Natural Cures for Heel Spurs – the quack is strong in this one.

The whole ‘natural cures’  industry is a scam. Just because something is natural does not make it better. Arsenic is natural. Ionizing radiation is natural. Neither of them are any good for you. Arguing that something is better because it is natural is a logical fallacy.

As for the natural cures for heel spurs in the infographic below. None of them will or can work. Its that simple. It is physiologically implausible and biologically impossible for any of them to work; let alone there being a single shred of evidence showing they work. I never cease to be amazed at those who should know better are so devoid of any critical thinking skills.

 

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Is global warming causing the increase in the prevalence of diabetes?

diabetes climate change
This is not foot related, but it is diabetes related and science related.

I have no doubts what-so-ever about climate change and global warming. All the science I have seen is good; the consensus of the overwhelming majority of climate change scientists is good. The only dissent to this overwhelming consensus of experts are those with vested financial interests or those into conspiracy theories who latch on one piece of negative evidence (and ignore the 1000’s of good evidence) or latch onto one dissenting scientist (and ignore the 99.5% of the other scientists). How many more generations that we survive on this planet will depend on how seriously the politicians take this scientific evidence that it is happening.

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More non-translatable foot orthotic research


I am having a bad weekend commenting on bad research. There were these two dumb studies on Homeopathy for Heel Spurs and this one on the non-existent anterior metatarsal arch. In the Clinical Biomechanics Boot Camp I really try to focus on the practical application of research, so really look for research that is translatable to clinical practice. If it’s not translatable, then what was the point of doing it? There is way too much foot orthotic research being done lately that is not translatable, wasting resources and not providing clinicians the sort of information that they need to do it better.

What brought this up for me today was this study in quite a prestigious online journal (PLoS ONE) that really tells us nothing. The only thing I get from this study is I can add it to the list of studies I use when trying to illustrate how not to do foot orthotic research.

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Homeopathy data dredging

Homeopathy does not work and can not work. The evidence is clear; and there is plenty of that evidence. It is no better than a placebo. Any ‘clinical’ effect of it is due to that placebo effect. I won’t get into it all the details here, but if you want more check this out: How Does Homeopathy work?.

That does not stop those who try to defraud the consumer with homeopathy from grasping at straws and coming up with implausible and improbable mechanisms as to how it might work (it doesn’t) and grasping at some badly done flawed studies published in a low or no impact factor journals, and ignore all the well done properly blinded and controlled studies published in high impact factor journals. And when that argument does not work, they come up with some sob story or special pleading that this is not the appropriate way to clinically test homeopathy (it is).

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Publication Rate of Conference Abstracts

Conferences presentations and in the conference abstract books there are often gems and lots of pearls of useful information. I often blog live from conferences (eg here and here) or peruse abstract books looking for gems (eg here and here). The problem with conference abstracts can be the lack of detail on the study to judge it and they are not subject to the same scrutiny of peer review that a full journal publication is; so how much weight in the grand scheme of things should a conference abstract be given? They have to be interpreted in that context of the lack of detail and the lack of peer review. There are examples I have seen where the preponderance of evidence on a topic may be altered to be in a different direction if the unpublished conference abstracts were included or not included in that body of evidence under consideration. That is a worry. A large number of conference abstracts never make it to full publications, despite they being ‘gems’ and would be a valuable addition to the body of peer reviewed literature on that topic.

Way back in 1999, I published this that looked at the publication rates of abstracts presented at the main diabetes conferences in Australia, Europe and the USA. The rates were 26%, 49% and 53%. At that time, those figures were pretty consistent with other disciplines. My attention was just brought back to this by this recent publication in Foot & Ankle International which looked at the publication rates from the American Orthopaedic Foot & Ankle Society meetings. They found it was 73.7% for podium presentations and 55.8% for posters. That is a bit better than the ~50% that I found and is often reported in the literature as a pretty typical publication rate reported.

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