Last month I wrote about a book on evolutionary medicine that I could not recommend. Now I’ve found one I can recommend. Marlene Zuk, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Riverside, has written a delightful book entitled Riddled with Life: Friendly Worms, Ladybug Sex, and the Parasites That Make Us Who We Are.
Did you know that Samuel Hahnemann, the misguided father of homeopathy, was an accomplished chemist who developed the first chemical test for arsenic? His test was applied in a poisoning trial in England: it was positive, but the color of the sample had deteriorated by the time it got to the jury, and they were
It has been a long time since I first became aware of Mannatech, the multilevel marketing company that sells “glyconutrient” dietary supplements. After its claims were debunked and it lost a court case, it had dropped off my radar; but last month it came roaring back in the form of an email from a reader
I have written about the dietary supplement ASEA several times on the Science-Based Medicine website. It is said to contain stable, perfectly balanced Redox Signaling Molecules, “a mixture of 16 chemically recombined products of salt and water with completely new chemical properties.” Nowhere do they divulge the identity of those sixteen products, and the label
Reflex integration therapy claims to relieve a variety of symptoms of a wide range of neurologic conditions including autism, ADHD, brain injuries, pain, Down Syndrome, cerebral palsy, Parkinson’s, and more. I touched on the subject in a previous article, but there are new developments. Now we have Quantum Reflex Integration with the addition of cold
I want my water to be dead. If there is anything “living” in it, it would be microbes that are a contaminant and potentially harmful. What do people mean when they talk of “living water”? If you look up “living water” on the Internet, you will find that it is a Biblical term, mainly used
Lewis Jones’ article “Cholesterol-shmesterol” is so full of distortions I hardly know where to start. He confuses the dietary cholesterol-heart connection with the blood cholesterol-heart connection, fails to differentiate between primary prevention (in healthy people) and secondary prevention (in those who already have heart disease), and he refers to “good” and “bad” cholesterol as dodgy
Astronomy is science; astrology is superstition, mythology, and pseudoscience. Depending on how surveys ask the question, anywhere from 22 percent to 73 percent of people believe astrology is valid. Horoscopes still appear regularly in newspapers. Over 90 percent of adults know their zodiac sign. It never occurs to some people to question whether horoscopes are
There is a website that reveals “The world’s most dangerous invention.” Care to speculate what that invention might be? I might have guessed nuclear weapons. Others have incriminated guns, cigarettes, genetic engineering, religion, The Web, The Large Hadron Collider, and automobiles. But this website was not talking about any of those, but about a far
As if we didn’t have enough things to worry about already, now we are being told to fear our toasters. A typical headline trumpets “The Effects of Invisible Waves.” We are increasingly exposed to electromagnetic radiation from cell phones, cell phone towers, wireless Internet routers, cordless phones, and power lines. Other sources 1,2 are our
