Cell phones might cause cancer, according to WHO
posted by GJ on May 31, 2011 @ 1:15PM

Supposedly some scientists at the UN's World Health Organization has reversed earlier recommendations and now say cell phones might cause cancer.

OK, repeat after me.  Cell phones cannot cause cancer.  Do you know what causes cancer?  DNA damage.  What damages DNA?  Usually, ionizing radiation (you can get it from other means as well, but cell phones supposedly cause EM field issues that cause cancer).  You get that exposure from the sun--and from your surroundings, to a degree, depending on where you live.

You don't get it from microwaves.  You don't get it from watching TV.  You don't get it from cell phones.

First and foremost, radation is a fancy word for light.  Radio waves?  Light.  Heat from your toaster?  Light.  Difference is the freqency of the light wave, that's all.  Ionizing radiation is simply a light wave over the very high end of the electro-magnetic field spectrum.  Think gamma rays, x-rays, and ultraviolet rays.  Ultraviolet is the threshhold--below this level, EM fields are no longer ionizing.

So, here's the scale:

• Low end of the frequency bar:  cell phones, wifi, microwaves, radio waves, tv broadcasts.  Good thing this is non-ionizing, since we're bathing in this stuff.
• Middle range of the frequency bar:  visible light.  Again, good thing this is...oh, you get it by now.
• High range of the frequency bar:  UV, X-ray, and Gamma rays.  Light goes invisble again at UV.  That same UV is what gives you a tan--another way to get cancer (of the skin).  UV isn't really too bad though, or we'd all have cancer.  X-rays are far worse--which is why you only get a few of those a year to minimize your exposure.  Gamma rays are way worse--don't expect to see those used for medical scans anytime soon.

So, cell phones are in the non-ionizing band.  In slightly non-sciency words, cell carrier waves just don't have enough juice to modify your DNA.  Thus, no cancer.  Perhaps those knuckleheads at WHO should read their own website. 

5 comments | Tags: woo, science

Here comes the SCIENCE!!
posted by GJ on October 27, 2009 @ 11:28AM

See how long it takes for her to go off the rails.  Provide the mm:ss of the first critical FAIL.  Be sure to keep beer nearby to sooth your headache, should you happen to understand a smattering of physics and this video reacts violently to that knowledge of yours. 

15 comments | Tags: woo, video

More anti-woo hilarity!
posted by GJ on August 25, 2009 @ 11:35AM

This is Irish comic Dara O'Briain.

2 comments | Tags: woo, video, funny, science

Homeopathic ER
posted by GJ on July 6, 2009 @ 10:32PM

1 comment | Tags: woo, video, funny

Saw this coming from miles away
posted by GJ on May 1, 2009 @ 4:25PM

You've seen the ads all over TV for the last few years.  Hydroxycut will make you lose weight--without exercise!

If you have even a basic understanding of biochemistry and physics, you'd recognize this as the dietary supplement equal of the perpetual motion machine.

What's scary about this, and practically every other junk science product out there, is this:  the developers of the product actually believe they know what they are doing.  They think, hey, we can add lots of caffeine, since that speeds up your metabolism and theoretically (by virtual of their rationalization, and positive-reinforcment based research) will help you burn calories faster.  They add several other ingredients, some well-known, some much less known, in an effort to come up with a magic pill to do the impossible.  However, these folks don't really know what they're doing--have no idea how to safely test a product--and really don't understand what the fuss is all about.

And of course, due to the wild west that is the dietary supplement business, the government only gets involved when people start dying.  Well, to no one's shock, especially not mine, that's where we are with this product.  For those that suffered no ill effects, it's not so bad--they just got to pay a "stupid tax," since any result they got wasn't the result of this product.

Want some hints as to other products in this category?  Glad you asked.

Cold-Eeze.  Airborne.  Dr. Frank's Homeopathic Spray for People/Animals.  HeadOn.  The list just goes on, and on, and on.  Fight back by staying wary.  A product shows up and claims wonderful benefits with practically no downside?  Be wary--very, very wary.  Ask the tough questions.  You'll find they almost always resort to the same evasive answers.

