10,000 genomes – why?

In the genomics world that I inhabit, a consortium has just published an intriguing proposal to sequence the genomes of 10,000 vertebrate species. It’s described an article in the current Journal of Heredity – unusual in that this is not a research article, but a proposal. Nonetheless, the article is full of interesting facts about what we know (and don’t know) about vertebrate species and how they’re all related. It makes a good read for anyone interested in evolution; for example, how many people know that all vertebrates have a common ancestor who lived about 500-600 million years ago? Perhaps more interesting, evidence is emerging that we all share about 10,000 genes – which means that these 10,000 genes are so useful that their functions have been preserved for 500 million years.

The consortium is led by a number of outstanding scientists, including UCSC’s David Haussler and NIH’s Stephen O’Brien, both of whose work I like and have followed for years. And some aspects of this proposal are terrific: for example, they want to start collecting DNA now from 16,203 vertebrate species. This will make a great specimen collection for future work. (Heck, maybe I’ll even sign on to the project myself.)

But this proposal is more than that: it is also the opening salvo in an effort to raise $50-100 million for the sequencing of these species. The paper was announced with press releases and news articles in both Science and Nature, demonstrating that it is clearly a lobbying effort for new funding. Fair enough – science takes funding, and sometimes you have to build support for new ideas. However, given that two of the three leaders of the consortium are primarily funded by NIH, I can only guess at who they’re expecting to cough up the money. The NIH's human genome funding has been led by NHGRI, which continues to look for new ways to justify maintaining the size of its three enormous sequencing centers (the Broad Institute, Washington University in St. Louis, and Baylor College of Medicine). Now, let me say here that genomes are the bread and butter of my own work, and these centers have done terrific work for the past 10-15 years - and I've often collaborated with them. And I hope they will continue. But it hasn’t escaped my attention that the new NIH Director, Francis Collins, was a key force in building up those centers while he was Director of NHGRI, and we all know that the centers are near and dear to him.

But wait a minute: 10,000 genomes, none of which are human? Exciting idea, sure, but not for NIH. The NIH-led centers are already participating in the 1000 Genomes project, which is attempting to sequence 1000 individuals (at a low-level “draft” quality). If NIH wants to scale up, there are 6 billion more of us available. Admittedly, not everyone wants to have his/her genome sequenced, but plenty of us would be happy to volunteer. Take a look at the Personal Genome Project, which was started by George Church at Harvard, and is trying to sign up 100,000 humans to have their genomes sequenced.

So I’m going to be the skeptic here: if NIH is thinking of throwing its sequencing dollars at 10,000 more genomes, I suggest that it focus on humans rather than a broad collection of other vertebrates. (I know, this should be obvious, right? But sometimes NIH gets distracted.) We still have only scratched the surface of what there is to know about the human genome, and there’s plenty of DNA sequencing to do in the human population. The 10,000 genomes project sounds like a great mission for the National Science Foundation, which has ceded much of large-scale sequencing work to the NIH in the past 10 years, except for plant genomes and some bacteria. In fact, maybe this is a chance for NSF to have its own large-scale sequencing center – I’d be all for that. But I’m not at all convinced that NIH should spend its biomedical research dollars on 10,000 vertebrates. Let’s see how this plays out.

Flu vaccine shortage

This is just a brief post to point out a news article on the wires today (from Agence France-Presse) quoting me at some length about the shortage of H1N1 (swine) flu vaccine in the U.S. The article discusses why the egg-based vaccine production method, which is woefully obsolete, needs to be replaced if we're to avoid such shortages. I also made a point about how risky it is for us (as a society) to be relying on chicken eggs for a virus that could wipe out chicken flocks. See the article at Yahoo news, here, or at the Daily Telegraph in the UK, here.

More misinformation on the flu from Mercola

As a followup to my post a few weeks ago on scare-mongering about influenza vaccines, I want to point out a beautiful dismantling of Dr. Mercola's latest nonsense by my colleagues over at Science-Based Medicine.

It seems that Mercola posted an article on his website titled "Do NOT Let Your Child Get Flu Vaccine -- 9 Reasons Why". (I'm not providing the link because I don't want to increase his web traffic, not even a tiny bit.) Not surprisingly, every single reason is wrong, misleading, stupid, or all three. As Dr. Joseph Albietz writes in his post, "There are so many mistakes, so much misinformation in so little space, it’s almost a work of art."

