Author Page for davenoon

Where half-assed knowledge is further diluted into nothingness…

Well, this is fantastic news if you were wondering how to squander $80,000 in four short years:

The American Medical College of Homeopathy’s (AMCofH) new four-year doctoral program is the first of its kind in the country and will provide the most comprehensive homeopathic medical training in North America. The college will matriculate its first freshman class for this unique program beginning in 2011 in Phoenix, Arizona. . . .

Those who graduate from the doctoral program will be qualified to diagnose illnesses and treat them with homeopathic medicine. This represents another major step forward in the establishment of integrative medical training in the United States.

For those who aren’t familiar with the terms, “integrative” and “complimentary” medicine are recent euphemisms for the blending of proper science with hilariously inept theories about the origins and treatment of disease. The folks at Science-Based Medicine have written extensively about this Trojan Horse (see here and here, for instance), and there seems to be no end lately to the list of hospitals, medical schools, and major research institutions that have for some reason chosen to accommodate implausible and evidence-free treatment modalities like homeopathy, reflexology, and energy therapy. Some offer continuing education courses (e.g., Harvard’s CME in acupuncture); some serve as hosts for centers in the study of so-called “complimentary and alternative medicine”; some (like the Mayo Clinic) publish entire books that offer undeserved dignity to a whole array of silly interventions. For promoters of “alternative” medicine, of course, these arrangements offer numerous advantages, including the affiliation with scientific disciplines that practitioners of the various crafts ultimately reject.  (Aside from a few extra coins, I don’t know what benefits the host institutions receive from the deal.  Imagine, for example, if a highly respected graduate institution — say, the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce — partnered up with The Weekly Standard and offered courses in the Green Lantern Theory.  We’d wonder if the good people of Kentucky had gone insane.  Then we’d remember Rand Paul, the Creation Museum, and the rest of it, and we’d realize that yes, the good people of Kentucky already are insane.  But still.)

Along these lines, the AMCoH apparently has a relationship with Arizona State University’s nursing program, thorough which students can receive a joint degree in homeopathy and clinical research management.  And as with most contemporary colleges of naturopathy and chiropractic, the new doctoral degree will simulate the pilgrim’s progress of medical school.  For example, students pursuing a Doctorate in Hahnemannian Principles — yes, that’s the name of the degree for now — will be required to attend hundreds of hours worth of basic medical lectures, including sessions on immunology, oncology, endocrinology and numerous other fields that of course have absolutely nothing to do with the animating fables of homeopath and which — if taken seriously — would cause everyone in the program to drop out.  I do have to wonder, though, what a seminar titled “Chemistry for Homeopaths” would actually entail.  Do these people even believe in the Periodic Table?  I kid, of course.  Some homeopaths, it turns out, insist that their water-drenched sugar pills work through some kind of undiscovered supermolecular force — a claim that is somewhat less entertaining than Luc Montaigner’s embarrassing theory that homeopathy works through some kind of undiscovered electromagnetic signal.

At any rate, it will be interesting to see how many hoopleheads actually throw down the $80,000 for this degree.  Homeopaths generally don’t earn high incomes unless they’re already licensed in some other practice (like chiropractic or osteopathy), in which case they can earn the extra income by forking over a few thousand dollars for bullshit online courses.  I’m not sure why anyone would put themselves that far into the hole for a career that offers wildly unpredictable financial rewards, but I suppose I’m really not the target audience for this sort of thing…

If you’re not sufficiently depressed about anything in particular these days…

…go read this long and immensely distressing piece by Emily Bazelon about the scientific and legal perils of diagnosing and prosecuting cases of Shaken Baby Syndrome. Researchers have known for quite some time — see this 2004 BMJ article, for example — that some of the classic indications of SBS aren’t necessarily specific to incidents of violent shaking, a problem for which an obvious corrective would be the exercise of great care in making sure that diagnosis rests on all three of the classic signs of such abuse (i.e., brain swelling, retinal bleeding, and bleeding beneath the skull).

