9 replies to this topic

[Omega 3 Snake Oil]

Anyone tried this? I'm looking into a naturopath in Toronto who provides it. I've had EBV related fatigue, adrenal fatigue, and a sleep disorder I believe to be autoimmune in nature. C sounds like a miracle cure all, which doesn't bode well, but then there are studies that support its efficacy... http://www.ncbi.nlm....les/PMC4015650/

[Duchykins]

You should be careful of that because that same journal (Medical Science Monitor) also published this:

http://www.ncbi.nlm....pubmed/17179919

2007

Hormesis, epitaxy, the structure of liquid water, and the science of homeopathy.

Abstract

According to the western medical establishment, homeopathy is both "unscientific" and "implausible". A short overview of its history and the methods it uses, however, easily reveals that homeopathy is a true science, fully grounded on the scientific method and on principles, such as, among others, the Arndt-Schultz law, hormesis, and epitaxy, whose plausibility has been clearly and definitely demonstrated in a number of scientific publications and reports. Through a review of the scientific literature, an explanation of the basic principles of homeopathy is proposed based on arguments and evidence of mainstream science to demonstrate that, in spite of the claims of conventional medicine, homeopathy is both scientific and plausible and that there is no reasonable justification for its rejection by the western medical establishment. Hopefully, this hurdle will be overcome by opening academic institutions to homeopathy to enlarge the horizons of medical practice, recover the value of the human relationship with the patient, and through all this, offer the sick a real alternative and the concrete perspective of an improved quality of life.


I'm attaching the full pdf here:  470153.pdf   316.27KB   5 downloads


The following are major red flags of pervasive personal bias, and woo, this paper is full of religious-like phraseology that I am accustomed to seeing in creationist articles, theological critiques of the scientific method, religionists complaining that "scientific materialism" is ruining Western culture ("religious/dogmatic scientism" is another favorite term of religionists), "spiritualists," various proponents of alternative medicine, things like that.

They like to accuse the other side of being "religiously" biased in favor of science because they don't like what real science has to say about their voodoo science beliefs, and because their bullshit is never acceptable from a scientific perspective. To them this means that science-minded people are unreasonably biased, closed-minded people.

This kind of irrational, emotional language, in what is supposed to be a peer-reviewed paper in a science journal, sticks out like a sore thumb (there is also quite a bit of misrepresenting and misapplying scientific concepts from different sciences):
_________________________________________________


...

Given the present situation and the usually insulting considerations which can be easily found in the “scientific” literature against homeopathy and homeopaths worldwide, the idea that hormesis continues to be ignored by mainstream medicine because of its association with homeopathy is not surprising. What is astonishing, instead, to the unprejudiced and truly “scientific” minds is that mainstream “science” could be still allowed to give patents of “plausibility” [12] or pronounce death sentences (“the end of homeopathy” [24,25]) in spite of this clear demonstration of unethical behavior and blind dogmatism!

...

Medical doctors trained in western medical schools are not always completely aware that the notions they have learned and put into daily practice do not represent “universal knowledge”, but are the result of a philosophical view of the world. The western view of the world behind “conventional medicine”, on the other hand, basically inspired to materialism and reductionism, does not correspond to the eastern one, and this gives rise to the differences between the two medical systems. The lack of this global view has led western medical “science” to claim its supremacy over any other medical system, simply because it seems to perfectly fulfill the “philosophical” presuppositions on which it is based. But exactly the same applies to any other medical system and has led, for example, Chinese medicine to discover a network of channels (meridians) within the human body that no western pathologist or anatomists could ever identify or describe, although this has never induced “conventional medicine” to affirm that acupuncture is magic or quackery, as it has been repeatedly and is currently done with homeopathy. And it is not by chance alone that the homeopathic “philosophy”, with the self-healing power of the “life force” (the “Chi” of Chinese medicine) and the view of the human body as a whole (“… I don’t cure diseases, I cure diseased individuals…” as Hahnemann used to say), represents the total negation of the materialist and reductionist approach to medicine. “The long-standing, deep-rooted and intense confrontation between traditional medicine and homeopathy…” [23], therefore, is not surprising; what is surprising, instead, and astonishing in very many ways, is the inveterate, bad attitude of “conventional” medicine not only to claim its presumed supremacy, but also to condemn and dismiss as magic or quackery any other medical system not based on its materialist and reductionist view of the world. This view, on the other hand, has very much to do, among others, with the principle behind the Avogadro’s number argument, according to which no biological effect can be “reasonably” expected by administering a solution containing very few or no molecules at all; in other words, “no matter, no effect!” But then… what about the placebo response?

