Miracles in the Dark

Behold the miracle that only works in the dark. Miracle cures are popping up on the Internet and in unlicensed clinics. They have the veneer of respectable medicine, but they violate the most powerful principle in our medical arsenal: Evidence based medicine.

What I will believe and not believe is determined by one simple test: Does it stand up to scrutiny by a third party? Can an outside agency get the same result with objective testing?

If you interested in learning more, I recommend the following sites:

Quackwatch:
http://www.quackwatch.com/

Skeptic Magazine:
http://www.skeptic.com/

The anti-quackery internet resource page:
http://www.pitt.edu/~cbw/fraud.html

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Alternative
• health
• miracles
• dark
• evidence
• based
• medicine
• quackery
• quack
• medical
• skeptic
• science
• James
• Randi
• Michael
• Shermer
• Linus
• Pauling
• glyoxylide
• oxygenation

[490er]

anyone that had a cure for cancer would be hunted down by everyone that gets money from cancer research

just think of it they get billions of dollars for tring to cure it

[C0nc0rdance]

@490er

The median income for a PhD cancer researcher (at the Associate Professor level) in Texas is $63,000 (texasregister (dot) com). That's after a minimum of 7 years of college and 10 years experience while making less than half that amount.

No-one gets in cancer research for the "Benjamins". We do it because we want to make a difference in the world, to help the sick, and for the love of science. If someone cures cancer, we'll just switch to diabetes or heart disease.

[490er]

@C0nc0rdance look it at this point of veiw

some cancers never go into submission and those poeple have to get treatment every single week for the rest of their life using chemo

chemo is a drug produced by drug companines that profit greatly from non treated diseas

[C0nc0rdance]

@490er

It's RE-mission, not submission. Chemo is NOT usually given daily for life. A typical course might be several weeks or months, followed by monitoring for residual disease.

Car repair companies profit from car break downs. That doesn't require a conspiracy, it's simply that we aren't "designed" to live to 120... eventually you will get a disease that will kill you. Modern medicine can forestall it for a decade or two, but we all die of something.

[MagiMysteryTour]

1. Warburg was nominated for a 2nd Nobel prize in 1944, but it was not awarded to him. PAULING is the ONLY person to receive 2 unshared Nobel prizes.

2. Vitamin C can shave days if not weeks off the length of a cold, in correct amounts. The glass or two of orange juice that you've likely taken would only shave off one hour.

Vitamin C would stand up to repeated testing. Refusing to really test it under valid conditions, and then claiming it "only works in the dark" is false reporting.

[C0nc0rdance]

@MagiMysteryTour

1. Correct, and previously noted.

2. Moving the goalposts. Vitamin C has been studied for decades, and research on it has the same access to resources as other micronutrients. Those studies that are well executed find only a very modest benefit in normal people, and paradoxical harms in some cases, discussed in the vid. The near-magical properties ascribed to "orthomolecular medicine" are not based on strong evidence.

[C0nc0rdance]

@VacEntertainment

Lucifer offered me free ice cream for life. Hey, it was a heck of a deal. Enslavement of manking + my immortal soul in exchange for a pint of "Cherry Garcia" Ben and Jerry's every day... = WORTH IT!

[DrSpooglemon]

I am with you on everything else in this video but I think you need to take another look at vitamins. Generally that is, not specifically in relation to cancer. Then again, vitamin E has anti-cancer properties. Can you be sure the average diet provides enough vitamin E? Also can you be sure the RDA is actually what your body needs. How many cases of hypervitaminosis are reported each year? How many seriously bad reactions to commonly prescribed drugs are reported each year?

[DrSpooglemon]

I am not convinced of "rebound scurvy". How many documented cases are there of this? I can think of no biological mechanism for this so the empirical evidence must be very significant. Chronic use of opioids cause a downregulation of the opioid receptors, hence withdrawl syndrome. Vitamins are not like drugs. Why would there be a rebound deficiency syndrome without an ACTUAL deficiency?

[C0nc0rdance]

3. Liver homogenate levels in a mouse, which are "GULO wild type" is about 62 micromolar (Hum Gene Ther. 2008 Dec;19(12):1349-58.) That's certainly not a megadose, more like the recommended dietary levels. Vitamins correct a deficiency, but more of them is not always better.

4. All vitamins have a benefit-dose curve. Sliding to the right on the dose axis does not continue to increase benefit beyond a certain level. In some cases, it reverses direction, vitamin C included.

[C0nc0rdance]

@MagiMysteryTour

6. Argument from conspiracy, and false attribution of motive.

7. I would recommend the Cochrane Reviews Database, a review of all literature on the topic:

Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2007 Jul 18;(3):CD000980.

"The failure of vitamin C supplementation to reduce the incidence of colds in the normal population indicates that routine mega-dose prophylaxis is not rationally justified for community use."

The duration reduction was about 8%, which amounts to a "few hours"