Natural Male Imprisonment

Steve Warshak, owner of the company that produces Enzyte has been found "guilty of conspiracy to commit mail fraud, bank fraud and money laundering," according to the AP.

On this day, I urge everyone to remember the reason anyone knows about Enzyte at all: their commercials. A discussion of the epistemological status of Enzyte and other "natural enhancement" pills commences below, but first let us watch some funny videos.











According to the manufacturer's website, Enzyte "includes Korean red ginseng, ginkgo biloba, zinc, and octacosanol." According to Enzyte's Wikipedia entry, no clinical effect has been proved.

I'm feeling a lot of guilt right now for putting off my homework, so rather than take the time to thoroughly go through the ingredients and claims and so forth, I'll refer you to sage advice given by the Federal Trade Commission in 1998.

• If the product is advertised as effective for treating impotence-and no physician's prescription is necessary-forget it. It won't cure the condition.


• If the product is advertised as a "breakthrough" in treating impotence, check with your doctor to see if it is legitimate.


• If the product is promoted by a "medical organization," call your physician to check the credentials. Phony "clinics" and sham "institutes" are touting bogus cures for impotence.


• # If the product says "scientifically proven" to reverse impotence in a high percentage of patients, check it out with your doctor. Some claims that "clinical studies" prove a product works are false; generally, high success rates should raise suspicions.


• If the product being pitched to cure impotence is "herbal" or "all natural," dismiss it. To date, no "herbal" or "all natural" substance has been shown to be an effective treatment for impotence.

Thanks to Ed Brayton.

Continue Reading...

Further Proof Science is Sexy

Dr. T. Stuart Meloy has developed spinal implant to treat bladder and pain problems that has the sexy side effect of causing orgasms in most women. According to an LA Times article:

Women who have used the device say they feel as if their clitoris and vagina are actually being stimulated, to quite realistic effect. ("One woman asked me, 'Would it be considered adultery if I gave the remote control to someone other than my husband?' " Meloy says.)

Some volunteers also report fleeting episodes of clenched foot muscles, Meloy says, probably a result of electrical pulses leaving the spine and stimulating nearby motor nerves. (He wonders if the phenomenon might somehow be related to a common orgasm description: "My toes curled.")

And when the device's pulse intensity is cranked up to maximum, Meloy says, some women find their vaginal and rectal muscles squeezing rhythmically in time with the pulses, even before the orgasmic finale.

Dr. Meloy is now looking for FDA approval to use the device to treat female orgasm dysfunction.

But that's not all!

Meloy says he has also implanted two impotent men with the device. Both volunteers were able to achieve an erection, he says, and reportedly had powerful ejaculations.

As soon as the good Doctor finds a way to bring the price down from a steep $12,000, perhaps we'll see a slightly less frustrated America. And some say science is boring...

Read more here and over at Skepchick. Here is the LA Times article.

Continue Reading...

What's the harm?

Here is a site keeping track of those harmed by pseudoscience and dangerous beliefs. Categories include Scientology, exorcisms, homeopathy, vaccine denial, acupuncture, UFOs and many others. I recommend taking a look.

Thanks to the Bad Astronomer for sharing.

Continue Reading...

Funny. Very Funny.

Mark Crislip over on the Science-Based Medicine blog is calling for alternative aviation since medicine has had such luck supporting alternative medicine. I highly recommend it.

Here is one of my favorite passages:

Quantum mechanics demonstrates that an electron takes many simultaneous paths to go from point a to point b. Only when the wave function is collapsed does the electron reach its destination. We have a prototype quantum airplane what will be able to simultaneously transport a passenger to all their destinations and with a simple collapse of the wave function the passenger will be at their destination of choice. With quantum aviation one can take the path less traveled and make a difference. In the quantum realm, our mind makes both our reality and our travel destination.

Aviation based on principals of homeopathy is especially promising. Airplanes, once they have flown their route, remember the route due to the principals of quantum complementarity. Then by making the planes smaller and slower by repeated factors of 10, planes can carry more passengers, go faster and farther with each aeronautic dilution.

Enjoy! (By the way, this is post #100. Woohoo!)

Continue Reading...

Just Wow

There is an article, complete with photos, on ABC News about a man with a 50 lb tumor on his face. He is currently undergoing surgical procedures in order to remove as much of the tumor as possible. It is cases like these that make me thankful for science-based medicine.

There is also a gallery of deformities on the ABC page. I will warn you that the page is not for the squeamish.

Continue Reading...

I'm Honestly Just Curious

At our recent meeting, one of the Society members suggested writing an article investigating whether or not foods or other substances actually affect the flavor of semen. We joked about conducting a large blinded experiment, but jokes aside I wanted to know the real information. With that in mind, I hit the Internet.