...

Western medical science has become the kingdom of materialism and reductionism and, as such, apparently incapable of perceiving any other truth or reality than that of its own world. Fortunately enough, materialism is no longer the “lighthouse” for scientists navigating the ocean of the complexity of the interactions between body and mind, if researchers in the fi eld arrive to ask themselves whether the mind can be as real as matter.

...

Given their inveterate attitude to ridicule homeopathic science and formulate judgements on its “plausibility”, holders of “true science” and supporters of the Avogadro’s number argument have probably reached a definitive answer, i.e. their materialist and reductionist “dogma”. Strangely enough, the materialistic view of the world by which “conventional medicine” is inspired seems to be in sharp contrast with that of mainstream scientists who investigate the matter of the universe. It is known, for example, that pioneering physicist, astronomer, and mathematician, Sir James Hopwood Jeans once said: “The stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter… we ought to rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.” [56] And a brain producing endorphins after verbal suggestions tells us very much about the farsightedness of this sentence! [39]. To further reinforce this view, contemporary astrophysicist Richard Conn Henry, in his article “The mental universe”, says, among others: “The only reality is mind and observations, but observations are not of things. To see the Universe as it really is, we must abandon our tendency to conceptualize observations as things”, and also: “If we can ‘pull a Galileo,’ and get people believing the truth, they will find physics a breeze. The Universe is immaterial – mental and spiritual”

As it is easy to verify, the above statements do not come from inspired Indian gurus or “foolish” homeopaths, but from scientists belonging to the western culture, whose open-mindedness and creativity allow to see things as they really are rather than through the “filters” represented by dogmatic scientism or personal interests (either academic or economic, as more usually happens with medical sciences). Do we need anything else to demonstrate that materialism (and the consequent Avogadro’s number evidence) is no more than a point of view and most probably a wrong one?


....

Conventional medicine, pressed by the economic concerns of the multinational drug companies which look at homeopathy and complementary medicine as the most serious threat to their multibillion-dollar business, still persists in presenting itself as the sole effective way to treat sickness [70], in spite of the demonstrated efficacy of homeopathy [71,72], on the one hand, and the alarming data concerning toxicity [73–75] and inefficacy [39] of prescription drugs on the other.

This situation is aggravated by the materialistic view of the world and a disproportionate belief in the power of technology, which has led modern medicine to claim that the investigation of the physical world rules out as false or nonexistent whatever cannot be measured in a laboratory, a position which sounds more like fundamentalist scientism and that, in principle, is contrary to true science and the scientific spirit of inquiry...


...

But fortunately, something is changing! There is an increasing request among researchers for a scientific revolution in clinical and laboratory medicine with the introduction of a cultural relativism which promises to be a great weapon against the dogmatic scientism of modern medicine. As has been reported, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle [77], demonstrating that a dynamical disturbance is necessarily induced in a system by a measurement, perfectly applies to clinical trials, where dynamical disturbances can be induced in the brain by almost any type of drug, and molecular biology, where the genetic information that makes living cells work is better represented by a probabilistic model [78]. On the other hand, Bohr’s complementarity principle, demonstrating that two incompatible descriptions have more often to be used to describe complex realities such as the human organism [79], perfectly describes the mind-body relationship in health and disease [80] and contradicts the prevailing materialist notion that mental and psychological processes are emergent properties of an organism.

In conclusion, while it is clear that homeopathy is a medical discipline applying the scientific method to cure the ill, much less clear is why it has not yet been introduced into the teaching, training, and research programs of western medical schools. It can be inferred from a number of different “symptoms” that pharmaceutical companies, whose immense economic power guarantees a strict control over research worldwide, represent the major opponent to the integration of homeopathy into the teaching and practice of conventional medicine, and given the enormous economic interests involved, the road towards this integration promises to be long, difficult, and “painful”. To accelerate this process, every open-minded physician will have to be bold and honest enough to acknowledge that conventional medicine needs to be profoundly reformed and that the time has come to open academic institutions to homeopathy and alternative medicine to enlarge the horizons of medical practice, recover the value of the human relationship with the patients, and through all this, offer the sick a real alternative and the concrete perspective of an improved quality of life

Edited by Duchykins, 15 July 2015 - 07:05 PM.

