Study: Alternative medicine sometimes causes death

Posted on December 25, 2010 by Michael

It has been documented again and again where alternative medical treatments have killed people. Rather than respond appropriately (and logically!), the usual woo-man answer is to point out all the deaths that occur as a result of real medicine. This, of course, does nothing to answer the initial concern, and even it was a logically valid point in the given context, it is easily countered by pointing out:

  • Mistakes cause many deaths. This does not count against the efficacy of real medicine.
  • People don’t die at an average age of 45 anymore in large part because of modern medicine. You can say “thank you” anytime.
  • People aren’t dying from an intrinsic property of modern medicine.

The reason I make this point is to get it out of the way so I can make this point: Alternative medicine sometimes kills children.

Australian researchers monitored reports from pediatricians in Australia from 2001 to 2003 looking for suspected side effects from alternative medicines like herbal treatments, vitamin supplements or naturopathic pills. They found 39 reports of side effects including four deaths.

The study was published online Thursday in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood, a specialist publication of the medical journal BMJ.

Unlike conventional medicines, whose side effects are tracked by national surveillance systems, there are no such systems in place for alternative therapies.

One thing the study didn’t say was that much of the harm from alternative (not real) medicine comes from the non-use of real medicine. When people get sick and decide to use unproven treatments rather than actually have something positive done for their health, they often risk becoming sicker. One medical school professor not involved in the study makes the same point:

“Perhaps the most serious harm occurs when effective therapies are replaced by ineffective alternative therapies,” he said. “In that situation, even an intrinsically harmless medicine, like a homeopathic medicine, can be life-threatening,” [Edzard] Ernst said.

It is difficult to know how many deaths come from replacing real medicine with alternative treatments. We know close to a dozen deaths occur every year as a result of faith healing. But that’s for children. I suspect the number would be higher for adults because older individuals are going to tend to have more underlying conditions than any child. And when we expand our horizon to consider general harm or being sick for longer, I believe the numbers would go up even further.

Alissa Lim of the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne and colleagues wrote that all four deaths they identified were caused by a decision to use alternative therapies instead of conventional medicines.

They described one case of a 10-month-old baby who had severe septic shock after being given naturopathic medicines and was assigned to a special diet to treat eczema. In another case, an infant who suffered multiple seizures and a heart attack died after being given alternative therapies — which the parents had chosen due to their concerns about the side effects of regular medicines.

Ernst said people should recognize the limitations of alternative medicines and that practitioners should be careful not to oversell their benefits.

I think I have a better recommendation than Ernst: Let’s just outlaw it all and start saving the health and lives of people.

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My favorite thing about New START…

Posted on December 24, 2010 by Michael

…is that of the few people in Russia’s government who are against the treaty, their big complaint is this:

The lower house’s Communists and Liberal Democrats opposed ratification, saying the treaty’s provisions will weaken national security.

“We think this treaty means a strategic defeat for Russia as it in no measure limits the development of the U.S. antiballistic defense,” said Leonid Kalashnikov, a Communist legislator and first deputy head of the International Affairs Committee. “The treaty also doesn’t take into account the nuclear arsenals of the U.S. NATO partners, which leaves us with a 30% inferiority in the number of warheads.”

Both of these issues were picked up by some of our crappier members of Congress (Kyl, McConnell). The difference lies in the fact that they lied about the treaty and said it weakens the U.S. anti-missile defense. Weird, huh? But they do converge with the dissent in Russia when they lament that their country might not have enough nuclear weapons. Call me crazy, but I’m pretty sure a handful would more than do the trick.

Anyway. I’m glad the Republicans were unable to hold together as their usual stubborn group that prevents anything good from happening.

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When they say Biden had a gaffe…

Posted on December 24, 2010 by Michael

…what everyone really means is he said something true that a lot of people don’t want to hear.

Vice President Joe Biden predicted Friday the evolution in thinking that will permit gays to soon serve openly in the military eventually will bring about a national consensus for same-sex marriage.

Changes in attitudes by military leaders, those in the service and the public allowed the repeal by Congress of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, Biden noted in a nationally broadcast interview on Christmas eve.