Bazelon, however, points out that more recent studies have suggested that even in cases where the usual triad of symptoms are present, the difficulty of establishing when the injury occurred is greater than previously thought — with the upshot being that parents or child care providers could possibly find themselves falsely accused of abuse if they happen to be in the baby’s presence when the first signs of distress occur. Moreover, there’s some evidence that other causes — undetected infections for one — might produce symptoms that strongly resemble SBS, in which case humans might wind up being prosecuted for the crimes of viruses.

It’s worth noting that the debate here isn’t over whether Shaken Baby Syndrome exists at all, but rather over how well anyone understands its causes and symptoms and what the implications of all this might be for prosecuting and defending legal charges stemming from alleged abuse.  (It’s worth pointing out as well that the anti-vaccination lunatics have long tried to hijack Shaken Baby Syndrome, much as they tried to hijack autism by claiming that it was nothing more than misdiagnosed mercury poisoning.  The “DTP Defense” was an enormous load of shit two decades ago, and it’s no more plausible today.  The notion that protecting your baby from pertussis is the equivalent of — literally — throwing her against the wall is pretty astonishing.  It’s an underappreciated aspect of the movement, but it’s quite revealing that anti-vaxxers hate medical science and pharmaceutical companies so much that they’re willing to offer a blanket exoneration to people who actually throw their kids against a wall, so long as it offers them the illusion that they’ve actually scored a point.)

Oh my sweet rapture/I hear Jesus calling me home

If you thought the Rapture Index was soooo 2004…well, you were right. Nevertheless, Rob’s post reminded me that since the Antichrist took the oath of office, I hadn’t much considered our proximity to the EndyTimies. Needless to say, we’re still almost fucked, though it appears that our holding pattern is being prolonged by a stagnation in category 03, where a “lack of [Satanic] activity” is bumming everybody out. What the hell is wrong with you people?

History and anti-vaccination anxiety

So The Times ran an op-ed the other day about the history of anti-vaccination fears. The piece was written by Michael Willrich, a very good historian of the progressive era whose forthcoming book on the early 20th century smallpox eradication program will be coming out in late March.  The majority of the article is quite interesting, but in other respects it’s a fine example of why history doesn’t always offer useful guidance for confronting the difficulties of the present.

Willrich’s entry-level argument — that opponents of vaccination predate the fraudulent and scientifically invalidated work of Andrew Wakefield — won’t surprise anyone who’s spent more than a few minutes studying the history of medicine and public health. More specifically, he notes that well into the 20th century, vaccination opponents frequently had perfectly sensible reasons to be wary of public officials whose enthusiasm for fighting infectious disease was often matched by their loathing of workers, immigrants and racial minorities. When I teach this history, in fact, I usually argue that vaccination opponents are entitled to a pass if they (a) lived prior to the widespread acceptance of germ theory, or (b) were part of an economic and/or ethnic stratum routinely scapegoated by sanitary reformers.  As Arthur Allen’s book describes in great detail, the history of smallpox vaccination in late 19th and early 20th century did indeed stray into some dubious civil libertarian ground, and the health risks associated with the smallpox jab — though unquestionably preferable to the virus itself — weren’t negligible.  (There was, for example, a significant risk that vaccine recipients would be infected with tetanus bacilli.)

But none of this historical detail, correct though it is, has much relevance to the issue laid out by the paper’s headline writers (“Why parents fear the needle”).  Put quite simply, only the most recent species of the anti-vaccination movement — beginning with the DTP scare of the 1980s, continuing through Wakefield’s MMR fraud, and more metastasizing over the last decade into a whole array of hysterical claims about the preservatives and adjuvants in nearly every shot on the market  — have emphasized children as the focal point of risk.  The health of children certainly mattered in previous eras of anti-vaccination hostility, but they weren’t the overriding focus.  And it’s worth pointing out that many of the perceived risks for children and adults a hundred years ago — like tetanus infections — were very real and abundantly documented, unlike the chimera of autism that has served as the basis for anti-vaccine science fiction for the past dozen years or so.

