Now since I am going to be critical of Mr. Spurlock I know exactly what people are going to say. I am only on the second paragraph of this post and I can already hear the arguments they are going to make. People are going to claim I am biased in favor of fast food and that I am saying that it is perfectly healthy and that it is what you should be eating all the time. So I feel like I need to address that ridiculous and obvious straw man argument ahead of time. Yes, I do enjoy the occasional fast food meal, and no I am not saying that fast food is good for you. There are many reasons why should not eat too much food (fast or not) that is deep fried or has little nutritional value like french fries. What I am saying is that there are ways to make that point without using meaningless invalid arguments that are just designed to frighten people.

So let’s get to the video. Morgan starts off by saying “We’re just going to give you an idea of how this food is breaking down in your body. I’m just going to put it in some jars and kinda show you how it breaks down on its own over time.” He then shows the food in various stages of disgusting decomposition over the next couple of months, a couple of weeks at a time. The only thing that does nothing are the fries from McDonald’s. But the silly thing is that after he makes that opening statement, about twenty seconds into the video, the whole “experiment” is rendered useless. I can’t believe I even have to explain this because it is so blatantly obvious, I am actually getting the urge to do the crazy internet commenter thing and do it in all caps. I’ll resist that urge and here it goes:

Your stomach is not an empty glass jar.

Showing how food, any food, does or does not decompose in an empty jar does not say anything about how your body breaks it down. First of all, when you put food in your mouth, you begin the process by chewing the food and mixing it with saliva. When the food reaches your stomach the gastric juices in there break it down. What’s left then goes into the small intestine where the nutrients are absorbed by your body. The rest then goes into the large intestine and then after some more time ends up in the toilet.

I know that many people are wondering why the fries don’t get moldy, as well as why the fries from another restaurant that he puts in another jar do. It has to do with how they are prepared. Guess what the fries did right before they were served to you, they took a bath in hot oil and were then covered in a lot of salt. Certain types of oil will inhibit the growth of microorganisms, and salt draws moisture away from food through osmosis, thus helping preserve it. Humans have been using salt to preserve various foods for thousands of years so you’d think people would know this. My hypothesis about the other fries is that since they were a lot larger than the McDonald’s fries they did not absorb as much of the oil, but there could be many other factors. The other restaurant may have used a different kind of oil, or used less salt, or even none at all so the customer could add as much salt as they wanted from the shaker on the table. Is it because there are “chemicals” in the McDonald’s fries? Well, since everything that exists in the universe is a chemical  I have to say yes. In this case the chemicals are the oil and the salt, or maybe I should use salt’s scary sounding chemical name, sodium chloride. Ah, run it’s a chemical! McDonald’s also adds citric acid as a preservative. Oh my gosh, run, another chemical! Yea, a chemical that is also found it very high concentrations in those other really unhealthy dangerous foods like oranges and grapefruits. That was sarcasm, in case you didn’t pick it up. I have also heard people say that it’s “unnatural” for food to not decompose and that foods found in nature won’t stay preserved like that. Well, I beg to differ. A favorite sweetener of the all natural anti human crowd is honey. Even Mike Adams, the crazy conspiracy mongering nut from naturalnews.com has good things to say about it. Well guess what? Honey does not decompose either. They have even found jars of honey in Egyptian tombs that are many centuries old and are still good. Any conspiracy theories on that one guys? Are the bees being paid off by “big food” or the government to put dangerous chemicals in the honey they make? I guess that would be quite a stretch, even for the craziest of the crazy. I wonder if Morgan Spurlock ever realized that his little demonstration made no sense. He seems like a pretty smart guy and you would think so. If he knew that and still put it in his movie just for the shock value, then I seriously question his credibility and ethical standards.

