The True Cost of Alternative Medicine

Whats the harm with alternative medicine if we are sure it doesn't work?

When normal means of medicine fails us, some will turn to alternative medicine for treatment.  However, when conventional medicine for extremely treatable conditions is subsided for alternative means of medication and therapy, the result can essentially be a fatality. Ultimately, the decision comes down to the patient, but not in all cases. A website called whattheharm.net shows just a small portion of a list of people who have died from using medicine outside the reins of evidence based science. Now, this is not the say at all, in any way that the medicine itself had killed them, but rather the lack of actual medication to treat these conditions. Probably the most recent prolific case is the case with Steve Jobs, who sought out alternative medicine to cure him of pancreatic cancer and sought out spiritualists to heal him, as opposed to doctors.
 

Whats the harm with Terminal Cancer?

Most stories that involve alternative medicine are orientated around cancer. So, if the patient is terminal, what is the harm in them seeking alternative care? One word; hope. Many of these naturopaths, who don’t have degrees in medicine and have no idea what they are doing, claim that they can cure the cancer. Granted, there is the odd case where the cancer will just go away on its own. The antibodies will destroy the cancer cells, and the patient will become healthy and normal again. This, by no means, is down to ‘alternative medicine’. This is genuinely just a luck of the draw. Then there are those that don’t survive, but have sought alternative treatment. In 1999, Ed Gochenour had his brain tumour treated using alternative medicine. The doctor was prosecuted by the FDA, with Ed testifying in court that the treatment worked and he was cured of his cancer. The patient died nearly two years later, from the original brain tumour. Again, in 2007 Mary Nedlouf had previously undergone treatment for breast cancer in the summer of 2006. In 2007, the cancer had reoccurred and she was told it was inoperable. After seeking alternative medicine, she was charged $3,000 (around £2000) a week for autosanguis and bioresonance therapy for her treatment from Dr Nakouzi. He told her, he would cure her cancer with these techniques and saying he would get to the ‘root of the cancer’ and prescribed a daily regimen of 40 pill supplements. Not too shockingly, but unfortunately, Mary died after two weeks of ‘treatment’. Her husband was quoted saying:

"[Nakouzi] robbed me of precious time to console her, to come to closure, to prepare for her departure."

That is pretty much the reality of alternative medicine. He gave hope to her and to her husband by using therapy which has absolutely no scientific merit at all.
 

11 Year Old Dies Through Alternative Treatment

In January of this year, an 11 year old girl named Makalya Sault from Ontario, Canada died from an acute case of lymphoblastic leukemia. This is a cancer of the white blood cells, which induces an overproduction of immature white blood cells (lymphoblasts). With chemotherapy, the prognosis is usually good, giving at least 5 years without re-occurrence. Makaylas parents were pastors, their faith being Christianity. On the basis of religious grounds, they had this 11 year old girl removed from chemotherapy treatment and put her in a health institution for alternative therapy. Here, she received ‘cold laser therapy’ and vitamin C injections. These, have absolutely no effect on leukemia. After she had died the family blamed the hospital in Canada for the chemotherapy she received, claiming it caused irrevocable damage to her heart. – Also, in that article, it indicates that this girl CHOSE to give up chemo. She really didn’t have a choice in this; this was her parent’s decision. Many of the news articles state this girl 'refused conventional treatment', but that is really hard to believe in an 11 year old girl would make that authoritative decision. It's ridiculous enough that freedom of religion allowed the means for this tragic death, let alone the decision of her parents were allowed to take effect. Actual real doctors, not alternative therapists, stated she died after suffering a stroke due to the relapse of leukemia.
 

Who is to blame?

In the case above, who do we blame? The parents blame the chemo, the doctors blame the cancer, the media blames the parents. Was it the parents fault for being so succumbed to the thought and promise of a cure? Well, that arguable. Should the government be blamed because they didn’t try to circumvent this occurrence, instead, they allowed it to happen? But, I believe, blame should really be placed on the practitioners that propagate these evidently false claims of cures for cancer. 

   

“People have been living on earth for about 250,000 years. For the past 5,000 healers have been trying to heal the sick. For all but the past 200, they haven’t been very good at it.”