I don't want to repeat all of Dr. Albietz's dismantling of Mercola's bogus claims (I recommend reading his post for the full list), but I want to mention a couple, just to show how dishonest - or maybe just plain stupid - Mercola is. Here, then, are some of his reasons for not vaccinating your children:

"5. Over-vaccination is a common practice now in America. American children are subjected to 29 vaccines by the age of two."

Wrong and wrong. First, "over-vaccination" is a term invented by anti-vaccination groups. There is no evidence that you can over-vaccinate - all the vaccinations available today help to prevent infectious diseases. More vaccines simply prevent more diseases. Second, there are only 10 vaccines on the routine schedule in the U.S., not 29. Some of them require booster shots, but these are not separate vaccines. But in any case, this is irrelevant because even if there were more, the evidence shows that they are beneficial.

Mercola's sixth reason is this:

"6. Modern medicine has no explanation for autism, despite its continued rise in prevalence. Yet autism is not reported among Amish children who go unvaccinated."

This one I've seen before. Jay Gordon, well-known anti-vaccination doctor and Jenny McCarthy sidekick, said the same thing on Larry King Live last year. This too is wrong, as Dr. Albietz also pointed out. The Amish do have autism, and they do vaccinate. So this is just a complete non-sequitur. It has nothing to do with the influenza vaccine.

Perhaps the most outrageous scare-mongering is this one from Mercola:

"3. Adjuvants are added to vaccines to boost production of antibodies but may trigger autoimmune reactions. Some adjuvants are mercury (thimerosal), aluminum and squalene. Why would you sign a consent form for your children to be injected with mercury, which is even more brain-toxic than lead?"

Note the use of the incredibly hysterical phrase "brain-toxic". Scary indeed, if only it were true. But no, this is wrong, wrong, wrong. First, the tiny bit of truth: yes, adjuvants are small trace elements, including aluminum, that make vaccines more effective. Note that this allows vaccines to be effective with a smaller dose of the immune agent, and there's never been any evidence that adjuvants are harmful (they've been used in vaccines for 50 years). But there is no adjuvant in the H1N1 vaccine. That's right - so again this is a non-sequitur, since it doesn't apply to the flu vaccine. And thimerosal is not an adjuvant - it's a preservative used in multi-dose vaccine vials, to prevent bacteria from growing in those vials. So that's wrong too. But wait - there's no thimerosal in the single-dose vaccines, and there's none in FluMist (the nasal version of the vaccine) either. And even if there were, there's now a huge body of evidence (too much to summarize, but look here for a start) that thimerosal has no harmful effects whatsoever.

Mercola's scare-mongering seems designed to promote his own unscientific, unproven vitamin therapies, which he sells on his website. The webpage with his "9 reasons" also contains instructions on "How to protect yourself without dangerous drugs and vaccinations." Not suprisingly, his advice is to buy his vitamin supplements and other products.

I can't tell whether he's just ignorant or whether he's intentionally misleading people to sell his products, but either way, he's a threat to public health.

Taking advantage of cancer patients

How much is 10 months of your life worth? What if you only have 14 months to live?

How should we react to a doctor who takes advantage of some of the most desperate cancer patients to sell them a therapy that doesn’t work? What if, after scientific evidence shows it isn’t working, he continues to promote his therapy and offer it to patients? What if he chooses one of the most intractable cancers, pancreatic cancer, which is a near-certain death sentence, and tells patients to use his therapy instead of the one therapy that offers a small chance of working?
Is scorn a strong enough feeling for such a doctor? Shouldn’t we try to do everything we can to stop him? Well, please meet Nicholas Gonzalez, M.D., who, according to his very own website, treats pancreatic cancer with “diet, supplements (with proteolytic enzymes for cancer patients) and detoxification routines such as coffee enemas.”

Gonzalez invented the “Gonzalez regimen” nearly 30 years ago, and he claims on his website that pancreatic cancer patients in his care have experienced near-miraculous recoveries and far longer survival times than patients receiving normal care. After lobbying Congress directly (again, according to his own website), Gonzalez convinced NIH (with help from Rep. Dan Burton of Indiana) to fund a trial of his regimen, comparing it to the only available chemotherapy. The regimen is quite complicated, so I’ll reproduce it exactly here, from the NIH trials website:

”Patients receive pancreatic enzymes orally every 4 hours and at meals daily on days 1-16, followed by 5 days of rest. Patients receive magnesium citrate and Papaya Plus with the pancreatic enzymes. Additionally, patients receive nutritional supplementation with vitamins, minerals, trace elements, and animal glandular products 4 times per day on days 1-16, followed by 5 days of rest. Courses repeat every 21 days until death despite relapse. Patients consume a moderate vegetarian metabolizer diet during the course of therapy, which excludes red meat, poultry, and white sugar. Coffee enemas are performed twice a day, along with skin brushing daily, skin cleansing once a week with castor oil during the first 6 months of therapy, and a salt and soda bath each week. Patients also undergo a complete liver flush and a clean sweep and purge on a rotating basis each month during the 5 days of rest.”

