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Alternative medicine as religion, again [Respectful Insolence]

noreply@blogger.com (Rhoda) — Wed, 14 May 2014 09:27:00 +0000

Over the years, I’ve often likened alternative medicine to a religion—or even a cult. Basically, it requires belief in a set of precepts that have at best little and more commonly no evidence to support them that is often accompanied by magical thinking that a god-substitute, be it nature, one’s body, or, of course, the magically mysterious “quantum,” possesses magical powers that will protect one from all harm if one simply believes and acts on that belief. The belief systems that undergird various forms of alternative medicine are every bit as ridiculous from a scientific viewpoint as the belief that the earth is only 6,000 years or so old, that evolution is false, and that all that fossil evidence for evolution out there is either a trick by Satan to lure the insufficiently faithful away from god or a test of faith by god himself. It is not for nothing that I have described the “central dogma” of alternative medicine as being, in essence, the same thing as the new age woo known as The Secret, namely that wishing makes it so. That belief leads believers to twist, for example, the science of epigenetics to support the idea that you can basically rewrite your own biology to your own liking through the power of your mind.

Yesterday I came across a perfect example of just this phenomenon. It comes, not surprisingly, from that conspiracy theorist to rule all conspiracy theorists, that quack to rule all quacks, the man for whom no pseudoscience is ridiculous enough, no quackery is quacky enough, and no conspiracy theory is is out there enough (or compares its targets with Nazis enough), Mike Adams, a.k.a. the Health Ranger, proprietor of one of the top five quackiest sites on the Internet, NaturalNews.com. It comes in the form of a video that tells me that there might be a second “central dogma” of alternative medicine that I had forgotten about other than the belief that wishing makes it so, but it’s related enough that perhaps it’s just a matter of how you phrase it. You’ll see what I mean. In the meantime, take a gander at Adams’ latest screed, The greatest health conspiracy of all time: making you believe you can’t heal without medical intervention. Naturally, it comes complete with a video, which is apparently an episode of a podcast series Adams calls “Awakenings”:

This is basically Adam’s message, which goes far beyond just the dogma that your body is this perfect self-regenerating luminous being:

The newest episode of “Awakenings” reveals what I call the greatest health conspiracy of all time: the institutionalized effort prevent you from realizing that you are born with all the programming you need to create perfect health and even heal yourself of deadly disease.
Even though this universal, fundamental truth is undeniable, nearly every modern institution of medicine, food, science and media tries to convince you that we’re all born as “defects” requiring medical intervention to be “healthy.”
The truth is far more empowering: You are born as a complete, empowered human being, requiring no injections, medications or interventions to achieve and express perfect health!

Now that I think about this, this idea fits in quite well with my previous characterization of the central dogma of alternative medicine, namely that thinking makes it so. Think about it. The idea is that your body can heal itself of pretty much anything if you believe the message that Adams is telling you. But, just as Christians believe that original sin keeps them from reaching heaven, in Adams’ world, big pharma, big industry, and big food, like Satan in the original story of the Garden of Eden, tempt you away from the One True Path of belief with processed food, products that result in “chemicals” being introduced into your body, and the intentional obfuscation of the tools necessary to have this perfect health.

Adams asks, “Why isn’t everyone in a state of perfect health?” Of course, this being Adams, he has a simple answer. Two, simple answers, actually:

We are all poisoned by exposure to damaging substances. Of course, these include genetically modified organisms (GMOs), in addition to the other usual suspects: food additives, insecticides, heavy metal, endocrine disruptors, and, of course, non-natural “chemicals,” which are, of course, so much more evil than “natural” chemicals.
Despite our “amazing DNA blueprint for perfect health,” humans don’t given themselves the “tools” needed to experience “perfect health.” Naturally, these tools include “superfoods.” Personally, whenever I see the word “superfood,” I know that I’m dealing with pseudoscience because there is no such thing as the magical, mythical superfoods that can put your body into a state of perfect health, no matter how much Adams believes there is (or wants to convince his marks that there is).

Naturally, Adams can’t resist going on a typical rant in which he claims that there are miraculous anticancer compounds in the right kinds of foods, such as certain fruits and vegetables, but that because drug companies “can’t patent food” and charge huge sums of money to use it to treat cancer they ignore these chemicals or suppress knowledge of them. Apparently there’s also no money to be made in finding ways to “activate your healing potential” in “your incredible DNA.” While it’s true that DNA is indeed incredible, Adams seems to be invoking it here the same way that Deepak Chopra invokes quantum mechanics, namely as magic, as something that can perform miracles because we don’t understand it. Of course, scientists understand a lot about DNA, perhaps even more than they understand about quantum mechanics, but that doesn’t stop Adams.

Indeed, Adams goes on to marvel at how the body “knows how to heal itself,” which is true for some things. As a surgeon, I’m continually amazed that, for example, if I sew to pieces of bowel together end-to-end, they will heal together and function properly, or that if I place a skin graft on properly prepared dermis it will attach and function as skin, or that if I sew two blood vessels together end-to-end, they will heal together and function as one continuous blood vessel. Biology is amazing. Our cells are amazing. How our cells work together to heal after an injury is a source of continual wonder and awe, every bit as much as the stars and black holes as described by Neil deGrasse Tyson on the new version of Cosmos are. The mysteries of biology are part of the mysteries of the Cosmos, and they are wondrous enough without magic.

Unfortunately, magic is what Adams gives us. He even goes so far as to claim, near the end of his podcast, that if you consume these super foods and add the magical substances they contain to your blood, if you “detoxify” yourself and avoid the “toxins,” you can be a super man or a super woman. I kid you not. Adams even claims that if you do these things you’ll become so intelligent that people will think you’re a genius, adding with faux humility that when people ask him why he’s so awesome (OK, Adams didn’t phrase it that way but there’s no doubt that’s what he meant), he demurs, saying, “I’m not a genius. I’m just a human who isn’t poisoning his brain.” He then adds as an explanation, “I just eat superfood, and I don’t poison my brain,” further adding that we’re all geniuses, we’re all spontaneous healers, and we’re all amazing beings.

Well, we are, but not all of us are geniuses, I don’t care how many super foods we eat or “toxins” we avoid, and the human body has limits. Critical looks at faith healing will often ask, “Why can’t God heal amputees?” Well, the same thing applies here. Nothing Adams can do will enable a human being to regrow an amputated limb. Let’s say that you really do poison yourself with large amounts of alcohol, in the process destroying your liver, leaving it in end stage cirrhosis. Eat all the super foods you want. Detoxify all you want. Avoid all the “toxins” and “heavy metals” you want. Your body won’t be able to heal that burned out liver of yours, and the only thing that could save your life will be a new liver, as in a liver transplant. And, no, it won’t be big pharma holding you back; even if you do every single thing Adams tells you, avoid GMOs and all those other “toxic” insults, and eat super foods, your liver will still be toast.

It won’t grow back.

No matter how much Adams blames toxic metals, endocrine disruptors, lack of nutrients, GMOs, and chemotherapy for poor health and lower IQ, the truth is exactly the opposite of Adams’ “Secret” (and it’s no coincidence that Adams chose that precise word). You can’t believe your way back to health or eat your way back to being that “perfect healing being,” because you were never a perfect healing being in the first place.

Indeed, all it takes to understand this is a minimal understanding of evolution and how adaptive responses can lead to disease. For example, acute inflammation is something the body is very good at healing by itself. It’s how the body heals wounds, and it works very well for that purpose if the wounds are not too extensive. However, chronic inflammation, which is nothing more than prolonged inflammation, can lead to a whole host of diseases, including heart disease and, particularly, cancer. It’s associated with many of the other chronic diseases of our time, such as type II diabetes. It’s an example of an adaptive response that goes too far and goes on too long, leading to disease.

In the end, the central dogma of alternative medicine is indeed that wishing makes it so, but wishing makes it so because a second part of the world view of alternative medicine is that the body is somehow this perfect spiritual organism that would always be in perfect health if we human beings didn’t always muck it up by assaulting it with all those “bad” things that Adams blames for the myriad health problems that plague human bodies. Naturally, it’s turned into a big conspiracy, with big business, big pharma, big food, and big government all conspiring to keep us eating unhealthy food that they sell us, to keep us sick so that we need pharmaceuticals, and to keep us unaware of how faith in the natural can save us.

Hmmm. That rather sounds like Satan, doesn’t it?

There is a major component of so much of alternative medicine that shares another major component of religion, and that’s the infantile belief that the universe actually gives a rodent’s posterior about you. In other words, many “alt-med” modalities have at their basis the idea that we humans can somehow bend the unfeeling universe to our wills in order to prevent us from ever suffering from ill health or, if we do suffer from ill health, to enable us to overcome it. The bottom line is that the belief system underlying alternative medicine is indeed very much akin to religion. We have the perfect, sinless (in this case, disease-free) creation that is rendered with sin (disease) by an evil force such as Satan (or in the case of the version of alternative medicine promoted by Mike Adams, GMOs, vaccines, “toxins,” and the like). Virtue is health, which implies that lack of virtue is ill health. What flows from this concept is that if you behave virtuously you will never get sick. The universe/nature/great spirit/whatever will see to that, because it likes it when we do the “right” things and doesn’t like it when we do not. Only following the One True Faith can redeem us. Well, that and buying whatever supplements that Adams wants to sell you.

View the original article here

A Science Festival that Sets the Standard for Inspiration [USA Science and Engineering Festival: The Blog]

noreply@blogger.com (Rhoda) — Wed, 14 May 2014 08:38:00 +0000

Guest Blog by Festival X-STEM Speaker Dr. Joe Schwarcz

How do you inspire students toward careers in science, and combat scientific illiteracy at the same time?

First, you spend two years planning the USA Science & Engineering Festival, the largest of its kind in the world. Then you rent the gigantic Washington Convention Center to host it and line up 3,000 displays, many of which feature hands-on activities.

You organize more than 150 stage presentations by Nobel laureates, athletes, astronauts, engineers and scientists of all kinds. You invite the likes of Bill Nye the Science Guy, National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins, famous sleight-of-hand artist Apollo Robbins and the consultants for Breaking Bad, Big Bang Theory and House to address the crowds. You highlight appearances by Crystal Lee (Miss California) and the Science Cheerleaders, a contingent dedicated to motivating girls to study science. And you don’t charge a penny for drenching the public with this remarkable dose of concentrated knowledge and entertainment.

I’ve seen science museums all over the world, and been to numerous science fairs and festivals — but I can honestly say that I have never experienced anything like this festival in Washington that I attended late last month.

Talk about being like a kid in a candy shop.

What to do, what to see; that was the problem. I had read a lot about 3-D printers but had never seen one in action, so that seemed like a good place to start. What amazing devices these are. You design an object on a computer, press start, and you begin to see it constructed in front of your eyes as instead of ink, the printer dispenses molten plastic, building up the object layer by layer. I now possess a comb made of polylactic acid that was “printed” in front of my eyes. That’s nothing, though, in comparison with the next steps in 3-D printing that were being demonstrated — printers that mete out layers of different cells to build up organs. The world’s first printed liver is expected to be unveiled within a year for experimental purposes.

Another printer was cranking out colour-coded interlocking pieces of plastic to be used in the building of a model of DNA. What an amazing blend of engineering, chemistry and biology. I watched as young students learned to assemble nucleotides while experts explained transcription and translation. Genetic modification came alive in front of their eyes. These kids were on their way to understanding the nuances of this technology, making them less likely to swallow the misinformation being parroted by many anti-GMO activists. At a nearby booth, they had the chance to carry out some experiments with real DNA. Simple and elegant. Just place a strawberry inside a Ziplock bag and smash it with your hands until it is pulverized, rupturing its cells. Filter into a test tube and add a bit of alcohol to precipitate the DNA that can then be drawn out in a threadlike form.

Robots were everywhere. Large ones were playing basketball, smaller versions were dancing with remarkably human-like moves, and others were building bridges. Some kids had a “feet-on” experience with non-Newtonian fluids as they scampered across pools filled with a corn-starch solution. Others were climbing through a mock-up of the Orion spaceship, the next generation of spacecraft, or were exploring a giant Walmart truck with its aerodynamic, energy-saving design. There were plenty of opportunities to learn about wind power, solar cells, the science of football, antimatter, “bubbleology” and radioactivity.

Onlookers were surprised to discover that Brazil nuts and bananas are radioactive, due to naturally occurring radon and potassium-40 respectively. Just imagine if activists like the Food Babe ever learned about that. Would we have petitions to ban these foods because of irrelevant traces of radioactivity? And I wonder what Banana Girl, a self-styled diet guru who eats 30 bananas a day, would say?

I doubt that Food Babe or Banana Girl were at the science festival, but they should have been. They would have experienced science that is based on evidence and proper risk-benefit analysis rather than Internet drivel.

They could have learned something from Crystal Lee, Miss California, who is a graduate of Stanford University with a degree in human biology and is dedicated to encouraging young women to focus on science and math. If they take this advice, they are unlikely to make ludicrous comments about miso soup eliminating radioactivity, as our pal the Food Babe maintains. She also opines that she would not purchase any soy products “that have been extracted with a very carcinogenic gas called hexane.” Hexane is not classified as a possible carcinogen and it is not a gas, as anyone versed in science would know.

The Science Cheerleaders were also turning people on to science, not by cheering, but by being role models. These young ladies are all cheerleaders for professional teams — and all have degrees in science. I had the pleasure of meeting Margaret, who is completing a PhD in chemistry at the University of Maryland, where she is investigating gold nanoparticles in the treatment of cancer.

I don’t think Margaret would agree with the Food Babe about the “dangers” of microwave ovens. The Babe buys into Masaru Emoto’s thesis that microwaved water does not form beautiful crystals but rather ones that are similar to water that was exposed to the words “Satan,” or “Hitler.” She does say that this “fact” is probably too hokey for most people, but apparently not for her, “because sometimes the things we can’t see with the naked eye or even fully comprehend could be the most powerful way to unlock spontaneous healing.”

Perhaps the reason the USA Science & Engineering Festival impressed me so much is because it hooks people on real science. There were no booths promoting miracle dietary supplements; there was no talk of non-existent molecules leaving an imprint in water; there were no global-warming deniers and no speakers suggesting that GMOs were paving a road to hell.

Instead, we had Amanda Boxtel, a young lady who was paralyzed after a skiing accident demonstrating how she can now walk with the help of a remarkable “exoskeleton,” and Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, describing how many top scientists were first captivated by science through an early hands-on experience. I’m betting that there will be a good number of future scientists who will look back on this outstanding festival as the spark that eventually burst into the flame of discovery.

View the original article here

A lesson about correlation and causation [Respectful Insolence]

noreply@blogger.com (Rhoda) — Wed, 14 May 2014 07:03:00 +0000

Besides yesterday being Mothers’ Day yesterday, I had a lot of grant stuff to do, which means that this one will be a quickie. On Saturday, a reader sent me a link to one of the most useful sites I’ve ever encountered. I realize that over the weekend it’s spread around the skeptical blogosphere like the proverbial wildfire, which is unfortunate (for me) given that I’ve made it a personal rule that I don’t post on the weekend any more, barring amazing developments. Still, this one tempted me. It’s a website called Spurious Correlations, and it is exactly what it claims to be. Its usefulness wil become apparent quickly.

One of the key arguments—if not the key argument—made by antivaccinationists is that correlation of the onset of the “autism epidemic” (i.e., the large increase in prevalence of autism and autism-spectrum disorders beginning in the 1990s) with the expansion of the vaccine schedule is strong evidence of causation. In other words, correlation equals causation. Of course, correlation can equal causation, but you need to have a lot of other evidence to show that. Most correlations don’t equal causation, and that’s where Spurious Correlations comes in. It has thousands of such spurious correlations, complete with graphs, numbers, and even correlation coefficients, many of which are well about 0.9, which is considered a very strong correlation indeed. For example, on the front page right now is a correlation between U.S. spending on space, science, and technology and suicides by hanging, strangulation, and suffocation, and the correlation coefficient (r) is 0.992082 (for a perfect correlation, r=1.0; no correlation, pure randomness, r=0; negative numbers mean a negative correlation in which one variable’s increase is correlated with the other variable’s decrease):

Amusingly, you can look for your own spurious correlations. I wanted to look for more spurious correlations to autism, but I couldn’t find it. So instead I looked for things that correlate with per capita high fructose corn syrup consumption (because HFCS is considered evil in alt-med circles) and found it correlated with (among other things):

Pedestrians killed in collision with car, pick-up truck or van (r=0.980767)
Murders by hanging, strangulation and suffocation (r=0.952419)
US crude oil imports from Venezuela (r=0.884883)
Deaths caused by lightning (r=0.805254)
Deaths during surgical operations with anastomosis, bypass or graft (r=0.845314)

Clearly, if I ever go back to doing abdominal surgery I’ll have to be careful about operating on people who consume a lot of HFCS, and people who consume a lot of HFCS need to stay indoors during thunderstorms. Meanwhile, HFCS demonstrated strong negative correlations with (among other things):

Number of lawyers in New Mexico (r=-0.988915)
US spending on science, space, and technology (r=-0.977791)
Biology/biomedical doctorates awarded (r=-0.976231)
Total ABA Lawyers Nationally (r=-0.962795)
Suicides by hanging, strangulation and suffocation (r=-0.961062)
Math doctorates awarded (US) (r=-0.943426)

Hmmm. Perhaps there is something to all that HFCS fearmongering. After all, as HFCS consumption falls, look at how there are more lawyers, more bomedical doctorates, and less suicide by hanging!

