The word “energy” gets tossed around a lot by folks who don’t really know what it means - most annoyingly, in the goofier alternative therapies. (”These crystals focus your body’s internal energy field and enhance energy flow, blah blah blah”). During my classes to become an EMIT I’ve been hearing the word plenty in a [...]

You’ve probably heard that the Lancet, the most prominent British research journal, has retracted a flawed 1998 study linking certain vaccines with autism, saying that the science was wrong and the main researcher misbehaved. (Coverage here, and here, but there’s plenty more online) That paper pretty much launched the modern anti-vaccine hysteria, and thus indirectly [...]

The case of a woman who got anthrax in Durham, apparently due to a group drumming session that used some African drums with animal hides as drumheads involves the first-ever case of gastrointestinal anthrax - as compared to anthrax affecting lungs or skin - reported in the U.S. Drum heads made from animal hides are [...]

Actually, one Maine legislator wants the state to require cell phones to carry warnings that they might cause brain cancer, reports the Portland Press-Herald.
The article does a good job emphasizing the fact that the issue has been studied fairly well and has found no danger. To reduce it to sayings/cliches, we have “better safe than [...]

The Associated Press has a great story today examining the role of the placebo effect in medicine - both real medicine and stuff like Reiki. It’s a well done article, neither pooh-poohing nor pretending that a couple of anecdotes provide legitimate evidence. It includes details about how lots of double-blind tests haven’t found anything real [...]

The Globe has more detail in this story about Dartmouth’s continuing research into possible links between blue-green algae blooms and neurological diseases, particularly ALS, aka Lou Gehrig’s disease. Apparently a toxin produced by the bacteria, called BMAA (ß-methylamino-L-alanine), is a trigger.
The connection was prodded in part by an ALS cluster around Lake Mascoma, near Hanover. [...]

Homeopathic “remedies” - expensive water that has been banged or shaken in ways that adherents claim gives it inexplicable powers - have always had one real advantage over medicine: Because they are diluted to nothingness they can’t have any side effects, which allows the very real power of the placebo effect to take hold.
So it [...]

Blue-green algae blooms in Mascoma Lake may be linked to a higher-than-expected rate of Lou Gerhrig’s Disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS), reports the Valley News. It’s a good story that is based on research at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center rather than the vague concerns of some residents, which is too often the case in stories [...]

Slate has a great piece today on how that much-quoted estimate of “34,000 flu deaths annually in the U.S.” is arrived at - it doesn’t just tally up all the death certificates with “flu” as the cause: “people who die of flu are often no longer infected when they die. Instead, they succumb to pneumonia [...]

No ifs, ands or buts from a special three-judge federal court set up to handle all those lawsuits claiming that vaccines cause childhood autism.
They said it doesn’t, and no federal compensation is necessary.One judge even said some parents “had been misled by physicians who are guilty, in my view, of gross medical misjudgment,” according [...]

The Centers for Disease Control has released its 2008 map on West Nile Virus incidents and it confirms that the mosquito-borne disease which worried us 5 years ago has virtually disappeared from northern New England. New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Vermont had no human cases this year, and Maine (which has never had a human case) didn’t even have any infected mosquitoes.

Alarming little item from AP today (top story in this Telegraph roundup): A Jaffrey woman may have died from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a degenerative brain disorder similar to “mad cow disease”. Outbreaks of CJD in Britain have led to mass slaughters of livestock there; let’s hope this case is a false positive.
On a happier note, no [...]

Lovely study by a medical journal that says up to half of all doctors routinely subscribe either inert placebos (sugar pills) or else relatively mild medicine (painkiller, etc.) that they know won’t have any effect medically - because patients want to be treated. (NY Times story here.) This has ethicists in a quandary - they [...]

Kathleen Seidel of Peterborough has long drawn attention (from me and many others) for her excellent  blog www.neurodiversity.com about the false link between autism and vaccines - she was sued by a lawyer for the true believers, but fought back and won. Now she is featured in a new book by pediatrician Paul Offit detailing [...]

If you’re bored witless Sunday - er, I mean, if you want to see a goofy bit of public science, come see me test the Internet meme that says celery is a “negative calorie” food. I’ll be on stage, chomping away, at 1 p.m. as part of the Health & Wellness Fair at the Radisson Hotel in south Nashua