Not an easy therapy for the patients, who had to consume over 100 pills a day in addition to the strict diet, enemas twice a day, and special baths. But does it work?

NO. In fact, the results of this trial were finally published just last month, in the Journal of Clinical Oncology – after 4 years delay – and we now learn that patients undergoing the Gonzalez regimen died in just 4 months, on average, compared to 14 months for patients in chemotherapy. Now 14 months might not seem like a good result, but when you only have 14 months to live, I’m sure you don’t want to die 10 months earlier while taking hundreds of pills and enduring twice-daily coffee enemas. This is quackery of the worst kind, killing the patients and making them miserable for the few months they have to live – according to the JCO article, patients had a worse quality of life under the Gonzalez regimen as well as having a much shorter survival time.

(Note that Kimball Atwood written extensively on the problems with the Gonzalez regimen, including links to his earlier posts on this subject, so I’ll try not to repeat too much of his excellent summary here.)

Not surprisingly, Gonzalez has had a major falling out with his collaborators on the study, who published the article without him as a co-author. So how did he react to these results? Did he have second thoughts, and perhaps consider whether he should stop selling his ineffective therapy (and offering false hopes) to pancreatic cancer patients?

Unfortunately, Gonzalez hasn’t changed his beliefs one bit, and he posted a lengthy “rebuttal” of the JCO article on his site soon after he learned about the article (which he apparently was unaware of until it appeared). In it, he boasts about how he alone was responsible for getting the study funded (“the grant was approved and awarded during a face-to-face meeting between me and the then NCI Director, Dr. Richard Klausner, held in the office of Congressman Dan Burton”), complains about being betrayed by the authors (his former collaborators), and maintains that it “implies falsely the study proves chemotherapy more effective than my treatment.” He goes on endlessly, complaining about how the scientists who ran the study at Columbia University mismanaged everything, and claiming that this is why the results didn’t show that his regimen worked. According to his diatribe, NIH, NCI, and the Columbia scientists were all part of a big conspiracy to hide the truth about his regimen. If there's any conspiracy here, it's Gonzalez's efforts to delay publication of this study and hide the results from his potential future patients (or should I say victims?). (And for those who want to blame "big pharma" for conspiring against Gonzalez, note that he proudly reports on his site that he has received millions of dollars in funding from two large for-profit corporations.)

The story of how this study got started in the first place is disturbing on many levels, and I will point readers again to a blogpost by Kimball Atwood’s for more details. Among other things, the investigators at Columbia University were warned repeatedly about violating IRB protocols on informed consent. And the basis for the study was a claim by Gonzalez – based on 11 patients whom he claims to have treated for pancreatic cancer – that he was achieving survival times substantially longer than standard therapy. It appears that he (in the most generous interpretation) chose selectively among patients to produce this claim.

Gonzalez has been investigated and put on probation in the past by the N.Y. medical licensing authorities, and has been sued successfully for malpractice, after recommending that a woman forego standard cancer therapy and take his treatment instead. (As Quackwatch documents, “he claimed that the cancer was cured even though it was progressing. It eventually damaged her spine and left her blind.”) Despite these past mishaps, he continues to offer his regimen to cancer patients, and his website today still contains claims of multi-year survival for many of his past patients.

Gonzalez is taking advantage of vulnerable, desperate patients and selling them a painful treatment that merely kills them faster. NIH deserves blame here too, as does NCCAM (the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine), which funded this unethical trial, and especially Congressman Dan Burton, whose support for pseudoscience has in this case caused inexcusable harm to patients whose lives were cut short. And the physicians at Columbia who went ahead with the trial are not without blame either.

How should I react to Gonzalez? Should we give him the benefit of the doubt, and assume he’s just trying to do the best for his patients? Should we believe his claims of a conspiracy and fund more investigations into his elaborate regimen for treating pancreatic cancer? Or should we take away his license, and do anything else we can to prevent him from offering this therapy ever again? I know what I think. I am appalled.

