Insulin, YouTube, advocacy, and more…

General

Why you should stay away from Insulin Potentiation Therapy: I never cease to be amazed at the inventiveness of scam artists. They prey on human nature, offering people the easy way to be cured. And, of course, people fall for it. Insulin potentiation therapy (ITP) was invented in the ’30s and is being carried on by a handful of practitioners across the world. The supposed rational is that cancer has many more insulin receptors than normal cells and treatment with insulin makes them more suceptible to chemotherapy drugs. This allows the “doctor” to administer lower doses of chemo thereby resulting in lower toxic side effects. Sounds great, right? It’s a shame it doesn’t work.

Banned chiropractor could be treating infants again by 2021:  “Examples I have seen on videos of babies being manipulated and the spiel that goes with the treatments are deeply worrying. Is this just the tip of the iceberg? It brings into question the effectiveness of chiropractic regulation.”

YouTube won’t let anti-vaccine videos make advertising money for their creators, citing a policy around ‘dangerous or harmful’ content YouTube channels that promote anti-vaccination (anti-vax) content are not allowed to run ads on the video sharing platform, according to a policy first reported by BuzzFeed News on Friday. YouTube said that it considers anti-vaccination content to be “dangerous or harmful,” which as a policy, it does not allow to be monetized. The company says this is not a new policy. Some channels promoting anti-vaccination content were reportedly able to monetise for some time, in violation of the policy, and a number of advertisers became upset after learning their ads were running alongside the harmful content.

Everyone can be an effective advocate for vaccination: here’s how: Tips for being an effective advocate for vaccination:

  • Ask about, and listen to, people’s concerns. Not everyone is driven by the same issues or experiences.
  • Find out what specifically is concerning the person. Is it safety? Effectiveness? Side effects?
  • Acknowledge their concern. Remember, everyone loves their children. No one is refusing to vaccinate because they want their child to get sick, or because they wilfully hope other children will get sick. Acknowledging that you see where someone is coming from can go a long way in establishing trust.
  • Provide information to respond to their concerns. Share what you know, and try to provide reliable sources for your information. Be careful not to debunk myths too aggressively, as this can actually backfire.
  • Share personal stories. Emotive stories tend to have more impact than facts. This is one reason stories of rare vaccine adverse events can seem to carry more weight than overwhelming safety figures. Share your own stories of positive experiences with vaccines, or better yet, discuss your experience with the diseases they prevent.
  • Don’t pass judgment. People may discuss vaccination many times with many different people before they decide to vaccinate, especially if they are very hesitant. Your goal should be to establish yourself as a trusted, non-judgmental person with whom they can share their questions and concerns. Berating them won’t convince them to vaccinate, but it will convince them never to speak to you about vaccines again.

Today’s Abused Health Concept

Pseudo-Math: Sharyl Attkisson and measles vaccine math – wrong in so many ways: Like many pseudo-science and conspiracy types, antivaxxers are constantly looking for a ‘GOTCHA’ moment where they can point out problems with scientific medicine. This means that they will often use nonsensical math that makes no sense to try to claim that vaccines have lower safety rates, or that the unvaccinated experience less disease. For example if unvaccinated children contract measles at 400% the rate of the vaccinated, but you have 9 times as many vaccinated children, then you can expect there to be 2.25 times as many vaccinated children with the disease. This is only because there are more vaccinated children than unvaccinated. But the anti-vaxxers will point to the higher number and claim that vaccines don’t work. Clearly they don’t understand numbers. And that’s assuming that they didn’t make up they own fake numbers, and still get them wrong.

Great Moments in Health and Science

The Human Genome Project: Reading the entire human genome – one long sentence at a time: The first mapping of the human genome and the technologies that have made genomic analysis faster and cheaper continue to bring about new discoveries as to how our bodies, and some of the illnesses that can affect them, work.

Thanks to Science

How does a vasectomy work and can it be reversed? We now have a safe, somewhat permanent contraceptive technique for men in the form of a vasectomy. Success rates for vasectomies are over 99%. The most popular technique involves an ‘open ended’ method where one side of the severed vas deferens is left open and this can normally be achieved using a ‘scalpel free’ puncture method. These are normally reversible within a certain timeframe.