Moreover, contemporary vaccination opponents have little room to argue (as Willrich’s historical subject might have) that contemporary vaccination schedules represent a violation of civil liberties or accentuate patterns of racial, ethic or class chauvinism.  In most states, the exemption laws are quite generous and acknowledge all sorts of religious kookery as well as secular, scientific illiteracy as legitimate grounds for parents to avoid vaccinations and heighten the risk that their children and communities will be exposed to preventable, deadly illnesses.  So here again, the smallpox struggle during the era of Teddy Roosevelt really doesn’t offer much guidance to the current debate.

The larger problem with Willrich’s argument, though, is his recommendation that vaccine advocates look to their progressive era forebears and “reclaim the town square with a candid national conversation about the real risks of vaccines.”  Perhaps I’m less optimistic than I should be that the American public will actually listen to informed public health advocates who faithfully represent the scientific consensus on vaccine safety and efficacy.  But clearly, Willrich doesn’t waste much of his time debating vaccination opponents or reading their literature.  Otherwise, he’d understand that initiating a conversation about the “real” and “minuscule” risks of vaccination will quickly run up against a wall of assertions about the “real” and “inevitable” afflictions lurking in every dose of Pediarix.  Advocates will have to explain why, if the risks are so minimal, the packaging inserts for commercially available vaccines all warn of horrifying potential complications (with no reference to their statistical unlikelihood); or they’ll have to explain why the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System exists in the first place if vaccines are so uncontroversially “safe.”  There are, of course, strong and convincing responses to both of these detours among many others, but I can attest from personal experience at least that most vaccine delayers/refusers don’t give a shit about the history of VAERS or about why product inserts are written the way they are.  For some people, terms like “febrile seizures” trip all the circuit breakers simultaneously, after which point you might as well be offering advice to your cat.

In the end, the unfortunate historical reality is that the best argument for smallpox vaccination was always an epidemic of smallpox itself — not an earnest spokesperson for science-based public health.  I certainly hope I’m wrong, but I count myself among those who doubt that America’s growing vaccine complacency will shift without a major public health catastrophe.  But if we have to wait until pertussis or measles is as common as smallpox was a century ago, there won’t be much reason to celebrate our collective enlightenment.

Zombie Dick Cheney Update

In what can only be described as a dubious victory for Medicare, Dick Cheney’s pulseless, mechanically-assisted heart — which I wrote about in greater detail last year — has evidently allowed him to resume “his old life, including hunting and socializing.”

And then there’s this:

Mr. Cheney’s pump was placed near his heart. With most patients, a power line emerges about waist level and connects to a controller, a minicomputer that plugs into a pair of one-and-a-half-pound, 12-volt batteries. Patients wear a black mesh vest over their clothing that holds the controller and batteries. They usually cannot shower and have to be satisfied with sponge baths.

Go ahead. Bitch about your job now.

“A mingled mass of perverse ingenuity, of tinsel erudition, of imbecile credulity, and of artful misrepresentation”

The UK organization Sense About Science has released its annual list of moronic celebrity health and diet endorsements. The roster of honorees is somewhat Anglocentric; deserving Americans like the galactically irresponsible Jenny McCarthy and shepherdess of woo Oprah Winfrey are nowhere to be found, though Shaquille O’Neal earns recognition for endorsing the scamtacular Power Balance bracelet — a cheap, hologram-festooned rubber band that millions of rubes have paid good money to wear, believing that it will supply them with magical powers of some kind or another. (Recently named CNBC’s Sports Product of the Year, Power Balance is little more than a reincarnation of the legendary Perkins Tractors.)

At any rate, the clear winner in the competition is “cage fighter Alex Reid,” who — though he does not avoid women — does deny them his essence.

