The Ethical Nag

Harvard Medical School’s Dr. Marcia Angell is the author of The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It.  But more to the point, she’s also the former Editor-in-Chief at the New England Journal of Medicine, arguably one of the most respected medical journals on earth. But after reading her article in the New York Review of Books called Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption, one wonders if any medical journal on earth is worth anybody’s respect anymore.

“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.”

Dr. Angell cites the case of Dr. Joseph L. Biederman, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and chief of pediatric psychopharmacology at Harvard’s Massachusetts General Hospital. “Thanks largely to him,” she explains,  ”Children as young as two years old are now being diagnosed with bipolar disorder and treated with a cocktail of powerful drugs, many of which were not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for that purpose, and none of which were approved for children below ten years of age.”  Read more…

You’ve seen them on display at health food stores and jewelry shops. You’ve read anecdotal testimonials like: “The best copper magnetic bracelet I’ve ever had!” You can order them online from thousands of commercial sellers.

But researchers from the U.K. have shown in the first randomized placebo-controlled trial that, no matter what claims their sellers may make, these metallic objects are in fact ineffective in treating pain. They say that any benefit derived from them can be attributed to psychological placebo effects.  ”Our findings suggest that such devices have no real advantage over placebo wrist straps that are not magnetic and do not contain copper,” says Dr. Stewart Richmond of the University of York, the lead author of the study, published in the current issue of the journal, Complementary Therapies In Medicine.

However, Dr. Richmond emphasizes that although these products don’t necessarily cause harm, people should be careful about spending a lot of money on products that claim to cure your ailments with magnetic therapy.

What is a randomized placebo-controlled trial anyway?  Read more…

Let’s say you’ve heard reports (from reliable medical sources like Oprah) that childhood vaccines are responsible for autism.

The science you learn from watching Dr. Oprah et al sounds confusing.  You decide to do a bit of research yourself. You even track down a convincing scientific paper that supports this theory, published in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.  This paper concludes that “mercury doses in thimerosal added to childhood vaccines increases the likelihood that mercury is one of the main factors leading to the large increase in the rate of autism”.  Wow! Dr. Oprah is right!

Sounds pretty authoritative, unless you already know that the officious-sounding Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons is published by an organization that Dr. David Gorski describes as “steeped in an utterly toxic brew of bad science and extreme ideology”.  (In fact, their journal is not even listed among the 13,410 legitimate scientific journals indexed by PubMed, accessing the MEDLINE database of 18 million citations, abstracts and articles on life sciences and biomedical topics). Dr. Gorski describes this vaccine-autism journal article:

“The paper was so ludicrously, execrably bad in design, execution and analysis that I had a hard time believing that any self-respecting journal would publish such tripe.”

Read more…