Note: I also recommend Orac's article on this topic, titled "The Gonzalez protocol: worse than useless for pancreatic cancer."

Scare-mongering about the flu vaccine and cancer

I guess I shouldn't be surprised. The anti-vaccination activists, the same people who continue to claim that vaccines cause autism, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, have invented a new way to scare people in order to prevent them from getting the vaccine against the new pandemic flu strain (aka swine flu). Here is the headline, which appeared yesterday on several websites:

"Another Shocking Warning About Swine Flu Vaccine"

The article begins with this gem: "The swine flu vaccine has been hit by new cancer fears after a German health expert gave a shocking warning about its safety." This "warning" was news to me: did you know that the vaccine can give you cancer? Neither did I. The source of this new claim is Wolfgang Wodarg, a German politician who is described in the article as a "lung specialist." The article on mercola.com (the website of Dr. Joseph Mercola, more about him below) calls him "Dr. Wodarg", but when I checked Wodarg's own websites, I found that he was a politician in the German parliament who claims to be an expert on health matters. Whatever his claims, though, he doesn't know beans about the flu.

Despite the lack of credibility of the source, I wanted to know where in the world this seemingly-crazy claim came from. Was there anything to it? The main claim is this: "The nutrient solution for the vaccine consists of cancerous cells from animals, and some fear that the risk of cancer could be increased by injecting the cells." Let's break this down.

There are at least two claims here: first, that the vaccine is grown in "cancerous cells from animals," and second, that "some" people are afraid that this could give them cancer. Let's deal with the second claim first. No references are given in the original story, and it appears to be completely invented. Mercola just repeats the invented claim, which in its original form read: "some people fear that the risk of cancer could be increased by injecting the cells." How can a reporter just make this up? My guess is that simply by stating that "some people" have this fear, the reporter has created a self-fulfilling claim - after reading about the "fear", it is entirely possible that some people will begin to fear the same thing. Whatever the case, it's extremely irresponsible to make this statement without providing any proof.

Now let's look at the first claim. Here there is a very tiny little speck of truth, grossly misrepresented and distorted. This is a common strategy among conspiracy theorists and quacks: find some little factoid and then make wildly distorted claims about it. Then when experts (real ones, not fake ones like Wolfgang Wodarg) are asked about the claim, they will endeavor to explain the truth, but in trying to be clear and accurate, they will give credibility to the original claim. I'm going to try to be clear and accurate here, but first I want to say that this entire story is complete and utter nonsense, and Wolfgang Wodarg is an irresponsible idiot for starting it. If people follow his advice, many will likely get very sick, and some people might die. There, got that out of the way.

So let's look at the "cancer cells" claim. First of all, the claim doesn't apply at all to the vaccines made in the U.S., which are grown in chicken eggs. It refers to a new vaccine manufacturing process that involves cell lines, which is being developed in Germany and in a few other European countries - and which will lead to much more rapid, efficient production of vaccines in the future. (The flu vaccine, as I've written in the journal Nature, is produced using out-of-date methods that are far too slow.) The Dr. Mercola website make no mention of any of this - possibly because Mercola is ignorant of it. But what about the German vaccine?

Here's the scoop: the company Baxter announced in August that it was testing its new H1N1 vaccine, grown in a Vero cell line, for safety and effectiveness. If it passes, it may be approved for use in Europe. Growing the virus in a cell line is much simpler, and faster, than growing it in eggs. The Vero cell line originally isolated in 1962, came from kidney epithelial cells from an African green monkey. These cell lines have been used for many purposes over the years, including vaccine development. And here's the grain of truth in Wodarg's claim: yes, Vero cells can be called "cancer" cells. Many cell lines are cancer cells, in that they divide and grow indefinitely (stem cells also have this feature). If they didn't, they wouldn't be much use as cell lines - the cells would simply die after a relatively short time.

However - and here's where Wobarg goes right off the rails - there is no evidence that Vero cells have ever caused cancer. These cells have been used in the past to produce other vaccines, including rabies and measles (references are easy to find), and no humans have ever gotten cancer from these vaccines. So there is no legitimate reason to believe that the flu virus will cause cancer. I'd probably have to write ten more pages to demonstrate why these cells don't pose a cancer risk, and there lies the insidiousness of the claims by Wodarg and Mercola: they made their outrageous claim with no evidence at all, but now, to refute it, I could spend hours and hours looking at the history of vaccines made using Vero cells.