Ah, you ask, but what doesn’t correlate with HFCS consumption? Ask no more! Here they are:

Hang-glider accidents killing occupant (r=0.00802163)
Number of people killed by an exploding pressurized tyre, pipe or hose (r=-0.0000909672)
Number of people killed by agricultural machinery (r=-0.0604786)
Drownings caused by an accident involving a canoe or kayak (r=0.0205583)
Deaths caused by cataclysmic storm (r=0.0240487)

I think that last one was messed up by the spike in deaths in 2005 due (clearly) to Hurricane Katrina. As for the rest, if you want to go hang gliding, work with agricultural machinery, or go canoeing or kayaking, drink those sugary drinks up!

Of course, the reason skeptics are suspicious of correlations is not because correlation never equals causation. It’s just that we realize that there really are lots of spurious correlations like this, far more than the average person realizes. A person who hasn’t taken the time to understand just how common such correlations are and how easy it is to mine various data to find them will find correlations compelling, particularly if they have a modicum of seeming plausibility, as the vaccine-autism link once did before so many studies demolished it. A skeptic, however, will realize that such a correlation is only a starting point that probably doesn’t mean anything but might. Further evidence, in the form of testing other data sets, doing controlled experiments (when they are possible to do), and other means of testing are essential to determine whether what is observed is just a spurious correlation as opposed to a correlation that really does imply causation. We also know that confounding factors can easily lead to the appearance of correlation, such as steady increases in two different variables over time that just happen to occur over the same time frame but have nothing to do with each other, such as, for example, computer or cell phone use and autism. This sort of spurious correlation can lead to other correlations, such as increasing wifi exposure and autism, given that the increase in computer and Internet use over the last 20 years has led to the proliferation of wifi hotspots and increasing exposure to radio waves from cell phones. The list goes on and on.

I really wanted to go into the data and see if, for instance, autism really does correlate with vaccination or whether brain cancer correlates with mobile phone use. More importantly, I wanted to find a bunch of ready-made spurious correlations for those two conditions for me to use to demonstrate the principle that just because there’s a correlation does not mean the relationship is causal, such as when I suggest that autism also correlates with Internet usage, home computer ownership, CD sales (at least until around 10 years ago, when CD sales started to take a nosedive and sales of downloadable digital music took off), and a variety of other conditions. Similarly, given that the incidence of brain cancers doesn’t appear to be significantly increasing—actually, quite the opposite, it appears to be decreasing—the suggestion that cell phone radiation causes brain cancer seems no more convincing that the long-refuted claim that vaccines cause autism, and that’s leaving aside the monumental physical and biological implausibility of the claim on the basis of simple physics alone.

Then I thought: Maybe that’s the point. If this website had the data for the sorts of things for which cranks often confuse correlation with causation, like cancer, autism, asthma, and autoimmune diseases (to name a few), then the site would risk going from being a useful tool to teach critical thinking skills by allowing readers to explore and find the most ridiculous spurious correlations they can, thus demonstrating that correlation is not the same thing as causation, no matter how much the human brain likes to grasp onto such correlations, to a site that cranks can data mine to support their favorite pet hypotheses. That, of course, would be bad. On the other hand, it would allow people with me to demonstrate all the other things that correlate with autism prevalence, thus allowing me to ask antivaccinationists why they think it’s vaccines that are the culprit rather than all the other things or that correlate with cancer, thus allowing me to ask why it has to be cell phones or any of the other bogeymen on whom cancer is blamed rather than all the other—heh, heh—spurious correlations. Of course, to cranks their correlations can’t be spurious and must be strong evidence of causation, while all those other correlations are obviously nonsense.

In any case, I think it would be a fun exercise if you, my readers, would play around with the Spurious Correlations site and find the most interesting or bizarre spurious correlations for use in educating people in critical thinking. And, remember, the per capita consumption of cheese in the US correlates strongly with the number of people who died by becoming tangled in their bedsheets (r=0.947091). So, please, people whatever you do, don’t eat cheese right before going to bed. Oh, and if you are unfortunate enough to be confined to a wheelchair, either temporarily or permanently, whatever you do, don’t you eat cheese either!

View the original article here

Too little sleep, and too much, affect memory

noreply@blogger.com (Rhoda) — Wed, 14 May 2014 05:05:00 +0000

When it comes to memory, sleep is a Goldilocks issue: both too much and too little aren’t good. Aim for “just right,” says a new report from the Harvard-based Nurses’ Health Study.

“Our findings suggest that getting an ‘average’ amount of sleep, seven hours per day, may help maintain memory in later life and that clinical interventions based on sleep therapy should be examined for the prevention of [mental] impairment,” said study leader Elizabeth Devore, an instructor in medicine at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, in a news release.

A group of women taking part in the Nurses’ Health Study were asked about their sleep habits in 1986 and 2000, and were interviewed about memory and thinking skills three times over a later six-year period. Devore and her colleagues observed worse performance on brain testing among women who slept five hours or fewer per night or nine hours or more, compared with those getting seven to eight hours of sleep a night. Their findings were published online in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

The researchers estimated that undersleepers and oversleepers were mentally two years older than the women who got seven to eight hours of shut-eye a night.

Beyond memory

Although this study couldn’t prove that getting too little or too much sleep causes memory and thinking problems, it’s in line with other work showing the potentially harmful effects of poor sleep. Previous research has linked poor sleep with higher risks of heart disease and stroke, type 2 diabetes, and depression.

How might sleep affect memory? People who are persistently sleep deprived are more likely to have high blood pressure, diabetes, and narrowed blood vessels. Each of these can decrease blood flow inside the brain. Brain cells need a lot of oxygen and sugar, so blood flow problems could affect their ability to work properly.

Poor sleep could affect the brain in another way. Sleep-deprived mice develop more deposits of a protein called beta amyloid in the brain compared with mice allowed to sleep normally. In humans, beta amyloid deposits in the brain are linked to declines in memory and thinking and also increase the risk of dementia.

What about people who sleep too much? People who spend more than nine or 10 hours a night in bed often have poor sleep quality. So for both too little and too much sleep, the important number may be the hours of quality sleep.

Another possibility is a two-way street between sleep and memory: sleep quality may affect memory and thinking, and the brain changes that cause memory and thinking problems may disturb sleep.

Getting better sleep

Here are 12 tips for getting better sleep:

Establish a regular bedtime and a relaxing bedtime routine—examples might include taking a warm bath or listening to soothing music.
Use your bed only for sleeping or lovemaking. Avoid reading and watching television in bed.
If you can’t fall asleep after 15 to 20 minutes, get out of bed and go into another room. Do something relaxing, such as reading quietly with a dim light. Don’t watch television or use a computer, since the light from their screens has an arousing effect. When you feel sleepy, get back into bed. Don’t delay your scheduled wake-up time to make up for lost sleep.
Get plenty of exercise. Build up to 45 minutes of moderate exercise nearly every day. Get your exercise early in the day. Try some easy stretching exercises or yoga to relax your muscles and your mind at bedtime.
Whenever possible, schedule stressful or demanding tasks early in the day and less challenging activities later. This helps you wind down at the end of your day.
Don’t go to bed hungry, but don’t eat a big meal right before getting into bed. If you want a bedtime snack, keep it bland and light.
Limit caffeine and consume none after 2 p.m.
To decrease middle-of-the-night urination, don’t drink any fluids after dinner.
Avoid alcohol after dinnertime. Although many people think of it as a sedative, it can get in the way of quality sleep.
Be sure your bed is comfortable and your bedroom is dark and quiet. Consider a sleep mask or earplugs.
Don’t take long naps during the day. If you need a nap, restrict it to 20 to 30 minutes in the early afternoon.

Practice relaxation breathing. Use slow breaths, especially when you exhale.

View the original article here

A lesson about correlation and causation [Respectful Insolence]

noreply@blogger.com (Rhoda) — Wed, 14 May 2014 04:19:00 +0000

Pedestrians killed in collision with car, pick-up truck or van (r=0.980767)
Murders by hanging, strangulation and suffocation (r=0.952419)
US crude oil imports from Venezuela (r=0.884883)
Deaths caused by lightning (r=0.805254)
Deaths during surgical operations with anastomosis, bypass or graft (r=0.845314)

Number of lawyers in New Mexico (r=-0.988915)
US spending on science, space, and technology (r=-0.977791)
Biology/biomedical doctorates awarded (r=-0.976231)
Total ABA Lawyers Nationally (r=-0.962795)
Suicides by hanging, strangulation and suffocation (r=-0.961062)
Math doctorates awarded (US) (r=-0.943426)

Hmmm. Perhaps there is something to all that HFCS fearmongering. After all, as HFCS consumption falls, look at how there are more lawyers, more bomedical doctorates, and less suicide by hanging!

Ah, you ask, but what doesn’t correlate with HFCS consumption? Ask no more! Here they are:

Hang-glider accidents killing occupant (r=0.00802163)
Number of people killed by an exploding pressurized tyre, pipe or hose (r=-0.0000909672)
Number of people killed by agricultural machinery (r=-0.0604786)
Drownings caused by an accident involving a canoe or kayak (r=0.0205583)
Deaths caused by cataclysmic storm (r=0.0240487)

View the original article here

A lesson about correlation and causation [Respectful Insolence]

noreply@blogger.com (Rhoda) — Wed, 14 May 2014 03:44:00 +0000

Pedestrians killed in collision with car, pick-up truck or van (r=0.980767)
Murders by hanging, strangulation and suffocation (r=0.952419)
US crude oil imports from Venezuela (r=0.884883)
Deaths caused by lightning (r=0.805254)
Deaths during surgical operations with anastomosis, bypass or graft (r=0.845314)

Number of lawyers in New Mexico (r=-0.988915)
US spending on science, space, and technology (r=-0.977791)
Biology/biomedical doctorates awarded (r=-0.976231)
Total ABA Lawyers Nationally (r=-0.962795)
Suicides by hanging, strangulation and suffocation (r=-0.961062)
Math doctorates awarded (US) (r=-0.943426)

Hmmm. Perhaps there is something to all that HFCS fearmongering. After all, as HFCS consumption falls, look at how there are more lawyers, more bomedical doctorates, and less suicide by hanging!

Ah, you ask, but what doesn’t correlate with HFCS consumption? Ask no more! Here they are:

Hang-glider accidents killing occupant (r=0.00802163)
Number of people killed by an exploding pressurized tyre, pipe or hose (r=-0.0000909672)
Number of people killed by agricultural machinery (r=-0.0604786)
Drownings caused by an accident involving a canoe or kayak (r=0.0205583)
Deaths caused by cataclysmic storm (r=0.0240487)

View the original article here

OBOS’s History is the History of the Women’s Liberation Movement

noreply@blogger.com (Rhoda) — Wed, 14 May 2014 02:08:00 +0000

By Joan Ditzion

At a recent conference at Boston University, OBOS founders Nancy Miriam Hawley, Paula Doress-Worters, Wendy Sanford, and myself wove together our diverse personal coming-of-age stories with the organization’s early history.

The B.U. conference, A Revolutionary Moment: Women’s Liberation in the Late 1960s and early 1970s, doubled as a reunion with many women we haven’t seen in decades, and it gave us the chance to share and reflect on our history during a panel on the birth of “Our Bodies, Ourselves.”

It also provided the opportunity to network with young activists and academics now carrying the movement forward and to reconsider longstanding questions, such as: How do we empower women and girls with information about health, sexuality and reproduction? How do we promote equality between women and men? And how do we build bridges around social justice movements?

OBOS, formerly known as the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, is a core part of the women’s movement and one of the few surviving collectives to come out of it. We are continually amazed that the project we founded in 1970 became a household phrase and has changed the global conversation on women and health.

OBOS founders, circa 1975 / Photo: Phyllis Ewen

The conference was an exciting celebration of the transformative early years of the women’s liberation movement. Activists, scholars, artists, writers and filmmakers gathered to reflect on victories and accomplishments, as well as unfinished work. Many discussions focused on how to advance women amidst recent setbacks, including the war on women that is reducing access to reproductive healthcare.

According to conference organizer Deborah Belle, director of B.U.’s Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies program, the conference was developed in response to the sparse documentation of these pivotal early years. Many gains are taken for granted or not known by a younger generation.

Feminist historian Sara Evans expanded upon that theme in her opening keynote address, asking, “Why is women’s liberation a footnote in late-20th century history of feminism?”

She mentioned some myths about the movement that needed to be cleared away to see the profound cultural transformation and accomplishments of this grassroots, national, global, decentralized movement — chief among them is the notion that the WL movement was limited to white middle class women. Women who took part in the movement were often described as shrill, anti-family, anti-sex (or oversexed), homophobic and racist.

To dispel the myths and contribute to a fuller narrative of this era, there were many sessions led by veteran second wave activists and scholars. Spirited new feminist films documenting this period were shown, including Jennifer Lee’s “Feminist: Stories from Women’s Liberation”; Mary Dore’s “She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry,” which includes footage of OBOS founders; Susan Rivo and the 888 Women’s History Project’s “Left on Pearl”; Catherine Russo’s “A Moment in Her Story,” which includes OBOS founder Nancy Miriam Hawley; and Lianne Brandon’s classic “Anything You Want To Be.”

We are grateful to B.U. and the conference organizers. Many of the sessions were recorded and will be available online, along with papers that were presented (check the list of panels on the conference schedule page for posted materials). We want the complex legacy of “Our Bodies, Ourselves” and the women’s liberation movement to be remembered and documented, and we hope to continue to stimulate intergenerational dialogue.

Joan Ditzion is an original OBOS founder and co-author of all nine editions of “Our Bodies, Ourselves.” She has been a geriatric social worker since 1985, a profession compatible with her social justice values. Her focus has gradually transitioned to issues of aging and older women and families.

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Boy meets girl, loses 380 lbs

noreply@blogger.com (Rhoda) — Wed, 14 May 2014 01:55:00 +0000

Brian Flemming weighed over 600 pounds in 2011. He was heavy as a kid, and remembers his eighth grade gym teacher telling him to stop drinking soda and go for a walk every day. "I obviously didn't listen," Flemming said.

Flemming still uses this driver's license from a few years ago. "It's an interesting conversation piece when I show my ID for anything," he said.

Quitting drinking helped Flemming lose 100 pounds by December 2012, but he had made no changes to his diet. He was eating at least 6,400 calories per day.

What a difference a year can make. By November 2013, Flemming was down more than 300 pounds.

Flemming went from a size 60 waist to a size 38. He still has about 30 pounds of excess skin around his waist and is trying to save money for the surgery to have it removed.

Flemming met Jackie Eastham in person for the first time this past December. They first connected while playing the mobile game Draw Something in 2012, and he credits her with helping to change his life. He lives in Michigan, she's in England. "He was taller, slimmer and much more handsome than I had expected him to be," said Eastham, who already considered him a close friend.

Flemming ran his third 5K race on his 32nd birthday a few weeks ago. He's down to 234 pounds -- a loss of nearly 400 pounds in 18 months.

HIDE CAPTION

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Brian Flemming weighed 625 pounds
A new friend inspired him to stop drinking
Within two years, he dropped nearly 400 pounds
"She saved my life," he said

Editor's note: Do you have a weight-loss success story to share? Tell us how you did it and you could be featured in our weekly weight-loss story on CNN.com.

(CNN) -- Inspiration can come from unlikely places. Brian Flemming found the will to change his life in a drawing game.

Flemming was addicted to alcohol, severely morbidly obese and full of self-pity when he met Jackie Eastham through a random match on Draw Something, the Pictionary-like mobile game. It was the spring of 2012. Most nights Flemming drank around a fifth of vodka mixed with a liter of soda while he zoned out in front of the TV.

