A Big Dose of Skepticism

Adler states that he will no longer report on "any amazing new treatments for anything." I wish he'd reconsider his position. How the heck does he expect companies like ours to peddle our valueless diet supplements if medical writers such as he are going around giving credence to wild ideas like the need for scientific rigor and statistical analyses of medical claims? That's outrageous! If it weren't for a naive public clamoring for quick diet fixes, that kind of reckless rhetoric could put us out of business.

I hope he appreciates our position that selling bogus products and services to gullible consumers is challenging enough without introducing facts to cloud the marketing equation. Just visit our website (www.FatChanceDiets.com) and you will see that we've got too good of a thing going to let science play a role.

Thank you for your understanding.

Cordially,
Dr. Bambiriketh Truque, CEO
Fat Chance Diets
truque@fatchancediets.com
www.FatChanceDiets.com

I hope you appreciate our position that selling bogus products and services to gullible consumers is challenging enough without introducing facts to cloud the marketing equation. Just visit our website (www.FatChanceDiets.com) and you will see that we've got too good of a thing going to let science play a role.

Thank you for your understanding.

Cordially,
Dr. Bambiriketh Truque, CEO
Fat Chance Diets
truque@fatchancediets.com
www.FatChanceDiets.com

Perhaps Mr. Adler should also read Sharon Brownlee's book "OVERTREATED - Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker And Poorer". The fact of the matter is much of mainstream medicine's therapies and treatments are never double-blind tested either and the financial structure of the current system is literally killing people. For Mr. Adler and the AMA to talk about "protecting people" is the pot calling the kettle black when 90,000 people die every year in hospitals from infections. Have you heard about any CAM therapy killing that many people in a year?

I did not find this column helpful at all. In fact, it grossly mischaracterizes complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) as "something you hear about from your hairdresser, who thinks she saw it on Oprah."

Lumping acupuncture in this group is also very misinformed (I am NOT an acupuncturist). In fact, the NIH Consensus Statement on acupuncture states, in part, "There are other situations such as addiction, stroke rehabilitation, headache, menstrual cramps, tennis elbow, fibromyalgia, myofascial pain, osteoarthritis, low back pain, carpal tunnel syndrome, and asthma, in which acupuncture may be useful as an adjunct treatment or an acceptable alternative or be included in a comprehensive management program. Further research is likely to uncover additional areas where acupuncture interventions will be useful."

Clearly, more research is needed but Adler's unqualified and unprofessional opinion undermines the work of thousands of reputable scientists who are working on CAM within the NIH and in other academic settings.

Val W. Finnell, MD
For more information about acupuncture: www.medicalacupuncture.org

As usual, people with deep personal attachment to these beliefs have a hissy fit when cold reality rears it's ugly head. Great point of view. As a nutrition professional, anytime a miracle diet rears it's ugly head, my response continues to be "Show Me The Thin People". So far, I haven't seen any.

> Jerry Adler wrote:
[http://www.newsweek.com/id/73283]
> > It's not too soon to start thinking about New Year's resolutions, and
> > here's mine, as a medical writer: I will not report on any amazing new
> > treatments for anything, unless they were tested in large, randomized,
> > placebo-controlled, double-blind clinical trials published in
> > high-quality peer-reviewed medical journals.

Diddums.
And I shall not report on any amazing health improvement results unless
they are individualized to the person or animal who is ill, the medicine
has no side effects, and it builds resistance to recurrence instead of
just making symptoms seem invisible for a while.
And Mr Adler I challenge you to find even ONE such event that meets YOUR
criteria as well.

If you find none - then obviously your criteria are artificial and
useless for measuring improved health or efficacy of medicine.

Namaste,
Irene
-- Irene de Villiers, B.Sc AASCA MCSSA D.I.Hom/D.Vet.Hom. P.O. Box 4703 Spokane WA 99220. www.angelfire.com/fl/furryboots/clickhere.html (Veterinary Homeopath.) "Man who say it cannot be done should not interrupt one doing it."

> Jerry Adler wrote:
[http://www.newsweek.com/id/73283]
> > It's not too soon to start thinking about New Year's resolutions, and
> > here's mine, as a medical writer: I will not report on any amazing new
> > treatments for anything, unless they were tested in large, randomized,
> > placebo-controlled, double-blind clinical trials published in
> > high-quality peer-reviewed medical journals.