– Dr. Paul Offit

Never has a truer statement been said. It’s is often discussed that alternative medicine is seen as a cult, drawing people in with good sales pitches and keeping them there. These people are phenomenally under educated in the realm of science. You have to be careful with the people who claim they know the ‘source’ of cancer and the ‘cures’ for cancer. Cancer is ridiculously complex and as I have discussed in another blog post (Is cannabis the cure for cancer?), does not have one unified treatment. There are several different cancers and several different treatments out there for some types of these cancers, but, there is no one universal, cure all, cancer treatment. It is alternative therapists who see a weakness in these people and take full advantage of it, and really it is despicable. Another case is discussed here, where a woman named Kim Tinkham was conned into using alternative medicine for her breast cancer. Dr. Young was quoted saying ‘there is no such thing as cancer’ and blamed her when the treatment didn’t work because she didn’t ‘truly believe’.
 

It really does work, I’ve read this story where…

No, it doesn’t work. As discussed earlier, there can be just a random occurrence that your body fights off the cancer with no treatment, which is often described as a ‘miracle’. These stories are through the words of a patient, there is no scientific proof or evidence behind these cases about the efficacy of alternative treatment. They provide a myriad of scientific inaccuracy and most often fail to point out the fact that alternative therapy is being used alongside actual medical techniques such as radiotherapy. Thus, the radiotherapy is helping the cancer recede, not the activated charcoal you are putting in your organic, no fat, no milk, no coffee and no chemical latte.

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Belle Gibson, a shamefully despicable woman, built her business around her story of having healed herself of a brain tumour through the controlling of her diet. She sold recipe books, claiming to have the cures for cancer through eating the right ingredients. It has been discovered, now, that she never had cancer at all. Even worse, in that interview, she appears to have no remorse of fabricating these claims and profiting of scared people with life threatening ailments.
 

Conclusion

Believers in alternative medicine eve infiltrate the NHS, just a few months ago we had David Tredinnick, an advocate of astrological medicine and homeopathy, running for a seat allowing him to integrate alternative medicine into the NHS. A few months ago I heard of a friend going to the doctors with severe mood swings due to hormone imbalance and told to take some homeopathic treatment for that. You as a patient have the right to deny medicine and ask questions regardless of the situation. If you feel the medicine recommended isn’t correct, seek a second opinion. A feel a lot of people turn to alternative medicine because they don’t trust doctors or ‘big pharma’. But these people are trying to help, as much as you think they aren’t. They are much more informed than alternative therapists and will tell you the side effects of the treatment. Cases where people received coffee enemas for common ailments have a serious risk of contracting septicaemia, which isn’t exactly discussed as a side effect in alternative treatments.

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The common thing to look out for and be careful off is an alternative medicine quackers use of the ‘historical use of herbal/alternative medicine’. This, in its basic form is an appeal to antiquity, which is a logical fallacy. They are essentially claiming that this medicine works, because it was used historically. This fact does not give any credence to evidence; these treatments were probably no more effective than they are now. Beware of buzzwords such as ‘oxidation’ and ‘cancer causing’, these are classic signs you are onto alternative pathways (but not always). This can be demonstrated here. To get to this website, I typed into google ‘cancer cured by cheese’, you can probably type in anything and get a quack result. The top result was ‘cancer cured by baking soda’, for the sake of my own mental capability; I am not going to click on it (I’m sure that another post will cover it). If there was evidence that alternative therapy works just as well as conventional medicine, they would stand up as one united treatment. They are completely separate entities, one based on myths and promises of cures, the other based on evidence and truth. Take your pick, but who’s to blame when you die from a lack due care with one of these?

E-Liquid: Safer Than Tobacco?

Are E-cigarettes Safer Than Tobacco?

Over the last couple of years in the UK, vaping devices (electronic cigarettes, e-cig and I’m guessing other names) have become a much more popular alternatives to tobacco. Obviously there is a multitude of evidence to prove tobacco is harmful and is strongly linked to lung cancer amongst other diseases of the respiratory system. As this week we have an announcement of possible regulation around the use of electronic cigarettes, we find ourselves asking; are they safe? Unless, of course, you are The Guardian, in which case the question is: 'will e-cigarettes ever look cool on screen'. Clearly they’re not worried, should we be?

What is an E-Cigarette?

Basically, what you are operating is a battery-operated vaporiser, consisting of a chamber and a heating element. A user will inhale; the airflow from inhalation passes a sensor allowing the heating element to turn on, heating up to around 55^oC. This heat vaporises the liquid, which is inhaled. Simple.

