Health & Medicine

My Monday, May 17 edition of the Calgary Herald had the following headline listed under TOP NEWS: Largest study suggests cellphone link to cancer risk.

That’s scary. Not true mind you, but scary.

The article written by Sarah Schmidt of Canwest News Service refers to the recently released INTERPHONE study. It plays fast and loose with the truth, but we can’t point fingers at the media alone in this case. The efforts of researchers to suck ever increasing amounts of money from agencies and organizations whose research grant evaluation standards are more about political correctness than scientific merit, can also be blamed here. Read the rest of this entry »

The Question Is, Who is Defrauding Whom?

CBC National News anchor Peter Mansbridge was filled with the appropriate level of indignation introducing the story of insurance fraud on the April 16, 2010 edition of the National. Unfortunately, the CBC’s pro alternative-medicine bias (examples of which are searchable on this site) placed the CBC in a position where they couldn’t quite get it straight as to who is defrauding whom.

The “investigative journalistic report” came complete with hidden cameras, disguised microphones and undercover journalists posing as customers. In reality, what we got was a public relations exercise posing as journalism. Read the rest of this entry »

New advertising effort promotes complimentary and alternative therapies.

The Canadian Cancer Society has undertaken a major new fund-raising campaign called Join the Fight complete with a new, very nice website at fightback.ca. The campaign was introduced through a full page ad in the  December 8, 2009 edition of the Calgary Herald. Roughly a third of the ad was dedicated to the work that is being done in the field of complementary and alternative medicine. 

Highlighting research funded by the Canadian Cancer Society, the headline read: Research team explores impact of complementary cancer treatments. The story describes the research of Dr. Marja Verhoef who readers of ASkepticRTN will recall has been involved in all sorts of CAM nonsense including the laughable Integrative Health Institute (now part of Mount Royal University).  Read the rest of this entry »

Television being what it is, it can be rather difficult to research the stories presented. I don’t record the television news and at my age, my memory is a good deal less than perfect.

What I do remember from the Wednesday, December 16 edition of the CBC Television News at 6:00, is someone telling me that acupuncture cures migraine headaches. Not for everyone mind you, but definitely for some people. I remember there was no qualifiers to this. It wasn’t that someone was claiming acupuncture cures migraines. It was a definitive statement by the reporter – acupuncture cures migraines for some people.

It is pure nonsense of course, but I couldn’t help wonder what evidence the reporter had, to substantiate the claim.  I could be wrong in my assessment after all. Perhaps some new research had demonstrated a strong link between acupuncture and pain relief. It would have to be new research, because after twenty years of past research, acupuncture has failed to show positive pain relief much beyond a placebo. Read the rest of this entry »