FSM News and Articles
Hawthorn medical institute faces scrutiny over clinical trials: Loophole exposed in Australia’s Clinical Trial Regulations. As discussed in a previous post, the National Institute of Integrative Medicine have been offering and conducting unaccredited cancer tests – for a fee to the participants. These paid-for tests manage to escape scrutiny due to a handy loophole – NIIM says these are part of a ‘clinical trial’. However, these tests are conducted at a lab that has not been NATA-accredited – the TGA states it is not it’s role to require laboratory accreditation and ensure quality within a clinical trial – that is the role of the local human ethics committee. This clinical trial has been approved by an ethics committee that does not meet the NHMRC minimum standards for a Human Research Ethics Committee. However the NHMRC says it does not have the power to investigate clinical trials. This lack of oversight essentially allows an institution to approve its own use of an experimental test or therapy – charging patients and using its own labs and its own ethics committee.
FSM Friends’ News and Articles
Vitamins and minerals aren’t risk-free. Here are 6 ways they can cause harm: Unlike conventional medicines, complementary and alternative medicines (CAM therapies) are often marketed with little explanation of potential harms. Thus, people often think of CAM therapy as being ‘risk free’. Recent research has identified six potential harms of CAM therapy. These include direct harms (like side effects, or unexpected interactions with other medicines) as well as indirect harms (unnecessary costs, may delay other more effective therapy).
‘My son does not have a grandad’ – Allegations of unethical conduct after man dies of prostate cancer: A recent complaint made about the National Institute of Integrative Medicine alleged unethical, misleading and deceptive conduct, where cancer tests and treatments were advertised as more effective than evidence shows. “We operate on these poor men when the penny drops the cancer has not been successfully treated,” Professor Declan Murphy, a prostate cancer surgeon at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, said. “They spend a fortune on cocktails of alternative treatments with no established oncological benefit.” A published article by the institute states that their patients receive “a wide range of treatments for their prostate cancer, including daily sonotherapy (sound healing), integrative nutritional therapy, intravenous vitamin C, supplements and hyperthermia, in which body tissue is heated.” These treatments are not best practice for prostate cancer and do not appear to have evidence of efficacy.
General
Restricted representations: “The individual allegedly promoted, on their website, a homoeopathic immunisation product that contained a representation that the product provided ‘a more competent immune response to the COVID-2 virus’. The advertisement further stated that the product was made from ‘the SARS COVID-2’ “
Today’s Abused Health Concept
Deceptive arguments about high survival rates: Aka “It’s not a big deal, 99% of people survive it! This is a favourite argument of anti-lock-downers, anti-maskers, and anti-vaccinators. ‘The Logic of Science’ blog highlights how dysfunctional this logic is. The real measure of danger is the infection rate, not the survival rate. Imagine 2 hypothetical diseases:
• Disease (A) has a 0% survival rate, but only infects 1 in 1,000,000;
• Disease (B) has a 99% survival, but infects 10% of the population.
This means that in a population of 10,000,000, (A) will kill 10 people, while (B) will kill 10,000.
Just remember that the horror of last century’s Polio epidemics was for a disease with a 99.9% survival rate. “Also, notice how those who like to cast aspersions on vaccines try to downplay death from COVID-19 while hyping mostly mild injury from the vaccine. Indeed, this “99% survive” argument would have us believe that a 1% fatality is too low to be seriously concerned, but a 0.002–0.041% rate of generally mild myocarditis is unacceptably high. It is crazy to think that 3–4 mostly mild cases of myocarditis is worse than 700 deaths! That’s simply not how math works.”
Great Moments in Health and Science
The development of vaccines for COVID-19 – How do COVID-19 vaccines work? Usually the great moments shared on this page are historic events, but the existence of vaccines for COVID-19 is history happening to us right now. Vaccines are a key part of how we can protect ourselves and those vulnerable people in our society who cannot have them.