Watch the ads--you'll see an explosion of these soon promising protection against the swine flu.  Same deal.  :)

No comments | Tags: woo, pseudoscience

And now a word from our sponsors
posted by GJ on April 8, 2009 @ 2:19PM

3 comments | Tags: woo

Remember my favorite woo "medicine," Airborne?
posted by GJ on March 5, 2008 @ 11:47AM

Payback time for the makers of Airborne.  Literally.

Such a shame to see charlatans held accountable for their lies.  Thankfully this product is pretty much harmless.  The same can't be said for a whole of of other "natural" cures out there.

Update:  The Sharper Image has gone bankrupt.  Want to know why?  60% of their sales were attributed to their woo product "Ionic Breeze" in their not-so-distant boom times.  Consumer Reports laid the smackdown on them in 2005, alleging that the product did not clean the air much at all, and worse it emitted dangerous levels of ozone.  So, with their flagship product sales dropping catastrophically, it's no surprise they went under financially. 

Ozone is a poison, for those who don't know.  Chemically, the oxygen you need it O₂ while ozone is O₃.  The "ions" used in these "ionic" air purifiers are ozone molecules, which are supposed to attract dust.  They also emit that "right after the lightning storm" smell, which some people like. That smell is ozone--lightning changes oxygen to ozone as it burns through the atmosphere. Now, does electrically charged ozone collect dust?  A little. However, that ozone is a big problem for some.

Now, you ask--who was the Ionic Breeze specifically marketed to?  Why, allergy and asmtha sufferers, of course--to better purify the air they breathe.  Who is most susceptible to ozone poisoning?  Same group of people.  So, this product was sold as a health benefit to people, and instead it would exacerbate the very problems it claimed to mollify. Aww, they're going out of business as a result of their poor business ethics.  What a shame.

Now you know why I hate this crap, and don't tolerate even the stuff that appears harmless.  Unless you test and vet your products, how do you really know if you'll harm someone, let alone know if the product does what it's supposed to? 

No comments | Tags: woo, science

Unintentionally Hilarious
posted by GJ on January 16, 2008 @ 9:46AM

Do hop on over to Astrological Magazine's website to say goodbye, for the venerable rag of stupidity distrubution is shutting down.  Be sure to read the reason why they are shutting down.  You'd be wise to don your irony helmet, too.

1 comment | Tags: woo, funny

The Immortal Lily The Pink
posted by GJ on December 12, 2007 @ 11:11AM

The Immortal Lily The Pink
The 100th anniversary of the FDA marks a milestone in medicine before which cranks and charlatans ran amok
by Daniel Loxton

 
Lydia Pinkham, as she appeared on an original antique advertising card, circa 1880.
This year has represented a little-remarked-upon major milestone in American medicine: the 100th anniversary of active Federal regulation of food and drugs. The Pure Food and Drug Act came into effect on January 1st, 1907 — the first step toward the creation of the modern Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and a step forward from the dangerous anarchy of the patent medicine era.

For the first time, drug manufacturers were required by law to disclose the dosage and purity of their products (including, for the first time, disclosing whether they contained poison, alcohol, or narcotics such as heroin or cocaine). They were also required to refrain from deliberately lying about their products, and from fraudulently substituting a claimed ingredient for some other ingredient.

Bizarrely, such laws were needed.

To celebrate this anniversary, and in time for the holidays, we’re pleased to share a brand new, free MP3 recording of a song with roots extending back to the bad old days of unrestrained snake oil: “Lily the Pink” (performed here by the Canadian bluegrass trio Dirty Dishes).

“Lily the Pink” (which evolved from “The Ballad of Lydia Pinkham”) is a comic send-up of the woman called “the queen of patent medicine.” Starting in 1875, Lydia Pinkham built a business empire on the hype-driven sales of a herbal concoction marketed to women for relief of “all those Painful Complaints and Weaknesses so common to our best female population.” In specific, it was intended to address menstrual cramps, and was also “particularly adapted to the Change of Life.”

True to the dizzy style of the unregulated patent medicine era, Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound was promoted with a blizzard of unlikely claims. (As the lyrics of “Lily the Pink” mockingly put it, “She invented a medicinal compound, efficacious in every case.”) Ad copy insisted that it cured everything from headaches to indigestion to farting, not to mention sleeplessness and depression. (Its primary ingredient was booze, so there was no doubt some evidence to support these latter claims.)