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The last time he had been weighed, on a special scale at the hospital, he was 625 pounds.

Eastham lived in England and was 20 years Flemming's senior. At first, the players shared casual banter between rounds. Their friendship eventually moved to Facebook, where they began to confide in each other.

Flemming was at a low point. Besides being an alcoholic and morbidly obese, he was pre-diabetic and had a recurring cellulitis infection.

Eastham was the first person he was totally honest with -- no one in his life knew about the drinking. He expected sympathy.

But she wasn't having it.

"She said there were people struggling for their lives and then there's you -- you have all these opportunities and you're throwing it all away," said Flemming, 32, now a business relations representative and part-time music teacher in Canton, Michigan.

It was personal for Eastham, who lives with myotonic dystrophy, an inherited type of muscular dystrophy that causes progressive muscle weakness and can affect various systems and organs. Her symptoms have been relatively mild so far, but she never takes her health for granted.

"I just thought bloody hell, you're a guy who's 30 ... and you're wasting your life," she said, remembering how she felt as the recipient of his drunken, maudlin messages. "My future is a lot gloomier. I'm trying to make the brightest future I can, and ... you're dragging yourself down."

It was the wake-up call Flemming needed. He'd show her he could change. That day -- October 13, 2012 -- he vowed to quit drinking cold turkey.

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That was the first step toward what would become a remarkable transformation. Less than two years later, Flemming has lost more than 380 pounds from his 6 foot 2 frame. He went from a size 60 waist to a size 38.

The days after he gave up alcohol were grueling, he said. He had cold sweats, shaky hands and couldn't sleep. He kept busy to distract himself and found comfort in daily chats with Eastham.

They progressed from Facebook to Skype video chats, where Eastham said she was initially shocked by his size.

The weight began to fall off. Without the extra calories from alcohol, Flemming lost 100 pounds in a couple months. That was motivation enough to make other changes. He had been consuming upwards of 7,000 calories a day, according to an app he used to record his meals. He stopped eating fast food and cut out sugar and red meat.

Now, a typical day for Flemming starts with a few ounces of low or no-sodium turkey breast, a serving of dry cereal, a bowl of non-fat Greek yogurt with artificial sweetener and a glass of low-sodium vegetable juice.

For lunch and dinner, he often eats chicken and vegetables with rice. And every Friday night, he treats himself to a scoop of ice cream. Now that he's doing more exercise, he's not as strict about his diet.

Adding in physical activity was a gradual process. Flemming says he began by walking in place in his parents' basement for five minutes a day every morning, adding minutes as he felt ready. When he was finally comfortable to exercise outside, he only went when it was dark and the neighbors couldn't see him. Eastham kept him company on Skype sometimes while he walked.

"She was a huge motivation. She'd try to push me to walk a little further each time," he said.

In July 2013, he walked his first half-marathon. Shortly after that he took up cycling, and then running, completing his third 5-kilometer run on his birthday a few weeks ago. He used running and calorie tracker apps to stay accountable and started seeing a psychotherapist to manage his depression and make sure he was approaching his weight loss in a healthy way.

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Eastham said she encouraged it, not wanting him to be dependent on their friendship to stay sober and motivated.

In December, Brian Flemming flew to Europe to meet Jackie Eastham in person. They remain close friends.

Flemming is now down to 234 pounds, with about 30 pounds of excess skin around his waist. He's trying to save the money for surgery to have it removed.

This past December, he went to Europe and finally met Eastham in person, where he was able to climb the Eiffel Tower after barely being able to walk up a flight of stairs less than two years earlier. They continue to talk every day -- and are still playing Draw Something.

Flemming now hopes to go back to school to become a therapist specializing in weight loss, depression and anxiety.

"Jackie is the best thing that's ever happened to me. I feel that she saved my life, even though she would never take credit," Flemming wrote in a blog post.

"Brian is so inspiring," Eastham said. "I hope he gets what he wants out of life."

Visit Brian Flemming's Facebook group to follow his journey. He invites readers to share their own stories about weight loss, addiction and eating disorders there.

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He lost 125 pounds, but still felt fat

noreply@blogger.com (Rhoda) — Wed, 14 May 2014 01:42:00 +0000

By the fall of 2009, at the start of his junior year of college, John Janetzko weighs about 290 pounds -- the heaviest he has ever been.

Janetzko started exercising more during the spring of his junior year, and he watched what he ate more closely. But his senior year was rough; he couldn't find time to go to the gym as he had before, and he gained back some of the weight he had lost previously.

Janetzko entered graduate school at Harvard University in the fall of 2011, and he got even more serious about weight loss. He met his goal of getting under 200 pounds by around January 2012, and from there he kept on slimming toward 180 and then 170. Here he is in June 2012, having lost all the weight he wanted, but still not feeling great about himself.

There was no one moment where it clicked that Janetzko liked the way he looked. He estimates that his self-image improved around May 2013, when this photo was taken.

Now at 165 pounds, Janetzko is still physically active, but he doesn't push himself so much in terms of exertion and calorie restriction. He is a doctoral candidate at Harvard University.

HIDE CAPTION

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

John Janetzko weighed 290 pounds in college
He overhauled his diet and fitness to lose weight
Even at 170 pounds he wasn't feeling great about his body image
It took time and positive reinforcement to accept himself

Editor's note: Do you have a weight-loss success story to share? Tell us how you did it and you could be featured in our weekly weight-loss story on CNN.com.

(CNN) -- If you're overweight, slimming down will make you feel great, right? For John Janetzko, embracing his own body took more than just weight loss.

The 24-year-old chemistry Ph.D. candidate at Harvard is just under 6 feet tall, and struggled with his body image for years. Even after losing 125 pounds, he still felt fat, and pushed himself in unhealthy ways in terms of diet and fitness.

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These days, at a lean 165 pounds, Janetzko feels more confident and generally better about himself.

"I feel more generically attractive in terms of what society's views are," he said. "But I guess I also feel like that was something I thought would be very quick, and would sort of happen right away."

Getting motivated

In childhood, Janetzko heard from his pediatrician that his weight wasn't healthy so many times that he became desensitized to it. But as his father remembers it, he wasn't ever really fat.

Intense studying and bad eating habits piled on pounds during college. By the fall of junior year, Janetzko weighed about 290 pounds.

"I would always be sort of afraid of how I thought people would think of me," he said. "I always expected my girlfriend at the time would find someone better."

The first stage of Janetzko's weight loss came when he lived at home in Toronto during college. A friend encouraged Janetzko to go to the gym with him, even offering to buy him running shoes. Janetzko started going to the gym often, focusing on jogging and light weights.

Instead of greasy takeout meals from food stands, Janetzko started picking up leaner options such as grilled chicken and broccoli, and cooked more on weekends. His father helped cook when Janetzko was busy.

"I started with the idea that being very strict with my diet was the solution," he said.

During his senior year, with graduate school applications and his father becoming ill, Janetzko slipped, forgoing the gym because there weren't enough hours in the day. His weight fluctuated, never quite bouncing back as high as it was, but still reversing some of the progress he had made.

The move from Toronto to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a breakup from a long relationship also distracted him from healthy eating. He was about 240 pounds when he entered Harvard.

Graduate school jump-started his motivation again. He told himself: "I've had so many changes, and it's really time to have an absolute fresh start."

How he did it

During the summer of 2011, Janetzko went to the gym consistently and cooked at least four nights a week. He had in his head a "running clock" of calorie and protein limits for meal times, aiming for about 2,000 calories a day.

Breakfast was usually a protein shake. Lunch would be salad, sandwich or burrito. Dinner would be around 1,000 calories.

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By the end of autumn of his first year at Harvard, he was closer to 200 pounds. On a visit home to Toronto, he ran his first 5K race, which motivated him to keep working on his fitness.

Janetzko also encouraged his roommates to go with him to exercise, and helped friends with their workouts and stretches.

"I guess that was a point where I was sort of feeling happy," he said.

Focused on fitness, he competed in volleyball leagues, swam, and played squash and soccer.

By mid-2012, he was down to 170 pounds. Losing those last 60 to 70 pounds in Massachusetts brought about the most substantial physical changes in his fitness journey.

"I said, 'What happened to you? Are they not feeding you?' " his father, Rainer Janetzko, remembers telling his son when he first visited after the weight loss.

Generally, though, Janetzko's new physique looks good, his father said. "Now when he puts a suit on, he looks better."

Going too far

Slim and athletic as he was, Janetzko still didn't feel good about how he looked in May 2012. It was an awkward time he calls the "transition" -- when he had lost a lot of weight, but his new body didn't register in his mind as a positive image.

"I would wake up in the morning, look in the mirror and feel like 'Oh God, I'm fat and ugly and this is terrible,' " he said.

At the same time, others told him he had gotten too skinny and didn't need to get thinner. Objectively, he had reached his goal -- but he couldn't see that in his reflection. He thought his mirror image still needed to lose 10 or 20 more pounds.

Focused on weight loss and fitness, Janetzko didn't pay close attention to his body's signals that it was being pushed too hard. As he ate less and started running farther and faster, Janetzko noticed he would start to get dizzy or even fall. Last semester he collapsed outside of a laboratory.

"That was a scary time for a lot of people -- my lab mates, my advisor and myself included," he said. "If you don't balance your diet properly (you) can't go and work yourself really hard."

His aversion to overeating had gone too far -- his appetite for some foods had diminished. Friends even wondered if he had an eating disorder.

"There were days when I could barely finish half a sandwich," he said. "I felt full but I clearly had not taken in all of the calories I need as a functioning person."

He has since gone to nutritionists for help. He isn't as rigid about what he eats anymore, and is more flexible about his workouts. He still minimizes fried foods but tries to be more varied with meals.

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Embracing a new self

Body image disturbance isn't unusual when people lose weight, said Emily Sandoz, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Often people have huge expectations about the life changes that will result from a weight loss that don't actually happen.

"Their experience of themselves as fat extends far beyond their actual body," she said. "People have to learn how to be in their skin in a new way."

Sandoz's approach to helping people with body image problems is to shift the focus to other areas of their lives that they care about, such as work or parenting. Mindfulness -- the idea of being present and in the moment -- is incorporated in her approach to helping clients be more accepting of their bodies.

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Over time, Janetzko has been able to reconcile his weight with his body image -- but there was no one moment where it suddenly clicked. Positive reinforcement from others and self-assurance have helped him feel better about himself.

His message to others

Many of Janetzko's old friends who see his recent photos on Facebook have contacted him to ask: "How did you do it?"

Janetzko's bottom line is that he was intensely motivated.

"If you count your calories and you're like, 'I want to lose weight,' you're going to be stuck in that forever," he said. "But I think if you can make changes in your lifestyle that you actually want to be doing, and then you'll do those no matter what -- you enjoy them -- then you never have to feel like you're trapped in a routine."

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She ditched diets, lost 160 lbs

noreply@blogger.com (Rhoda) — Wed, 14 May 2014 00:32:00 +0000

When Teena Henson celebrated her 50th birthday in 2011 she weighed 332 pounds.

By June 2012, she had lost 100 pounds by working out daily at a new gym in her hometown of Gilmer, Texas.

Henson continued to lose weight by making healthier eating choices, even when she went to fast food restaurants. She often switched out fried chicken for grilled or ate a side salad instead of fries.

Henson keeps this skirt she used to wear as a reminder of how far she's come.

Since she started working out three years ago, Henson has participated in five 5K races. She recently finished one in 46 minutes, her personal best.

Henson was named "Member of the Month" from Anytime Fitness for not missing a single day at the gym in October 2013. "I logged in a total of 303 days last year," she said.

Henson lost 166 pounds "in two years, nine months and 13 days," she said. She's since kept the weight off.

HIDE CAPTION

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Teena Henson decided to lose weight after seeing a gym ad in a newspaper
Family members, especially her mom, always said Henson should lose weight
Henson works out frequently and makes healthy food choices

Editor's note: Do you have a weight-loss success story to share? Tell us how you did it and you could be featured in our weekly weight-loss story on CNN.com.

(CNN) -- Teena Henson's "journey to life" began with a newspaper ad.

She remembers wishing they had an Anytime Fitness in her hometown of Gilmer, Texas. She specifically wanted to join Anytime Fitness because it is open 24/7 and is made for men and women of all levels of fitness.

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"Then there was an ad in the local paper that Anytime Fitness was opening," she said. "It was like, 'Here it is; it's in your hands. Now, what are you going to do with it?' "

Read Teena Henson's story on iReport

Determined to get herself on the right track, Henson signed up at the gym while it was still under construction.

It was March 2011; Henson was 5-foot-4 and 332 pounds. She knew that her poor diet and inactivity were not the path to a long, healthy life. She didn't suffer from any serious health problems, but her parents and three brothers were all diabetic so she knew the potential consequences.

Henson, 54, is very close with her family. Loved ones, especially her mom, would often approach her with concerns about her health, telling her she should lose weight.

"I think the older I got, the more concerned my mom became because she knew she wouldn't be there to take care of me," Henson says. "She was my No. 1 supporter on my plan to exercise and lose weight."

In the past, Henson would put herself on diets to make everyone happy, but they wouldn't last long.

There was an endless array of rules, from eating nothing but grapefruits to nothing but carbs, until she realized that "diets" just weren't for her.

"For me, 'diet' is a four-letter word for failure," she said.

What she was looking for was a lifestyle change. And not because her friends and family wanted it for her, but because she wanted it for herself.

With Anytime Fitness' hours, Henson had no trouble finding time to work out. She goes to the gym every day after work for anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. She even created a mantra:

"I have a desire to work out. I keep a determination to work out. I created a discipline to work out, and I choose to work out."

What she struggled with most was changing her eating habits.

She started by cutting out soft drinks and dropped 18 pounds in the first month.

Her mom, known as Mama Henson to many of Henson's friends, cheered her on daily and was excited to see her daughter start to adopt a healthier lifestyle.

"Every day she would ask me, 'How much you lose today?' I would laugh and say, 'Mom, I can't lose every day.' But she would tell me that I was trying and that's all that matters," said Henson.

After cutting out soda, Henson started making healthier food choices.

She continued to eat at fast food restaurants because it was convenient, switching out fried chicken for grilled, a side of fries for a side salad.

By December 2011, Henson was down 64 pounds and healthier than ever. Unfortunately, her mom's health was deteriorating. Mama Henson had suffered several seizures and mini-strokes that severely weakened her.

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Henson's healthier lifestyle would help provide the mental and physical strength she would need in the final months caring for her mother.

Two months before her mother died, Henson remembers walking into the house after a workout. She had lost 100 pounds at this point. Her mother looked up at her and said, "You're pretty."

"We both just started crying," Henson said. "I don't have a clue why she said it; it was a memorable moment."

Mama Henson passed away in August 2012.

Whenever Henson loses sight of why she's working out or skipping sweets, she thinks of her mom's smile and how much she wanted her daughter to be happy.

"I knew she was proud of me for losing the weight," Henson said. "I know she felt I was going to be OK now that I had lost the weight."

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In the past year, Henson has made even more changes to her diet. She has started to eat products like quinoa, whole wheat bread and fresh vegetables.

"There was a time when you couldn't have gotten broccoli anywhere near me." But now she roasts it and includes it in her meals for the week. She cooks in bulk on the weekends, freezing meals in individual containers for during the week so she knows exactly how many calories she's eating. She aims to eat 1,200 calories a day.

In less than three years, Henson has lost 166 pounds, or 50% of her body weight. On March 8, she celebrated the three-year anniversary of her first step into Anytime Fitness.

Losing the weight has helped her find an inner strength. It allows her to see a glimpse of the strong, accomplished woman her mother always saw.

One of Henson's passions has been participating in 5K walks for charity. Since she started working out three years ago, she has participated in five walks and recently finished one in 46 minutes, her personal best.

Henson's transformation has been so complete that her doctor, who has been monitoring her progress since she started losing weight, uses her pictures to show patients what a little determination can do.

"The smallest of changes one can make in their present lifestyle can garner big changes," Henson said, "not only in the physical body, but in the mind."

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She found love, left sugar, lost weight

noreply@blogger.com (Rhoda) — Sun, 20 Apr 2014 08:23:00 +0000

Cady Stanton struggled with her weight for most of her life. She used food to cope with stress and anxiety, eating large quantities of ice cream before going to sleep at night.

Stanton married in 1996 and moved to eastern Washington. The healthy diet and exercise plan she had maintained before the move went out the window. She grew depressed and stopped weighing herself when she hit 265 pounds.