Cage fighter Alex Reid took things much further with his tips for health this year. Giving his fans advice on how to prepare for a match, he told the Sun: “It’s actually very good for a man to have unprotected sex as long as he doesn’t ejaculate. Because I believe that all that semen has a lot of nutrition. A tablespoon of semen has your equivalent of steak, eggs, lemons and oranges. I am reabsorbing it into my body and it makes me go raaaaahh.”

Oddly enough, this is precisely how Dick Cheney has managed to stay alive all these years.

Happy Secession Day!

The NYT has been running a series on “Disunion” that, alas, I’ve somehow managed to overlook for the past two months. Regardless, the most recent entry coincides with the 150th anniversary of South Carolina’s Secession Ordinance nation-destroying exertions in defense of slavery, signed and feted on this date in 1860. In the course of describing South Carolina’s post-secession exuberance, Jamie Malanowski offers one of the great wedding-crasher stories in US history, featuring one of the least remembered Worst Americans Ever.

There was one party, however, that would not be postponed, that of the wedding of John Bouligny, the popular congressman from Louisiana and one of the very few officials from the deep South who opposed secession, to Mary Parker, daughter of Washington’s wealthiest grocer. The bride’s father had produced a magnificent spectacle, filling his large home with roses and lilies and illuminated fountains. The president came, joined by his niece Harriet Lane, and was the first to kiss the bride.

It was a happy event in a beautiful setting, reminiscent of so many other happy events and beautiful settings the president had enjoyed in his younger days as a diplomat in Russia and Great Britain. But soon the mood was broken by a commotion instigated by the entrance of Lawrence Keitt, the brash, bombastic, recently resigned congressman of South Carolina. Jumping, bellowing, waving a piece of paper over his head, he shouted “Thank God!’’ again and again. Finally he elaborated. “South Carolina has seceded! Here’s the telegram! I feel like a boy let out of school.’’

Lawrence Keitt ranked among the finer B-list Slave Power deacons of his era. When Preston Brooks was clubbing Charles Sumner half to death in early May 1856, it was a liquor-fortified Keitt who — wielding a pistol or a cane of his own, depending on the account — helped prevent anyone from intervening on behalf of the Massachusetts Senator.  After being censured by the House for his role in the assault, Keitt resigned and immediately stood for re-election; two years after being returned to his seat, he initiated a brawl on the House floor when he attacked Pennsylvania congressman Galusha Grow, a former free-soil Democrat who had joined the Republican party at roughly the same moment that Keitt was abetting the attack on Sumner.  When the party of Grow and Sumner elected Abraham Lincoln in November 1860s, Keitt joined the congressional fire-eaters and abandoned his office for the second time in five years.  His wife Susanna — also a piece of work — justified her husband’s (and her state’s) disunionism by characterizing the “Black Republicans” as “a motley throng of Sans culottes and Dames de Halles, Infidels and freelovers, interspersed by Bloomer women, fugitive slaves, and amalgamationists.”

Keitt went on to organize the 20th South Carolina Infantry Regiment, which eventually joined Lee at Cold Harbor in late May 1864.  On May 31, Keitt wrote to Susanna, to whom he expressed a wish that she could “see the confidence of our troops,” whom he believed were being “led by the hand of providence.”  Several days later, fused with and placed in charge of another South Carolina unit, Keitt led an ill-advised cavalry charge across an open field near Beulah Church; his men were easily shredded by Union fire while the 1st New York Dragoons brass band serenaded them with renditions of “Yankee Doodle” and “Hail Columbia,” with a round of “Dixie” adding to the humiliation.  Keitt himself, badly wounded, was retrieved from the field and hauled on a litter to a crowded farmhouse, where doctors administered whiskey and morphine until he died the next morning.

The End of Education

…in which I emerge briefly from the end-of-semester grading abattoir to note that I have detected a student plagiarizing from Conservapedia.