Less believably, Pinkham’s Compound was advertised to “dissolve and expel tumors from the uterus at an early stage of development. The tendency to cancerous humors there is checked very speedily by its use.” It was also, the ads said, remarkably effective: “98 out of every 100 women who take the medicine for the ailments for which it is recommended are benefited by it. This is a most remarkable record of efficiency. We doubt if any other medicine in the world equals it.”

Remarkable indeed.

It’s clear that most of these boasts were made up whole cloth, but was any of it true? I asked quack medicine expert Dr. Harriet Hall, “Was Pinkham’s herbal cocktail at all useful for treating anything?”

“The bottom line,” Hall told me, “is that we have no idea whether her product was effective or safe, since it has never been properly tested. We have no good evidence that any of the individual components are safe or effective, and we have no way of knowing what might happen when you mix them. Mixing remedies could do almost anything — they could cancel each other out, have additive effects, vastly increase the chance of side effects, who knows?”

Certainly the Lydia Pinkham Medicine Company had no idea whether its product was safe or effective. It was literally something Pinkham brewed up in her basement, without scientific testing of any kind.

On the other hand, we do now have firm evidence regarding the efficacy of black cohosh, the herb modern alternative medicine proponents most often cite as the effective active component to Pinkham’s Compound. Long considered promising as a treatment for the symptoms of menopause, black cohosh unfortunately bombed in a recent large trial designed by the National Institutes of Health to clarify the ambiguous existing literature and settle the question. The results of this randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial were unequivocal: black cohosh is useless for the control of menopausal hot flashes and night sweats.

As far as science can tell, Lydia’s Compound was worthless in public health terms. By free market standards, however, it was a soaring success story. Pinkham’s booming 19th century enterprise raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

The secret, then as now, was marketing. Pinkham spread the message through national print ad campaigns, door-to-door sales, point of purchase postcard giveaways, and many books and pamphlets that alternated recipes or household tips with ads for her product. The company’s aggressive marketing pioneered a formula for selling quack medicine that is still common today:

Market directly to women: At the mercy of a male-dominated medical establishment, women were eager to seize control of their own health. Offering them a way to sidestep the then-primitive medical mainstream through the consumption and word-of-mouth promotion of a herbal “alternative” was (and still is) an effective hook for a sales pitch. With its “just us girls” attitude and its “Only a woman can understand a woman’s ills” tagline, the Lydia Pinkham Medicine Company turned shameful social inequality into a source of profit.
Sow fear of mainstream medicine: “ANY HOSPITAL EXPERIENCE is painful as well as costly and frequently dangerous,” warned Food and Health, a promotional book produced by Pinkham’s company. “Many women have avoided this experience by taking Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound in time…”
Present your big business as warm, folksy and personal: With Lydia Pinkham’s matronly portrait as its logo, the company was able to present itself as a homemade cottage enterprise. (Fans of the animated TV series Futurama may recognize “MomCorp” and its subsidiary “Mom’s Friendly Robot Company” as comic descendants of the Pinkham advertising model.) Customers who wrote for advice even received personal responses from Lydia herself — for years after she died. In fact, a large, dedicated department within the company churned out replies by the thousands.
Today, this time-tested advertising model — present your mainstream competitors as cold and mercenary, while presenting your own for-profit company’s herbal products as warm, homemade, and natural — is still in wide use in the alternative medicine industry. Indeed, it’s shocking how little has changed.

Today, herbal concoctions and other supplements are cooked up and marketed with wild abandon, with all the unrestrained, unverified boasting of the patent medicine era still on display. We are told (coyly, skirting the few rules for labeling) that herbs and proprietary blends can cure more-or-less anything — just as we were assured by Lydia Pinkham.

Have we really made so little progress against health fraud?

In fact, we’ve come a long way. Today, most medicines are carefully regulated, and consumers can be reasonably assured of the basics: that effectiveness, side effects and interactions are known to some degree; that the bottle contains what the label says; that we are not unknowingly buying bottles of heroin, and so on. We all know that regulation comes with its own cost (drugs take a long time to get to market, for example) but we’re much, much better off than drug consumers in Pinkham’s day.