Stanton got divorced in 2005 and moved to Seattle. She gave up her car and started walking and biking everywhere, going from 265 to 200 pounds almost effortlessly.

Stanton, second from left, the day the adoption of her son David, middle right, became official in 2010.

In 2005, Stanton first met Ryan Laundry while pursuing her degree in psychology but moved to Pennsylvania two years later for a Ph.D. program. When she came back to Seattle, she reconnected with Laundry, who encouraged her to follow a low-sugar diet. At the wedding in June 2012, Stanton weighed 157 pounds.

After the wedding, Stanton and Laundry started taking hiking and backpacking trips together. Stanton currently weighs 142 pounds.

Stanton maintains her current weight by eating foods that are low in sugar and exercising regularly. Instead of eating ice cream to cope with her stress, she sets aside time to meditate. "Life is easier. The guilt and shame I felt sneaking ice cream at night is gone."

HIDE CAPTION

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

At night, Cady Stanton would eat ice cream in secret to cope with her anxiety
Growing up, her family didn't eat healthy meals
Stanton stopped weighing herself at 265 pounds; she now weighs 142 pounds

Editor's note: Do you have a weight-loss success story to share? Tell us how you did it and you could be featured in our weekly weight-loss story on CNN.com.

(CNN) -- Cady Stanton used to find solace in the sweet taste of ice cream.

Growing up, she would sneak downstairs after her family had gone to sleep and numb her anxiety by digging into a half-gallon container. She would eat until she was sick, knowing this was something she had to do in secret.

As the oldest child of a struggling Jehovah's Witness family, Stanton shouldered a lot of responsibilities at a young age. Her mother suffered from a number of health issues, and her father worked three jobs just to put food on the table.

The family's financial struggles had a huge impact on Stanton's diet. Nearly all Stanton's family was overweight, as they had neither the resources nor the knowledge to prepare healthy meals regularly.

They ate a lot of ground beef, spaghetti and the occasional treat of a take-and-bake pizza. They would wait in line for government-issued cheese and foodstuffs like powdered eggs and milk.

"Healthy eating requires money and time, something financially stressed families have little of," she said. "We ate what was quick and cheap and familiar."

Stanton knew she was overweight in the first grade when she looked down and saw her feet swelling out of her Mary Janes. But it wasn't until her freshman year of high school that she made the connection between what she was eating and her body size.

One day she found herself staring into the vending machine of the gym locker room. She was 5-feet-5-inches and 200 pounds.

"At that moment it finally struck me that what I ate made me overweight," she said. "You'd think I would know that. I was an honors student."

Stanton changed her diet and started exercising regularly. In two years she went from 200 to 150 pounds. But there was one change she was still unable to make: sneaking food at night to comfort herself.

Consuming large quantities of ice cream had a calming effect. She had no other way to cope with her anxiety, so she was unable to keep the weight off.

She married in 1996 and moved to Washington. She stopped running and her weight climbed. She grew depressed when she realized the church she had joined wasn't as welcoming as the one in her hometown of Portland, which was her only social outlet as a child.

She stopped weighing herself when she hit 265 pounds.

In 2005, she divorced her husband and moved to Seattle to start rebuilding her life. She gave her car to a relative and started walking and biking everywhere, losing 50 pounds almost without effort.

That same year, she met Ryan Laundry. She was pursuing her degree in psychology at the University of Washington at the time and weighed 215 pounds. While Laundry was interested in pursuing a romantic relationship, Stanton wouldn't allow herself to think that he could be in love with her.

"That's part of being overweight," she said. "The last thing you want to do is humiliate yourself by assuming someone likes you romantically."

She moved to Pennsylvania to get a doctorate degree in Human Development and Family Studies, but she and Laundry reconnected when she returned to Seattle. They bonded over raising teenage boys: Stanton had adopted her son, David, in 2010, and Laundry was taking care of his teenage brother. It was as though they had never been apart.

This time Stanton was open to letting herself be loved by Laundry.

"You can't live on someone else's love; you have to be OK on your own," she said. "But I needed that to start taking care of myself, to start filling up those holes on my own."

Laundry told Stanton about how he had lost a lot of weight on a low-sugar diet and encouraged her to try it for herself.

"I balked. Bread had sugar. Pasta had sugar. Fruit had sugar. And, more importantly, my ice cream had sugar."

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But at 215 pounds, she figured it was about time she let go of her reliance on food to ease her anxiety. She eliminated pastries, fast food, ice cream and even fruit with high amounts of sugar from her diet. Instead, she started eating salmon, tofu and grapefruit, learning the difference between emotional hunger and physical hunger.

"About four to five days in, my sugar cravings dropped. After two weeks, I didn't even care if there were cookies at work."

In a little more than a year, by the time she and Laundry were married in June 2012, Stanton had gone from 215 pounds to 157 pounds. Today she weighs 142 pounds.

Stanton maintains this weight by enjoying limited amounts of foods she now considers "treats." For breakfast, she has a protein shake made with cranberry juice and probiotics. She also stays active by walking two miles as part of her regular commute, and running or going to the gym on weekends.

Instead of sneaking ice cream at night, she now sets aside time for meditation in order to cope with stress. She doesn't keep any of her old escapes in the house, not even low-sugar ice cream.

"When I was overweight, I think people judged me somehow as less competent and efficient," she said. "Life is easier. The guilt and shame I felt sneaking ice cream at night is gone."

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Sad news: A Burzynski success story is gone [Respectful Insolence]

noreply@blogger.com (Rhoda) — Sun, 20 Apr 2014 07:31:00 +0000

I’m depressed as I write this, because I have some very sad news to relate to you. It appears that Laura Hymas died on Sunday morning. I learned this on Twitter yesterday from a source I trust, not to mention from mentions on Ben Hymas’s Facebook page, in which friends are commenting on how they remember her. Apparently, her brain tumor recurred, and ultimately she entered hospice and was reported to be in her “final stages” a week ago. My sympathy goes out to her family. She died at far too young an age. No one deserves to have her life cut so short by such a deadly brain tumor, particularly a young mother recently married.

Hymas, as you might recall, has been held up as a success story by a doctor about whom I’ve blogged on numerous occasions over the last two or three years. I’m referring, of course to Stanislaw Burzynski, a doctor who is not an oncologist—and not even board certified in internal medicine—but claims to have discovered a treatment for the deadliest cancers that is far superior to the standard of care, even going so far as to claim to be able to cure a cancer that’s never been cured before, namely diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG). As I’ve pointed out before, this claim is false, at least the part about there being no record in the medical literature of anyone having ever survived DIPG. That’s not the only—shall we say?—liberty with the truth that Burzynski and his supporters have used, but I’m not really in the mood to go too much into the detail of why I consider Burzynski to be a despicable human being, other than to mention how his supporters have used the story of Laura Hymas to promote his treatment with antineoplastons. Indeed, she is prominently featured in Eric Merola’s latest paean to the brave maverick doctor in a segment in which a recording she took of a conversation between her and her NHS oncologist in which she and her family tried to persuade him to be the U.K. doctor monitoring her as she takes antineoplastons. It’s a harrowing scene in that I saw a doctor trying desperately to do the right thing, despite extreme pressure from the patient.

As recently as November, Ms. Hymas was still being touted as a success story, cured by Stanislaw Burzynski when no one else could cure her, leading to credulous stories in the British press like this one, entitled Young mother with brain cancer given just a year to live BEATS the disease and gets married after having controversial treatment in the US. And, I must admit, that of all the Burzynski “success stories,” that of Laura Hymas puzzled me more than most. Of all the many patient anecdotes presented by Burzynski and his propagandist as “success stories,” Hymas’s story was the one the came the closest to actually sounding as though there might be something to it, although I still couldn’t rule out that her good fortune was a result of the conventional therapy she had before she discovered Burzynski. Then she dropped out of site not long after her wedding, and I got worried. I had a bad feeling about her, and I really hate it when my bad feelings turn out to be right.

As I said, I’m saddened to learn of her death. It doesn’t matter that she was used by Burzynski. She really believed that Burzynski had saved her, making it difficult, if not impossible, for me to be too hard on her, just as I find it difficult to be too hard on any of Burzynski’s patients, preferring to put the blame squarely where it belongs: On Burzynski. I also feel obligated to discuss her death. Given how many of Burzynski’s previous “success stories” who ultimately turned out not to be anything of the sort were forgotten by Burzynski after their deaths, never to be mentioned again, instead to have all memory of them other than by their families wiped from the Internet and no mention of their deaths, we skeptics honor them by remembering them and, to the extent we can learn it, how they died, because it’s certain that Burzynski and his supporters won’t. In fact, they’ll do their best to bury the memories of former “success stories” who died.

Just to show you how despicable the Burzynski propaganda machine is, though, I can’t help but point out that it is still going full tilt. Just yesterday, as the news of Laura Hymas’s death was hitting Twitter and Facebook, the pro-quackery organization known as the Alliance for Natural Health (ANH) used Burzynski again to promote yet another bad, bad law known as the Compassionate Freedom of Choice Act:

Recently, by working together, we made great strides in helping dying patients win access to potentially lifesaving treatments. It was your messages, together with those of other grassroots activists, that convinced the FDA to grant 12-year-old McKenzie Lowe a right of access to Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski’s innovative antineoplaston treatment.
As you may recall, the FDA had insisted that the treatment go though the agency approval process. Although the treatment had proven effective in earlier years and had passed the agency safety tests, it had not completed the whole process. The FDA had the authority to grant “compassionate use” to patients who asked for it and would clearly die without it, but chose not to grant it.
Despite our recent victories, the fact remains that the compassionate exemption rule is broken beyond repair—after all, these patients needed government permission to try to save their own lives, and the government couldn’t care less.
That’s why we’re thrilled that last Thursday, Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-VA) introduced the Compassionate Freedom of Choice Act of 2014. The bill eliminates the requirement for an FDA okay, and streamlines physician and patient access to experimental drugs. It would ensure that dying patients and their families—who don’t have the time or the strength to do so—won’t have to wage fruitless bureaucratic wars.

The ANH is describing, first, how the FDA caved under pressure, in essence wiping its hands of the issue of whether to allow compassionate use exemptions (a.k.a. single patient INDs) for Burzynski’s antineoplastons. Basically, the FDA ruled that, even though Burzynski has been cited numerous times for serious FDA violations and his antineoplaston trials are on partial clinical hold, patients can still receive antineoplastons on a single patient IND, just as long as the physician administering them is not Stanislaw Burzynski or someone who works for him. As I pointed out at the time, it was an astoundingly cynical decision and a massive propaganda victory for Burzynski.

But what about this H.R. 4475, this “Compassionate Freedom of Choice Act of 2014?? Unfortunately, the text of the bill is not yet published. That means we can only take the word of Rep. Griffith and speculate. To me, this bill sounds as though it could be a lot more problematic than the “right to try” bills I discussed not too long ago. Those bills, as I mentioned, are state bills. They don’t change federal law, and the FDA would still have jurisdiction over anything that had any interstate commerce component whatsoever. Unless a pharmaceutical company is in the same state as the patient, the FDA has jurisdiction. Actually, the FDA has jurisdiction anyway, because it has jurisdiction over drug approval in the US, and no drug company is likely to grant access to unapproved pharmaceuticals if it thinks that it will harm its chances of approval for its drug. So changing the law for a state is unlikely to have much of an effect in terms of opening up access to experimental drugs. Changing federal law, on the other hand, could make a difference.

The law, as described, is designed to “allow the manufacture, importation, distribution, and sale of investigational drugs and devices intended for use by terminally ill patients who execute an informed consent document, and for other purposes.” According to Griffith:

The Compassionate Freedom of Choice Act removes disincentives for drug companies to grant exemptions. For example, the current application for expanded access requires a drug company to share information—which we all know drug companies don’t do very well. It also requires, among other things, a detailed description of how and where a drug will be produced; complex pharmacological and toxicological information; and, if enough patients ask for the drug, a whole new Investigational New Drug (IND) application by the drug company.
Under the new bill, drug companies can still deny dying patients access to experimental treatments. But if they don’t have the FDA in opposition, drug companies may be much more willing to say yes. For example, drug companies are often afraid that if a patient dies under expanded access treatment, it will affect the eventual approval of the drug. With less risk and less paperwork, drug companies are more likely to increase patient access to experimental drugs.

It’s hard to tell exactly how this bill would affect access to experimental drugs without knowing what “disincentives” it removes and its specific language. I can say, however, as I’ve pointed out before that in the case of most experimental drugs that have only passed early stage testing (as in phase I clinical trials), the likelihood of doing no good or even causing harm is likely to be much higher than the likelihood of doing any good. Such a bill, depending on its wording, has the potential to do great harm. Moreover, such bills are custom-made to allow someone like Stanislaw Burzynski, who has long been supported by the ANH, continue to ply his trade.

Another way that we can honor Burzynski patients like Laura Hymas is to do our utmost to make sure that doesn’t happen.

View the original article here

Ad hominem and harassment: How antivaccine activists work [Respectful Insolence]

noreply@blogger.com (Rhoda) — Sun, 20 Apr 2014 06:15:00 +0000

For some reason, I was really beat last night, and, given that this weekend is a holiday for a large proportion of the country (if, perhaps, not for a large proportion of my readership), I don’t feel too bad about slacking off a bit by mentioning a couple of short bits that I wanted to blog about but didn’t get around to. And what better topic to blog about on Good Friday than the exact opposite of what this Easter season is supposed to be about, namely the behavior of antivaccinationists? I realize it’s an easy target, but, hey, I’m tired. Besides, it amuses me, and, as I’ve said so many times before, this blog is about what I like and what amuses me. You’re just along for the ride, and if you like what I like, great. If not, there are plenty of other blogs out there.

This particular bit of misbehavior on the part of the antivaccine movement happened earlier this week and hit rather close to home. Remember nearly four years ago, when the Boy Wonder (Jake Crosby) launched an attack against me in which he accused me of having an undisclosed conflict of interest putting me in essence in the pay of Sanofi-Aventis. It was utterly ridiculous, as always, and based on his usual “six degrees of separation” conspiracy mongering, but it did spark antivaccinationists to start writing and calling the Board of Governors of my university demanding that I be fired or disciplined. Fortunately, the medical school and university stood by me. Indeed, he medical school dean even called me and asked if I felt threatened. When I likened the antivaccine activists harassing me to animal rights loons, she totally “got it,” which is why I recommend that comparison to any other academic who is subject to this sort of harassment. In any case, nothing came of it, other than some agita on my part, when I wasn’t sure whether Jake’s sliming would gain traction.

Even with Jake having completely nuked his bridges to the antivaccine crank blog Age of Autism (AoA) and the antivaccine activist organization SafeMinds, it would appear that the antivaccine movement still likes to try to harass its critics at work. Earlier this week, I received an e-mail alert from the Autism Action Network (A-CHAMP) with the Subject: header of “Take Action: Paul Offit claims we know autism is prenatal.” (Yes, I am on the mailing lists of a number of antivaccine crank and other crank organizations, the better to have blogging material come to me, rather than having to seek it out.) Right on schedule, a couple of days later, on April 16, the antivaccine crank blog AoA published this “Take Action” notice:

Note: Here is an easy to use action alert to ask Dr. Paul Offit’s bosses to Action alertrequest that he stop making “stuff” (another word would fit well) up about autism – as a distraction for the epidemic and to protect his industry land connections. Click HERE.
Offit: “When you have autism, you are born with autism”
Ask Offit’s bosses to stop him making stuff up
In a recent interview with Medscape (www.medscape.com/viewarticle/822981) millionaire vaccine industrialist and spokesman, Paul Offit, MD, pretends that he knows that autism begins before birth, which denies that autistic regression occurs, “When you have autism, you are born with autism. There is no changing that, and to some people, that is helpful to know.” We thought this might come as a surprise to many people who watched their healthy child regress into autism, and anybody who follows autism research.
Offit promotes himself as one of America’s leading authorities on autism, even though, like most parents, he has no professional training in autism. Which may account for him saying things that have no foundation in either the medical literature, or the experience of hundreds of thousands of people. And he has several jobs at very prestigious institutions, which one would hope would value a close adherence to truth and known facts. Offit is the Maurice R. Hilleman Professor of Vaccinology, and Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania, and Chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases, and the Director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
If you are tired of credentialed elites with obvious conflicts of interest making up stuff about autism that conveniently supports their own financial interests please click on the Take Action link above to send an email to Offit’s bosses at the University of Pennsylvania and the Children’s of Hospital of Pennsylvania.
And why not give Offit’s bosses a call and ask them to ask Offit to stop making things up.
Amy Gutman, President, University of Pennsylvania, (215) 898-7221
Steven M. Altschuler, MD, CEO, Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania (267) 426-6143
Please share this message with friends and family.

