Weekend Reading

Happy 2014 Everyone! It’s been a while since the last weekend reading update. Here’s some links and posts for your reading pleasure. The picture above is from the Toronto ice storm that we’re still recovering from.

Weekend Reading

The SBP post on “pH Balancing” is one of the most popular, with over 43,000 views views since it was posted in 2009. The topic seems to come up again and again because alternative practitioners promote ideas that are not reality-based. Unfortunately, some pharmacies sell products that are marketed based on this falsehood. If you see these products for sale, think about taking your business to a pharmacy that puts a higher priority on selling credible products.

Just a short update today. Here’s some link and clips from the past week:

Food allergies: The stakes are too high for myths and pseudoscience

The price of life is eternal vigilance. If you have severe food allergies, that is your reality. Every day, every meal, every bite. Eating is an intrinsic and essential part of what we do and who we are, so the idea that our bodies can rebel violently to everyday foods can be difficult to believe. But it’s real, and the numbers of the severely food allergic are growing. Frustratingly, we don’t know why. While recognized over 100 years ago, the social acknowledgment had lagged. That’s improved in the past decade. Food allergy prevention approaches are now a routine part of travel, school, sports, and the workplace. Peanuts on planes seem to have completely disappeared. The days of lunchbox peanut butter sandwiches are over, with many schools completely banning all peanut-containing products. It is the education system that seems to have become a ground zero for allergy programs and policies, where educators are challenged to ensure that schools are safe environments for all children, some of whom have long lists of food allergies.

A right way, and a wrong way, to promote the role of the pharmacist

The right way:

Science-based health advocacy and the end of “Registered Holistic Allergists” in Canada

Caution! The GSR-120 is an uproven allergy treatment

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 nor effective. It’s not only naturopaths – there is a wide field of different practices, all claiming the ability to identify and treat allergies. These methods lack scientific substantiation – some prefer to redefine the word allergy:

A Holistic Allergist uses a new definition of allergy: “A bioenergetic counteraction to a given substance resulting in abnormality”.

It’s strategy first documented in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass:

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”