Archive for September, 2012
Are you iron deficient?
How are you feeling today? Tired? Is it your active lifestyle wearing you down? Or is it a sign of something more serious? Complaints about fatigue seem ubiquitous. Perhaps it’s a product of a culture with little downtime. Yet from a medical perspective, fatigue can’t be dismissed with a simple instruction to “get more sleep”. […]
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Tags: anemia, fatigue, iron deficiency
Weekend Reading
Links, articles, and posts that may be of interest to SBP readers:
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Tags: measles, public health, vaccines
To become a more effective scientific skeptic, you need to know your logical fallacies. This is part two of my irregular series – my first was on the middle ground fallacy. Today’s focus is a very, very common fallacy: Tu quoque.
Filed under: articles | 5 Comments
Tags: homeopathy, logical fallacies, perfect solution fallacy, tu quoque
As the trend of fake food allergies and fake food intolerances has begun to permeate pharmacy practice, I’ve become much more attuned to allergy pseudoscience. As I have pointed out before, there are scientific ways to diagnose and treat allergies, and then there are the methods used by “alternative” health practitioners, which are neither accurate […]
Filed under: announcements | 1 Comment
Tags: allergies, allergy treatments, anaphylaxis, bie, BioEnergetic Intolerance Elimination, GSR-120, health fraud, Registered BioEnergetics Practitioners, Registered Holistic Allergist
Every time I think I can take a break from homeopathy, something pulls me back to the topic. Today it’s an unbelievably poorly reasoned defense of homeopathy, in, of all places, the British Medical Journal. Glasgow-based general practitioner Des Spence writes, It was an intentional overdose. To prove a point I poured about 30 tiny […]
Filed under: articles | 16 Comments
Tags: des spence, ethics, homeopathy, nhs
Once again I’m blogging about vaccines, and antivaccinationism. Few health interventions that are both demonstrably effective and remarkably cost-effective seem to stir such opposition among a small but vocal few. I have noted before the remarkable statistic that vaccination has prevented more Canadian deaths in the past 50 years than any other health intervention. Yet […]
Filed under: articles | 8 Comments
Tags: vaccines
From the Canadian Society of Allergy and Clinical Immunology: The Canadian Society of Allergy and Clinical Immunology (CSACI) is very concerned about the increased marketing of food-specific immunoglobulin G (IgG) testing towards the general public over the past few years, supposedly as a simple means by which to identify “food sensitivity”, food intolerance or food […]
Filed under: updates | 14 Comments
Tags: food intolerance, food intolerance tests, food sensitivity, hemocode, IgG blood tests, rexall, yorktest
Weekend Reading
Read beyond the headlines and the media coverage and look at the data in the paper.
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One of the terms that you’ll see used to describe health quackery, scams and pseudoscience is “snake oil”. Snake oil was a real product, sold in the early 19th century as a cure-all elixer in the “patent medicine” era. Popularized in movies, the snake-oil salesman would pull into town, and start the hard sell for […]
Filed under: Uncategorized | 6 Comments
Tags: medical quackery, oil of oregano, pertussis, snake oil, vaccines
It Takes a Village – Skepticism in this Small Town
In my last post, I introduced myself as a pharmacist in a small-ish town, eager to combat the growing acceptance of pseudoscience into the mainstream. I love living where I live for a multitude of reasons. But I’ve found it rather challenging to wave the flag of skepticism. I have no problem displaying my preference […]
Filed under: commentary, guest post | 34 Comments
Tags: fluoride, pharmacy practice, public health, skepticism