Gardasil? Take a guess:
Finally in March 2012, a naturopathic doctor asked what Kaitlyn’s latest vaccine was. Turns out, Ms. Armstrong says, there is a heavy concentration of aluminum in the vaccine, and Kaitlyn is allergic to metals. She had no clue this was an ingredient — something she always looks for as it’s a long-standing allergy of Kaitlyn’s.
“My body didn’t know how to deal with it,” Kaitlyn says, adding medical tests confirmed the high metal concentration in her blood.
Her mother explained in a presentation to the Durham District School Board that her daughter’s body was blocking her ability to absorb vitamin D and iron, and Kaitlyn’s liver and kidneys were working overtime to rid her body of the metals.
Kaitlyn is now on detox, with weekly appointments at a private clinic downtown Toronto where she receives vitamin pushes through an IV. She also gets her blood cleaned to remove the metals.
So, here we have a story of a girl who had developed puzzling, debilitating chronic pain that doctors were having a hard time diagnosing, again, a very common story for fibromyalgia patients. Then she ended up at a naturopath’s office, and because naturopaths are very commonly antivaccine that naturopath asked about—you guessed it!—vaccines. Gardasil came up, and even though the time between the symptoms and the vaccine was several weeks, the link was made, and “detoxification” treatment prescribed, complete with what sounds like the quackery that is chelation therapy. One wonders if Kaitlyn’s diagnosis of high levels of heavy metals in her blood was based on a provoked urine test for metals. I bet it was. Yes, indeed it was, as this more detailed description of Kaitlyn’s story clearly reveals to anyone familiar with the quackery that is provoked urine testing for heavy metals:
Jump ahead to February while we wait for the MRI, a friend suggests a naturopath. At this point as a concerned parent who feels helpless I figure why not we have nothing to lose. Our appointment with the naturopath enlightens us to the ingredients of the HPV vaccine. Little did I know that it contained an aluminum adjuvant. I felt sick to my stomach hearing this information. Kaitlyn had a pre-existing metal allergy. I was never told the ingredients of the vaccine, nor was I told the scope of individuals that should not receive it. She needed to start the process of detoxing her body, which most people know is a very long slow process.
In the meantime, a nurse friend of mine informed me of a medical doctor who practices natural medicine in downtown Toronto, about 45 minutes from our home. This doctor does a procedure called chelation. So in March 2012 we started seeing Dr. Jaconello and she began weekly vitamin push treatments with him. We have learned that it is believed the vaccine has caused an auto-immune response in her body attacking her joints. This explains the swollen lymph nodes, the yeast infections, the skin rashes and the all over joint pain.
In May, 2012 she started chelation via injections and IVs. To put it into perspective, prior to her first injection, the aluminum level in her urine was 0.10 mg; 6 hours after chelation it was measured again and 210mg came out. Chelation was and is her miracle. She was scheduled for 10 treatments but after only 6 treatments, she is almost back to her old self. The smile has returned to her eyes. She is back to running and playing soccer at the competitive level. She still has pain in her knees, back and hips but it is bearable. It used to always be a 9/10 or a 10/10 today it is a 3 or 4/10. She is about 85% back to her old self. Her strength and agility is returning. She is very determined both mentally and physically.
Yep. That’s the scam of “provoked urine testing.” Of course if you administer a chelator the level of various metals in the urine will increase dramatically, even if there is metal poisoning. That’s what chelating agents do!
Here is Dr. Paul Jaconello’s website. It offers a veritable cornucopia of unscientific and pseudoscientific treatments, including orthomolecular medicine, chelation therapy and other forms of “detoxification,” intravenous hydrogen peroxide, intravenous vitamin C, hair mineral analysis, an “antiviral drip” (which includes hydrochloric acid!), and Myers’ intravenous nutrient “cocktail.” Worse, I’ve only scratched the surface of the treatments offered there that I consider to be quackery.
I feel very sorry for Kaitlyn Armstrong. I truly do. Not only has she developed a chronic pain syndrome at an age when she should just be concentrating on high school and the dance lessons that she clearly loves, but she’s now been led down the rabbit hole of naturopathic quackery. I’m glad she’s getting better, but you can bet that it almost certainly has nothing to do with anything either the naturopath or Dr. Jaconello has done. Again, the course of fibromyalgia tends to be to wax and wane.