[pamojja]

You should be careful of that because that same journal (Medical Science Monitor) also published this:

...

 

I think one should consider each study on their own merit in times as these:

 

 

http://disinfo.com/2...mply-be-untrue/

 

“The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.”

 

Dr. Richard Horton, the current editor-in-chief of the Lancet

 

 

“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine”

 

Dr. Marcia Angell, longtime Editor in Chief of the New England Medical Journal (NEMJ)

[Duchykins]

Both of those quotes only strengthen my convictions.  There is more need than ever to steer clear of journals that allow such obvious garbage to slip through their cracks.

 

If one of my teachers caught me citing papers from a journal known to publish papers like that, they would probably take a whole letter grade off of whatever project I was doing.  

Edited by Duchykins, 16 July 2015 - 12:20 AM.

[Duchykins]

I knew there was more to this story and it only took me 30 seconds to find some dirt.

 

George Vithoulkas, known homeopathy proponent on various quack lists, is one of the peer-reviewers at Medical Science Monitor.  I wonder how many other quacks are on that list of "peers"?

 

Problems, problems, problems.

 

And it gets better!

 

He has his own "educational" website, is that cute?  

 

Antibiotics puts you at risk for getting AIDS!  

 

HIV doesn't cause AIDS, AIDS causes HIV!

 

[and don't forget to buy his book, it's plugged no less than 3 times on this page]

 

http://www.vithoulka...-the-real-cause

 

 

 

AIDS and The real cause

 

This paper was submitted to the "Sunday Times" on the occasion of dispute with Duesberg in 1989 but was not accepted for publication.

 

The whole argument cannot be exposed here but one can read in George Vithoulkas' book: A New Model for Health and Disease

 

I think that a controversy has already started between two main and opposing points of view:

 

a. that Aids is caused by the HIV virus and

 

b. that AIDS is the result of drug overuse

 

As I think I have already contributed a lot to such arguments through my writings I believe Nature would give me the privilege to express my views in a nut-shell.

 

It seems to me that both the above assumptions are over-simplifications of a much more complicated issue.

 

In the (a) case the final phenomena which is: the appearance of a virus in the body is considered as the cause of the disease when in effect it is actually the result of it.

 

In the (b) case only part of the truth is stated. Not every one who takes antibiotics will risk developing the AIDS symptomatology -though may be risking in developing other syndromes like the post-viral syndrome (the chronic fatigue syndrome). Only those individuals that have been repeatedly infected with venereal diseases and who have used repeatedly and for long periods of time antibiotics are in the risk group.

 

The whole of the above argument has been dealt with in a hypothesis I wrote in 1986 with all the supporting evidence I could find at the time. The title of this book was "A New Model for Health and Disease, the real cause of AIDS" published first in Dutch in 1988 by Elmar, in Italian by the Editora Cortina in 1989 and in English in 1991 by North Atalantic Books in U. S. A. I spoke about these ideas first in a congress in Berlingame in California as early as 1984 as well as in different other courses

The main points that I am supporting through this hypothesis about the specific AIDS syndrome are the following

 

1. The AIDS virus appeared first in the promiscuous group of homosexuals. The research, at least in the beginning, showed clearly that these individuals had already been infected several times by venereal diseases and treated repeatedly with antibiotics.

 

Actually the high risk groups (promiscuous homosexuals, prostitutes, promiscuous heterosexuals or bisexuals, Haitians and finally the African people during their sexual liberation era) all were people with repeated exposures to venereal diseases and consequent treatments with antibiotics. Actually promiscuous homosexuals with AIDS had confided to me and to my students that they would take antibiotics every day, before their casual encounters and for long periods of time as a preventive measure.

 

2. The initial appearance of a specific virus in the human body was only the result of a depleted and harassed immune system and not the cause of it. It is a similar phenomenon with the worms eating up a dead body. Every stage of degeneration of a human organism has its own particular microbes bacteria, virus etc thriving on it.

 

The appearance of the virus took place initially because the immune system was degraded to a specific degree through a series of repeated assaults of antibiotics in a considerably short time, while it was already under the stress of a venereal disease -mainly syphilis and/or gonorrhea. It seems that the combined stress of an organism which is repeatedly infected with venereal diseases and treated with antibiotics develops a state that resembles the AIDS syndrome.

etc

 

Edited by Duchykins, 16 July 2015 - 12:41 AM.