This is how antivaccinationists roll. They don’t have the evidence. They don’t have the science. They don’t have the clinical epidemiology. So they attack the messenger. They’ve been attacking Paul Offit this way for years. They’ve attacked me this way, but appear to have backed off now that it’s become clear to them that their attacks don’t gain any traction at my university and that I now view them as a badge of honor. Nowadays, the antivaccine cranks seem to be focusing largely on law professor Dorit Reiss and Forbes blogger Emily Willingham. At some point, new pro-science bloggers will earn the ire of the antivaccine movement–and I will congratulate them when they do–and become the new favorite target of these cranks. They also never learn. In the culture of academia, freedom of academic expression is highly valued, and if that expression happens to be in support of science it’s incredibly unlikely that any university’s administration would act to silence an academic like Dr. Offit, Prof. Reiss, or myself, as much annoyance as such e-mail and phone campaigns might cause deans and chairs. Indeed, a supporter of Stanislaw Burzynski tried the same thing on me just this year, and one of the associate deans told me that dealing with such cranks was just part of the job.

Still, years ago, I didn’t know that. I really thought that my job might be in jeopardy if cranks targeted me at work. Cranks rely on that fear to intimidate and silence newbies. I also realize that I’m lucky to be in academia. If I worked for a private hospital or clinic, for instance, it’s quite conceivable that the administration would find my extracurricular activities too troublesome to tolerate. Others who speak out against the antivaccine movement who aren’t in medicine or science and work for corporate America could also find that their bosses aren’t supportive of extracurricular activities that result in complaints and—to them—potentially adverse publicity. Government employees are particularly vulnerable because of political considerations and rules about advocating for causes; sometimes supervisors are just plain spineless. This is how the antivaccine movement silences bloggers. As much as I love to welcome new voices to the pro-science fold, I do want them to understand that they could potentially fall victim to attacks like the one most recently launched on Paul Offit, the attacks I’ve suffered over the last nine years, and the attacks that frequently target Dorit Reiss and Emily Willingham, among others. Such attacks used to frighten me; now I consider them, at most, to be an annoyance, not to mention as a badge of honor that I’m being effective.

I also take my amusement in noting that character assassination and ad hominem attacks aren’t just the weapon of choice of the antivaccine movement against its enemies, but also against itself. I need to fire up the microwave for some fresh popcorn to watch the latest internecine bloodletting going on in the antivaccine movement, courtesy of—of course!—Jake Crosby, who’s busily re-nuking all the bridges to his former friends and allies that he started nuking about a year ago. This time around, he’s busily continuing his attacks on former ally and mentor Mark Blaxill in a post entitled Mark Blaxill Didn’t Disclose Pharma Conflict at 2001 IOM Meeting:

Other than identify himself as a parent, Blaxill revealed no conflict of interest whatsoever. He only stated that his research was not supported by any funding source as IOM requested that he disclose. What he did not reveal was that he was still in the employ of Boston Consulting Group, which still had vaccine manufacturers as clients. He would admit this in email to SafeMinds’ board of directors the following year and to omnibus attorney Mike Williams the year after that. Blaxill even consulted for Merck.

Jake’s a crank whom I detest, all the more so after having actually met him in person about a year ago, but it is rather amusing to see some of the people who cheered him on as he tried to accuse me of undisclosed COIs getting a taste of their own medicine from the Frankenstein monster they created. Sure, his “logic,” such as it is, is completely based on conspiracy fantasies and support of pseudoscience, but that’s always the case, a world in which vaccines cause autism and all-pervasive, all-powerful pharmaceutical companies will do anything to silence it, even buying off people like Mark “Not a Doctor, Not a Scientist” Blaxill apparently not to push too hard against vaccines. Of course, if that really were the case, one wonders why those evil pharma overlords wouldn’t just co-opt Blaxill completely and have him “convert” to being pro-science, having seen the light? After all, if what Jake writes is true Blaxill is too stupid to be an effective double agent.

There, as tired as I am, I feel better.

View the original article here

Samuel Hopkins Adams, Articles on the Nostrum Evil and Quackery [denialism blog]

noreply@blogger.com (Rhoda) — Sun, 20 Apr 2014 04:59:00 +0000

As part of related research into consumer protection, I recently scanned in a copy of Samuel Hopkins Adams’ seminal articles on the patent medicine industry. These articles, which appeared in Collier’s magazine starting in 1905, helped build the record for the 1906 Pure Food and Drugs Act, and for amendments to that law in 1912.

There are fourteen articles in the series and in them you will see how little has changed in the world of quackery. Adams focused much of his attention on the relationship between publishers and quacks, a problem that exists to this day (publishers are one of the most reliable opponents of consumer protection laws). Here, he points out the idea that publishers will lose their contracts with patent medicine quacks if “hostile legislation” is passed.

In this first article, Denialism readers will recognize two key strategies used by today’s nutritional supplement sellers: claims of universalism/universal cures, and the idea that doctors are suppressing remedies in order to protect their professional racket. Enjoy. Uncorrected OCR follows.

INTRODUCTION
This is the introductory article to a series which will contain a full explanation and expire of patent-medicine methods, and the harm done to the public by this industry, founded mainly on fraud and poison. Results of the publicity given to these methods can already be seen in the steps recently taken by the National Government, some State Governments and a few of the more reputable newspapers. The object of the series is to make the situation so familiar and thoroughly understood that there will be a speedy end to the worst aspect of the evil.

Gullible .America will spend this year some seventy-five millions of dollars in the purchase of patent medicines. In consideration of this sum it will swallow huge quantities of alcohol, an appalling amount of opiates and narcotics, a wide assortment of varied drugs ranging from powerful and dangerous heart depressants to insidious liver simulauts; and, far in excess of all other ingredients, undiluted fraud. For fraud exploited by the skillfulest of advertising bunco men, is the basis of the trade. Should the newspapers, the magazines and the medical journal refuse their pages to this class of advertisements, the patent medicine business in five years would be as scandalously historic as the South Sea Bubble, and the nation would be richer not only in lives and money, but in drunkards and drug.fiends saved.
“Don’t make the mistake of lumping all proprietary medicines in one
indiscriminate denunciation,” came warning from all sides when this series
was announced. But the honest attempt to separate the sheep from the
goats develops a lamentable lack of qualified candidates for the sheepfold.
External remedies there may be which are at once honest in their claims
and effective for their purposes; they are not to be found among the
mu~h-advertised ointments or applications which :fill the public prints.
~ut!cura may be a useful preparation, but in extravagance of advertising
1t nvala the most clamorous cure-all. Pond’s Extract, one would naturally
suppose, could afford to restrict itself to decent methods, but in the recent
ep~demic scare in New York it traded on the public alarm by putting forth
“~1aplay:• advertisements headed, in heavy black type, “Meningitis,” a
d1aease In which witch-hazel is about as effective as molasses. ~his is
fairly comparable to Peruna’s gh9ulish exploitation, for profit, of the yellow.
fever. scourge in New Orleans,· aided by various southern newspapers of
tan~mg, which published as news an “interview” with Dr. Hartman,
president of the Peruna Company.

6
prominent Chicago newspaper and spread before its advertising manager a full-page advertisement, with blank spaces in the center. “We want some good, strong testimonials to fill out with,” he said. “You can get all of those you want, can’t you Y” asked the newspaper
manager. “Can youf” returned the other. “Show me four or five strong ones from
local politicians and you get the ad.”
Fake Testimonials That day reporters were assigned to secure testimonials with photo.graphs which subsequently appeared in the full-page advertisement as

——–· —–·-······—······-·····–··-··· …… ———.
! ~–~~H~N£Y M;:l~
Xa:n•B of I’a.p•>:. ··-··’····-·······-’-·–’-'········—-··-/
l’ \/rtlt \
” r ‘ ><
er ‘v\.i.-.. -·-···-· —–o~ua.nater.
A CONTRACT €0NTA·I-NING THE RED CI:.AUSE ‘l’he “Red Clause” is shown in heavy type, beginning with the words “It Is mutually agreed . • .” The Gazette bus recently decided to exclude all
patent-medicine advertising from its columns.
promised. As for the men who permitted the use of their names for this purpose, several of them afterward admitted that they had never tasted the “Compound,” but that they were willing to sign the testimonials for the joy of appearing in print as “prominent citizens.” Another Chicago news.
7

A WINDOW EXHIBIT IN A CHICAGO DUUG STORE.
8
paper compelled its political editor to tout for fake indorsements of n nostrum. A man with an inside knowledge of the patent-medicine business made some investigations into this phase of the matter, and he declares that such procurement of testimonials became so established as to have the force of a system, only two Chicago papers being free from it. To·day, he adds, a similar “deal” could be made with half a dozen of that city’s dailies. It is disheartening to note that in the case of one important and high·class daily, the Pittsburg Gazette, a trial rejection of all patent. medicine advertising received absolutely no support or encouragement from the public; so the paper reverted to its old policy.
One might expect from the medical press freedom from such influences. The control is as complete, though exercised by a class of nostrums some· what differently exploited, but essentially the same. Only “ethical” prepa.rations are permitted in the representative medical press, that is, articles not advertised in the lay press. Yet this distinction is not strictly adhered to. “Syrup of Figs,” for instance, which makes widespread pretense in the dailies to be an extract of the fig, advertises in the medical journals for what it is, a preparation of senna. Antikamnia, an “ethical” proprietary compound, for a long time exploited itself to the profession by a campaign of ridiculous extravagance, and is to·day by the extent of its reckless use on the part of ignorant laymen a public menace. Recently an artie!~ announcing a startling new drug discovery and signed by a physician was offered to a standard medical journal, which declined it on learning thnt the drug was a proprietary preparation. The contribution was returned to the editor with an offer of payment at advertising rates if it were printed as editorial reading matter, only to be reject~d on the new basis. Subse.quently it appeared simultaneously in more than twenty medical publica.tions as rending matter. There are to-day very few medical publica.tions which do not carry advertisements conceived in the same spirit and making much the snme exhaustive claims ns the ordinary quack “ads” of the daily press, and still fewer that are free from promises to “cure” diseases which are incurable by any medicine. Thus the medical press is as strongly enmeshed by the “ethical” druggers as the lay press is by Paine, “Dr.” Kilmer, Lydia Pinkham, Dr. Hartman, “Hall” of the “red clause,” and the rest of the edifying band of life-savers, leaving no agency to refute the megaphone exploitation of the fraud. What opposition there is would naturally arise in the medical profession, but this is discounted by the proprietary interests.
The Doctors Are Investigating
“You attack us because we cure your patients,” is their charge. They assume always that the public has no grievance against them, or rather, they calmly ignore the public in the matter. In his address at the last convention of the Proprietary Association, the retiring president, W. A. Tal.bot of Piso’s Consumption Cure, turning his guns on the medical profession, delivered this astonishing sentiment:
“No argument favoring the publication of our formulas was ever uttered which does not apply with equal force to your prescriptions. It is pardon.able in you to want to know these formulas, for they are good. But you must not ask us to reveal these valuable secrets, to do what you would not do yourselves. The public and our law-makers do not want your secrets nor ours, and it would be a damage to them to ha1Je them.”
The physicians seem to have awakened, somewhat tardily, indeed, to counter-attack. The American Medical Association has organized a Coun.cil on Pharmacy and Chemistry to investigate and pass on the “ethi~l” preparations advertised to physicians, with a view to listing those wb1ch
9
are founrl to    be reputable and useful TJ1at tl · · d d
-. · us Is regar e as a directIt t)
assau on 1e propnetary mterests is suggested b tJ t ts
the verge of frenzy in some cases, emanatincr fro~ t~eo;ro es ‘ e oq~ent to ~an~facturers control. . Alre~dy the council has issued s:ru~r~:~:f~~~~c;r::~ 1ep01 ts on products of Imposmgly scientific nomenclature. and rno y t
follow.    ’ re are o
What One Druggist Is Doing
Largely f~r trade reason~ a few druggists have been fightin the nos.trums, but without any considerable effect Indeed •t · · ~
tb t 1 d . · , I IS surpnsmg to see
~ peop e are ~o eep!y Impressed with the advertising claims put forth duly as to be Impervious to warnings even from -t A t
· 1    exper B. cu -ratet th E
s ore, e cononuca Drug Company of Chicago st rt d ·
and displayed a sign in the winuow readincr · ‘ a e on a campaign
o ·
PLEASE DO NOT ASK US
ANY OLD
What is
PATENT
Worth?
MEDICINE
/<’01· you embarrass us, as our honest ans1cer must be that
IT IS WORTHLESS
1( you mean    to as7e at what price we sell it that is an entirely different proposition. ‘
When sick, consult a !J.OOd physician. It is the onl ro er course. A:zd pou ~ll find it cheaper in the enJ fha! self-medtcatton 1vtth worthless “patent” nostrums.

This was followed up by th , . f .
prominent nostrums that they ~::1esme: 8 In ormmg all applicants for the
was unable to get rid of ite wa: I~g m~!l~Y· Yet, with all this that trums comprise one· third f . s . pa en .-me Icme trade, and to-day nos.thirds of that of the averaoge~:~enlltnte busmess. They comprise about two.
. 1 ti . a s ore.
I.egJs a on IS the most b · -d .
Jlt’Deral public or the aw k o ~Ious/~~e .Y’ pen~ID~ the e~lightenment of the lion proceeds slow! a enmg o . 1e JOUrnalistic conscience. But legisla.lu practical termsya:n~2~~vo6oso~~amtst ~p:osition, which may be measured e last report of the Pro ;ie ‘ a s.a .e ~n the other side. I note in statement that “th P h tal!’ AssoCiations annual meeting the signifi.Most of the I . ~ t•eaviest expenses were incurred in legislative eg~s a Ion must be done by states, and we have seen
,
10
in the case of the Hall Catarrh cure contract how readily this may be con· trolled. .
Two government agencies, at least, lend themselves to the purposes of the patent-medicine makers. The Patent Office issues to them trade-mark registration (generally speaking, the convenient term “patent medicine” is a misnomer, as very few are patented) without inquiry into the nature of the article thus safeguarded against imitation. The Post-Office Depart· ment permits them the use of the mails. Except one particular line, the disgraceful “Weak Manhood” remedies, where excellent work has been done in throwing them out of the mails for fraud, the department bas done nothing in the matter of patent remedies, and has no present intention of doing anything; yet I believe that such action, powerful as would be the opposition developed, would be upheld by the courts on the same grounds that sustained the Post Office’s position in the recent case of “Robusto,” namely:
That the advertising and circular statements circulated through the mails were materially and substantially false, with the result of cheating and defrauding those into whose hands the statements come;
That, while the remedies did possess medicinal properties, these were not such as to carry out the cures promised;
That the advertiser knew he was deceiving;
That in the sale and distribution of his medicines .the complainant made no inquiry into the specific character of the disease in any individual case, but supplied the same remedies and prescribed the same mode of treatment to all alike.
Should the department apply these principles to the patent-medicine field generally, a number of conspicuous nostrums would cease to be patrons of Uncle Sam’s mail service.
Some states have made a good start in the matter of legislation, among them Michigan, which does not, however, enforce its recent strong law. Massachusetts, which has done more, through the admirable work of its State Board of Health, than any other agency to educate the public on the patent-medicine question, is unable to get a law restricting this trade. In New Hampshire, too, the proprietary interests have proven too strong, and the Mallonee bill was destroyed by the almost united opposition of a “red-clause” press. North Dakota proved more independent. .After Jan. I, 1906, all medicines sold in that state, except on physician’s prescriptions, which contain chloral, ergot, morphin, opium, cocain, bromin, iodin or any _ of their compounds or derivatives, or more than 5 per cent. of alcohol, .must so state on the label. When this bill became a law, the Proprietary Association of .America proceeded to blight the state by resolving that its members should offer no goods for sale there.
Boards of health in various parts of the country are doing valuable edu·
cational work, the North Dakota board having led in the legislation. The
Massachusetts, Connecticut and North Carolina boards have been active.
The New York State board has kept its hands off patent medicines, but the
Board of Pharmacy has made a cautious but promising beginning by
compelling all makers of powders containing cocain to put a poison label
on their goods; and it proposes to extend this ruling gradually to other
dangerous compositions.
Health Boards and .Analyses
It is somewhat surprising to find the Health Department of New York
City, in many respects the foremost in the country, making no use of care
fully and rather expensively acquired knowledge which would serve to pr11·

11
teet the public. More than two years ago analyses were made by the chemists of the department which showed dangerous quantities of cocain in a number of catarrh powders. These analyses have never been printed. Even the general nature of the information has been withheld. Should any citizen of New York going to the Health Department, have asked: “My wife is taking Birney’s Catarrh Powder; is it true that it’s a bad fhing?” the officials, with the knowledge at hand that the drug in question is a maker of cocain fiends, would have blandly emulated the Sphinx. Outside criticism of an overworked, undermanned and generally efficient department is liable to error through ignorance of the problems involved in its admin.istration; yet one cannot but believe that some form of warning against what is wisely admittedly a public menace would have been a wiser form of procedure than that which has heretofore been discovered by the formula, “policy of the department.”
Policies ·change and broaden under pressure of conditions. The Health Commissioner is now formulating a plan which, with the work of the chem.ists as a basis, shall check the trade in public poisons more or less con.cealed behind proprietary names. .
It is impossible, even in a series of articles, to attempt more than an exemplary treatment of the patent-medicine frauds. The most degraded and degrading, the “lost vitality” and “blood disease” cures, reeking of terroriza.tion and blackmail, cannot from their very nature be treated of in a lay journal. Many dangerous and health-destroying compounds will escape through sheer inconspicuousness. I can touch on only a few of those which may be regarded as typical: the alcohol stimulators, as represented by J:’eruna, Paine’s Celery Compound and Duffy’s Pure Malt Whiskey ( adver.tised as an exclusively medical preparation) ; the catarrh powders, which breed cocain slaves, and the opium-containing soothing syrups which stunt or kill helpless infants; the consumption cures, perhaps the most devilish of all, in that they destroy hope where hope is struggling against bitter odds for existence; the headache powders, which enslave so insidiously that the victim is ignorant of his own fate; the comparatively harmless fake as typified by that marvelous product of advertising effrontery, Liquozone; and, finally, the system of exploitation and testimonials on which the whole vast system of bunco rests, as on a flimsy but cunningly constructed foundation.