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The part that is called into question is the liquid in itself. The liquid is made up of four principle components:

• Propylene Glycol: This is a clear organic compound, commonly used as an E-number and the production of polymers. The FDA has approved propylene glycol for use in different medications, but as it is an e-number, it is commonly used in food also. Hazards include S24 and S25: Meaning avoid direct contact of a pure solution with eyes and skin. This acts as a base, essentially carrying the nicotine and flavouring into a vapour.

• Glycerine: Also referred to as glycerol. This product is far more vaporising than propylene glycol. Thus, it is added in order to create more vapour, lowering the amount of propylene glycol. Commonly, glycerine is referred to as sugar alcohol and is very widely used in the food and pharmaceutical industry. This product is ridiculously not at all toxic.

• Flavourings: This is pretty much where it becomes questionable. We all know what food flavourings do, but what are they? They can be natural; those obtained from plants or artificial; distillates and manipulates of the natural sources. As in food, not all of these are safe for use in e-liquid. In artificial butter type flavours we have the use of diacetyl, acetoin and acetylpropionyl, which has been linked to severe cases of lung disease. So really, what is being added at this point is the source of all-evil with an e-cigarette. However, that said, when properly researched and created in a regulated laboratory, these will be just as safe as adding them to your food.

• Nicotine: Really the golden nugget of the e-liquid. The nicotine intentionally varies between e-liquids, so you can have a little (around 0.6%) or a lot (around 2.5%).

Why are they used?

The common belief is mostly, that they are much safer than that of tobacco, but they don’t contain the by products of tobacco. Meaning that they are less likely to cause cancer and lung problems. They are cheaper and much more pleasant for the users and bystanders in terms of smell. However, there are very few studies either way showing that they are good for you or bad for you. This is a very new market, so there is going to be very little in the way of reviews and long-term studies. A review I found published in the Journal of Public Health compares six longitudinal studies and four studies to state that there is a reduced desire to smoke amongst the population. Which may well be true, but they are still consuming the nicotine, although you can purchase e-liquid with 0.0mg/ml of nicotine. This is what the studies appear to be looking at, the reduction and cessation of traditional tobacco smoking, not really the health effects.

Formaldehyde

Whilst researching all this, I keep coming across the popular belief that there is a high level of formaldehyde contained in the vapour. Formaldehyde is a Group one compound, carcinogenic within humans. A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine states that high voltage discharge in an e-cigarette causes up to an inhalation of 14.4 (±3.3 mg) of formaldehyde hemiacetyl per day. This is likely to be due to the combustion of the propylene glycol, which is something that you do not want to happen. When complete combustion happens, you are essentially creating hydrocarbon and other by-products, one of which will be formaldehyde products, as stated in the study. However, complete combustion is not the aim in vaping. You want vapour, not smoke. What is ignored in this study is the fact that it is comparing the processes of heating elements ability to create the products. Thus, at low voltages we get vapour consisting of the nicotine-y goodness that people crave and, from this study, no detectable limit of formaldehyde. At the high voltages you will get breakdown products that are not wanted and I imagine would smell and taste like burning wood or tyres. There would be no benefit, a case of cherry-picking data and applying it as incorrectly as is humanly possible. The researches calculate (albeit inaccurately on practically falsified information) that there is a 5x risk of developing cancer from the use of 3ml of the liquid. But this is one study, using a worst-case scenario; if you vape at high voltage, you would get a breakdown product of formaldehyde. It was sad to see that some respectable skeptical blogs had jumped on this themselves to criticise e-cigarettes due to the level of formaldehyde produced from the high voltage.

Is there a chance that this could happen, and people are ingesting formaldehyde? Yes, I suppose. This is a highly unregulated market, and there are a lot of people out there making money off of this and not really knowing what they are doing. But If you think about what is being inhaled to get the formaldehyde, the taste of it, surely they wont use them again or they will use a better quality brand. There are companies out there that do test their liquids for quality control, although, as it is unregulated, they don’t necessarily have to.

So, are they safe?

There is no long term health study that gives that impression, nor is there any health study that states they are not safe:- there is nothing either way. Despite that, vaping is promoted to be a harm reduction aid, its healthier than smoking, its better for you, there are less long term-health effects. Is any of this true? It’s pretty premature to say. As it emerges to be more regulated, this market is booming. More studies will be released to denote its safety or harm. In terms of decreasing tobacco related deaths or weaning people off of cigarettes, it appears to work very well.