Unfortunately, current regulations have a hole in them, a hole large enough to drive a truck through — or rather, truckload after truckload of untested, unregulated herbal “supplements.”

The fault for this lies with a piece of legislation called the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA), which seized back control of patent medicines from the FDA. Driven by strenuous lobbying from supplement manufacturers, this legislation removed all herbs, vitamins, and minerals from FDA oversight — despite the fact that herbs are drugs, exhibiting a full range of effectiveness (or ineffectiveness), dangerous side effects, and interactions with other drugs. Not only are the producers of herbal drugs and other supplements no longer required to prove that their products work — or whether they are safe — but the burden of proof regarding safety is explicitly shifted to the FDA.

That is, anyone can sell any old combination of herbs at any dosage, without any obligation to even try to find out if that product is safe or not.

Only if a supplement kills enough people to get the FDA’s attention, and if the staff of the FDA can find the time and budget, can the FDA then attempt to prove in court that the supplement is unsafe. This costly and lengthy close-the-barn-door-after-the-horses-have-escaped procedure is of course attempted only rarely, and in the most severe cases. The first such case was the banning of ephedra, a supplement suspected in hundreds of deaths. This ban was soon challenged in court (by a company which sells ephedra), and overturned — on the basis that the DSHEA forbids FDA action even in such an extreme case. Luckily, the ruling against the ephedra ban was itself overturned on appeal. After more than two years of legal battles, ephedra supplements are today illegal.

Despite this eventual victory on this one substance, the DSHEA renders the FDA almost powerless over herbal drugs, even if they are known to be dangerous. (Certainly the FDA has no power at all over herbal drugs whose dangers are simply unknown.) This industry-driven legislation inexplicably shifts the cost of safety testing from the companies that profit from the sales of supplements to the taxpayer. More to the point, the risk is shifted from the R&D budgets of companies to the personal health of individual consumers — exactly where we began, in Lydia Pinkham’s day.

Thanks to the DSHEA, the supplement industry has exploded (by several hundred percent or more). It now rakes in tens of billions of dollars a year. Requiring no expensive safety testing or FDA approval, these products are produced with an enviable profit margin, which has of course drawn large pharmaceutical corporations enthusiastically into the supplement industry. (People buying “alternative” herbal products rarely appreciate the likelihood that they are feeding their dollars into the exact same Big Pharma system they are attempting to circumvent, with the only difference being that corporation has been excused from the responsibility or cost of ensuring the safety or effectiveness of one of its lines of drugs.)

We’ve come a long way — but we’ve also, in some ways, come full circle.

This is a shame, because the room for mischief we’ve granted to modern alternative medicine manufacturers is the exact same ground we won at such great cost and effort from the early 20th century patent medicine industry. Like today’s Natural Cures infomercial star (and convicted con-man) Kevin Trudeau, the Pinkham company engaged in a series of running battles with Federal regulators regarding the dishonesty of its labeling and advertising. As is still the case, vagueness and coy insinuation became the best friends of quack medicine manufacturers. (Noting yet another label change in 1939, Time magazine quoted the American Medical Association’s exasperated patent medicine czar: “Lydia E. Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound is ‘Recommended as a Vegetable Tonic in Conditions for which this Preparation is Adapted.’ This statement is about as informative as it would be to say that ‘For Those Who Like This Sort of Thing, This is the Sort of Thing That Those People Like.’”)

It’s clear that we still have much work to do in this important public health arena:

In 1875, one business empire was founded on the sale of Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound, an untested medical potion for “those painful Complaints and Weaknesses so common to our best female population.”

Today, after a century of wrestling with the patent medicine industry, another company markets an alternative medicine concoction promoted as “beneficial in menstrual and menopausal distress.”

It is called Lydia Pinkham Herbal Compound.

17 comments | Tags: woo, medicine, science

New Ghost Video...you be the judge
posted by GJ on November 13, 2007 @ 6:14AM

This one is even dumber than the swing. 

3 comments | Tags: woo, video