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Experimental Biology [Life Lines]

noreply@blogger.com (Rhoda) — Sun, 20 Apr 2014 03:08:00 +0000

I am very excited about the upcoming Experimental Biology conference that starts next weekend. I just looked through the Spring newsletter for the Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology section of the American Physiological Society. Check out the exciting programming in comparative physiology at this year’s conference:

Monday, April 28
10:30 AM – 12:30 PM
Featured Topic: Abstract-Driven Trainee Session

3:15 PM – 5:15 PM
Featured Topic: Comparative Physiology of Aging and Senescence

Tuesday, April 29
8:00 AM – 10:00 AM
CEPS Symposium: RNAseq Approaches to Understanding Extreme
Physiological Adaptations
Speakers: Brooke Harrison, Matt Andrews, Jason Podrabsky, Daniel Warren

10:30 AM – 12:30 PM
CEPS Symposium: Organismal Adaptation/Response to Hypoxic
Environments
Speakers: Tobias Wang, Paul Ponganis, Tatum Simonson, Allyson Hindle

3:15 PM – 5:15 PM
August Krogh Distinguished Lecture: Hibernation, Guts and Microbes:
Bringing Symbiosis into Animal Physiology
Speaker: Hannah Carey

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Cats beware… [Life Lines]

noreply@blogger.com (Rhoda) — Sun, 20 Apr 2014 02:33:00 +0000

Image from: bluecrossanimalhospital.ca

The FDA has issued a warning that Easter lilies are toxic to cats. According to veterinarian Dr. Melanie McLean at the US Food and Drug Administration ingestion of even a small portion of the leaves, pollen or flowers of the plant are very poisonous to cats. Initial complications include vomiting but then may lead to kidney failure and death if not treated. If you think your cat may have ingested a lily, then seek immediate medical attention for your pet.

Tiger, Asiatic, Day and Japanese Show lilies are also highly toxic to cats.

Dog owners take comfort, lilies are not a major threat to dogs other than some risk for developing an upset stomach.

Source:
CBS News

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Study: New fathers struggle with depression, need interventions, too [The Pump Handle]

noreply@blogger.com (Rhoda) — Sun, 20 Apr 2014 01:47:00 +0000

Women aren’t the only ones at risk for depression and in need of screening services when a new baby comes into their lives. Young fathers face significant mental health challenges as well, according to a new study.

Published in the May issue of Pediatrics, researchers found that fathers who live in the same households as their children experience a decrease in depressive symptoms in the period immediately before their children are born. However, depressive symptoms among young fathers, who were around 25 years old when they became fathers, increased an average of 68 percent throughout their children’s first five years of life.

The study notes that depressed fathers are more likely to experience parenting-related stress, more likely to use corporal punishment and neglect their children, and less likely to interact with their sons and daughters. As a result, their children may be at higher risk of social problems throughout life, psychiatric problems later in life, and of experiencing delays in language and reading development. According to lead author Craig Garfield, of Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, the study is the first to pinpoint when young fathers face an increased risk of depression, which could help inform more precise and targeted interventions.

“It’s not just new moms who need to be screened for depression, dads are at risk, too,” Garfield said in a news release. “Parental depression has a detrimental effect on kids, especially during those first key years of parent-infant attachment. We need to do a better job of helping young dads transition through that time period.”

To conduct the study, Garfield and his colleagues examined data from more than 10,600 young men who participated in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. The Pediatrics study found that young fathers who do not live with their children experienced high levels of depressive symptoms before their children are born, with such symptoms decreasing during the years of early fatherhood. That’s in contrast to fathers who live with their children — described as resident fathers in the study — who experience fewer symptoms before their children arrived and higher levels in the years after birth. Black and Hispanic young fathers experienced more depressive symptoms than white fathers — a finding that study authors warned may result in a “clinically significant rise” and may merit special attention.

Identifying and helping fathers struggling with depression could have a positive domino effect, improving health for the entire family, writes Garfield and co-authors Greg Duncan, Joshua Rutsohn, Thomas McDade, Emma Adam, Rebekah Levine Coley and P. Lindsay Chase-Lansdale. However, reaching such fathers and getting them into appropriate treatment is a challenge, as the study notes that men ages 18 to 44 years old are less likely than women to interact with the health care system, have a primary care doctor or have health insurance. Though, the Affordable Care Act could start improving those numbers. Plus, the study noted that fathers often accompany their children to pediatric visits, which could make such clinical settings an ideal place for reaching young fathers at risk.

“This is a wakeup call for anyone who knows a young man who has recently become a new father,” Garfield said. “Be aware of how he is doing during his transition into fatherhood. If he is feeling extreme anxiety or blues or not able to enjoy things in life as he previously did, encourage him to get help.”

To read the full study, visit Pediatrics.

Kim Krisberg is a freelance public health writer living in Austin, Texas, and has been writing about public health for more than a decade.

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Stanislaw Burzynski publishes 42.5% of one clinical trial [Respectful Insolence]

noreply@blogger.com (Rhoda) — Sun, 20 Apr 2014 00:12:00 +0000

Damn it.
After hearing the horrible news that Laura Hymas had died on the same day that I found out that the pro-quackery “health freedom” Alliance for Natural Health (ANH) was supporting a federal “right to try” bill, I thought it would just be a one-off post about Burzynski, his allies, and the human toll exacted by his cancer quackery. No such luck. The reason is that yesterday morning I awoke to e-mails and Tweets from multiple colleagues and bloggers making me aware of an article published in a journal that (once again) I had never heard of, Child’s Nervous System. The article is by—surprise! surprise!—Stanislaw Burzynski and the usual suspects at the Burzynski Clinic and Burzynski Research Institute and entitled The response and survival of children with recurrent diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma based on phase II study of antineoplastons A10 and AS2-1 in patients with brainstem glioma.
My first reaction was: Hmmmph. It looks as though Burzynski finally found a journal editor naive or ignorant enough to publish one of his clinical trials. Then I looked at the abstract and realized that I had jumped to a conclusion. Burzynski hasn’t published one of his phase II trials at all. He’s published only less than half of a phase II trial, as you will soon see. In fact, he’s published exactly 42.5% of one of his phase II clinical trials.

Looking over the methods, I noted that this is trial BT-11. That means that it’s one of the 72 clinical trials submitted by Burzynski in the mid-1990s in order to take advantage of FDA willingness to consider approving his clinical trials. This was a willingness forged in the furnace of Rep. Joe Barton’s constant flogging and investigating of the FDA and his frequent dragging of then FDA director David Kessler in front of his committee for some tender loving rhetoric about his “persecution” of Burzynski, interspersed with crying families of cancer patients who were afraid that the FDA might actually manage to convict Burzynski. Again, remember, these families honestly believed that Burzynski was responsible for their loved ones still being alive and that Burzynski was the only doctor who could save them from death due to their various advanced tumors of the brain and other organs. It’s not the patients that I castigate, rather, it’s Burzynski’s cynical use of these patients as “human shields” against the FDA. In any case, let me just refresh your memory about these 72 clinical trials, quoting the immortal words of Burzynski’s lawyer, Richard Jaffe:
CAN-1 [a "wastebasket" clinical trial by Burzynski approved by the FDA and earlier described by Jaffe as an "artifice, a vehicle we and the FDA created to legally give the patients Burzynski’s treatment"] allowed Burzynski to treat all his existing patients. That solved the patients’ problems, but not the clinic’s. A cancer clinic cannot survive on existing patients. It needs a constant flow of new patients. So in addition to getting the CAN-1 trial approved, we had to make sure Burzynski could treat new patients. Mindful that he would likely only get one chance to get them approved, Burzynski personally put together seventy-two protocols to treat every type of cancer the clinic had treated and everything Burzynski wanted to treat in the future…Miracle of miracles, all of Burzynski’s patients were now on FDA-approved clinical trials, and he would be able to treat almost any patient he would want to treat!
Now, more than 15 years later, we finally see one of these 72 trials published—sort of. There is far less to Burzynski’s clinical trial than meets the eye. After reading the study, my reaction to it was: Huh? That’s all you could come up with in over 15 years? Really?
I’ll take care of the formalities first. From the methods:
The study was designed as a single-arm, two-stage, phase II trial of ANP as monotherapy. The study was listed by the National Cancer Institute (NCT00003459). It was supervised by an independent Institutional Review Board (BRI-IRB, BCBT- 11). The study was performed
This “independent” IRB is, of course, the same IRB that is chaired by an old crony of Burzynski’s from Baylor who also happens to be the chair of the board of the Burzynski Research Institute. It’s also the same IRB that was recently roundly condemned in an FDA warning letter for abusing the single patient IND process, failing to provide adequate informed consent, and failing to protect patients interests and make sure that the risks of BRI clinical trials are minimized.
Of course, the line in the paper that leapt off the page at me was this one:
The protocol permitted admission of patients with brainstem glioma for whom standard curative treatments are not available. A total of 40 patients were enrolled, but the scope of this paper has been limited to the 17 RPDIPG patients.
So why isn’t Burzynski reporting on the other 23 patients? This is what I mean when I say that Burzynski is reporting less than half of a phase II trial: 17 patients out of 40, which equals 42.5% of the patients on that trial. RDIPG, by the way, stands for “recurrent pediatric diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma.” I also note that the inclusion criteria for the original BT-11 trial include “histologically confirmed (except if medically contraindicated) brain stem glioma that is unlikely to respond to existing therapy and for which no curative therapy exists.” So why limit it to just 17 patients? It’s not explained in the manuscript other than the sentence above. I’m also puzzled by the choice of dosage, in which the infusion rates of antineoplaston therapy were scaled according to the patient’s age, rather than the more standard method of calculating overall daily dose based on either body weight or body surface area and then simply administering that dose. It’s not necessarily wrong, but it’s nonstandard.
It’s also important to note that this is not a randomized trial. There is no control group. It’s more like a combined phase I/II trial than a strictly phase II trial given its lack of randomization and control group plus its dose escalation design. Again, this is not wrong; it’s how many early phase II trials are done. It’s just that, even if the trial were promising, it would not in any way constitute definitive evidence that antineoplastons are efficacious against brain tumors. In any case, I think I’ll just cut to the chase here and show you the results. Here’s Figure 4, a Kaplan-Meier survival curve showing overall survival (OS) and progression-free survival (PFS).
Not particularly impressive, is it? It sure doesn’t look like any sort of miracle cure. However, it should be noted that DIPG is a horrible tumor, and the median survival tends to be on the order of several months, with survival beyond two years rare—rare, but, as I note, not “never,” as Burzynski claims. Moreover, as dismal as this survival curve is, in fairness, one has to note that it’s better than typically reported for DIPG. (Yes, DIPG is just that bad.)
Still, there’s some rather deceptive reporting going on there. No, it’s not outright lies. However, it’s reporting that fails to put results in context. For example, Burzynski reports a complete response in 6% of patients. That would be one patient out of seventeen. That one patient, it would appear, is a patient with a grade I pilocytic astrocytoma. This is a tumor that is not considered to be malignant. No, seriously. It’s generally not considered a malignant tumor:
Juvenile pilocytic astrocytoma (JPA) is a rare childhood brain tumor. In most cases, the tumor is a benign, slow growing tumor that usually does not spread to surrounding brain tissue. Symptoms of a JPA will vary depending upon the size and location of the tumor. Most symptoms result from increased pressure on the brain and include headaches, nausea, vomiting, balance problems and vision abnormalities.
So, in reality, excluding this one patient Burzynski’s long term survival result, even among these seventeen patients, is, as one would expect for DIPG, zero. Not surprisingly, that same patient is the one who had what was described as a “complete response” (CR). Excluding that patient, as would be appropriate, makes Burzynski’s CR rate zero as well. In fact, there were two cases of pilocytic astrocytoma included with this group, and the other patient with this tumor type was reported as a partial response (more the 50% tumor shrinkage). So, even in this apparently cherry-picked group of patients, Burzynski’s results are not what they seem and not as impressive as he presents them. That’s leaving out the toxicity:
Safety assessments were analyzed based upon the total number of enrolled patients (n=17). Grade 4 toxicities including hypokalemia and fatigue occurred in 6 % and hypernatremia in 18% of the group. Grade 3 fatigue and urinary incontinence occurred in 6 % and somnolence in 12 %. In patient 2 (Table 2), grade 4 hypernatremia was detected when he was on mechanical ventilation in the intensive care unit. This patient received terminal care and was disconnected from the ventilator upon request of the members of his family. His attending physician determined brain tumor as the cause of death.
Remember the definition of grade 4 toxicity. According to the Common Terminology Criteria for Adverse Events (CTCAE), it’s toxicity that is potentially life-threatening, and grade 3 is severe, as in requiring treatment or even hospitalization. I’m also not convinced about this hypernatremia in that it’s listed as grade 4, but then Burzynski dismisses the patient’s death as being due to the brain tumor. Yet, clearly even from this description it seems as though the development of grade 4 hypernatremia is what prompted the family to decide to stop treating him and switch into the palliative care mode, disconnecting him from the ventilator. In any case, if you add up the toxicities, grade 3 or 4 toxicities occurred in 42% of patients. Contrary to how Burzynski’s treatment is represented, both by him and his supporters, this is hardly “nontoxic” therapy.
Finally, leave it to Burzynski’s supporters to sabotage him in their enthusiasm to “prove” what a genius he is. The ANP Coalition—remember these guys?—published a blog post the other day announcing with pride the publication of 17/40 (or 42.5%) of Burzynski’s clinical trial. In it, they exulted:
The results of this study depict a high level of efficacy along with a more than acceptable tolerance of ANP.
One of the article’s sterling successes is Jessica Ressel. You can meet Jessica under our website’s “Meet the Miracles” button.
Who remembers Jessica Ressel? I do. In fact, she played a prominent role in the very first movie made by everyone’s favorite Leni Riefenstahl to Dr. Burzynski’s—oh, never mind. I’m referring, of course, to Eric Merola’s first Burzynski “epic” that portrayed Burzynski as a misunderstood genius and “brave maverick doctor.” In fact, her diagnosis of pilocytic astrocytoma is very consistent with what her tumor looked like on imaging. Indeed, even two and a half years ago I thought that it looked like a small, odd tumor. Indeed, Burzynski’s description of the tumor in his paper does not jibe with what I saw when I watched Merola’s first movie about him. There, the tumor was small. In the paper, the the tumor was described as “tumor involving 72 % of pons at the baseline.” Go back and look at the images I took from the film and showed in my original post on Merola’s first movie. Does the lesion look as though it takes up 72% of any structure? Not to me, it doesn’t. It’s easily covered by a yellow “radiologist’s mark.” I will admit that I’m not a radiologist, in particular a neuroradiologist. Even so, the lesion shown on the scan that Eric Merola included in his medical records for his movie is small. Even a “dumb surgeon” such as myself can recognize that, and the largest measurement ever recorded for the tumor was 1.7 cm, with many times the measurement being recorded as well under 1 cm. This same “dumb surgeon” also recognized that there was something very strange about the tumor size measurements recorded during Ressel’s treatment. Again, go back and read my review if you want the details. (I love being able to say that, given that I wrote it two and a half years ago.) Suffice to say, Ressel’s case is not convincing evidence that antineoplastons are effective against DIPG.
The bottom line is that this “study” is nothing more than a typical ploy by Burzynski and his allies to convince the rubes that, alone of all the scientists studying such seemingly untreatable tumors, Burzynski can offer a chance of curing them. The problem, of course, is that there’s no evidence that he can. He’s only presenting 43% of his patients in this study. My guess is that the rest of the patients did poorly, and if that’s the case, then his real survival rates are probably less than 50% of what he is reporting because he’s excluded them from the denominator. That would bring his results right into line with everyone else’s—or even make them worse than average.
Then there are the scans shown in Figures 2 and 3. Look at them. They show different sections of the brain. (Use the eyes to compare.) Given that, they don’t actually demonstrate whether or not there is a response. There are a number of other oddities, too, such as how long it took to accrue so few patients, why the study is only now being published seven or eight years after the most recent data reported, and the like. Come to think of it, this isn’t even really 42.5% of a clinical trial, and even this undoubtedly carefully cherry picked segment of one of Burzynski’s 72 phase II trials is completely underwhelming.
I’ll conclude by pointing out that, upon seeing this study, I wrote an e-mail to Concezio Di Rocco, the editor of Child’s Nervous System, expressing many of these concerns in a less “insolent” fashion. Here was his response:
Thank you for your letter. I have already asked some eminent neuroncologists to write a comment in the direction you suggest.
Bob Blaskiewicz also wrote an e-mail to the editor, and this was the response he got:
I have invited eminent neurooncologists to write a comment to be added to the articles. Unfortunately the reviewers of the journal failed to provide their promised evaluation so that after several months there were “no negative comments” to justify rejection. Now I look for receiving comments from Canada and UK to be published in the journal. Should you be willing to contribute you are welcome.
I’m not entirely sure how to interpret this, but this seems to be saying that Burzynski’s article was not peer-reviewed. Basically, it appears that Burzynski submitted his article, and the editor, not getting any comments back from his peer reviewers, just decided to publish it. This suggests that the policy of his journal is that the default action for a manuscript is to publish unless there are negative comments. I’ve never heard of a journal with such a policy before, which makes me wonder if I’m missing or misinterpreting something here. Either way, I’m not surprised. The only way Burzynski can publish his tripe is if he slips his study into a journal with—shall we say?—less than rigorous editorial standards.
Same as it ever was, which is why my final reaction remains: Hmmmph. It looks as though Burzynski finally found a journal editor naive or ignorant enough to publish one of his crappy clinical trials.

