Sysiphus Speaks

The new guidelines open the door to acupuncture, chiropractic, cognitive behavioral therapy, osteopathic manipulation and physical and occupational therapy.

What It's Like to Go Through a Homeopathic Health Assessment came through my feeds today. It is in the website StyleCaster, a fashion and beauty site. The author, Victoria Moorhouse, writes predominantly about cosmetics, hair and beauty products and I suspect she has never read, say, the Science-Based Medicine site.

"The problem is that no matter how good your intentions, eventually you want to kill someone yourself." I thought of this when I saw the headline More chiropractors sanctioned for sneaking into hospitals to treat babies. Really. Sneaking into hospitals to snap the spines of babies. Scary.

I ran across Homeopathic Medicine Should Have a Role in Managed Care over at managedcaremag.com. The article is by a PhD from the Temple University School of Pharmacy. Seeing an article by not only pharmacist, but a professor and a dean suggesting homeopathy gives me pause.

Medicine is weird. Astrologers do not debate in astronomy journals and alchemists are not debating in chemistry journals. Yet in this BMJ this month there is a Head to Head, Should doctors recommend homeopathy?

Horses were getting a variety of pseudo-medicines in anticipation of the The Stuart Horse Trials. The horse Time to Tango received acupuncture, laser therapy, and chiropractic. Poor beasts. Were the interventions effective?

What this bill actually does is allow so-called "Lyme literate" physicians to escape censure from the authorities and bamboozle patients into spending their hard-earned money on unproven and possibly harmful long-term antibiotic treatments for a fictional disease. The Act became law without the Governor's signature.

Acupuncturists also never use gloves, because they are under the delusion that acupuncture is the same as giving a vaccine. Nope.

California Senate Bill 277, which eliminates religious and personal belief exemptions from vaccination for school children, passed in the Assembly on June 25.  It is now back before the Senate for consideration of Assembly amendments to the bill. Assuming the Senate concurs in the amendments, which appears likely, the bill heads to Gov. Jerry Brown for his consideration.

The authors of Chiropractic care and the risk of vertebrobasilar stroke: results of a case–control study in U.S. commercial and Medicare Advantage populations also like the Cassidy study, The work by Cassidy, et al. [32] has been qualitatively appraised as one of the most robustly designed investigations of the association between chiropractic manipulative treatment and VBA stroke which was done in Canada. Hey. Lets see if we can reproduce the same flawed in the US.  Then we can have two bad studies, which is better than one bad study.

American cancer quack Brian Clement apparently thought he could chum up more business in Europe, so he headed across the pond. Unfortunately for him, the skeptics were waiting in ambush.

I would not suggest it is good to be poor, but at it would appear that an inadvertent beneficial consequence of the lack of access of information about worthless of pseudo-medicines is preventing them from using acupuncture, chiropractic, natural products, and yoga.

While aimed at Dr Oz et. al., the proposal would also appear to apply to every Integrative Medical program in the US. Any hospital that offers reiki, acupuncture, energy therapy, chiropractic, etc  that uses the web would be at risk.

There is a nice review this month in Clinical Infectious Disease of all the wack-a-loon therapies offered on the internet for patients with chronic Lyme, Unorthodox Alternative Therapies Marketed to Treat Lyme Disease.

The FDA recently announced it would send field staff out to collect samples of commercially-manufactured raw dog and cat food. The samples will be analyzed for Salmonella, Listeria monocytogenes and E. coli, all of which have been found in raw pet food, in the animals who eat it, in their feces, on their bodies after eating it, in the areas they inhabit, and on their owner's bodies. Not surprisingly, this has led to both pet and human infection and illness.