Sysiphus Speaks

After 10 years of litigation over misleading claims made by dietary supplement manufacturer Hi-Tech Pharmaceuticals, two of its executives were recently ordered to jail for contempt.

Loyola announces opening of new acupuncture clinic for patients with pelvic health disorders The usual nonsense is put forth to justify charging patients for fantasy-based therapies:

What's the harm of TCPM? Ask Asiatic black bears, Tigers, Seahorses, Rhinoceros, Saiga antelope, Musk deer, and the Pangolin.

There are groups who are unable to make an informed, or perhaps an uninformed choice, about using pseudo-medicines and who should not have to suffer adverse consequences from having pseudo-medical treatments inflicted upon them. Children are one such group. Society has an obligation to children to protect them from the others, which we often ignore.

Consumers who purchased Whole Foods house brand homeopathic remedies filed suit in August against the upscale supermarket chain, alleging fraud and violation of state consumer protection laws.

Waiting for a vaccine-preventable infection. More lousy acupuncture studies. Medical students interested in homeopathy are not as strong at science. Water wet. TCPM consuming donkeys. What the FDA does, and doesn’t do, for now. https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/corrigendum-the-week-in-review-for-03122017/

To date, the FDA has refused to wade into the murky waters of trying to determine just what "natural" means. Now, however, consumers, the food industry and the courts are asking the FDA to define "natural" and the FDA wants your help.

A patient with a history of migraine presented with transient visual loss to the ER, they blame it on migraine. 2 days later she goes to a chiropractor with neck pain pain and the chiropractor thinks about vertebral artery dissection and gets an MRI to confirm the diagnosis

Canada’s Bad Science Wants You. Penguins get acupuncture, tiger cubs get chiropractic. Homeopathic lead for lead toxicity. And more

Mumps cases, like an infected parotid gland, grow. Acupuncture graduates will not have gainful employment. Hypno-Reiki. The one true cause of all disease. And more.

More poorly done acupuncture studies. Burzynski eats just desserts. Italians like homeopathy. New Jersey is going after Oregon. And more

Acupuncture has long been popular in China but there are differences between its practice in the West and East, as 'Big needles, small bodies'—the absence of acupuncture treatment for infants in contemporary Shanghai: a qualitative study makes clear. At the Longhau Hospital acupuncture clinic it was noted there were no infants and very few children seen in the acupuncture clinic. They wondered why…

Dietary supplements, on the other hand, don't go through any pre-market approval process to determine safety and efficacy. They are limited to nebulous "structure and function" claims and are supposed to have substantiating evidence for those claims somewhere in their files, although they don't have to share that information with the FDA or the public. I suppose if you are going to make illegal claims, you might as well go for the big time. 

The week in review. Chiropractic and stroke. Integrative Medical doctors don’t trust vaccines. Death from medical marijuana. Shilajit: compost or mulch oozing from Himalayan rocks. India goes full Tuskeegee with AIDS. And more

No one has never said after a negative study 'looks like acupuncture is useless for this condition.  Stop using it'. That would require a bit of honesty about what is probably a wasted career in acupuncture. Here are two recent examples.