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Patients, doctors embracing alternative medicine in battle against cancer? Not so much. [Respectful Insolence]

noreply@blogger.com (Rhoda) — Sat, 19 Apr 2014 23:40:00 +0000

In the well over nine years that I’ve been blogging, there’s one tried and true, completely reliable topic to blog about, one that I can almost always find. I’m referring, of course, to the credulous news story about pseudoscience. The pseudoscience can be quackery, creationism, anthropogenic global warming denialist arguments, or whatever; inevitably, there will be some journalist, somewhere, who will fall for it and write a story that basically toes the line that supporters of pseudoscience like to see. Given that I pay the most attention to medicine, I notice this phenomenon the most when applied to quackery and, as I like to call it, quackademic medicine.
Two messages are constant in such credulous stories about the infiltration of quackery into mainstream medicine. The first message is that it’s not quackery, even though you and I know that it is. The second message is that it’s becoming enormously popular, embraced not just by patients but by physicians, the latter of whom are putting their imprimatur of medical authority on these modalities. The subtext to these two messages is that all these “alternative” treatments, this “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), this “integrative medicine” is something new and wonderful that should be not just tolerated but celebrated. A perfect example of such lazy, credulous reporting popped up in my Google Alerts yesterday. At first I thought I’d ignore it, but it kept irritating me, to the point that I decided, what the heck, it’s deserving of some not-so-Respectful Insolence. And so it shall receive some.

The article, by Elizabeth Payne, appeared in The Ottawa Citizen under the title, Patients, doctors embracing alternative medicine in battle against cancer: Naturopathy, acupuncture among techniques increasingly being used alongside established treatments. Yes, I’m sure regular readers can tell that such a title is akin to waving the proverbial red cape in front of the bull. Unfortunately, the story doesn’t “disappoint.” It’s every bit the mess I expected it to be when I read the title. It begins with the story of a woo-loving patient named Jennifer Miriguay, who is in the middle of her second battle with breast cancer and wanted to “take control of her health.” Man, I hate that cliche, but it’s a cliche that seems to appear in just about every one of these articles about the infiltration of quackery into mainstream medicine. Why is it that embracing quackery is “taking control of your health”? On a strictly trivial level, I suppose that it is, but in exactly the wrong way. Think of it this way. Taking control of your health does not require embracing quackery, but the unrelenting message from those who promote quackery is that it does and infiltrates the discourse about CAM or “integrative medicine,” or whatever the term du jour is. This embrace of quackery led to:
Her appointment with a naturopath at the Ottawa Integrative Cancer Centre was a “watershed,” she says. But Miriguay said she feared her oncologist wouldn’t be as positive about her embrace of naturopathy and acupuncture while being treated for metastatic breast cancer.
She was wrong. Her doctor didn’t balk, telling her he wished all his patients would take diet and nutrition as seriously.
The 41-year-old mother of two is part of a quiet, but significant, shift that is breaking down walls between traditional medicine and complementary therapies for treating cancer.
It’s a movement cancer patients have long pushed for, often to be met with negative or uncertain responses from their doctors. But that is changing. And a nondescript Hintonburg clinic is part of the shift.
No, it’s a shift that is breaking down the walls between quackery and science-based medicine by “integrating” quackery with conventional medicine. Contrary to what this writer seems to think, this is not a good thing. Even worse is that this article reads far more like an advertisement for the Ottawa Integrative Cancer Centre (OICC) than it does a news story. In fact, it reads like a PR reaction to a negative story that circulated about the clinic last week. The story mentions that a patient died after being taken from the clinic to a hospital, but then goes right into a statement that the police had determined that the death of a patient in the late stages of cancer was not suspicious. The original story appeared on April 4, and I haven’t been able to find out much since then. I can only assume that the authorities didn’t find anything. Patients with advanced cancer are prone to dying suddenly, whether they’re undergoing conventional therapy or naturopathic therapy. Without knowing the specifics of what treatments this patient was undergoing, I simply can’t comment.
I can comment, however, on this:
The clinic is supported by doctors, including Shailendra Verma, a medical oncologist at The Ottawa Hospital, who sees the importance to patients of breaking down barriers between conventional and complementary cancer therapies. It is also supported by the Ottawa Regional Cancer Foundation.
Verma, who is a scientific adviser to OICC, calls it a much-needed bridge.
“For far too long, disciplines have worked in isolation without communication and our patients have often felt caught between differing therapeutic philosophies, often to their detriment.”
I have no problem with legitimate scientific and medical disciplines communicating, the better to serve and care for patients. In fact, I applaud and encourage it. It’s often been true in the past that different specialties work in their own little silos, not communicating adequately. This is becoming less and less true, as cancer care becomes more and more interdisciplinary, but that’s not the point, and that’s not what bothers me. Where I have a problem is when that “communication” involves lending legitimacy to pseudoscience, such as the various forms of quackery that are at the heart of naturopathy, such that they are treated as co-equals with science-based medicine. It needs to be emphasized that these “differing therapeutic philosophies” have an incredibly wide chasm between them. It’s the difference between science and pseudoscience, medicine and quackery. What’s detrimental, in this case, is not shutting out naturopaths. It’s letting them in and treating them as legitimate health care professionals.
Given this credulous advertisement for the OICC, I thought I’d mosey on over to its website and see what sorts of treatments it offers. Sadly, I wasn’t surprised. Certainly, there is the usual stuff, like exercise, massage therapy, “psychosocial support,” yoga, lymphedema and lymphatic drainage, and “nutrition.” In addition to this seemingly benign, “gateway” woo, there’s naturopathy, a veritable cornucopia of different quack techniques based on pseudoscience, vitalism, and prescientific thinking; acupuncture (of course!); and reflexology (or, as I like to call it, a foot and hand massage with delusions of grandeur).
There’s more than just that, though. The OICC offers intravenous vitamin C therapy, which is unapproved, unproven, and, as administered by naturopaths, basically cancer quackery. Intravenous vitamin C, however, isn’t what surprised me. What surprised me is that the OICC offers intravenous dichloroacetate (DCA). You remember DCA, don’t you? It’s a small molecule drug that was tested in an animal model of cancer and had impressive anticancer activity in that model. In response to that rodent study, scammers popped up selling DCA to desperate cancer patients. The man, Jim Tassano, was a pesticide salesman who, as far as I can tell, purchased DCA from China and synthesized some of it on his own. (It’s a simple molecule, not that difficult to make for a chemist.) Ultimately, he was shut down by the FDA, but who knows what damage he did in the meantime?
These patients self-reported their results but, as all too often is the case in such self-selected support groups, they didn’t have an understanding of cancer, how to determine response, or clinical trials, which led even the best educated among them to misinterpret their results. Indeed, a husband-wife team in Edmonton even began offering DCA themselves. Ultimately, there was a human clinical trial, a phase I trial in glioblastoma. The results were not unpromising, but they were hardly earth-shattering. At the time, I pointed out how initially highly promising results in animal studies all too often disappoint in actual human studies. It happens. In fact, it happens far more often than the same miraculous results are observed in human clinical trials. That’s why we academic physicians have learned to temper our optimism and be very skeptical of preclinical studies in animals.
And the OICC is administering it to cancer patients. I don’t know what the law regarding approval of drugs and off-label prescribing is, but this is off-label prescribing on par with Stanislaw Burzynski prescribing phenylbutyrate off-label for cancer, in order to generate antineoplastons. There’s no strong evidence (yet) that DCA is effective against advanced cancers, just a preliminary phase I trial that produced biochemical evidence suggesting possible efficacy. There are some ongoing clinical trials right now, two in head and neck cancer. There’s a study that was terminated for “higher than expected risk and safety concerns the study should be closed” and a study that was withdrawn before it started accruing.
In other words, there’s no justification for anyone, much less a bunch of naturopaths at the OICC, to be administering DCA to cancer patients outside of the context of a clinical trial.
Finally, it turns out that we’ve met the executive director before Dugald Seely, ND, FABNO, who practices the “integrative” modality known as “naturopathic oncology,” or, as I like to call it, “integrating” cancer quackery into oncology, which Seely reported, although not using such language. He’s also tried to convince people that adding naturopathic treatment to the treatment of cardiovascular disease can result in improved Framingham risk scores. It didn’t, at least not as touted.
So what we have, in the end, is an article that is, in effect, an advertisement for the OICC, that ignores just how much quackery is in “naturopathic oncology,” and that touts what naturopaths told the reporter, namely how “integrative medicine” and alternative therapies are becoming mainstream. There is a grain of truth in that; otherwise, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing. But, make no mistake, it’s a minority of physicians who embrace this pseudoscience. The problem is that the vast majority of physicians, even as they realize it’s pseudoscience, are shruggies and do nothing about it.

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Diabetes complications are falling while number of cases continues to rise

noreply@blogger.com (Rhoda) — Sat, 19 Apr 2014 21:51:00 +0000

Two reports released this week shed light on the current state of type 2 diabetes in this country, and their conclusions are both promising and sobering. First, the good news: An article in The New England Journal of Medicine shows that rates of diabetes-related problems like heart attack, stroke, and lower-limb amputation are down by more than 50% over the last two decades.
Now the bad news: during the same time period, the number of people with diabetes has soared, according to a report in the Annals of Internal Medicine. In the early 1990s, 5.5% of adults had diabetes. By 2010, the number had nearly doubled, to 9.3%. That translates into about 21 million American adults living with diabetes.
Although Americans are doing a better job of controlling their diabetes, they’re falling far short at preventing it. “The major reason why the prevalence of diabetes is going up is an increase in the number of people who are overweight and obese,” explains Dr. Osama Hamdy, medical director of the Obesity Clinical Program at the Harvard-affiliated Joslin Diabetes Center and author of The Diabetes Breakthrough, a newly published book from Harvard Health Publications.
Nearly 70% of Americans are overweight or obese. And unless something is done to reverse this trend, millions more could edge closer to diabetes.
The obesity–diabetes connection
To describe how being overweight contributes to type 2 diabetes, Dr. Hamdy uses an automotive analogy. “You have more tissue in your body, so you require more glucose [sugar]. Just as if you have a bigger car, you need more gas,” he says. Insulin—the hormone that moves glucose from the blood into the tissues for use and storage—is like the key to that car.
The more sugar that enters the blood, the more insulin is needed to drive it to its intended destination. The pancreas can pump out extra insulin to meet the need, but over time, the body becomes increasingly less sensitive to it and the pancreas eventually reaches its insulin-producing limit. “Then you get diagnosed with type 2 diabetes,” Dr. Hamdy says.
The upside is that the process can be reversed. When you lose weight, you have less tissue, which means you need less sugar—and therefore less insulin. “You become more efficient, like a hybrid car,” says Dr. Hamdy.
In his own research, he’s found that losing just 7% of your body weight can improve insulin sensitivity by about 57%—more than diabetes drugs can usually do. “What we have seen is that once people start to lose weight in the very early stages of diabetes, they can actually reverse the entire course of the disease,” Dr. Hamdy says.
Minor changes, big results
The ability to reverse diabetes might seem dramatic, but the lifestyle changes needed to achieve it aren’t. The cornerstones of diabetes prevention—diet and exercise—can be easily incorporated into even the most hectic schedule.
Take exercise, for example. “Most people don’t know that if you do short bouts of exercise it is even more efficient than if you do longer bouts,” says Dr. Hamdy. People who can’t carve out time to get to the gym could actually see greater results just by incorporating three 10-minute exercise sessions into their everyday routine.
Here’s a sample schedule:
In the morning when you wake up, stretch for 10 minutes.
After you eat lunch, take a brisk 10-minute walk.
After dinner, strength train with light hand weights or an exercise band for 10 minutes.
Those three 10-minute sessions provide stretching, aerobics, and strength training—all essential components of a well-rounded workout. And if you do them every day, they add up to 210 minutes of activity a week.
An unhealthy diet can also be transformed with a couple of basic fixes. One is to divide your plate into three sections:
Fill one with lean protein—fish, legumes, beans, tofu, or skinless chicken
Fill another with green vegetables—spinach, broccoli, kale, or Brussels sprouts
Fill the third with whole grains—whole-wheat bread, brown rice, quinoa, etc.
The other part of the diet fix is learning how to listen to hunger and satisfaction cues to control portion sizes. Dr. Hamdy recommends assessing your hunger based on a five-point scale:
Starving
Hungry
Ok—satisfied
Full
Stuffed
The goal should be to sit down to a meal when you’re hungry, and stop eating when you’re satisfied.
Preventing diabetes can be done, but it takes a real commitment to change. And until more people are willing to change their eating and exercise habits—and pass those habits on to their children—the obesity and diabetes rates will continue to rise.