[Duchykins]

More fun from Medical Science Monitor; they want to overthrow germ theory of disease:

 

 

The "continuum" of a unified theory of diseases.

 

2010

 

http://www.ncbi.nlm....pubmed/20110932    878341.pdf   230.53KB   2 downloads

 

....

 

The suppression of acute diseases as a cause of the onset of chronic diseases

 

Let us take this idea a little further; we have diseases that we call acute, and diseases which are chronic and degenerative. It is important to distinguish between why someone falls ill with an acute disease versus with a chronic disturbance. We want to discover what actually happens in an person who is born and has health problems and how those problems develop over the life span.

 

Almost everyone has health issues. There is not a single child born who does not potentially have health problems, at one time or another, whether acute or chronic.

 

The general picture of disease in humans is characterized by two main groups, from the point of view of febrile expression: one with high fever and the other with low or no fever. To the first group belong the acute, to the second the chronic diseases. The main purpose of this essay is to show the relation between such diseases in the same individual; in other words, to show that there is a continuum within a specific organism that determines the reaction of the individual’s immune system.

 

A very interesting observation is that many chronic diseases have exacerbations and remissions [35–44]. Let us take for example a person who is suffering from epilepsy. In the crises stage he has an epileptic seizure, but when he does not have the crises, what changes occur in his body and what changes occur in order for an epileptic seizure to take place? The same question is valid with multiple sclerosis, bronchial asthma, hay fever and other chronic degenerative conditions.

 

The next legitimate question therefore is: “Are the exacerbation waves that occur during a chronic condition comparable to acute diseases, as the body having a relapse?” If we can understand how the body functions, perhaps we can arrive at a theory of disease that is completely different from what is taught to students in a conventional medical school.

...

 

 

This was followed by more  "bad closed-minded Western science/medicine blah blah" woo nonsense.

 

 

Then later, stereotypical quack hijacking of physics principles to promote some nebulous "unbalanced energy" belief as a cause of sickness:

 

 

Discussion

 

Every step forward that man has taken in his scientific endeavors has always been met by resistance. Human history is full of such social and scientific revolutions that have shaken the existing foundations and beliefs of humans. Invariably such discoveries have required a period of many years for elaboration and acceptance. Each one of these important steps has, however, opened ever wider horizons that have allowed humans to evolve. Homeopathy represents one of these great revolutions, and since it acts on still unknown and little explored levels of the human world, is requiring more than two hundred years (since the time of its discovery by Samuel Hahnemann) before the scientific world open its mind to a serious evaluation of the tens of thousands of proofs, today in our hand, on its wonderful effect on humans and animals.

 

We are all aware of the fact that every living being cannot escape the laws of thermodynamics. According to the second of these laws, the entire universe spontaneously tends towards the maximum possible disorder. Only the supply of free energy in a system can counteract this increase of chaos. Nobody can deny the presence of a dualism in every living being, in which the universal tendency toward disorder (something that spontaneously occurs after the death of the being itself) is continuously counteracted by an intrinsic tendency toward the order and harmony in equilibrium of forces that maintain the being “alive”.

 

The discovery of the complex and wonderful biochemical mechanisms of life induced humans to experience the possibility to affect them, by the introduction of other molecules into the body’s systems, attempting to modify the pathways and control the “causes” of the malfunctioning. Actually, in an energetic system that has self-managed itself for more than four billion years, the biochemical mechanisms that we observe, when the system is unbalanced (for example during a high fever), are nothing other than the last effects of the best possible solution that the wonderful and intelligent defense mechanism found for trying to restore order in the system which has been upset by a stressor. Hence, these metabolic effects should not be interfered with by use of other chemical agents because they do nothing more than impede the defense mechanism in its intelligent expression of recovery. On the contrary, it is necessary to promote the capacities of the defense mechanism by removing the “energetic” causes of its weakening.

 

_______________

 

 

Then, they claim all your health problems are connected to thing that finally kills you, and imply prescription drugs do more harm than good, exactly like that other paper did:

 

 

 

Conclusion

 

Every human being is affected by diseases, acute and chronic, which are inter-connected throughout life in a “continuum of a unified substratum of diseases”, which leads up to the final disease condition that marks the end of life.