“I think the country’s evolving,” he said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.:” And I think you’re going to see, you know, the next effort is probably going to be to deal with so-called DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act). He said he agreed with Obama that his position in gay marriage is “evolving.”

Here are the basic facts that support Biden:

  • The U.S. Constitution does not give the states or feds the ability to discriminate against gays as a group.
  • The U.S. Constitution, in fact, bans such discrimination.
  • The point of marriage as sanctioned by the government is to provide a framework of rights to two individuals.
  • As more and more people come out as gay, more and more people realize that they never had anything to fear.
  • Christianity is losing its grip. I mean, let’s not get crazy and feed into the persecution complex so common among Christians: the religion is still extremely strong and to be a Christian in America is to have an overall advantage in so many ways (sort of like how being white is an overall advantage).

    • But it hasn’t the grip it once did.

  • Old people tend to be bigots at a higher rate than young people. They also tend to die at a much higher rate. And if we add 1 and 1…

Now sit back and wait for the bigot organizations to use Biden’s statements as a source of fear; they’ll use his words to try and thwart lesser efforts than gay marriage, all the while claiming that their concern is to prevent a slippery slope to equality in marriage. Of course, that will be one of their concerns, but their bigger concern will be to prevent gays from enjoying any civil rights whatsoever.

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Jon Stewart passes 9/11 First Responders bill

Posted on December 22, 2010 by Michael

Because let’s be honest, it was Jon Stewart who got everyone’s ass in gear.

The 9/11 legislation provides money for monitoring and treating illnesses related to Ground Zero and reopens a victims’ compensation fund for another five years to cover wage and other economic losses of sickened workers and nearby residents. Schumer and Gillibrand had sought $6.2 billion and keeping the compensation fund open for 10 years.

They ended up getting $4.2 billion. Good for them and even better for the 9/11 First Responders. I’m glad the Republicans backed down on their opposition to giving health care to anyone.

In other great news, the bill repealing DADT has been signed by President Obama.

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Catholic Church: Double Effect is wrong

Posted on December 21, 2010 by Michael

Well, they didn’t really say that. But they effectively stated as much when they stripped an Arizona hospital of its affiliation with the church.

The Roman Catholic Diocese of Phoenix stripped a major hospital of its affiliation with the church Tuesday because of a surgery that ended a woman’s pregnancy to save her life.

Bishop Thomas Olmsted called the 2009 procedure an abortion and said St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center — recognized internationally for its neurology and neurosurgery practices — violated ethical and religious directives of the national Conference of Catholic Bishops.

In fact, the woman was virtually guaranteed to die if she continued to carry the 11 week old fetus much longer. Now keep that in mind:

Double effect is the ethical principle which says something is ethical so long as it conforms to these four conditions:

1. The nature-of-the-act condition. The action must be either morally good or indifferent.
2. The means-end condition. The bad effect must not be the means by which one achieves the good effect.
3. The right-intention condition. The intention must be the achieving of only the good effect, with the bad effect being only an unintended side effect.
4. The proportionality condition. The good effect must be at least equivalent in importance to the bad effect.

This case in Arizona is textbook. The first condition is satisfied because the act was to save the mother’s life. The second condition is satisfied because the means is the removal of a physical condition, not the explicit murder of another person. The third condition is satisfied because the doctors only want to save the mother’s life, not destroy the fetus. The fourth condition is satisfied because even if the fetus is a human, the mother’s life must be equally considered.

In fact, double effect isn’t really important here because the fetus is not a human being, but I digress.

The church stripped the hospital of its status (and, really, that’s a good thing anyway) because it thinks the woman should have risked certain death (which isn’t really a risk, now is it?). We know the end result would be the death of her and her fetus. How that is considered good is a mystery.

And that raises another point, doesn’t it? What methodology, what guidelines, what anything does the Bible (or any holy book) offer in this situation? One person unfamiliar with basic, classic philosophical examples couldn’t come up with an answer. (In fact, he might say the problem here was just logistics.) It doesn’t look like the Catholic Church has an answer either.