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Ceremonies, remembrances mark one-year anniversary of Boston Marathon bombing

noreply@blogger.com (Rhoda) — Wed, 16 Apr 2014 23:56:00 +0000

One year ago today, the detonation of two improvised bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon killed three people, injured more than 260 others, and shattered a day traditionally filled with joy and camaraderie. Although the bombing immediately extinguished the celebration, it sparked an outpouring of extraordinary work and compassion that continues to this day.
Residents of Boston, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and beyond rallied to help those injured by the bombs. It is a testament to the extraordinary care and preparation by first responders and staff members at all Boston-area hospitals that only three people died.
Many of the wounded were taken to teaching hospitals affiliated with Harvard Medical School: Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, and Boston Children’s Hospital. Physicians at Mass Eye and Ear helped those suffering from serious blast injuries. During the following weeks and months, clinicians at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital and McLean Hospital helped others recover. (Many of these institutions are marking the anniversary with a variety of events.)
“Not one single person transported to our hospitals on the day of the bombings died,” said Dr. Jeffrey Flier, Dean of Harvard Medical School, in open letter to the HMS community. “Hundreds of hospital personnel, including some third-year HMS students who are graduating this year, responded in droves, doing what the medical profession has always been called upon to do—helping and healing, relieving suffering and saving lives. They followed their impulse to serve, to comfort and to heal.”
In an article written for Harvard Medicine News, M.R.F. Buckley describes how staff members at Harvard-affiliated hospitals responded to the bombings.
In his book Code Blue: The Making of an Emergency Physician, Dr. Michael J. VanRooyen, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and an emergency department physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, wrote about the day of the bombing and its aftermath. You can read his account here.
For a different perspective, John Hockenberry, host of the NPR Radio show The Takeaway, looks at how Boston has recovered from the bombing. He says that a recent report about the emergency response to the explosions at last year’s marathon finish line found that the city of Boston “showed strength, resilience, and even defiance in the wake of the attack.”
One year after this senseless tragedy, the healing continues. Our hearts and prayers go out to those who lost a loved one or who themselves still bear physical and emotional scars from April 15, 2013.

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How to Achieve Good Life and Fitness

noreply@blogger.com (Rhoda) — Mon, 14 Apr 2014 06:17:00 +0000

Amazon Price: $14.99 $12.87 You save: $2.12 (14%). (as of 04/11/2014 9:54 am - Details). Product prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on the Amazon site at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product.
In a world infatuated with junk food and fad diets, why have we overlooked the simple instructions provided in the Bible that have guided people for thousands of years toward better health? You don’t have to be Jewish or a Christian to find wisdom for healthier living in this doctor’s scripturally based book on eating and feeling better, and living longer. You’ll learn the truth about grains and nuts, and the ins and outs of meat, fat and sweeteners. Discover why beverages can be the elixirs of life or death. The principles here will help anyone who is sick and tired of feeling sick and tired find energy, freedom from illness and more vibrant health.
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“Making a healthy shift in diet can be tough. Julie provides the tools you need to make the change and have healing foods taste great.”
— Dr. John Gray, New York Times best-selling author of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus
“This book is indispensable for anyone wanting to get to the root of illness. Extremely well written and documented, Julie’s book makes it easy to learn how to reverse inflammation naturally.”
— Zoltan P. Rona, M.D., M.Sc., author of Vitamin D: The Sunshine Vitamin
Did you know that virtually every health condition from asthma to irritable bowel syndrome is linked to inflammation? When inflammation gets out of control, the result is pain and discomfort—and it’s a phenomenon that’s on the rise. If you’re one of the millions of people who have been affected by allergies, diabetes, skin disorders, heart disease, arthritis, or any other condition ending in “-itis,” then you know firsthand what havoc inflammation can cause. In Meals That Heal Inflammation, television personality and registered holistic nutritionist Julie Daniluk shows you how to conquer these health conditions with foods that will make you feel fantastic.
This comprehensive book is packed with meals that can assist the body’s healing process—all while treating your taste buds to new and delicious flavors. The recipes, from healing teas to balanced meals and tempting desserts, are simple to make. Whether it’s the savory cranberry quinoa salad or the sumptuous key lime pie, every recipe in this book contains foods that naturally heal inflammation.
Extensively researched and full of reference charts, diagnostic quizzes, food comparison lists, and the latest information about the healing properties of everyday foods, Meals That Heal Inflammation is an essential addition to every kitchen.
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The Filtrete Healthy Living filter not only vastly improves the air quality in your home, it also keeps your air conditioning and heating systems running efficiently, saving on utilities and maintenance costs. The electrostatic filter attracts and captures airborne household dust, lint, dust-mite debris, mold spores, pollen, pet dander, smoke, bacteria, and particles that can carry viruses. With each pass through the specially pleated filter, the air in your living space improves, making for a healthier home environment. This high-performance filter outperforms comparable non-electrostatic fiberglass and washable and reusable one-inch filters.
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Amazon Price: $24.95 $18.96 You save: $5.99 (24%). (as of 04/11/2014 9:55 am - Details). Product prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on the Amazon site at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product.
"What would you say if I told you that the secret to healthy, vigorous, and disease-free living might be as simple as knowing your blood type," ask Dr. Peter D'Adamo and Catherine Whitney, and in Eat Right 4 Your Type, they shows us the simple answer.
If you've ever suspected that not everyone should eat the same thing or do the same exercise, you're right. In fact, what foods we absorb well and how our bodies handle stress differ with each blood type.
Your blood type reflects your internal chemistry. It is the key that unlocks the mysteries of disease, longevity, fitness, and emotional strength. It determines your susceptibility to illness, the foods you should eat, and ways to avoid the most troubling health problems.
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which vitamins and supplements to emphasize or avoid;
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whether your stress goes to your muscles or your nervous system;
whether your stress is relieved better through aerobics or meditation;
whether you should walk, swim or play tennis or golf as your mode of exercise;
how knowing your blood type can help you avoid many common viruses and infections;
how knowing your blood type can help you fight back against life-threatening diseases;
how to slow down the aging process by avoiding factors specific to your blood type that cause rapid cell deterioration.
Eat Right 4 Your Type provides a clear, simple life plan that anyone can follow and suggests the easiest ways to determine your blood type and diet for your blood type. Here is a breakthrough book that will change the way we eat and live.
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Smoke and mirrors and women, Oh my

noreply@blogger.com (Rhoda) — Mon, 14 Apr 2014 06:06:00 +0000

by Katherine L. Record
Last week, the Supreme Court attracted lots of attention when it heard arguments about whether a corporation can exclude mandatory preventive benefits from its employee health plan, based on a religious objection to certain types of healthcare.
This is a tale as old as time; religion has long been the basis for opposition to reproductive (i.e., women’s) health – including the preventive healthcare now in question, contraception.
Yet this argument has nothing to do with government infringement on the practice of religion.
In fact, the corporation, Hobby Lobby, covered two of the four contraceptive devices in dispute until its lawyers were actually arguing the issue in court, apparently to little detriment to the company’s faith in God. What’s more, Hobby Lobby’s 401(k) includes more than $73 million invested in the companies that produce these objectionable contraceptives (e.g., intrauterine devices, emergency contraception).
This has not stopped Hobby Lobby from arguing that the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is threatening its freedom, as a corporation, to practice religion.
This is a clever argument. We take religious freedom seriously, as we should. Masking coverage of FDA-approved contraceptives, as the ACA requires, as an infringement on faith is catchy. Nonetheless, it is nothing more than smoke and mirrors, which we, as attorneys, have a knack for creating.
Practicing law is often a matter of distilling a problem into sterile elements and stringing them together to form a line of reasoning that favors a given conclusion. Generally, this allows judges to apply the law with an even hand, no matter how complicated life gets.
Yet it also allows us to paint an issue as something it is not. This is particularly problematic when the issue is inequality, a concept lawyers have masqueraded for years (justifying slaves as property, segregation, limited voting rights, a narrow definition of marriage).
Last week we did it again. Here’s the picture Hobby Lobby painted:
The ACA’s requirement that most health plans cover preventive services, including all FDA-approved contraception, violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA). RFRA is a federal law that bars Congress from enacting a law that substantially burdens religious practice, even if it generally applies to all faiths, which passes muster under the First Amendment. In other words, RFRA creates more robust protection of religious freedom than the First Amendment.
Let’s break it down:
(1) RFRA protects the corporation’s right to practice religion just as it does a person’s right to practice (i.e., a corporation is a person, which is the case under the First Amendment, but has never been treated as such under this federal law);
(2) covering certain types of contraception substantially burdens this corporation’s religious practice; and
(3) the government does not have a compelling interest that justifies this insufficiently narrowly tailored intrusion into the company’s faith.
Sounds good, right?
It did to the Court. Last week, the attorney representing the United States and the Justices of the Court focused on this argument just as Hobby Lobby painted it, waxing poetic on statutory interpretation, principles of corporation law, the distinction between for-profit and non-profit tax status, and the intention of Congress as it existed in 1993 – when it enacted RFRA to protect a “person’s” right to religious practice.
All of this is irrelevant.
The legal profession is being dishonest by cloaking the real issue in legal doctrine. Hobby Lobby paints contraceptives as the Scarlett letter of the ACA, alleging that coverage of some types disrupts their Christian faith. Yet the ACA requires coverage of all FDA-approved contraception to protect women’s health – not to promote sex that does not produce offspring. In fact, 98% of sexually active Catholic women use contraception, yet the Catholic Church marches on.
As it turns out, healthcare is healthcare, even if you have a uterus.
Women who do not space out pregnancies are at higher risk for adverse outcomes – both for the mother and the child. Women who get pregnant accidentally – whether unintentionally or unwillingly, are more likely to give birth prematurely, to develop depression, to avoid prenatal care.
Moreover, some women require contraception for reasons entirely unrelated to conception (e.g., amenorrhea or menstrual irregularities, fibroids, endometriosis). And not all women can take the kind of contraception Hobby Lobby deems pious (e.g., an intrauterine device can be medically necessary if a woman cannot take the pill).
In short, women and children are healthier when medically indicated contraception is available – which is why contraception is a healthcare benefit. Requiring companies to offer the same level of healthcare to both female and male employees does not impede religious autonomy, it keeps the workforce healthy.
In June, the Supreme Court will issue a ruling couched in terms of religious autonomy. Yet it will not affect religious practice, Hobby Lobby’s or otherwise. Rather, the Court will determine whether an employer can charge women more than men for preventive services (i.e., provide comprehensive coverage for men and partial coverage for women). In other words, the Court is once again considering equality, masqueraded as a religious threat.
Are women sufficiently person-like to access the same degree of medical coverage as men? The Court very well might say no.
Fortunately, the law is not a foregone conclusion. Indeed, over time, the Court has reversed itself on matters once considered predetermined by our forefathers (e.g., the federal ban on gay marriage, criminalization of sodomy, and the status of black persons as, well, persons). Women might not be equal to men quite yet, but there is hope.
Katherine L. Record is the Senior Fellow at the Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation (CHLPI) at Harvard Law School and a member of the Our Bodies Ourselves board of directors. This post was previously published on Harvard Law School’s Petrie Flom Center Bill of Health blog.

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Why is contraception a health problem for all

noreply@blogger.com (Rhoda) — Mon, 14 Apr 2014 06:05:00 +0000

Photo “ritual” by Monik Markus used under CC BY-2.0 from https://flic.kr/p/8YaubV
Some of the media coverage of Tuesday’s arguments before the Supreme Courton the contraception mandate tended to pit women’s rights activists against social conservatives, making contraception seem like a lifestyle choice that only benefits some women — you know, the ones who have sex.
What often gets lost in the debate is why contraception is considered a preventive health issue — and why treating it as such is beneficial for everyone.
During the healthcare debate, the Department of Health and Human Services charged the Institute of Medicine (IOM) with reviewing preventive services that are important to public health and well-being, and recommending which ones should be considered in the development of comprehensive guidelines.
IOM came up with this evidence-based list of preventive services for adults and children, all of which are now covered by insurers with no required co-payment. Take a look at the IOM report, which explains the selection process.
For women, this includes annual well-woman visits, testing for STIs and HIV, support for breastfeeding, and screening and counseling for domestic violence.
It also includes FDA-approved contraception methods, as well as patient education and counseling on contraception. What makes contraception a health issue? Well, with all due respect to Mike Huckabee, it’s not about women’s libidos.
Here’s the deal: When women use contraception, they can avoid unwanted pregnancies and space planned pregnancies to promote optimal birth outcomes.
When a pregnancy is planned, women can start prenatal care, including increasing their intake of folic acid; work with their healthcare providers to address relevant medical conditions, as well as substance abuse; and take other steps that lead to healthier outcomes for both the mother and the infant.
Pregnancies that are unplanned are more likely to be affected by delayed prenatal care, maternal depression, low birth weight, poorer childhood physical and mental health, and other complications. Breastfeeding rates are also lower after unintended pregnancies.
Social conservatives should also take note that 40 percent of unintended pregnancies end in abortion. And there is an economic cost: Two-thirds of unintended pregnancies are paid for by publicly funded insurance programs, usually Medicaid. For more information, Guttmacher Institute has a terrific fact sheet on unintended pregnancies that explains the incidence rate, demographics, outcomes and costs.
When you look at the facts, contraception is smart public health policy.
Of course, for some women, birth control is essential for other health reasons, including acne, fibroids, endometriosis and to reduce problems associated with irregular or very heavy periods.
Despite the proven health benefits — and the benefits to society as a whole — Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood claim that the requirement to provide health insurance that includes no-cost contraception violates their religious freedom.
Not surprisingly, the Court’s three female justices were most skeptical of their position. As Jeffrey Toobin writes in The New Yorker:
After Paul Clement, the lawyer for Hobby Lobby, began his argument, twenty-eight of the first thirty-two questions to him came from Ruth Bader Ginsburg (four questions), Sonia Sotomayor (eleven), and Elena Kagan (thirteen). The queries varied, of course, but they were all variations on a theme. The trio saw the case from the perspective of the women employees. They regarded the employer as the party in the case with the money and the power. Sotomayor asked, “Is your claim limited to sensitive materials like contraceptives, or does it include items like blood transfusion, vaccines? For some religions, products made of pork? Is any claim under your theory that has a religious basis, could an employer preclude the use of those items as well?” Clement hedged in response. When Clement asserted that Hobby Lobby’s owners, because of their Christian values, did care about making sure that their employees had health insurance, Kagan shot back:
“I’m sure they want to be good employers. But again, that’s a different thing than saying that their religious beliefs mandate them to provide health insurance, because here Congress has said that the health insurance that they’re providing is not adequate, it’s not the full package.”
At Talking Points Memo, Sahil Kapur wrote:
The most forceful was Justice Elena Kagan, who repeatedly asked aggressive questions throughout the 90-minute argument about the legal dangers of exempting certain entities from laws on the basis of religion.
“There are quite a number of medical treatments that religious groups object to,” she said, positing that a ruling against the Obama administration could empower business owners to seek exemptions from laws about sex discrimination, family leave and the minimum wage. “You’d see religious objectors come out of the woodwork,” Kagan warned, arguing that it’s problematic for judges to test the centrality of a belief to a religion or the sincerity of beliefs that are invoked in court.
Much of the argument also centers around whether companies really have religious freedom, or if that really only applies to people — whether corporations count as “people” has been a major issue before the Court in the recent past. In “The Hobby Lobby Case Represents The Worst Kind Of Anti-Choice Arrogance,” Sarah Erdreich writes:
But even if the owners do have a religious commitment, Hobby Lobby is not pretending that it is a religion. It is a business. That any business should have power over what can literally be the life-and-death health decisions of its employees, well, that’s another issue for another day. But as long as Hobby Lobby sells its supplies to saints and sinners alike, it has no business questioning what its employees do when they go to see the doctor.
Access to birth control is important for everyone — for preventing pregnancies, and to allow women and families to best time and plan healthy pregnancies. Hopefully the male members of the Supreme Court will see it that way, too.
To catch up on the issue, check out this coverage:
Argument recap: One hearing, two dramas
Birth control, business, and religious beliefs: In Plain English
Supreme Court Appears Divided in Contraceptive Coverage Cases
Obama Administration’s Weak Defense May Prove To Be Birth Control Benefit’s Achilles Heel
Justices Divide By Gender In Hobby Lobby Contraception Case

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Experts will discuss women's health movement and health reform

noreply@blogger.com (Rhoda) — Mon, 14 Apr 2014 06:04:00 +0000

"We are a very rich country, but we have medical care in a way that unconscionable rationed."
Judy Norsigian, our body co founder and CEO, restrain ourselves not in March of this year 6 discussion on women's health with Sonia Pressman Fuentes, national organization for women (NOW) co-founder.
Luz Corcuera, Program Director of the healthy start coalition of manatee, Florida, is home to the dynamic conversation, includes the history of the health of the women's movement and the establishment of our body us and now, as well as current health care issues, the impact of poverty on health and much more.
About halfway, Fuentes talks about joining the equal employment opportunity Commission in the late 1960s and is the first female lawyer in the lawyer Office, where they dislike encountered against the sex to enforce discrimination to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, gender or nationality.
Fuentes was an activist at the time, but one, she often found herself capable of representing the interests of women a few women in the Commission.
' When I have always a problem always said was, 'what about discrimination on grounds of sex?' "So my boss, the General Council, took me to sex offender, because I raised the question of discrimination on grounds of sex."
The whole interview is good value to watch. Thanks to Manatee educational TV in Florida to host of the entertainment!

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