The bottom line is that supplements only work if there is a deficiency. If you take in any more than the body needs, the body just excretes it or stores it and it makes no difference except running the risk of an overload or an overdose. You can not “boost” anything by doing it. It also wastes your money, making for expensive urine.
Increasingly, you can see more advice to use zinc supplements to treat verrucae on the foot. Is that advice warranted?
Continue readingWhen you are busy and have so much important stuff to write about, it is so much easier to go after the ‘low hanging fruit’. Much less effort is needed and when it so easy, you don’t need to think too hard about it. Research on reflexology never fails to deliver on that count.
Reflexology is total bunk; it is made up pseudoscientific bullshit that has no basis what-so-ever. There is absolutely no known physiological mechanism linking areas on the foot to different organ systems and not one clinical trial that stacks up to scrutiny shows that it works. Every single clinical trial on it either shows it does not work or if it shows it works, it has fatal flaws in the methodology (and as such should never have been published, let alone carried out) or more often than not, was not even a clinical trial on reflexology, but a clinical trial on a damn good foot massage. Almost everyone is going to feel better after a damn good foot massage, so measures of anxiety etc are going to improve, especially if a chronic illness is present. Being more relaxed after a damn good foot massage is going to affect a number of psychosocial factors as well as some physiological parameters. BUT, that is not evidence for the junk that is reflexology, that is evidence for a damn good foot massage.
What does apple cider debunking, overpronation and cigarette smoking, Oscon supplements for Severs disease and vaccines causing autism have to do with each other?
^^^ that is the final slide in a video from my Critical Thinking Boot Camp. Anyone who blogs about science always get responses and comments with anecdotes about what was written with responses that it either does or does not apply to them. The science either ‘sucks’ or is the ‘greatest thing since sliced bread’ depending on the anecdote! It has now reached the point where I just delete that anecdotal comments on my posts as they contribute nothing of use to the topic under discussion. Steve Novella succinctly summed this up:
It is almost inevitable that whenever we post an article critical of the claims being made for a particular treatment, alternative philosophy, or alternative profession, someone in the comments will counter a careful examination of published scientific evidence with an anecdote. Their arguments boils down to, “It worked for me, so all of your scientific evidence and plausibility is irrelevant.”
In my other blog, I previously litigated all the issues around “anecdotes” and why useless treatment sometimes appear as though they did work. I don’t intend re-litigating the same issues here but develop them further with some examples I have dealt with recently. For background, I refer you to those two posts.
Health Benefits of Apple Cider
My first example comes from a blog post by Melinda Moyer following an article she wrote on the health benefit of apple cider. These three quotes sum up the issue:
After getting hate mail for debunking the health claims of apple cider vinegar, I’m explaining why I rely on science, not rumors.
Last month, I wrote my first Truth Serum column, “What Apple Cider Vinegar Can—and Can’t—Do for Your Health,” which explored what the science says about apple cider vinegar’s supposed health effects. I found that there isn’t much evidence ACV can cure colds, heal acne, help you lose weight, or alleviate heartburn—and that vinegar can sometimes be harmful.
Then came the angry emails and Facebook posts. Readers chided me for interviewing researchers and doctors rather than people who have actually been helped by apple cider vinegar. Others felt the evidence is irrelevant; vinegar works for them, so they’ll keep using it. A few implied that my writing was unbalanced and unfair.
I am sure you can see the issue …
The whole idea of the peer review process prior to publication is to weed out the junk, so it does not get published. One thing that the alternative therapies have in common is that their journals let a lot of junk science through. Too many studies get published in those journals that should never see the light of day, let alone been conducted so badly in the first place. There are ethical issues at stake in this and the editors of those journals would do well to apprise themselves of publication ethics. Institutional ethics committees or review boards also have a responsibility to prevent bad science from even getting off the ground.
What spurred that little rant was this publication today on ‘The effect of reflexology on the quality of life with breast cancer patients‘ published in the journal, Complementary Therapies in Clinical Practice. They do not get much worse than this one.
It was a study that supposedly randomized 60 people with breast cancer into two groups; one group the control and one group getting reflexology; the aim being to see how it affected their quality of life and symptoms. Sounds good on the surface, but:
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.
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).
