Snake oil comes in many guises, most of which exist to reduce the contents of one’s purse.  Last week an Associated Press writer detailed how the government spent $2.5 billion of our money to test various so-called alternative health remedies, most of which would be considered snake oil by mainstream medicine, and came up virtually empty handed.

Echinacea for colds. Ginkgo biloba for memory. Glucosamine and chondroitin for arthritis. Black cohosh for menopausal hot flashes. Saw palmetto for prostate problems. Shark cartilage for cancer. All proved no better than dummy pills in big studies funded by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. The lone exception: ginger capsules may help chemotherapy nausea.

Acupuncture and some of the hands-on manipulative therapies fared a little better. Read more »

In the fall of 1898 Sir William Crookes (right) gave his inaugural address as the incoming president of the British Academy of Sciences.   Unlike the typical such speech, this one was prophetic and alerted the British populace for the first time to a real and growing problem.  And the populace began to worry, because Sir William was the Al Gore of his day, alerting his country (and the world) to a looming danger.

Other than prophesying disaster, however, there were a few notable differences between Sir William and Al Gore.  First and foremost, Sir William was a true scientist, not a bloated former politician with no technical training.  He was the inventor of the predecessor of the tubes later used in televisions and radios and had discovered and added thallium to the periodic table.  The second major difference is that his worries were valid.  They weren’t concocted from a gibberish of people hoping to cash in on the public’s fears of an imaginary melting of the earth, but were born of a serious concern for the continued success of the human race.  Or at the very least, the continued success of the people of Great Britain.

Sir William Crookes was deeply (and rightfully) concerned that the world would soon run out of the ability to fertilize crops, and that, as a consequence, millions would die.  At that time Britain was importing guano (the droppings of sea birds) from islands off the coast of Peru and from the nitrate fields of Chile, but those sources were finite, and Sir William realized they would at some point run out.  (He predicted sometime in 1930 as doomsday.)

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I’ve had a number of people email me about a new study appearing in the Archives of Internal Medicine purportedly showing that statins really do provide benefit to those who take them regularly.  As you can see from the heading of an email piece I pasted above, even Medscape is all over this article and blasting it out to physicians all over the world.

I’m sad to say that this is the same kind of paper I would have been taken in by 20 years ago before I really understood how to read the scientific literature critically.  In fact, I would have used it myself to justify giving statins to all kinds of people, and I’m sure other physicians are doing so right now.  But I would have been in error to base my prescribing on this paper, and all the other docs out there giving statins like they were candy are in error as well.

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I posted last year about all the trouble Pfizer got into by using Robert Jarvik, the developer of the artificial heart, as their spokesman for the most commonly prescribed statin drug Lipitor.  Pfizer has taken a new tack and is now bombarding the airwaves with yet another commercial for Lipitor using as their spokesman an actual victim of a heart attack.

They chose a 58 year old California ad man and talent agent named John Erlendson who did indeed have a heart attack at age 57, and who was not taking any cholesterol-lowering medicines prior to that.  As opposed to the Gollum-like Jarvik, Mr. Erlendson comes across as a sincere guy who is genuinely distraught over his medical condition.  He is easy to empathize with.

Pfizer spent $181 million advertising Lipitor last year, and if the frequency with which they are running their new ad is any indication, I’m sure they are not pinching pennies with their ad budget now. It’s difficult to have a television on for half an hour and not see Mr. Erlendson at least once.  But, hey, what’s a measly $181 million when you’ve got sales of $12.7 billion?  I’ll take that deal any day.

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The last few studies I’ve posted on here seem to have been designed by their authors to show that low-carb diets aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Of course none of these studies have used real low-carb diets – they’ve all used diets that are called low-carb, but really aren’t. They’ve set up a low-carb straw man, knocked it down, then crowed about it. These antics have left us all longing to see a study using a real low-carb diet.

Fate has dropped two studies into our hands that clearly demonstrate the superiority of low-carbs diets when matched against the high-fiber, high-cereal diet beloved of so many in the nutritional establishment and even against low glycemic index (Low-GI) diets.

In the same couple of week period two studies came out – one you’ve probably read about; the other you likely haven’t. By combining the data from these studies, we can see how these three diets match up.

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