Sadly, I didn't find much. Well, that's a lie: I found a lot. I just didn't find much that was useful.

First off, Snopes doesn't have an article on this. They do have several other articles involving semen, but none regarding flavor.

My next step was Google. I found a boatload of articles on what to eat or not eat to improve semen flavor, but most of them are uncited. In fact, many just seem to be using the argument from sex-columnist authority.

However, a few pages in my search stood out.

This one cites its source—in a way. The page displays an image captured from a book (click for a larger image on the native page), and that book is cited at the bottom of the page. However, the image itself contains a citation to a different source, and it's only a parenthetical reference. I could not track down the full reference, so as of now this chart remains anecdotal.

A BBC program conducted an experiment (with video, if you're interested). I think it might have been a little... poorly controlled.

There's a product on the market that claims to sweeten a man's semen. They present no scientific research, but the patent application (apparently for the same product) says the 27-couple market research was "highly positive." I bet.

Two sites referred to scientific tests (or the dearth thereof) on semen flavor. This WikiAnswers page mentions the lack of research before diving into the anecdotes. Dr. Drew calls the semen-flavor claim a "myth" and makes reference to people who have studied this. However, he provides no names or references, so this has to be chalked up to anecdote as well.

As of now, everything I've found has been anecdotal (with the exception of the BBC experiment). Since I'm not a person knowledgeable in medicine, Google's pretty much as far as I go. Well, I did do a Google Scholar search, but nothing interesting came up. So I ask you the reader, do you know of any evidence on this subject? Has anyone scientifically studied semen flavor?

Continue Reading...

Pediatricians Against TV Show

Check CNN for the full story. Also, you can click here for the press release from the American Academy of Pediatricians. You can also click here to read the letter sent to ABC.

The largest group of pediatricians in the nation is upset over an upcoming ABC show called "Eli Stone" because

It features British actor Jonny Lee Miller as a prophet-like lawyer who in the opening episode argues in court that a flu vaccine made a child autistic. When it is revealed in court that an executive at the fictional vaccine maker didn't allow his own child to get the shot, jurors side with the family, giving them a huge award.

The writers of the show claim they would be "deeply upset" if parents were not vaccinating their children because of their show. I would ask, then why make let the nonsense triumph in your show?

I say kudos to the American Academy of Pediatrics for fighting the reason and for reminding me why I don't watch television.

Continue Reading...

Midwifery

An article was published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about midwives, which are illegal in Missouri. Well, in a way.

After almost 20 years of legislative debate, midwifery was legalized in Missouri last summer, when Sen. John Loudon, R-Chesterfield, inserted a vague clause into a larger bill. A circuit county judge, however, ruled that legislative procedures were not followed and struck down the law, which has been sent to the Missouri Supreme Court on appeal.

Whatever the outcome, midwife advocates and doctors promise another showdown this legislative session over a more comprehensive bill that would license and regulate midwives.

What form would this licensure take? This article is pushing midwifery as a "health freedom" and "female empowerment" issue, but by using a midwife rather than a doctor you're essentially allowing someone with no medical training to perform medicine. No license can fix that.

Midwifery is a tradition that goes back centuries, whereby women support each other through pregnancy, birth and early infancy. Much of that tradition was born out of necessity, when there were few doctors and even fewer hospitals.

Now that the necessity has lifted, when everyone can have access to a trained doctor in a hospital, why does this practice continue?

A few statistics on the sidebar of the article provide a bit of evidence about the safety of midwife births relative to hospital births. For instance, "Infant death rate was 1.7 per 1,000, consistent with low-risk births at hospitals." Is this the low-risk death rate or the overall death rate? And how does a midwife assess risk, given that they monitored the fetal heart rate in less than ten percent of cases?

Medical intervention rates for planned home births with midwives were consistently less than those of low-risk births in hospital.

I should hope so! Again, midwives have no formal medical training. Yet despite this fact, they perform episiotomies and C-sections in 2.1 and 3.7 percent of cases, respectively. That's surgery!

And why is it a virtue to minimize intervention? I would much rather have a professional intervene in the birth of my child if it was recommended to me than to refuse that intervention or, worse yet, never have it recommended in the first place.

While 99 percent of all births in the U.S. occur in hospitals, states need to recognize that some parents are going to choose home birth, said Katie Prown, a midwife advocate who helped draft legislation that legalized midwifery in Wisconsin and Virginia. "So what can we do to make it safe?"

Either train the midwives in actual medicine or incentivize real doctors to perform home births.

In fact...

Doctors say a system already exists for women to have a home birth in Missouri and Illinois: Midwives with a nursing degrees. But non-nurse midwives say they only want training in pregnancy and home birth, not nursing degrees with hospital training.