None of this background was mentioned in the Star article or how Kaitlyn and her parents have set up a Facebook page to “fight back against PGS-post gardasil syndrome.”
Another story discussed in the article is that of Annabelle Morin:
A 14-year-old Quebec girl, Annabelle Morin, died two weeks after receiving the second injection of the vaccine.
It was 7:30 p.m. on the night of Dec. 9, 2008, when her mother, Linda, found her in the tub, her head underwater and turned to the side.
The paramedics lifted Annabelle’s body on to a stretcher. “I put a blanket on her, saying, ‘She’s going to freeze,’ ” Linda recalled. “I did not know she was already dead.”
The Quebec coroner’s office said the cause of death was drowning, yet also said that any role Gardasil might have played should be further investigated.
Then:
From her home in Laval, Que., Linda Morin, 55, recalled the night of her daughter’s drowning, when she returned home from the hospital and was questioned by two police officers. She did not, at the time, have an explanation.
Not until a few months later, when she read an article about two young Spanish girls who suspected Gardasil caused their hospitalizations, did Morin think she might have an answer.
She called her daughter’s school, asked some questions, took some notes and built a timeline.
Annabelle got her first Gardasil shot on Oct. 9, 2008. Morin remembered that on Oct. 25 Annabelle “came out of (her) room disoriented, she could hardly walk, she couldn’t speak. She was mumbling.” Annabelle was also vomiting and complained of a bad headache. Morin took her daughter to the hospital, where a brain scan turned up nothing. Soon Annabelle felt better.
The episode occurred 16 days after her first Gardasil shot.
Annabelle got her second shot on Nov. 24. After about the same span of time, 15 days later, she died.
As tragic as this story is and as much as I feel for the parents, there is no good evidence in this story that Gardasil had anything whatsoever to do with Annabelle’s tragic drowning. Indeed, the story for correlation isn’t even that strong. Annabelle felt ill two weeks after the first shot in the series, which isn’t particularly strong a correlation, particularly given that she got better quickly. Then, two weeks after her second shot, she died. The story is not particularly compelling evidence of causation. In fact, Annabelle’s story sounded familiar; so I did some Googling. It’s been discussed before in great detail by someone very near and dear to me, if you know what I mean. One thing I know now is that Annabelle had a history of migraines, which could have easily explained her first incident of feeling sick and disoriented. The other thing I now remember is that Annabelle’s mother latched onto Gardasil as the cause of her daughter’s death and is suing Merck after apparently having encountered one of Joe Mercola’s fear mongering articles about Gardasil online.
Indeed, Morin’s case has been used by two antivaccine “scientists” (and these days I use the term loosely to describe them), Lucija Tomljenovic and Christopher A. Shaw, who featured Morin’s anecdote in an article in which they attempted to argue that deaths after Gardasil were caused by Gardasil when they almost certainly were not. Despite all these problems with Morin’s story about her daughter, the Star‘s video featured Linda Morin telling her story, looking over video of her daughter riding a horse, completely with manipulatively sad piano music playing over. The video even includes a shot of this poor girl’s sad mother putting flowers on her grave, after which Ms. Morin laments that Annabelle was her only child, over a shot of her daughter’s empty bedroom, complete with a close-up of doorway where her daughter’s height was marked with a pen at various ages from 4 to 9. The video concludes with Ms. Morin saying that we “have to remember Annabelle” and that “she didn’t die for nothing.”
Again, no one could watch that video and fail to be moved by Ms. Morin’s grief, still raw over six years later, but the emotion provoked by the deeply sad spectacle of a mother who unexpectedly lost her daughter washes away all trace of critical thinking. Did these reporters even Google any of these girls’ names? There are blog posts discussing their cases and why they are not convincing evidence linking Gardasil to their deaths or adverse health outcomes. True, they’re buried among a whole lot of antivaccine websites capitalizing on their stories, but surely some critical reporting was warranted.