 

The question is whether medicine can discover ways of treating acute diseases – which constitute the beginning of the imbalance – with milder means, that promote and enhance the natural reaction of the immune system rather than suppressing it with strong chemical drugs and perhaps damaging the immune system irreparably. The defense mechanism as a whole appears to have a “higher” intelligence that is able to maintain optimum balance under any stress. But if, under certain conditions, the body cannot overtake and neutralize the stressor while the problem is on a peripheral level, this compromises its overall wellbeing and transfers the defense to a deeper level by mobilizing the defenses in a deeper and therefore more important organ or system, in this way marking the “beginning” of a chronic degenerative disease.

 

The model we present here emerges from almost fifty years of direct observations of tens of thousands of patients.

 

 

 

___________

 

Wow, this is some scientific paper, wouldn't you agree?

Who wants to bet I can find 5 more bullshit papers from this journal?

[Duchykins]

Let us also take a look at the authors of the vitamin C paper in the OP.

 

Nina A. Mikirova

 

- preaches that megadosing vitamin C (up to 100 grams) can prevent and cure cancer, has written several "peer-reviewed" papers about it

- has been published in Orthomolecular Medicine, a journal that has been banned from MEDLINE indexing until further notice  

(obviously a conspiracy to suppress Teh Truth^TM)

- seriously loves vitamin C and thinks it can apparently treat all kinds of shit (note that this is a Riordan Clinic index)

 

https://riordanclini...nous-vitamin-c/

 

 

Ron Hunninghake

 

- another vitamin C magical panacea fanatic:  “I always look upon high dose vitamin C as nature’s way of dealing with crisis in terms of your health. This notion however does not exist in the conventional thinking of the medical mind.”

- thinks megadosing vitamin C can cure Ebola apparently?  Or was it Chikungunya Fever?   Definitely cancer, in any case.

- Riordan Clinic poster boy, also popular with Orthomolecular Medicine like his buddy Nina (they're written a bunch of papers together)

 

 

What the real problem here is that you have all these alternative medicine journals with editors that are basically exchanging and "peer-reviewing" each others' work (but in reality legit scientists rarely have any part in it, if at all) and publishing them.  Then they look way more legit than they really are.  That's why the same handful of names keep popping up in these kinds of publications.  It doesn't fool the scientific community, though, because they know better.  So it's not so much about what they're studying and publishing as it is about how they do it.  (another reason why it's important to walk away from entire journals when you find one or two quack papers published in them)  This is not to say that it's some devilsh conspiracy on their part, it's just because it's the only way they could be published as "peer-reviewed scientific papers."

 

I have a major beef with this kind of professionally unethical shenanigans because intelligent design creationists did exactly the same thing when they were trying to put on this big "we're scientific" face to public in the early 2000s.  Yeah, they're real live peer-reviewed scientific papers!  Their peers were all creationists.  Once again, the scientific community was not fooled, though quite a bit of the public was and still are.  Most of these journals were abruptly abandoned after the 2005 Kitzmiller v Dover verdict, further indicating the journals were just a front.  But some persist, and some new ones arose afterward.

 

This is all very very bad science.

 

The only difference between the two is that the ID creationists really did do it knowingly and deliberately, and were caught red handed hatching out this kind of plan (in their infamous wedge document).

Edited by Duchykins, 16 July 2015 - 02:49 AM.

[Duchykins]

Unfortunately I found some problems here.  I don't like uncovering these kinds of things because of what it means for the people who are making diet and drug choices (ergo significant potential for harm to health and/or psychological wellbeing) at least partially influenced by these questionable sources of information.

 

 

Professional shenanigans from the American College of Nutrition:

 

http://www.cspinet.o.../200610021.html

 

The Journal of the American College of Nutrition's June supplement on sodium intake and human health failed to reveal that its editor and several authors had long-standing ties to the food industry. Then, in violation of the National Library of Medicine's rules, the editors allowed MEDLINE to index the supplement.

 

 

______________

 

 

Johnston has authored or co-authored many papers on vitamin C, including this one, which was published in an open-access journal.

 

http://www.ncbi.nlm....les/PMC4113757/

 

This is problematic because there is overwhelming evidence busting the myth that vitamin C helps prevent colds.

 

 

Relative to a lot of the voodoo and pathological science I see, these problems are not particularly egregious.  But they're not irrelevant either.

Edited by Duchykins, 18 July 2015 - 04:08 PM.

[Ark]

What about the vitamin C pump?

[Duchykins]

I actually meant to put that last post about Johnson in a different thread where someone cited on of his vitamin C papers.  Oops.     Hard to keep track of so much bullshit these days.  Sorry.