Tough. You've got to walk before you can run, and basic medicine will, hopefully, give you the skills you need to keep patients alive.

My favorite quote comes from a doctor, who doesn't buy the "freedome of choice" argument.

While there are few other options for non-hospital births, direct-entry [aka untrained, non-nursing-or-medical degreed] midwives shouldn't be allowed to practice just so that a mother can have a child at home, said Goldman, an obstetrician for the past 33 years.

"So what should we do? Dumb down the process so you have a choice?" he said. "What about the fetus' choice?"

I guess sometimes empowerment and the myth of "natural births" trump the safety of a newborn child.

- Thanks to Bing at Happy Jihad's House of Pancakes for the link. He's got a lot more there about this story and others related to it.

Continue Reading...

Quacks and Their Nostrums

Via NeuroLogica I found a video from the 1950s about products with bogus health claims. It's a must-watch. The description from the video's poster captures its essence:

We're used to laughing at videos from the 1950's which show overly-conservative social values, stereotypes and primitive science. However this video shows how we may have taken a few steps backward.

Although it may contain some 1950's sexism and idealism, it illustrates how medical education and regulations seem to have gone in the wrong direction in recent times.

Questionable medicine and quackery is a bigger problem now then ever.

Listen to this. It may be old. It's more relevant than ever

This video is great in that it's exactly what people need to know about these "cures:" they aren't typically dangerous themselves, but prevent or delay real treatment; testimonials are less than worthless; the process of cracking down on violations is laborious and twisted, but it can be done.

The video is horrible, however, in that America hasn't learned a thing in fifty years! In fact, this situation has gotten worse. From Steve Novella:

A couple of things have changed since the making of this film. The most obvious is the shameless and direct fashion that the actors talk about “quacks.” There is no bowing to misguided political correctness or false open-mindedness. That was a time when quacks were quacks, before con artists and health frauds became savvy enough to hide behind conspiracy theories, cries for health care freedom, and appeals to post-modernist anti-scientific jargon.

Not to mention that "medicine" of this nature is funded by the government through NCCAM, and is given a legal double standard through DSHEA.

How can we progress in bringing medical skepticism to the public when we seem to have been losing ground for decades?

Continue Reading...

"Medicinal Moonlight" or "A Photon is a Photon is a Photon"

Moonstruck Flock to Arizona light Collector

A couple in Arizona spent over 2 mil on a device they call an "Interstellar Light Collector." Basically it's 5 stories worth of mirrors that focus the light of the moon with "the precision of a Swiss watch." Kind of cool? Yeah, sure. But there's always gotta be that guy that turns a kind of cool thing into a dumb thing.

According to the Reuters article, "Some visitors to the site believe that exposure to the moonlight has helped alleviate some medical conditions. After bathing in the moonbeams, [one visitor] said he noticed an improvement in a long-standing asthma condition."

"The Chapins [the guys who put up the 2 million] are eager for researchers to use the site to determine if moonlight does have any demonstrable applications in areas including medicine, plant biology and certain industrial processes. They also welcome visits by skeptics to the site." (field trip?)

As far as i know a photon is a photon is a photon, and, unless you're a plant, the only thing their really good for is an assortment of skin cancers. But i bet if you could convince some guy you didn't like to walk in front of this thing at noon on a sunny day.... Well i guess it's could have some benefits after all.

unrelatedly, this is pretty cool too

Continue Reading...

The Onion on Acupuncture

The Onion, as usual, makes us laugh while getting it right. Indeed, there isn't a difference between "real" and "fake" acupuncture. They're referring to this study (reported here by Steve Novella).

Continue Reading...

Some Thoughts on Clinical Trials and Patients' Rights

I just finished reading an article from Reason, a Libertarian magazine. The article, "Dying for Lifesaving Drugs: Will desperate patients destroy the pharmaceutical system that produces tomorrow's treatment?" by Kerry Howley, discusses patients' rights to experimental drugs versus the FDA's need for proper double blind clinical trials. I found the article's analysis on the necessity of double-blind studies and patient right to be worthy of comment.

The article focuses on cancer patients who, in the course of their treatment, run out of effective methods with which to combat their ailment. These patients are often desperate to try any treatment with the slightest hint of effectiveness because the amount of time spent on ineffective treatments has left them with little time to wait for new FDA approved remedies. The reason is not always how long they have left to live, but more often, it is how long it takes for a treatment to be approved.

The United States has one of the strictest protocols when it comes to testing and approving new medical treatments. Blind and double blind tests are conducted in three mandatory phases. The FDA describes these phases:

"Phase 1 trials try to determine dosing, document how a drug is metabolized and excreted, and identify acute side effects. Usually, a small number of healthy volunteers (between 20 and 80) are used in Phase 1 trials.

