Why, he sues the manufacturer, of course.

Gary Null, a pusher of alternative medicine, supplements, and author of such fine literature as the “Joy of Juicing,” nearly died from an overdose of Vitamin D. The overdose was a result of using Gary Null’s Ultimate Power Meal in two meals per day, every day, and as the suit claims “the manufacturer of Gary Null’s Ultimate Power Meal overloaded the supplements with Vitamin D.”

Irony, it seems, is a beautiful thing.

Now, I’m not happy that Mr. Null had to undergo such a horrible experience, but there’s a lesson in his story that everyone should learn. Medicine – real medicine, made by pharmaceutical companies, tested in clinical trials, approved by the FDA, and produced in strictly controlled manufacturing processes – doesn’t suffer from “inadequate safety testing that [leads] to six consumers being hospitalized with severe kidney damage.” Medicines made by “Big Pharma” aren’t perfect, of course, but when you’re taking a drug with potentially harmful effects, you’re typically under the careful eye of a physician. This very same physician carefully regulates your dosage, and can tell when you’re crossing the boundary from safe usage to insane, potentially fatal usage.

Self-medicating, especially with products that aren’t as tightly controlled as prescription pharmaceuticals (e.g., homeopathic and alternative “medicine”), is insanely dangerous. Just ask Mr. Null. Further irony: he continued taking the supplement even after he started experiencing symptoms, thinking that it would help him.

“Null continued to take the Ultimate Power Meal, all the while thinking that it would help him, and relieve his condition; instead, it made him worse,” the suit says.
…
“Null would later be told that if he had not flown back to New York and seen his doctor, then he could have died within a short period of time,” the suit says.

In the end, Null had to seek professional medical help. Not everyone who uses alternative medicine and experiences complications (either from dangerous drug interactions, improper manufacturing techniques, or lack of professional help) is so lucky. Fortunately, incidences like this help to illustrate the dangers, and many of Null’s customers have vowed never to use one of his products again.

***

A skeptic at heart, Matt Coleman studies law at the University of Texas. He holds a degree in philosophy from the University of Michigan, and has long since learned that one should never suffer fools lightly.

Questions, comments, hate-mail? Drop him a line at matt [at] decencyproject.org. Please note that by emailing matt [at] decencyproject.org, you acknowledge and accept that the content of your correspondence can be reproduced by the recipient for purposes of comment, criticism, satire, summary, clarification, illustration, and other uses as outlined under the United States copyright fair-use policy.

On the other hand, I haven’t seen many people link to Michael Specter’s TED Talk, and I think it’s worth watching, too. In short: denying the progress of science doesn’t just risk your own person, but can actually hurt the people around you.

In an article from New Scientist, we have the [perhaps not so shocking] news that individuals undergoing faith healing have the “areas of the brain responsible for scepticism and vigilance become less active.”

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Schjødt and his colleagues scanned the brains of 20 Pentecostalists and 20 non-believers while playing them recorded prayers.
…
Only in the devout volunteers did the brain activity monitored by the researchers change in response to the prayers. Parts of the prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortices, which play key roles in vigilance and scepticism when judging the truth and importance of what people say, were deactivated when the subjects listened to a supposed healer.

The results are interesting, but are limited to a very narrow group. I do find it amusing that the non-believers didn’t undergo any changes. Yet, we might all have a blind spot: “It’s not clear whether the results extend beyond religious leaders, but Schjødt speculates that brain regions may be deactivated in a similar way in response to doctors, parents and politicians.”

***

The Texas Freedom Network reports that California has proposed legislation that will help them ward against changes to textbooks caused by Texas’ SBOE.

Since Texas is such a huge market for texts (with its standardized adoption process), the changes made by the SBOE could have a profound effect on the whole US textbook market.

Californians and other non-Texans are increasingly worried that textbooks written for the Texas market will make it into their states’ classrooms. That’s because publishers often write their textbooks to meet curriculum standards in Texas — which has a huge textbook market and a centralized adoption process — and then sell those textbooks to schools across the country.

At what point will Texas lawmakers finally realize that the State Board of Education is undermining the state’s reputation — politically, educationally and in the business world — across the country?

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

The Austin Skeptics haven’t had a meeting for a while – something which I intend to fix – but in the meantime I’ve gotten married, gotten into UT Law school, and did a bunch of other fun stuff.

Now, for you we’ve got something fun: Adam Savage’s recent speech to the Harvard Humanist Society.

The full speech is here, but I’ve pulled out some of the highlights below.

See, I order my life by the same mechanism that I use to build things. I cannot proceed to move tools around in the real world until my brain has a clear picture in it of what I’m building. The same goes for my life. I’ve tried to pay attention. I’ve tried to picture the way I want things to be, and I’ve noticed that when I had a clear picture, things often turned out the way I wanted them to.

…

The idea of an ordered and elegant universe is a lovely one. One worth clinging to. But you don’t need religion to appreciate the ordered existence. It’s not just an idea, it’s reality. We’re discovering the hidden orders of the universe every day. The inverse square law of gravitation is amazing. Fractals, the theory of relativity, the genome: these are magnificently beautiful constructs.

The nearly infinite set of dominoes that have fallen into each other in order for us to be here tonight is unfathomable. Truly unfathomable. But it is logical. We don’t know all the steps in that logic, but we’re learning more about it every day. Learning, expanding our consciousness, singly and universally.

