Last Sunday, 60 MINUTES Australia broadcast a story about a very sympathetic girl with cerebral palsy and her family, who traveled to Bioss Stem Cells, a stem cell clinic in Monterrey, Mexico, for unproven “stem cell” treatments. The story was nearly completely devoid of skepticism and played, in essence, as a 20 minute advertisement for quacks. It is one of the worst examples of boosterism and false balance about unproven treatments I’ve ever seen.
The Oregon Health Authority is on the verge of passing a radical policy that would require chronic pain patients receiving Medicaid to have their opioids tapered to zero while covering “nonpharmacologic treatments for pain” that include primarily acupuncture, chiropractic, massage therapy, and other “alternative” treatments. Not surprisingly, the Oregon Chronic Pain Task Force, which is responsible for this proposed infliction of quackery on the most vulnerable, has three acupuncturists and a chiropractor sitting on it.
It seems as though I have to write a post like this every year or two, as measles outbreaks keep raging and children keep getting sick and even dying. I feel obligated to “thank” the primary author of this misery, the man whose scientific fraud and other efforts have fueled antivaxers’ fear of the MMR vaccine. So thanks Andrew Wakefield. Thanks for the measles. Again. In 2018.
Our old friend anti antivaccine activist J. B. Handley invokes the “vaccines didn’t save us” gambit. It doesn’t go well for him. You could say that he fought vaccine science, but, as always, the vaccine science won.
Orac discovers the Luminas Pain Relief Patch. He is amused at how how quacks confuse the words “quantum” and “energy” with magic.