Phase 2 trials include more participants (about 100-300) who have the disease or condition that the product potentially could treat. In Phase 2 trials, researchers seek to gather further safety data and preliminary evidence of the drug's beneficial effects (efficacy), and they develop and refine research methods for future trials with this drug. If the Phase 2 trials indicate that the drug may be effective--and the risks are considered acceptable, given the observed efficacy and the severity of the disease--the drug moves to Phase 3.

In Phase 3 trials, the drug is studied in a larger number of people with the disease (approximately 1,000-3,000). This phase further tests the product's effectiveness, monitors side effects, and, in some cases, compares the product's effects to a standard treatment, if one is already available. As more and more participants are tested over longer periods of time, the less common side effects are more likely to be revealed.

Sometimes, Phase 4 trials are conducted after a product is already approved and on the market to find out more about the treatment's long-term risks, benefits, and optimal use, or to test the product in different populations of people, such as children."

It seems obvious that almost everyone would agree that testing drugs and treatments for effectiveness and safety is a good idea, but what happens when a patient has run out of options with approved medicine? Does that patient then have the right to try experiment drugs whether or not the patient qualifies for the clinical trials? It is very often that patients who have "tried everything" are not qualified for clinical trials involving new drugs because the purpose of the trial is to reduce the number of variables in their experiments. It is important that the researchers know that they are seeing the consequences of the new drug in their patients, not the delayed consequences of other treatments.

Okay, so these patients cannot be part of the clinical trials but why not just give them the drug anyway on the off chance that it helps? Surely they can waive their right to sue if it does not help, right? Actually, patients are NOT allowed to waive their right to sue in this case. This is a perceived inconvenience that is currently being contested in the case of Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs v. Andrew von Esch­en­bach.

On the surface, it seems like a great idea to give patients access to experimental drugs after it is found that they do not qualify for clinical trials. It seems like the most humane and possible lifesaving solution. In fact, it often seems better than being a test subject. However, there are some reasonable objections to this view.

In the Reason article, it is quoted that only 11% of drugs that enter clinical trials end up accepted by the FDA. This number drops to about 6% for cancer drugs. This means that the patient has a greater than 90% chance of receiving an ineffective or even dangerous drug or treatment (even if the patient received a drug that is later proved effective to treat their ailment, there is no guarantee it would work for him or her specifically). While that percentage might seem high, there is at least SOME hope of getting better. However, the time and money spent on approving, manufacturing, and distributing these experimental treatments could be seen as a waste of hard-to-gather research money and a distraction from the research that would clarify which of there treatments are actually effective.

There is also the risk of patients suffering terrible side effects from experimental drugs. Even if they do not sue, these cases could be used as evidence to block the production of a drug that might be found to be effective after more research. It could be that the experimental drug the patient took was not even responsible for the side effects or a combination of that drug with another treatment that caused the problems, but if the side effects were bad enough, it probably would not matter how they arose.

In many clinical trials, only a fraction of the subjects are given the medication or treatment being studied. This is essential to a proper double-blind study. It is imperative that neither the doctors nor the patients know whether they have been given the drug or treatments (an independent group should randomly assign the treatments). This is to help get rid of certain biases in the study, including those of the researchers, and to take into account the placebo effect.

If patients are allowed to take these experimental drugs when ineligible for a clinical trial, it is by no means inconceivable that many patients and their primary physicians might opt to make the patient ineligible for the study (possibly by prescribing a drug or procedure not allowed by the clinical trial) to ensure that the patient is actually able to take the drug and does not end up as part of a control group in the clinical test. For many conditions (certain types of cancer for example), the number of people affected is very small. That means, in order to perform a proper study of a treatment or a drug, a large percentage of the people who are suffering from the ailment need to be available for a clinical trial. It is possible that allowing patients the option of taking experiment drugs could decrease the pool of qualified test subjects. This would slow down the regulation of new treatments and would most likely end some of the smaller studies.

In the end, I believe that the question underneath the issue of a patient's right to take an experimental treatment is whether the possibility of saving one or several lives in the present outweighs the need to conduct clinical trial, in the same manner that they are done today, so more lives are saved in the future. While I agree that allowing patients unchallenged access to experimental treatments is probably a bad thing for the reasons stated above, I cannot in good conscience deny someone their right to seek the means to continue living. Perhaps there are enough people willing to take the risk of a clinical trial to keep the system working and to allow patients who do not qualify to partake in experimental treatments. Sadly, I do not think this is the case. I do not blame those who would rather be guaranteed a treatment than have the chance of ending up part of a control group. We should all be thankful that there are those who are willing to act as guinea pigs for the advancement of medicine.

Continue Reading...