And wait: there's a third claim buried in the sentence about the fear of cancer: by writing "some fear that the risk of cancer could be increased by injecting the cells", Mercola is claiming that cancer cells will be injected into your arm if you get the vaccine. Sorry, Dr. Mercola, that's not true. The vaccine is grown in a cell line, purified to remove the Vero cells, and then the virus particles themselves are killed. So this third claim is bogus too. But just like the others, to disprove it thoroughly, I'd have to dig through the literature on cell cultures, purification, and vaccine testing. Mercola didn't bother to look at any real science, as far as I can tell.

This article was posted on mercola.com on September 8 (yestesday, as I write this), and it appears to be spreading quickly among the anti-vax movement, with postings on Facebook and elsewhere. Unfortunately, the likely effect of this is to reduce the number of people who get vaccinated for swine flu, which in turn will increase the severity of the pandemic as it continues to spread this fall. Even worse, nonsense like this increases the average person's overall distrust - or fear - of vaccines, which has even greater public health consequences.

Why does someone who claims to be a doctor (Mercola) do this? Why does he want to keep people from getting vaccinated? Is he so interested in money and self-promotion that he just doesn't care? Is he so poorly trained and ill-informed that he really believes this drivel? It would have taken him about 5 minutes to figure out that the Vero cell line isn't used for vaccines made in the U.S. - why didn't he point that out, rather than warning all of his readers (mostly in the U.S.) about this new "risk" of vaccination? To me, this kind of reckless disregard for the facts indicates that he just doesn't care.

I looked a bit further into "Dr." Mercola (an osteopath, not an M.D.), whose website is awash in self-promotion as well as offers to buy his books and other products, and he is more than just an anti-vaccination quack. He makes all kinds of unsubstantiated health claims about his products (and he has an entire website devoted to selling them), and it wasn't too hard to learn that he has violated federal regulations at least twice: in 2005 and again in 2006, the FDA ordered him to stop making illegal claims about multiple products he was selling on his website (see the 2005 FDA letter here, and the 2006 FDA letter here). Not surprisingly, these FDA warnings did little to slow this guy down.

Mercola is a conspiracy monger as well - he recently posted an article titled "Do Drug Companies Secretly Favor a World Flu Pandemic?" which claimed, in addition to its wacky title, that vaccines "don't work" and that they pose a "significant health risk" to children. And today he posted a video accompanied by the claim that "studies show that flu vaccines are unsafe and ineffective." This guy must have a few wires loose somewhere. Or he is one greedy, uncaring quack. Or both.

Why the ad hominem attacks, you ask? It's true that regardless of how much of a quack Mercola might be, that doesn't mean that everything he says is false. However, once we learn that someone is willing to lie in order to promote bogus medical treatments (see the FDA violations I mentioned above), we should view any future claims from that source with great skepticism. I can't stop Mercola from making his pseudoscientific statements, but perhaps I can convince a few people that they shouldn't believe anything they read on his site.

In the meanwhile, people, get yourself vaccinated against the flu!

Opening up influenza research with a new kind of journal

Today is the launch of a new type of online publication, a cross between website and a "real" journal, called PLoS Currents: Influenza. What is it? Well, it's a website for immediate publication of new findings about the influenza virus. Submissions are screened by a panel of moderators (I'm one of them) and if they are appropriate, we will publish them immediately - no delays - and they will be freely available for anyone to read. They will also be given a permanent, searching PubMed identification, just like a regular journal paper.

What's the difference between this and a regular journal? Well, first of all, submissions won't be thoroughly reviewed, which means they don't "count" as journal papers, but it also means you can publish them later in a peer-reviewed journal. The Public Library of Science has already bought into this model - they're sponsoring PLoS Currents, after all - and we expect other journals to do so also. So why publish, you might ask? That's easy: in a highly competitive field such as influenza research, different scientists are often racing to answer the same question. By publishing super-rapidly in PLoS Currents, you will get a citable, time-stamped reference that establishes your discovery, and most importantly, establishes when you made it.

The big win here, we hope, is that scientists will be empowered to announce their results to the world without worrying about being "scooped" - a common fear that leads to many results being kept secret for months while papers are prepared and revised. This in turn will speed up scientific progress overall, which is the real goal behind PLoS Currents.

Also, because we aren't looking for complete manuscripts (although those are fine too), we'll accept new observations, new data, and more speculative ideas (as long as they have some data to support them) in PLoS Currents.