One thing that David Bruser and Jesse McLean did that American reporters frequently do is to misunderstand the purpose of an open adverse event reporting database. In the US, we have the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). Designed as a “canary in the coalmine”-type early warning system designed to pick up adverse events early, it’s a database to which anyone can contribute a suspected vaccine adverse event. It is not authoritative, and the adverse events are not generally verified. Indeed, as has been reported before, one pro-vaccine blogger, Dr. Jim Laidler, reported that the influenza vaccine turned him into the Incredible Hulk. True, the VAERS staff did contact this blogger and ask him about it, but, as he noted, if he had refused to remove the entry, it would still be there. Another pro-vaccine blogger, Kevin Leitch, verified that VAERS lets you enter basically anything by reporting that a vaccine had turned his daughter into Wonder Woman. Not surprisingly, antivaccine lawyers have made the database almost worthless as a source of information over the incidence of adverse events due to vaccines by encouraging their clients to enter all sorts of reports, in particular reports claiming that vaccines caused autism.
So what did the Star reporters do? This:
In the U.S., where there is a public database of vaccine-related side-effect reports collected from around the world, the Star found thousands of suspected cases, including more than 100 deaths.
This is exactly how the VAERS database should not be used.
Apparently Health Canada runs a similar database, which the reporters used thusly:
In Canada, when doctors, nurses, pharmacists or patients suspect a pharmaceutical or vaccine has caused a side-effect, they can file a report with Health Canada. The Star analyzed the regulator’s database of reports and found more than 50 “serious” incidents, including at least 15 hospitalizations connected to the vaccine since 2007.
Which sounds very much like VAERS and is very much like VAERS, as the Canada Vigilance Adverse Reaction Online Database website shows quite clearly. The main difference is that the Canadian database is a more general database that tracks reported reactions to all health products, not just vaccines. Indeed, the Canadian government goes to great pains to emphasize:
Inclusion of a particular reaction does not necessarily mean that it was caused by the suspected health product(s). Certain reported reactions may occur spontaneously. They provide a background rate in the general population and may have a temporal, but not necessarily a causal, relationship with the health product. The purpose of the Canada Vigilance Program is to detect possible signals of adverse reactions associated with health products. Additional scientific investigations are required to validate signals from the Canada Vigilance Program and to establish a cause and effect relationship between a health product and adverse reaction. Assessment of causality must include other factors such as temporal associations, the possible contribution of concomitant medication or therapies, the underlying disease, and the previous medical history.
So what did Bruser and McLean do with these reports? The same thing they did with the VAERS reports, they misinterpreted them to provoke maximal fear of Gardasil:
Suspected side-effects listed in the Canadian reports include: Convulsions; more than 10 cases of joint, abdominal and other serious pain; two cases of anaphylaxis, a severe allergic reaction; two deaths, including that of a 10-year-old girl; and a hemorrhage, stroke and life-threatening heart condition. In many of the cases, the patients were teenagers, often 13 or 14 years old.
Yes, they did qualify their statements by stating that these reactions were not necessarily due to the vaccine, but in the context of video of a mother laying flowers on the grave of her dead daughter and teen dancer lamenting how she can’t dance anymore because of Gardasil, this disclaimer doesn’t carry much force. Overall, this Star report is one of the most irresponsible stories about vaccines I’ve ever seen, and that’s saying a lot.
Not surprisingly, bloggers who are proponents of evidence- and science-based medicine pounced on the Star‘s story as the crap journalism that it was. Jen Gunter, for instance, was an early and vocal critic, and our very own Scott Gavura also weighed in, characterizing the Star‘s article as a “gift to the antivaccine movement.”. Quite correctly, Dr. Gunter pointed out that the authors had confused correlation with causation and cited:
Dr. Gunter was also very critical of how the authors credulously interviewed Dr. Diane Harper. As am I. Look at how the Star reported it:
“It’s very sad because what I see is the physicians are not accepting the fact that these young women have pain and issues,” said Dr. Diane Harper, who was the principal investigator of a major clinical trial for Merck as the company was developing the blockbuster vaccine for the worldwide market. “The docs in the trenches have been conditioned to respond, ‘vaccines don’t have side-effects.’ ”
Harper, now the chair of family and geriatric medicine at the University of Louisville in Kentucky, said Gardasil’s approval by the FDA was fast-tracked unnecessarily, since the progression of an HPV infection to cancer often takes decades and can be detected through regular pap screens. She said the vaccine could have been analyzed over a much longer time frame.
“There could be harm,” Harper said. “You just don’t know until you look at it in the full population.”