Diddums.
And I shall not report on any amazing health improvement results unless
they are individualized to the person or animal who is ill, the medicine
has no side effects, and it builds resistance to recurrence instead of
just making symptoms seem invisible for a while.
And Mr Adler I challenge you to find even ONE such event that meets YOUR
criteria as well.

If you find none - then obviously your criteria are artificial and
useless for measuring improved health or efficacy of medicine.

Namaste,
Irene
-- Irene de Villiers, B.Sc AASCA MCSSA D.I.Hom/D.Vet.Hom. P.O. Box 4703 Spokane WA 99220. www.angelfire.com/fl/furryboots/clickhere.html (Veterinary Homeopath.) "Man who say it cannot be done should not interrupt one doing it."

So Mr. Adler believes that "large, randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind clinical trials published in high-quality peer-reviewed medical journals" are the only treatments to be considered legitimate? The "peers" who review these medical journals are doctors of conventional medicine who have a stake in what is published there. Wouldn't that be something like the fox guarding the henhouse? And who died and left the allopaths in charge? Where in Mr. Adler's article does it mention the millions of people who have died from treatments using conventional medicine and drugs? And how much funding for these trials is provided by large pharmaceutical companies with a stake in the outcome? It seems to me the successful use of holistic medicine is eating into their profit margins.

Homeopathy has been used for centuries with no harm to patients, and no bad side-effects. It is not a form of healing that can be tested in the same way as pharmaceutical drugs. There are plenty of studies that show the efficacy of homeopathy, though (surprise, surprise!) the journals of conventional medicine choose not to publish those.

Homeopathic remedies are different for each individual, so if ten people walk in with a headache, it is possible that no two of these people would receive the same remedy. To compare allopathy (conventional medicine) with homeopathy is like comparing apples and oranges. Each has their place in the healing arts, but one should not dictate the practices of the other.

Laurel Avery

It's great to see a genuine skeptic, one who doesn't decide ahead of time what the evidence will show. But several claims in Mr Adler's article warrant a little skepticism of their own.


"If someone really does cure cancer???whether a drug company researcher or a Tibetan herbalist???The New England Journal of Medicine or The Journal of the American Medical Association will be happy to publish the news."

I'm sorry to tell you that without knowing the financial independence of both journals, such a claim is impossible to substantiate. It's well-known that one of the more prestigious U.K. medical journals has turned to unsubstantiated muckraking in its latest edition for exactly that reason.


"Their papers get published because the editors of journals in fields like homeopathy start from the premise that the whole thing isn't a preposterous hoax, as Bausell and most mainstream doctors believe."

If what most mainstream doctors believe has any relevance, then surely what a large number of doctors and specialists practising homoeopathy believe is just as relevant. Belief is not a solid basis for conclusions bearing on the lives of medical patients. By contrast, a premise such as the premise that the article implicitly criticises editors such as me of basing publishing decisions upon may arise not from belief but from the conclusions of many high-quality studies arbitrarily excluded in The Lancet's badly flawed and highly criticised but always quoted 2005 meta-analysis of homoeopathic clinical trials.

The allegations of hoax as the basis of microdoses and ultradilutions ignore a fact openly acknowledged in physics journals: that homoeopathic high potencies are measurably different from mere ultradilutions.

More importantly, they ignore that homoeopathy does not depend and never has on ultradilutions or ultra potencies (potencies using dilutions beyond Avogadro's limit for reasonable chance that a molecule of the original medicine remains in the resultant medicine). Homoeopathy can be practised almost entirely without dilution or potency. The value of potencies is that they modify the force of a medicine that can otherwise prove a little strong for the patient already suffering the symptoms the medicine can cause.

The peer-reviewed journal Similia, which I edit, makes its editorial decisions based on just one premise: that the substance capable of removing the entirety of a patient's illness is that substance that can most closely reproduce the patient's symptoms in the healthy. That premise remains almost undisputed in modern medicine.

Yours sincerely,

John Harvey
Editor, Similia

I sent in the following letter to the editor:
Before Adler makes his resolution to "not report ??? new treatments ??? unless ??? tested in large, randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind clinical trials published in high quality peer-reviewed medical journals" he would do well to read Dr Coulter on The Controlled Clinical Trial. The CCT is supposed to be the "gold standard" but its misplaced faith, not only due to a corrupted process but by the very nature of the CCT.


Choose a population that is homogeneous (similar) then it says little about individuals who are not similar (e.g. women and children, left out of most studies or those sicker or healthier or having different symptoms or health histories than the study population). Choose a population that is very heterogeneous then it is difficult to get consistent results. So the drug companies do their studies on narrowly defined groups picking only doctors who have given them good results in the past.