We're also pioneering a new way to author papers, using the Google Knol software. After writing your contribution in Google Knol, submission will require little more than a few mouse clicks. To launch the journal, four of its moderators (with colleagues) have posted the first few contributions just these week. Check it out here.

If PLoS Currents: Influenza is successful, it will open the door to an almost unlimited set of new publications in virtually any scientific field. We chose influenza because, with the recent emergence of the new H1N1(A) pandemic flu strain, it became clear to many of us that waiting the typical 3-4 months (at best) for results to appear was just too slow. Similar delays occur in virtually every other area of biomedical research, and it's time we took fuller advantage of the web to speed things up.

Bad medicine at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center

M.D. Anderson Cancer Center (at the University of Texas) is one of the top cancer treatment centers in the United States, and probably in the world. This makes it especially disheartening to see that they have a new website, Cancerwise, that endorses pseudoscientific treatments; in other words, it promotes bad medicine. From what I can see, most of the site discusses perfectly reasonable topics, which makes their endorsement of “woo” especially insidious – how is a patient, or even a scientist from another discipline, supposed to distinguish the real science from the quackery?

What caught my notice in particular – although this is not the only example – is the article “The 3 Most Common Questions People Ask About Acupuncture” written by Lorenzo Cohen. As I and many others have pointed out in previous blog posts, and as the scientific literature shows quite clearly now, acupuncture does not work. When compared to placebo in published trials, the benefits of ‘sham’ acupuncture, where the needles don’t even pierce the skin, are the same as those for ‘real’ acupuncture. Likewise, when the needles are inserted in random positions instead of the ‘real’ acupuncture points, the effects are indistinguishable. So it doesn’t matter where you place the needles, and it doesn’t matter if they pierce the skin – in other words, the only effect is the placebo effect: if a patient believes in acupuncture, and he/she thinks he/she is getting treatment, then they report a mild, subjective improvement in certain types of pain.

With that in mind, here is a disturbing bit of pseudoscience from Cohen’s article:

“The effects of acupuncture also tend to be cumulative, so it's important not to expect too much too soon. At M. D. Anderson, we consider 8-10 treatments as one course, and for long-term problems, multiple courses may be necessary. I often tell patients with chronic conditions, ‘It's like fertilizing your garden -- don't expect the flowers to bloom tomorrow. In the long-term, though, you should end up with a better result.’ "

This is complete nonsense - there is no scientific data to support it. But what is a patient supposed to think when he/she reads that M.D. Anderson recommends 8-10 acupuncture treatments for their patients?

Cohen also throws in this canard, a quote from his own “integrative medicine” director: “"Can't hurt, might help, why not!" Here’s why: there are real risks to acupuncture, such as infection, and the scientific evidence says the benefit is zero. So here’s my reply: can’t help, might hurt, why do it?

Then, in the section titled “What should I use acupuncture for?”, Cohen writes:

“...it's always a good idea to recommend acupuncture when the patient is:
* Experiencing uncontrolled nausea, vomiting or pain.
* Experiencing side effects from treatment or medications.
* Has failed conventional treatment for symptom control.”

Always? Always? How about “never”? There isn’t a single well-done clinical trial demonstrating the effectiveness of acupuncture for any of these conditions. (For a summary of some of the evidence showing its ineffectiveness, see this link at Science-Based Medicine.) Other scientists at M.D. Anderson (are they even paying attention?) should step in and do something to make it clear that the institution doesn’t recommend pseudoscientific, unproven therapies for anything.

There are other articles promoting pseudoscientific methods on the Cancerwise site, including this one, which applauds Sen. Tom Harkin for his support of NCCAM (which I’ve written about multiple times) and alternative/integrative medicine. I’m sure we’ll see more such articles there, and it’s very dismaying to see woo-meisters like Lorenzo Cohen make progress in their attempts to drag us back into the past, when medicine was little more than guesswork and superstition.

One of our jobs in academia is to be especially critical of ourselves, so when we see an academic center making mistakes, we call them out on it. So I’m joining other bloggers in doing so – notably Orac, who wrote about this same topic last week. (I highly recommend Orac’s lengthy discussion – he thoroughly dismantles Cohen’s claims, including Cohen’s references to studies that supposedly support those claims.) I don’t know who at M.D. Anderson is responsible for the Cancerwise site, but they have a list of 18 authors on that page, and I hope that at least some of them will be concerned to know that they are endorsing pseudoscience.

Here's an idea for another article at Cancerwise: the title can be identical to one of Cohen's section headings: "What should I use acupuncture for?" And the article can be very short, just one word: nothing.