I’m now going to go roust a bear from hibernation and make him eat my kidneys.

Annals of slacktivism

I’m confused. Isn’t this how the wingers brought down the Iranian government last year?

Well, it turns out that the good people of Facebook-land have made the effort to defeat child abuse by replacing their profile pictures with images from cartoons. Um, okay guys good plan. I can’t possibly see how this plan will not work. Somewhere a father is raising his hand to beat his child when he decides to check on his Farmville first, and when he opens Facebook he sees Snarf from Thundercats and he thinks, “You know what? I think instead of beating my child I’ll take up knitting or maybe origami.” Mission accomplished, Facebook friend!

Then again, it’s an under-publicized historical fact that A. Lincoln was persuaded to issue the Emancipation Proclamation after millions of union supporters changed their Facechapbook avatars to dageuerreotypes of famous abolitionists.

A thinking man’s approach to racialized health disparities

So long as we’re beating up on Tom Maguire today, I thought I’d draw your attention to yesterday’s avid defense of the vitamin D hype. As most readers are probably aware, seemingly everyone over the past several years has been promoting vitamin D as a magical prophylaxis against cancer, cardiovascular disease, influenza, depression, hot dog fingers and masturbatory insanity among numerous other afflictions. Not only have vitamin D supplements — in quite large doses — been promoted by a lot of ordinary physicians and health professionals, but vitamin D has figured with special prominence in the “alternative medicine” community, especially among opponents of the H1N1 and seasonal flu vaccines.

Yesterday, however, the Institute of Medicine released a thorough examination of the evidence on vitamin D and calcium in order to update its recommendations on Dietary Reference Intakes (DRI). The long and the short of it is that (a) there’s no good evidence that vitamin D serves any useful purpose beyond promoting bone growth, strength and repair; (b) humans don’t need quite so much of the stuff as previously believed; (c) most of what we need can be gained from dietary sources; and (d) there’s no good reason to believe that widespread vitamin D deficiencies actually exist, barring the discovery of a previously undetected outbreak of rickets across the northern latitudes.

Ordinarily, this wouldn’t be a big deal. Nutritional hypes come and go, in saecula saeculorum, and so it goes. But Tom Maguire, along with the natural health crowd, is not having it. And here’s part of his uniquely powerful, common-sensitized rationale:

I am applying a bit of common sense here (often risky when science is involved, but away we go). The first humans to leave Africa were dark-skinned. In the higher latitudes and reduced sunlight of Northern Europe, selective evolutionary pressure favored white skin. Was that exclusively about bone health? And more importantly, could modern urban blacks in northern latitudes really be getting enough Vitamin D strictly from food supplements? And is it just poverty that explains the many grim health statistics for the black community?

Why it would be irresponsible not to speculate! Too bad the American Colonization Society didn’t have access to Tom Maguire’s brain way back when….

Great moments in misanthropy

David Simon deflates the hopes of an entire generation. Good for him. All we need now is another Vietnam to thin out their ranks a little.

(Via Lindsay Beyerstein)

More from the Tinfoil Hat Brigade

Here’s some more embarrassingly reported tripe on the purported health dangers of cell phones, this time from The New York Times. Since its publication about a week ago (Nov. 13), “Should You Be Snuggling with Your Cell Phone?” has been among the paper’s top e-mailed articles. Predictably, the dubious scaremongering of Devra Davis provides the inspiration for the piece; also unsurprising is the author’s reliance on the work of University of Washington bioengineering prof Henry Lai, who is usually rolled out on occasions like this to supply additional weight to the belief that low doses of non-ionizing radiation from electromagnetic fields (EMF) can provoke an array of health adversities. (Lai is among the small number of proper scientists who actually believe that the phenomenon of electromagnetic hypersensitivity [EHS] exists, despite all evidence to the contrary.)