It’s unfortunate that the hospital says it will still follow Catholic Church guidelines (not Biblical guidelines…since they do not exist), but this is an overall good incident. While I hate to see the sort of irrational arguments that say the saving of one life is really just abortion of another, it’s fantastic that the Church has severed its formal ties with an institution committed to actually helping people. I hope that whenever necessary the hospital will not hesitate to continue saving living humans.

Filed under: News, Religions | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »

Two quick things:

Posted on December 21, 2010 by Michael

First, I find it hilarious that conservatives are still whining about the child nutrition bill that was recently passed. Some jamoke filling in for the odious Glenn Beck said on the radio today that the bill takes control from the hands of parents, apparently countering a debate point that said otherwise. He’s wrong. The bill prevents kids from being able to buy as much crap at school. This empowers good parents who give their children lunch money for the purpose of buying substantial food, not snacks and soda. The only people who are having their control restricted are kids who want to buy junk. And if any crappy parents want to fill their kids with fat, they can buy it themselves. The government is not required to provide shitty food to children. Oh, and the bill also does all these other great things:

• The bill expands eligibility for lunch programs and sets nutrition standards for school meals.

• It is the first increase in school lunch funding since 1973.

• The act will allocate an additional $4.5 billion over 10 years to school meal programs, boosting the federal reimbursement rate for school lunches by 6 percent. Maine would receive about $1.1 million annually.

• The number of children eligible for those school meals will increase.

• The U.S. Department of Agriculture will use Medicaid data to certify students who meet income requirements, providing 115,000 new children with meals, and census data to determine schoolwide income eligibility.

• The act will allow program providers, such as day-care centers, at-risk after-school programs and emergency shelters, to be reimbursed for providing after-school meals.

• The act will allow the USDA to set nutrition standards for all school meals and require schools to make nutritional information readily available to parents.

Oh, the horror.

Second, it looks like the New START treaty with Russia is going to pass when it comes to a vote.

Eleven Republicans joined Democrats in a 67-28 proxy vote to wind up the debate and hold a final tally on Wednesday. They broke ranks with the Senate’s top two Republicans and were poised to give Obama a win on his top foreign policy priority.

“We know when we’ve been beaten,” Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah told reporters hours before the vote.

I’m just glad Obama doesn’t trust Russia as much as the Republicans do.

This one is really a no-brainer. In fact, as anyone who has bothered following this story knows, these treaties routinely get passed without much fuss; everyone recognizes that they are necessary and good. The only reason this one has become an issue is because Republicans either simply don’t want to give Obama any sort of victory or they want to wait until they hold power in the House and are stronger in the Senate so they can pass it and claim at least partial credit. It’s political pettiness run amok.

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Reminder: Lunar eclipse starting soon

Posted on December 20, 2010 by Michael

I won’t be seeing tonight’s lunar eclipse due to the nice blanket of clouds overhead, but those fortunate enough to have clear skies should make an effort to have a look. It’s the first time it has happened in full on the Winter Solstice since 1638.

Here are the times:

Filed under: Astronomy/Cosmology/Physics, News | Tagged: , , | 3 Comments »

Just pass it

Posted on December 20, 2010 by Michael

The GOP is just awful.

President Barack Obama tried to sway reluctant Republican senators on Monday to back a new arms control treaty with Russia as GOP aversion to giving a politically damaged president another victory intruded on his national security agenda.

There it is; that’s all you need to know. The GOP is refusing to pass the sort of thing that always gets passed easily because they want to politically harm the president. This was never about New START or anything important; it’s the height of pettiness.

Kerry bemoaned the politics atypical for arms control treaties.

“When the leader comes to the floor and says that our national security is being driven by politics, we really need to step back for a moment and calm down and think for a moment about what is at stake,” the Massachusetts Democrat said. He later added: “I mean is there no shame ever with respect to the arguments that are made sometimes on the floor of the United States Senate.”