On to another dumb argument used just for shock value and scare mongering that I heard recently. This one was on the television show “The Doctors.” Doctor Travis Stork, who I criticized before for recommending an herb for memory loss when studies have shown it does not work, was talking about certain foods you should avoid. One item on his list was soda. First he made a perfectly valid statement about how it was full of sugar and offered no nutritional value. He could have stopped there, but he continued with a little demonstration that was no better than the claims you see in many chain emails. He had an old car battery sitting in front of him with corroded terminals. He then poured the cola over the terminals and it dissolved away the corrosion. That must mean soda is actually corrosive toxic waste that will dissolve away your internal organs right? Wrong! The pH scale is used to measure how acidic or basic something is. The scale goes from one to 14, with one being the most acidic and 14 being the most alkaline or basic. The pH of cola is somewhere between two and four, which is pretty acidic. But it is not as acidic as the gastric acid that is already in your stomach which has a pH of between one and two. You would think that Travis Stork would know that since his is, you know, a doctor. Again, I am not saying that soda is good for you, just that this argument against it is invalid, misleading, and not necessary.

The bottom line is that if you want to make people aware that french fries and soda are not healthy there are perfectly valid arguments you can use. They are basically the same as many other unhealthy foods because they have lots of calories, little or no nutrition, and are chock full of saturated fat and sugar. But they are also not dangerous toxic poisons either. If you like them , you can have some on occasion, just don’t overdo it. If you use invalid and demonstrably false and unscientific arguments, it does nothing to advance your cause, it just makes you look stupid.

Homeopathic remedies frequently relieve or eradicate eczema – not only for people but animals as well. They are safe to use with babies through to the elderly. Many different remedies can be used depending on the symptoms of the sufferer but some of the main ones are listed below.

It is important to note that while these remedies can be used by yourself at home to safely treat numerous acute problems, eczema is a chronic complaint that should have the careful management of a trained homeopath. If you are not sure of what you are doing, too strong a dose, or too many doses of even the best matching remedy can cause a temporary aggravation of your eczema. While this will not be harmful, it is best avoided.

For good results in the treatment of your eczema, please use the services of a fully qualified homeopath.

The “remedies listed” that they mention are Arsenicum Album, Calcarea Carbonica, Graphites, Medorrhinum, Natrum Muriaticum, Sulphur, and Psorinum all in homeopathic dilutions. Considering how dilute homeopathic preparations are, what they are actually recommending is water, water, water, water, water, water, and yet more water. Let me explain. Homeopathy is a pre-scientific magical system of diluting ingredients (such as those listed above) which cause similar symptoms to whatever ails you, in vast quantities of water. For example since caffeine normally keeps you awake, homeopaths believe that their highly diluted caffeine will help you get to sleep. I wish I was making that up, but I’m not. It’s that stupid. But wait it gets even more stupid! If you actually take their magic caffeine, you’re not actually going to get any caffeine because it is so diluted that there is no chance that even one molecule of the original substance remains.

When you look at a package of a homeopathic preparation, (I won’t actually call them remedies) you might see something like 10X or 10C. That does not mean one part in 10 or one part in 100. “X” means the roman numeral 10 and “C” means the roman numeral 100, but the first number means the number of zeros in scientific notation. So a 30X preparation is one followed by 30 zeros. That is a ridiculously huge number, and it is already way past the amount for which there is no chance of even having one molecule of the already crazy “active” ingredient. I looked at all of the concentrations sold on that website of the ingredients recommended for the eczema treatments and most used the “C” scale, 30C to be exact. 30C is one followed by 60 zeros. How big is that number? It’s almost as many atoms as are in the entire milky way galaxy. Many homeopaths offer the explanation that the water maintains some kind of spiritual memory of the so called active ingredient. But wouldn’t that mean that the water would still have the memory of all the other stuff it had ever been in contact with? Urine for example? According to the homeopaths, when we drink a glass of water, we are all drinking homeopathic pee. Nice.