Harper, as I’ve discussed before, was a featured speaker at a conference organized by the National Vaccine Information Center (NVIC), a prominent antivaccine group and one of the oldest in existence. She was also featured in a recent Katie Couric interview in which she cast doubt on Gardasil’s safety and efficacy. For some reason, she is much more enthusiastic about the other HPV vaccine, Cervarix, which is more commonly used in Europe, while Gardasil is used in the US. In any case, she’s been known for making statements about “harm” from Gardasil without any actual evidence to back them up.
It wasn’t too long before the Star‘s ill-advised counterattack began. In response to all the criticism, Star columnist Heather Mallick wrote an op-ed entitled “Vaccine debate is one we shouldn’t even be having“, in which she lashed out at critics of the Star story, in particular Dr. Gunter, whom she dismissed and disparaged thusly:
Here’s a tip: don’t read a website run by a rural doctor whose slogan is “wielding the lasso of truth.”
One wonders what Mallick has against “rural” doctors that she would use the term as an insult. In any case, she doubled down on the Star’s story, framing it thusly:
The Gardasil vaccine story reported Thursday by David Bruser and Jesse McLean of the Toronto Star was about information, and access to it. It was not about the drug itself — it is safe and effective — but about parents and girls not always being told what they need to know in order to make informed decisions, and being dismissed by doctors when they became terribly ill.
The problem, of course, is that girls are given information about adverse reactions. Just because an adverse reaction is reported in the VAERS or Health Canada database does not mean that the vaccine caused the reaction, as Dr. Gunter retorted and I just explained in detail above.
Mallick then made this analogy:
You’re either for vaccinations or against them, never mind the grey areas. This is Tea Party thinking, to react with alarm rather than reason. It has brought us mandatory sentencing, anti-choice clinics that lure young pregnant women, climate-change deniers and men’s rights. It is a fact-free zone, and when it intersects with Canadian life, it makes it much more difficult to make rational decisions.
And the vaccine debate is one we shouldn’t even be having. The loony American right’s obsession with non-science, in the face of all the facts, should not spill over into Canada.
Which is a complete straw man. The Star endured criticism not because the “loony American right’s obsession with non-science” had spilled over into Canada but because two Star reporters had royally screwed up, and the editors failed to recognize how bad the screw-up was! It had absolutely nothing to do with politics. Particularly amusing, though, was how Mallick tried to invoke Ben Goldacre’s name and his new book to justify her position. Goldacre, in response, let loose with an epic and entertaining series of Tweets that should be required reading for anyone who wants to know how to do a Twitter smackdown correctly. Seriously. You should stop right here, click that link, and scroll down to Goldacre’s Tweets. They eviscerate Mallick’s nonsense in the way her nonsense needed to be eviscerated. Here’s a taste:
@HeatherMallick @karengeier @TorontoStar @TorStarEditor @DrJenGunter … that i was doing something good, and right”. Amazing. I’m amazed.
— ben goldacre (@bengoldacre) February 9, 2015
@HeatherMallick @karengeier @TorontoStar @TorStarEditor @DrJenGunter .. you are using your print media platform to smear those who have…
— ben goldacre (@bengoldacre) February 9, 2015
@HeatherMallick @karengeier @TorontoStar @TorStarEditor @DrJenGunter .. tried to point out, to far smaller audiences, your own errors.
— ben goldacre (@bengoldacre) February 9, 2015
@HeatherMallick @karengeier @TorontoStar @TorStarEditor @DrJenGunter Again, I’m not just appalled…
— ben goldacre (@bengoldacre) February 9, 2015
@HeatherMallick @karengeier @TorontoStar @TorStarEditor @DrJenGunter … I’m genuinely baffled that you would risk signing your name to this.
— ben goldacre (@bengoldacre) February 9, 2015
Michael Cooke, Toronto Star Editor was even worse. He took to Twitter and embarrassed himself:
@karengeier @TorontoStar no we didn’t … we gave a voice to mothers and daughters who have had not had one.
— Michael Cooke (@TorStarEditor) February 5, 2015
@peltast I’m not rude on social media, but try not to be an idiot. We never said that. The story is smart, relevant … and discussable.
— Michael Cooke (@TorStarEditor) February 5, 2015
Elsewhere Julia Belluz noted:
Over the weekend, and again on Monday morning, I wrote to the Toronto Star about my concerns. The editor-in-chief Michael Cooke replied first. He dismissed the questions I raised, and pointed to a “very pro-Gardasil story” I wrote for Vox recently. He then said that my “time might be better spent doing your own Vox-paid-for research into Gardasil-good-and-questionable rather than idly picking into other reporters’ work” and that I should “stop gargling our bathwater and take the energy to run yourself your own, fresh tub.” He’s a charmer.