I’ve discussed Davis’ work before, but Lai’s role in the debate is also worth noting. Here’s the Times:

Henry Lai, a research professor in the bioengineering department at the University of Washington, began laboratory radiation studies in 1980 and found that rats exposed to radiofrequency radiation had damaged brain DNA. He maintains a database that holds 400 scientific papers on possible biological effects of radiation from wireless communication. He found that 28 percent of studies with cellphone industry funding showed some sort of effect, while 67 percent of studies without such funding did so. “That’s not trivial,” he said.

The unit of measurement for radiofrequency exposure is called the specific absorption rate, or SAR. The Federal Communications Commission mandates that the SAR produced by phones be no more than 1.6 watts per kilogram. One study listed by Mr. Lai found effects like loss of memory in rats exposed to SAR values in the range of 0.0006 to 0.06 watts per kilogram. “I did not expect to see effects at low levels,” he said.

Of course he wouldn’t. And neither would virtually anyone else, since Lai’s rat studies from the early 1990s — which occupy a special place in the EMF literature — have failed to receive any subsequent confirmation. Numerous attempts have been made to replicate the results detected by Lai and his co-author, but none have succeeded. Any application of the weight-of-evidence standard would be sufficient to relegate Lai’s two rat articles to the far margins of the relevant scientific literature, and yet you can’t swing a dead cat without bumping into another credulous journalist willing to mention them. (These same journalists, by contrast, seem curiously unaware of Lai’s efforts to affirm the efficacy of Hulda Clark’s low-voltage “zapper”, which she claimed would rid the body of virtually any disease, including Alzheimer’s and AIDS. Lai’s willingness to accept money from and conduct research on behalf of known scam artist should be enough to give pause, even if the results of his peer-reviewed research had actually held up over time.)

As for Lai’s database of “400 scientific papers” and his claim that industry funding correlates positively with industry-friendly results? Well, these are the sorts of things that might sound impressive to readers but don’t actually carry any real meaning. As it happens, the half-century of literature on the health effects of electromagnetic fields (including cell and cordless phones) now runs into the tens of thousands of articles — covering the whole gamut of lab studies, animal studies, and epidemiological studies, as well as examinations of short- and long-term exposure at varying frequencies. Given that science is messy to begin with and that the results of small, preliminary studies are often challenged or disproved by larger, better-designed research, it’s not surprising that someone willing to pick cherries could bring up a list of published work (including his own) whose data and conclusions have nevertheless failed to thrive under additional scrutiny. Rather than worry about the “400 published papers” mentioned by Lai and the Times, it would be far better to look at the reviews conducted by the World Health Organization, public health and other government agencies around the world, as well as standards-setting organizations like the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation
Protection (ICNRP) or the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
International Committee on Electromagnetic Safety (IEEE/ISCES), the latter of which has a brief, outstanding report — for people who get excited by this sort of thing — in the October 2009 issue of Health Physics (available as a .pdf here). The IEEE pays special attention to a literature review (the 2007 BioInitiative Report) conducted by a group headed by Lai himself; suffice it to say that the IEEE committee was not impressed with the effort.

Similarly, although the question of funding does matter, industry support for the research do not matter not nearly so much as the question of what the largest, best-designed and reproducible studies have discovered. As it stands, in spite of noise in the data, the weight of the evidence continues to support the conclusion that cell phones, cell towers, wi-fi networks or any other everyday electromagnetic fields pose no significant risk to human health.

If anyone has read this far in the post, you may be wondering why anyone should care about this. Personally, I couldn’t be bothered if people read articles like the one in the Times and decide to cancel their high-speed internet or throw away their iPhones. After all, the public health effects of cell phone hysterics are nonexistent compared to the perils caused by, say, people who refuse to have their kids vaccinated against measles. But while the species may be distinct, the fears of EMF and vaccines share the same genus. Moreover, bad science reporting on any particular issue is bad for critical thought in general, and it reinforces our shared misunderstanding of how the scientific community actually works. And if that’s not sufficient justification, remember that the condemnation of bullshit is its own reward.