Okay so what if these deluded people want to use their diluted magic pee pee water treatments? Why am I bothering to write about it, what is the harm if it is just water? Look at the quote above, in it do they recommend their homeopathic items and tell you to go see a real doctor too? Nope, it says: “eczema is a chronic complaint that should have the careful management of a trained homeopath.” Let’s take a look at what can happen if you try to treat a chronic condition like eczema with magic water without being under the care of a real physician. Gloria Thomas died at the age of nine months. She spent the last few months of her short life crying and suffering from severe eczema. Her father, a trained homeopath, refused to treat her with conventional medicine. So that is what being under the care of a “trained homeopath” will do for your eczema. I feel so sorry for that poor kid. It was not her fault that she was born into a family that believed in magic, but it was she who had to suffer the consequences. Her parents are now in jail, where they belong.

That is why I am writing about this. That is what the harm is, that and so many more stories like it. That is why skeptics organizations worldwide are fighting to do something about this, and to get the public informed about the danger of “treatments” that do nothing. Of course we are being criticized for it, being called the “evil closed minded skeptics” as usual. But I ask you, who here is truly closed minded, us or the idiotic homeopath parents who watched their little baby suffer and die? They saw what was happening but were so far into their belief, so closed minded, that they never took the baby in for some real science based medicine that would have saved her. Is it skeptics that are closed minded, or homeopaths who still rely on a 200 year old magical system invented by one man at a time when pretty much nothing useful or valid was known about medicine? Science works, science changes with new information, science is not closed minded, science saves lives. It looks like we are finally making an impact, I hope we can so more people will not have to suffer Gloria’s fate.

“Will the implementation of universal health care help or hinder alternative medicine?”

One of the panelists, Jefferey Toobin, starts to say exactly what I would “There’s only medicine, if it works it works, if it doesn’t it doesn’t.” But Maher quickly interjects with a pro alternative anti-scientific rant. I will take his claims point by point:

“That’s not how this country works, often alternative medicine is illegal in this country you can go to jail for practicing it.”

This is not true, but it should be. There are lots of so called alternative treatments in this country that are perfectly legal. Homeopathy, chiropractic, reiki, acupuncture, and various detoxification “treatments” are all perfectly legal and some are even covered by insurance. Why in the world would anybody want quackery, and make no mistake that is what many of these treatments are, to be allowed? You want to be taken advantage of by snake oil salesmen with treatments that have absolutely no plausible scientific validity? What exactly is rational about that Bill? He goes on:

“Such as even suggesting any alternative treatment for cancer, you don’t understand how much the pharmaceutical companies have their tentacles wrapped around the government in this country. I don’t know whether Laetrile works, I know the shit they’ve been trying for the last 50 years doesn’t. I know they’ve made no progress as far as cancer in this country.”

Ah the old “Big Pharma” conspiracy.  I have news for you Bill, every large corporation “has its tentacles” wrapped around our politicians, not just the pharmaceutical companies. That is a totally separate issue than whether or not scientific medicine is better than quackery. And it does not mean that somehow doctors, pharmaceutical companies, and the government and all part of a grand conspiracy to keep us all sick for fun and profit. Offering alternative treatments to a person with a serious disease such as cancer should be illegal, because if that person avoids or delays real medical treatment, it can lead to their death. And “no progress” in cancer treatment for 50 years? First of all, there are many different types of cancer. They have made more progress with some than with others, but even if they hadn’t that still would not validate pseudo-scientific treatments in any way.

“There are people who actually go out of this country when they get cancer and some of them come back alive when they’ve been given a death sentence, but in this country you can’t talk about that.”

The logical fallacy here is anecdotal evidence. How does Bill know how all of the people who leave the country for cancer treatment and come back alive were cured? Where exactly to they go? What treatment do they get? Is his statement even true? What if they left the country and got a real scientifically valid cancer treatment that they could not get here for some reason or another? What if their cancer spontaneously went into remission? This has nothing to do with unproven non scientific medicine being a better solution.

He then defines alternative medicine as “holistic” and says “As opposed to drugs and surgery.”