So you can see how the Vioxx fiasco occurred and with billions at stake these disasters will continue to happen.



Alternative medical practices are usually more individualized which requires more time, effort and expense than just giving everyone the same drug and aren???t bankrolled by pharmaceutical giants. Thus the studies tend to be much smaller and not published in more mainstream journals. Non-mainstream science appears in non-mainstream journals.

Enter Your Comment

Mr. Adler suggests that any improvements people experience under complimentary and alternative health care can be attributed to the placebo effect and places the number of these highly suggestible people at roughly 30% of subjects studied. That statistic was a surprise to me, as I???m sure it was to the thousands of other complimentary health care practitioners around the world who rely on the referrals of satisfied clients and patients. A 30% success rate wouldn???t keep any of us in business for very long.

The objects of Mr. Adler???s scorn, acupuncture, homeopathy and nutritional therapy, all predate modern medicine. They do no harm, something modern medicine cannot claim, and, in this writers opinion, do much good.

Sam Rose
Certified Nutritionist

Nothing has changed since the time of Mark Twain??? Are you insane, or just dumb? Life spans have increased by decades, we can now CURE cancer most of the time when caught early, heart attacks no longer kill, and people with diabetes no longer die by age 20. In large part, this is due to the great strides in modern medicines (chemotherapy, anticoagulants, antihypertensives, antihyperlipidemics, etc.). Drug company profits and advertising budgets need to be rained in, I agree. But don't be demagogue the issue and don't be a fool. Because I know that you will be more than happy to see your orthopedist when your chiropracter messes you up or your oncologist when that lump in your breast continued to grow despite your "chinese" herbal remedies, or when you start getting unexpained chest and arm pain. As for feeling "great" after menopause, I know dozens of women who feel great after menopause and they took NOTHING. Menopause is NOT a medical condition. It is life. So in reality, you shouldn't NEED anything for it, other than time. But I'm sure your placebos help your mind.

Now If you want to take cynicism to the next level, check out the marketing hype, half truths and even some outright lies the drug companies heap on your doctor to promote their wares. And now they are heaping it on you, poor consumer, directly on TV and in magazines. Just because that drug rep presents a study or even an FDA approved study, does not mean you can trust his information. Nothing has changed since Mark Twain said theri were lies, damned lies and then there were statistics.

'Twas a time when state of the art physicians prescribed dog dung and bat guano for their patients. These days, the drug companies are serving up large portions of bovine excreta to all of us.

A Disgust Doc

Until you suffer from something so debilitating as artritis and the conventional might kill you before it helps than you can critisize the people who try the unconventional. The AMA was is Waikiki last month, you know what I saw a bunch of overweight over indugent sick looking people. I am a food server in Waikiki and saw them eating "junk" everyday. I don't think I will ever follow any of their recomendations I never want to look like them or be with someone who looks like that. I am 48 in menopause and feeling great because of my choice of alternitive way of life, thanks to my own God given logic . Thank you but no thank you for your ill information!!!!

People who buy medications or engage in alternative therapies that lack FDA approval are just being plain silly. This is not to say that all FDA-approved medications are absolutely safe. But peer-reviewed literature has shown them to do what they say they do. And if the alternative medicines are so good, then why does almost every independently performed study show that they do nothing at best, and delay potentially life saving treatment at worst?

Mr Adler also approved Vioxx, time told a different story, did it not, but i bet he sold his stock ASAP, before they lost in court for being a dirty drug!

This is going to be you? Marijuana bad, Maranol good [syth THC with all toxic side effects cost 2500 per pill] pot 100 an oz last from 2wks to a month! Maranol megaprofits a pharm company who made it while we are being told "There is no medical use for marijuana" and smoking or growing personel is a federal offence at 46,000 per day to keep them in prison! The drugs you approved last year have already lost there class action law suits for being DEADLY! Go figure in the "Take a pill" era" find a non-drug way to treat, slow or cure is snake oil? Drugs which cost more than the 250,000 dollar home you bought plus the drugs to treat side effects and drugs to treat the side effects of the side effect drugs and so on in Media friendly or profitable! This is your way of saying if it's an American only test, and results, just for profit, you approve, to pamper your stock value! If it does not, or was not approved by the USA only, then it's snake oil ,weather you know it works or not-right! Like pot, grown bad, man made for profit, good! Take a pill if you own stock. Open your mind if you don't, we don't need this guy with alt. motives, to tell us what is, or is not good, for us!