While the speech is mostly about religion (or rather, Savage’s lack thereof), it has some fantastic shout-outs to science- and reason-based views of the world.  Definitely worth 5 minutes of your time.

-MC

The link below will take you to the clip on Hulu (available until January):

http://www.hulu.com/watch/112769/the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-thu-dec-3-2009?c=817:1273

PUBLIC EDUCATION

Early word: New tests are tough

As hundreds of Texas school districts get a jump on the end-of-course tests that will debut statewide in two years, preliminary results indicate a large number of students will have trouble passing the exams, the Dallas Morning News reported.

High school students will be required to pass the battery of 12 end-of-course tests beginning with freshmen entering high school in the 2011-12 school year. But many districts are already giving versions of the tests to their students, and some are even using them as final exams.

The Algebra I test was administered to nearly 79,000 students this year; 57 percent of them passed. Results were similar on the tests measuring knowledge and skills in biology, chemistry, geometry and U.S. history.

I’m not sure where these tests come from; the article doesn’t say. But if they’re anything like the tests implemented when I was going through public school in Michigan, they’re designed to test basic knowledge of the various scholastic disciplines. An inability to pass the test is meant to reflect that you simply didn’t learn — or weren’t exposed to — the materials everyone is expected to know before they graduate from high school.

Given that Texas also has draconian measures in place requiring public universities to admit the top 10% of students from each high school, we ought to expect a continued decline in the caliber of students enrolled in the state’s many universities. Add on budget cuts, inept governing bodies, and falling standards, and we can expect another generation to go through the Texas educational system and come out the other side as failures.

The least we can do as skeptics is promote strong education initiatives, but it’s hard to see where to begin our push.

One place: the Texas State Board of Education. Elections are coming up, and a handful of the members are facing strong opposition. Check out http://www.teachthemscience.org/ for a rundown of the various SBOE members, their positions, and their opponents.

WIRED magazine covered both stories, and did a good job of explaining why self-injecting a toxin is a very bad idea.

These sites are brazenly circumventing regulations that protect consumers from bad or fake drugs and ensure that the chemicals are used correctly. The laws were designed precisely to prevent Americans with little to no medical training from doing things like buying a form of toxin, mixing it with saline and injecting it into their faces.

The web site’s proprieter had a host of made-up credentials, of course, something we’ve come to expect from woo-pushers of all sorts.

The domain’s registration details are private, but medspacanada.com, which refers back to discountmedspa.com, is registered to Cristie Stone, with the same phone number and e-mail address listed on discountmedspa’s website. The physical address listed for medspacanada.com is the home of the Manitoba Society of Pharmacists, which has no record of Stone.

“Not only is Christie [sic] Stone not a member or the Society, I can honestly say that I have never heard her name before,” wrote Jill Ell, executive director of the society, in an e-mail to Wired.com.

…

“Laurie belongs to the Texas Medical Council and is licensed to sell these products to the women that want to use them and understand that it is their responsibility to use them safely,” she wrote.

Wired Science could not find an organization called the Texas Medical Council. It does not maintain a website and has not been mentioned in the press. A representative for the Texas Department of State Health Services had never heard of it.

In any case, after WIRED managed to order and acquire a case of the toxin without even a hint of the word “prescription,” the Texas Attorney General’s office got wind of her and took the necessary steps to shut her down.

D’Alleva faces civil penalties of $25,000 per violation per day for each time she broke the rules for selling prescription drugs under the Texas Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. In a post to the website, she claimed to have more than 2,000 customers.

In any case, this was some good work by WIRED, the Texas Department of State Health Services, and the Texas Attorney General’s office. I’m glad to see one fewer pseudo-doctor practicing in Texas, and hope to see the trend continue.

This is just a quick (and late!) announcement of the Austin Singers concert being held at 4pm today, Sunday November 22nd, at the University Presbyterian Church on San Antonio St (behind the Scientology building on the Drag). The concert program has an advertisement for the Austin Skeptical Society, so with any luck we’ll see a few new members as a result!

For those of you wondering, yes, Elizabeth is in the choir. I got to see their performance last night, and it was excellent!

More information about the concert can be found here: http://www.austinsingers.org/

Thanks!

But if you still aren’t convinced consider this.  Although performing evolutionary experiments is difficult due to the large timescales involved, it is possible if a fast growing organism is used.  Professor Richard E. Lenski at Michigan State University has performed just such an experiment.  He raised over 30,000 generations of E. coli. and provided them an environment short on glucose, on which they subsist, but high in citrate, which normal E. coli. cannot metabolize.  One (although none of the other) of the colonies evolved the necessary mutations to utilize the citrate!  Furthermore, this required not one, but multiple mutations to be effective, proving that even such complex mutations are possible (albiet not as common/likely as single step mutations, as one would naturally expect).  Given this complication, it is not surprising that only colony developed the necessary mutations.

Feral Camels Plague Australia — (autoplay video, via National Geographic)

Calculating Justice: The Failure of Statistics in the Courtroom — (via New Scientist)

DIY Botox — (via Wired)

Laundry, Tires, and Climate Change — (via New Scientist)

The Virulence of Anti-Vaxxers — (via Cosmic Variance)

Educate Women, Save the Planet — (via Scientific American)