So he’s opposed to drugs and surgery? I can’t understand why anyone would be opposed to drugs that can cure diseases and life saving surgery, but here is Bill’s reasoning:

“The reason why we have this giant health care problem is because people are so sick and the reason they are so sick is that the system we have now, western medicine, the non alternative system, only treats symptoms. That’s how they keep the scam going, if you only treat symptoms, of course people are going to get sicker. Yes, Nasonex will stop you from sniffling and will shove the mucus right down your throat.”

Wow. Let me say first that he is correct that there are some drugs and treatments that do only “treat symptoms.” For example there is no cure for the common cold, but when I get a cold I would at least like something to relieve the symptoms so I don’t feel like crap while I have it. The medicine he mentions, Nasonex, is an medication that treats allergy symptoms. I have no idea if it “shoves the mucus right down your throat” as Bill claims, but I do know that when I am suffering from severe allergies in the spring, I definitely want something to temporarily relive those symptoms. But his claim that the system we have only treats symptoms for everything and that it’s a scam is so demonstrably false it’s not even funny. Life expectancy has doubled since medicine became science based and we discovered what actually causes disease. Since then, through vaccination we have eradicated or marginalized many very serious diseases: Diphtheria, Pertussis, Hepatitis A and B, Polio, Small Pox, Measles, Mumps, Rubella, Tetanus, Varicella, HiB, Meningoccal, and Rotavirus. Not good enough for you? What about antibiotics? Millions of lives have been saved by antibiotics. They don’t just “treat symptoms,” they kill the bacteria that have infected you. And since we’re talking about cancer treatments too, chemotherapy kills cancer cells. It’s not perfect, it does not always work, and the side effects really suck, but it is not designed to just treat symptoms.  I can’t believe he also seems to have a problem with surgery. There are many types of conditions where surgery will absolutely save your life. I guess if Bill Maher gets seriously ill, he would rather have some crank stick little needles in his skin or something.

People do not get sick because of the system we have. People get sick because there are viruses, bacteria, and other things in the world that make them sick. Proponents of alternative medicine often use these kind of buzz-phases like “western medicine only treats symptoms,” “holistic,” “treating the whole person,” and “all natural” because their “treatments” are totally made up and have no scientific evidence or even plausibility to back them up. Bill Maher may not like the pharmaceutical industry (and I’m sure there are probably many valid criticisms of those and many other types of companies) but at least the pharmaceutical companies have to prove their products work  in real scientific clinical trials before they can sell them. Can you imagine if a pharmaceutical company were to sell a drug to the public for a serious illness that they knew was only a placebo? It would be a scandal! But alternative medicine does this all the time. Their treatments are usually nothing more than placebos and they don’t just give them away. Supplements, complimentary, and alternative medicine, there is your S.C.A.M.

What I do not understand is how Bill Maher can champion science when it fits with what he wants it to, and dismiss it for something else. He understands why evolution is true and why 9/11 conspiracy theories are not (even though he is a very outspoken critic of the Bush administration whom those conspiracy theories target), based on the scientific evidence. You can’t pick and choose what scientific data shows based on what you want to be true. Bill Maher calls himself a rationalist, but his disdain for science when it comes to medicine is not rational at all. In fact it is extremely dangerous. This is why while he may agree with skeptics on many things, but is definitely not a skeptic. Skeptics go with what the scientific data shows, even if that data goes against what they want to be true. I hope that if Bill Maher or anyone in his audience gets seriously sick that they will avail themselves of what science has to offer instead of quackery. It will probably save their lives.

For more information on scientific medicine, why it works, and how to spot quackery please visit Dr. Steven Novella and his team at http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org.