Filed under: News, Politics and Social | Tagged: , , , | 3 Comments »

Total lunar eclipse Monday night

Posted on December 19, 2010 by Michael

Here are the times:

There is nothing complicated about viewing this celestial spectacle. Unlike an eclipse of the sun, which necessitates special viewing precautions in order to avoid eye damage, an eclipse of the moon is perfectly safe to watch. All you’ll need to watch are your eyes, but binoculars or a telescope will give a much nicer view.

The eclipse will actually begin when the moon enters the faint outer portion, or penumbra, of the Earth’s shadow a little over an hour before it begins moving into the umbra. The penumbra, however, is all but invisible to the eye until the moon becomes deeply immersed in it. Sharp-eyed viewers may get their first glimpse of the penumbra as a faint smudge on the left part of the moon’s disk at or around 6:15 UT (on Dec. 21) which corresponds to 1:15 a.m. Eastern Time or 10:15 p.m. Pacific Time (on Dec. 20).

The most noticeable part of this eclipse will come when the moon begins to enter the Earth’s dark inner shadow (called the umbra). A small scallop of darkness will begin to appear on the moon’s left edge at 6:33 UT (on Dec. 21) corresponding to 1:33 a.m. EST or 10:33 p.m. PST (on Dec. 20).

The moon is expected to take 3 hours and 28 minutes to pass completely through the umbra.

The total phase of the eclipse will last 72 minutes beginning at 7:41 UT (on Dec. 21), corresponding to 2:41 a.m. EST or 11:41 p.m. PST (on Dec. 20).

At the moment of mid-totality (8:17 UT/3:17 a.m. EST/12:17 a.m. PST), the moon will stand directly overhead from a point in the North Pacific Ocean about 800 miles (1,300 km) west of La Paz, Mexico.

The moon will pass entirely out of the Earth’s umbra at 10:01 UT/5:01 a.m. EST/2:01 a.m. PST and the last evidence of the penumbra should vanish about 15 or 20 minutes later.

Filed under: Astronomy/Cosmology/Physics, News | Tagged: | 2 Comments »

Sacrifice, Valor, and Integrity; the ending of DADT

Posted on December 18, 2010 by Michael

The Senate has voted to adhere to American principles while simultaneously making the nation stronger and safer.

In a historic vote for gay rights, the Senate agreed on Saturday to do away with the military’s 17-year ban on openly gay troops and sent President Barack Obama legislation to overturn the Clinton-era policy known as “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

…

“It is time to close this chapter in our history,” Obama said in a statement. “It is time to recognize that sacrifice, valor and integrity are no more defined by sexual orientation than they are by race or gender, religion or creed.”

The vote was a relatively overwhelming 65-31. I say relatively because it ought to be 100-0 (or apparently 96-0), but the fact that 8 Republican’ts actually did something right makes this overwhelming. It isn’t like them to do the right thing. For example:

Sen. John McCain, Obama’s GOP rival in 2008, led the opposition. Speaking on the Senate floor minutes before a crucial test vote, the Arizona Republican acknowledged he couldn’t stop the bill. He blamed elite liberals with no military experience for pushing their social agenda on troops during wartime.

“They will do what is asked of them,” McCain said of service members. “But don’t think there won’t be a great cost.”

This is the same guy who said he would always ask those he commanded what they thought he ought to do. “Do you want to go out and attack the enemy? No? Why, that sounds like good ol’ fashion American values!” But maybe it’s just my elite liberal eyes that make me question if that fits the definition of leadership.

The repeal of this discriminatory law is the most significant federal civil rights legislation in decades. Far from being another meaningless lame duck session, this Congress has made a difference in both the effectiveness of our military and in the personal well-being of real, living human beings who matter. But while DADT is discriminatory, it cannot be overlooked that it was an important stepping stone. As frustrating as it is to approach civil rights in such a piecemeal fashion, that’s just how it often is. Just as Thomas Jefferson made the first step towards ending slavery by putting an end to the slave trade in 1808, Bill Clinton made the first step that has led us to where we fortunately stand today. As Adm. Mike Mullen said:

“No longer will able men and women who want to serve and sacrifice for their country have to sacrifice their integrity to do so,” he said. “We will be a better military as a result.”

Filed under: News, Politics and Social, Rights | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments »

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