It may (or may not) surprise to learn that hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD) the “disorder” treated by the new drug Addyi didn’t exist before 2004. Why in 2004 did we decide that normal female sexual response was a condition? Well, HSDD was established/invented/introduced by industry to prepare the market for a testosterone patch for …
Continue reading “How Medscape helped Sprout stack the deck for Addyi”
Earlier this year two groups of academics (scientists and faculty members) at the University of Toronto wrote letters of concern to the President of the University regarding the course Alternative Health: Practice and Theory HLTD04H3-S, Special Topics in Health taught by Beth Landau-Halpern, a homeopath. One group wrote about their concerns that the course presented …
I hear this fairly often – women telling me they asked their GYN for an IUD (yeah!) and were told that they couldn’t because they had never had children. Their GYNs are wrong and unfortunately it’s not just a few who think this way. A study from last year tells us that 32% of OB/GYNs …
Continue reading “My GYNO says I can’t have an IUD. Is she right?”
Dr. Oz promises to come out swinging on Thursday, both against the 10 physicians who wrote a letter to the Dean of Medicine at Columbia and to defend himself against the charges of quakery. Here are 10 of his recommendations I’d like to see him explain/defend with science (i.e. provide medical evidence above personal experience). …
Continue reading “10 quack treatments Dr. Oz needs to defend”
Dr. Oz plans to strike back at the doctors who wrote a letter (see below) to the Dean of Health Sciences and Medicine at Columbia calling for his resignation. Oz’s response will apparently be in the form of an episode of his show this Thursday. CNN is reporting that an Oz spokesperson had the following …
The University of Toronto is taking heat for studying homeopathy in children with ADHD. For those of you not familiar with homeopathy, it is the practice of treating patients “with diluted natural substances aimed at stimulating the body’s healing systems” (this definition is from the paper used as the pilot study for the clinical trial …
Continue reading “How did the University of Toronto IRB approve a homeopathy for ADHD study?”
Someone sent me a sad link to a coroner’s report about a baby in Australia who died from bleeding due to late onset vitamin K deficiency. It’s an older case (2011), but I decided to do some research to see if this was something I needed to write about. Above the fold I found this …
Continue reading “Unhealthy advice on vitamin K shots from the Healthy Home Economist”
There seems to be an alarming trend in anti-vaccine information at some Canadian Universities. Here are the three that recently caught my eye: University of British Columbia A known anti-vaccine group, the Dwoskin Family Foundation, funds “research” at the University of British Columbia. I say they are anti-vaccine because they compare vaccination to the Holocaust. The Dean …
Continue reading “Are Canadian universities fertile ground for anti vaccine pseudoscience?”
The preferred route for a hysterectomy is vaginal. This means the entire surgery is done through the vagina with no incisions in the abdomen of any kind. The joke among surgeons is that it is a bit like taking a car apart through the muffler. While doing surgery entirely through the vagina may sound highly …
Continue reading “UnitedHealth steps in to help GYNs make better decisions regarding hysterectomies”
Today the publisher of the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest newspaper, wrote that the article “A wonder drug’s dark side” will be removed from the online site. This is 15 days after it was originally published. It obviously still lives on in print and in screen shots, but now at least no anti-vaccine groups will be …