This is a public health hazard, it is irresponsible and dangerous. Thanks to vaccinations, children are now safe from many horrible deadly diseases that were common just a couple of generations ago. If enough people listen to Jenny McCarthy, children will die. It has already happened in the United Kingdom where a discredited study wrongly linked MMR vaccine with Autism. Consequently, there have been outbreaks of the measles in that country.  Ms. McCarthy is now claiming that she is not anti-vaccine, but I don’t believe her. If she was not against vaccines, she would not be out there spreading misinformation about them. She is now claiming that the vaccines are full of toxins, but her assertion is based on a lack of understanding that a high school chemistry class would easily cure. Contrary to what she says, vaccines do not contain ether, anti-freeze, or aborted human fetal tissue. Even though her claims have been debunked over and over, she still keeps repeating them. And she has stated herself in a recent interview with Time Magazine that “I do believe sadly it’s going to take some diseases coming back to realize that we need to change and develop vaccines that are safe. If the vaccine companies are not listening to us, it’s their f***ing fault that the diseases are coming back. They’re making a product that’s s***.  If you give us a safe vaccine, we’ll use it. It shouldn’t be polio versus autism.” There it is, she actually acknowledges that these diseases are going to come back. I wonder if she and Oprah Winfrey have really thought about what that means: the death of children.

Maybe to them those deaths are just statistics. I wonder if putting a human face on this travesty might help. You see, anti-vaccine propaganda in Australia has recently claimed the life of a four week old baby. Little Dana McCaffery was going to be vaccinated, but she was still too young. Her parents were unaware that the community they were living in had lost herd-immunity due to low vaccination rates for whooping cough. I want Jenny and Oprah to go to her website, read what happened, look at her picture and realize that she is not just a statistic. She was a person who spent her very short life suffering and gasping for air until she died. I myself saw this video on Phil Plait’s blog, and it has haunted me ever since. The anti-vaccination cranks in Australia actually sent them hate mail. What kind of a sick people send hate mail to a couple whose baby just died? Words fail me, they really do. Pseudoscience kills. For the sake of public health I really hope Oprah reconsiders her decision.

I have seen Dr. Oz on the Oprah Winfrey show a couple of times and both times he made statements that were misleading and potentially harmful. On one episode a member of the audience asked him about having their feet massaged to relieve stress. Nothing wrong with that, it would have been fine for him to recommend a foot massage as a method of relaxation. However, instead of just telling the person to get a foot massage, he recommended a method of deep tissue massage known as Rolfing. A Google search of Rolfing quickly reveals tons of pseudo-scientific gibberish about how it is supposed to “align the human body with gravity” and can “restore energy flow.” It also leads people to other non evidence based “energy healing” modalities such as Reiki and Reflexology. So what is the problem with this? Nothing if all you want is a massage because it feels good, but many practitioners of these techniques claim that they can use them to actually cure serious diseases. If a person who is seriously ill avoids real medical treatment for one of these methods it can lead to their condition becoming worse or even to their death. By having a real doctor point a largely uncritical audience to these methods, it gives them an air of legitimacy that they don’t deserve.

On another episode, Dr. Oz recommended acupuncture to a woman who had pain in her shoulder. He sends her backstage for a treatment with an acupuncturist and (surprise surprise) when she comes back, she feels better. Many people watching this view it as a test that shows that acupuncture works. In order to test something like this properly, you would need a large group of people with similar symptoms. You would then need to divide them into two groups at random. One group would get so called “real” acupuncture where the practitioner inserts the needles where they should be inserted (acupuncturists believe there are what they call meridian points in the body) and another group would get sham acupuncture where the needles are inserted anywhere or are not inserted far enough. What is most important is that the study must be blinded so each group does not know what they are getting. Better yet, the test should be double blind so that neither the participants nor the person administering the test know which is which. Granted, this would be difficult to do with acupuncture, but some methods have been devised, such as having the needles inside of a sheath so the practitioner and patient don’t know if the needle is going in fully or not. These controls are important to filter out bias, the placebo effect, etc. Many studies have been done on acupuncture and other “energy healing” techniques and the all follow a similar pattern: The better designed the study is, the less of an effect there is and the best designed studies show no effect at all. Again, if all you are looking for is pain relief and you get a placebo effect from it there is nothing wrong with it. But right there on the show the acupuncturist, while giving Oprah herself a “wellness” treatment, claims that “Acupuncture treats any condition from allergies to, obviously, pain to gastrointestinal issues—a wide range of chronic diseases.” Telling people that sticking little needles into their skin can treat “any condition” and “a wide range of chronic diseases” is egregious, irresponsible, and dangerous.