Indeed. There’s nothing like attacking civil and reasonable critics with the pharma shill gambit and accusing them of laziness.
It also turns out that the public editor Kathy English was singularly ineffective. She appeared not to focus on the disclaimer that “there is no conclusive evidence showing the vaccine caused a death or illness” and ignore the overall impression that the stories of a teenage girl who died suddenly and another one suffering from chronic debilitating pain produce, which, given how they were told, completely overwhelmed the nuance of that disclaimer. She also responded, “The story was not intended to be either anti-vaccine nor pro-vaccine.” As Julia Belluz correctly noted, that’s not how readers will see it, given how little the Star did to contextualize their finding.
Over the course of the week, the criticism became too much, and it became so apparent that the Star had made the most epic of epic fails, that the Star‘s backing it up and seeking a way out of the mess it had created for itself became inevitable. I’m just surprised it took the Star so long. First, on Wednesday the Star published an article entitled “Science shows the HPV vaccine has no dark side“, featuring signatures of 65 specialists. One wonders why the Star apparently never consulted any of them in its original story. Then the title of the original article, as noted, was changed from “A Wonder Drug’s Dark Side” to “Families seek more transparency on HPV vaccine.”
The correction, it’s hard not to note, did not run on the front page, where the original story first ran, as Julia Belluz noted sarcastically on Twitter:
So @TorStarEditor runs Gardasil corrective on A17. A step in right direction, but needed to be A1. Before “50 shades” review & “satanic cat”
— Julia Belluz (@juliaoftoronto) February 12, 2015
Same as it ever was.
Finally, the Star‘s publisher, John Cruickshank, was forced to apologize, saying we failed in this case, which is the understatement of the year thus far. It’s too little and too late, particularly after Cruickshank’s staff had so unprofessionally lashed out at critics. Coming around full circle, as Michael Hiltzik noted in his excellent Los Angeles Times commentary:
The article implied that hundreds of thousands of Canadian families had been systematically misled about Gardasil’s supposed dangers by doctors, the pharmaceutical industry and Canadian public health officials. Interspersed among its emotion-laden anecdotes were acknowledgments that years of scientific studies have shown no linkage between Gardasil and such symptoms. These included a study financed by the governments of Sweden and Denmark of 998,000 Swedish and Danish girls ages 10-17, of whom 297,000 had received at least one dose of the vaccine. The study, which found “no consistent evidence for a plausible association” between the vaccine and serious disorders, matched results from other studies involving hundreds of thousands of subjects.
But as the Star’s publisher later conceded, the “you-are-there” depiction of families struggling with illness and death hopelessly overwhelmed its acknowledgments of Gardasil’s established safety and efficacy.
Exactly.
We humans, as I’ve said many times before, are pattern-forming animals. We are very quick to confuse correlation with causation, and our memories are malleable. We also desperately crave explanation. Linda Morin suffered a horrific unexpected loss; it’s natural that she would seek explanation. It’s human that she would latch onto what is almost certainly the wrong explanation for her daughter’s death. It’s what humans do. The same is true for Kaitlyn Armstrong and her family. Kaitlyn developed a puzzling and little-understood condition at a very young age. Naturally her mother wanted an explanation. Unfortunately, her search for an explanation led her and her daughter straight into the arms of a naturopath quack, who is blaming her illness on the aluminum adjuvant in the vaccine and treating it with chelation therapy and intravenous vitamins.
As for readers, because we humans are social animals who want to believe the accounts our fellow humans relate to us, particularly when those fellow humans are as sympathetic as, for example, the grieving mother of a dead teen girl, to the average reader sympathetic anecdotes will almost always trump dry scientific evidence that tells us that Linda Morin’s grief and Kaitlyn Armstrong’s suffering are almost certainly not due to Gardasil, particularly when the grieving mother is shown laying flowers on her daughter’s grave with sad music accompanying it in a video. Reporters know this. Editors know this. Publishers know this. Why is the leadership of the Toronto Star so surprised that the Star‘s story provoked the harsh criticism that it did?
Probably because they really did think they were on to something. More’s the pity. I can only hope that they learned something from this journalistic debacle, but I fear they probably didn’t.