Stem cell therapies show great promise, but as yet the vast majority of that promise has not been validated in rigorous clinical trials. Unfortunately, for-profit stem cell clinics are running clinical trials that require patients to pay to be part of them (“pay-to-play”). These trials are not rigorous. Even more unfortunately, it appears that some universities are also running “pay-to-play” clinical trials that bear an uncomfortable resemblance to those run by for-profit clinics.
Faye Flam of Bloomberg Technology defended Presidential candidate Marianne Williamson against charges of being antivaccine and antiscience. It does not go well. Flam ignores the worst nonsense and misunderstands science.
This week, JAMA Internal Medicine published a clinical trial purporting to find that acupuncture helps stable angina. Here’s a hint: It doesn’t. It’s a bait-and-switch study that used “electroacupuncture” instead of acupuncture with poor blinding and lack of consideration of prior plausibility.
Antivaxers are going to descend on Washington for their Vaccine Injury Epidemic (VIE) Event in November. Meet the new antivax march, same as the old antivaccine march.
This month the largest epidemiological study of its kind was published and concluded, once again, that autism is primarily due to genes and that the environmental component of autism risk is small. Not surprisingly, once again antivaxers didn’t want to hear that message.