Dr. Oz himself chimed in on the “science” of acupuncture and alternative medicine. The following quotes are taken directly from Oprah’s website:

“Here’s the irony—acupuncture has been around for 2,500 years in China,” Dr. Oz says. “There are a billion people in another part of the world who use these therapies.”

Here Dr. Oz makes logical fallacy of an appeal to ancient knowledge. Just because something has been around for 2,500 years does not necessarily make it valid. Just over a century ago in the west, before medicine became scientific, if you went to the doctor they would do something like try to bleed you with leeches in an effort to “balance your bodily humors.” I wouldn’t want 150 year old unscientific medicine performed on me, much less unscientific medicine from 2,500 years ago. When he states that a billion people use it, that is another fallacy known as argumentum ad populum or an appeal to popularity. How popular something is has no bearing whatsoever on whether it is true or not. Even if every person on the planet thought that one plus one equaled three, that would not make it true, one plus one would still equal two. It wouldn’t make any difference if six billion people liked acupuncture (or something else) and used it, that is not a criteria to judge its efficacy.

“But let’s broaden the discussion, because it’s not just about acupuncture,” Dr. Oz says. “The reason I’m so excited and passionate about alternative medicine is … [because it is] the globalization of medicine.”

Dr. Oz talks about his passion for alternative medicine, saying that it’s the “globalization of medicine,” presumably bringing together east and west. I don’t really like the term western medicine. It implies that where a particular treatment originated it what makes it real or better. The terms western medicine, Chinese medicine, Indian medicine, holistic medicine, alternative medicine, etc, are quite meaningless. This is not about one country or culture being better than the other. This is about whether or not the methods and treatments in question work, no matter where they come from. There is only scientific medicine which is based on evidence, and unscientific medicine which is based on superstition. There are plenty of unscientific medical methods that were made up in the west. Some examples are Homeopathy (Germany), Chiropractic (United States), and Iridology (Hungary). If any of these were to be scientifically proven, they would cease to be alternative and just be part of regular medicine.

Alternative medicines, Dr. Oz says, deal with the body’s energy—something that traditional Western medicine generally does not. “We’re beginning now to understand things that we know in our hearts are true but we could never measure,” he says. “As we get better at understanding how little we know about the body, we begin to realize that the next big frontier … in medicine is energy medicine. It’s not the mechanistic part of the joints moving. It’s not the chemistry of our body. It’s understanding for the first time how energy influences how we feel.”

I keep having to remind myself that this guy is a actually a medical doctor. Statements like that make me wonder if he ever cracked a science book in all those years of medical school. People who practice or promote unscientific healing techniques seem to think that energy is a substance. Their ideas center around “restoring the flow of energy”or “unblocking energy.” In this context the word energy is completely and utterly meaningless. Energy is not some kind of substance that can be manipulated to promote healing. Energy is a measurement of the capacity of something to perform work. In other words it is the potential or actual ability to move things. If Dr. Oz could prove or “measure” things like Chi, Prana, Auras, or any of the types of mystical “Life Force Energy” claimed in these practices, he would win the Nobel Prize for physics. Did he? Did I miss that news story? Of course not, it would major news because it would change everything we know about reality. Keep in mind here that energy is not something you measure, energy is itself a measurement of work. Sorry Dr. Oz but the next frontier in medicine is not “energy medicine” as you claim. Here’s a news flash for you: Metaphysical concepts such as vitalism were abandoned by medical science in the 19th century. You are over a century behind the times on that one.

In an ideal world, people like Dr. Steven Barrett, Dr. Steven Novella, or Dr. Mark Crislip would get their own television shows about the wonderful scientific medicine we have that has doubled our life expectancy in just the last century. As for Oz, just like in the movie, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, the magic he is pushing is not what it’s cracked up to be.