One study published in the Biomedical Journal states that ‘little evidence about their health effects suggests that vaping is probably safer than smoking’. Well, we have zero evidence that there is a god, but that is still debated in every city in the world. What a ridiculously stupid sentence to close a study with, 'the absence of evidence means no evidence in an area that isn't overly studied' perfect. This is a good time to point out that the studies that are out there include obsolete studies such as this one. If you look there are a fair few studies, only a handful of which are scientifically sound. Which is something that is seen all the time, but in the case of a new emerging area, it is very frustrating, albeit, a little gelastic. Properly created a e-cigarette will vaporise (not burn) pharmaceutical and food grade, FDA approved glycerine, propylene glycol, nicotine and flavourings. Avoiding the more buttery flavours to assure there is little chance of lung disease from diacetyl, acetoin and acetyl propionyl. Can we be assured this is what is happening? Not at all. There is no regulation around this market as of yet. You can do research and look at the backgrounds behind the companies manufacturing them, such as EL-Science to assure you have a quality assurance. However, it must be stressed that the long-term effects of vaping are not at all apparent. It does appear that they are healthier and a good way to help with reducing cigarette consumption, but this isn’t 100%. It is pretty much impossible in medical science to say that something is ‘risk free’. I’ve discussed this before, everything carries a risk, and hopefully this one is minimal.

 

Conclusion

In regards to regulation; yes, it should be regulated in order for it to be so widely sold and widely available. Should they be prescribed on the NHS? In my opinion; not at all. We have a crippled NHS in the UK, adding a prescription service for something that is costly, and millions of people will be prescribed will cripple us further. Until more studies are conducted, I can’t really comment on the safety overall. All I can say is; they appear safe, there are no adverse health benefits that have been reported over the last year and half of them being widely used and, when properly manufactured, the e-liquids are safe and are vaporised safely with a properly, well manufactured e-cigarette device. People who have opinions appear to have strong opinions either side, but the fact is; the science is being pushed aside and ignored. It would be wise to wait for hard evidence before making any judgement call on their use and proficiency.

Of course, you get the reports of the e-cigarette batteries blowing up. I recall last year receiving multiple e-mails from my university about how they are banned because a battery exploded in the dining hall. Again, inferior manufacturing products have been bought. There are a lot of cheaper, subsidiary products out there that are insufficient for use and unsafe in every aspect, for any product ever made. E-cigarettes and e-liquids are no exception. If you are going to use these products, pick a researched brand, not a high-street market.

Mobile Cancer: Perpetuating The Myth

Study Finds Strong Correlation of Mobile Phones to Cancer 

Last month whilst travelling I picked up a free newspaper, which is commonly distributed amongst public transport in the UK: The Metro. Whilst flicking through this I saw an intriguing article on how cancer has been linked to mobile phones, again. I personally thought this argument was solved about 15 years ago. I remember there being a lot about it in this news and I even remember a TV drama created about a man who got tumours from using a cell phone. Either way, I had forgotten about it. Last week, a guy next to me was reading my good old favourite newspaper (if only for a laugh), ‘The Daily mail’. I looked over to see what racist view they were spouting and to my surprise, I found the headline ‘MOBILE PHONES LINKED TO CANCER SAYS STUDY’. I sighed and shuddered at the thought and continued to play, on my mobile:- what can I say, I’m a risk taker.

I found the article itself online, with the full title of ‘Mobile phones ARE linked to cancer, study claims: Long-term use ‘is associated with Alzheimer, Parkinson’s, headaches and skin irritations’. Yes, the ARE is written in capitals, nothing like alarming people. 

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The Claim and The Article

So, lets assume that’s real, that that is actually happening and we are having this array of disease due to the use of mobile phones and tablets with their radioactive properties. When you reach the second point of the summery of this article, you get:

“Scientist claim radiation causes oxidative stress in the body- a damaging process thought to be closely linked to degenerative disease”

As with most papers, and most ‘scientific journalists’ commenting on things they know nothing about, we have to look hard for this paper so it can be reviewed. Luckily, this was actually quite easy to find. The study itself was published in Electromagnetic Biology and Medicine and was a review article, not a study, entitled “Oxidative mechanisms of biological activity of low intensity radiofrequency radiation”. As I said, this is a review article, which means that the data that is presented in this paper is not new data. No study has been conducted, no subjects have been used, no data has been generated. A review is a cohort of studies banded together to create a better view of the overall data that we have on a given subject. However, one has to take care when reviewing this information, like any other articles, these are open to bias, more specifically ‘citation bias’. This is the act of only really choosing scientific articles that back up your claim and support your viewpoint, making the paper itself ridiculously obsolete.

The author of this article is a man called Igor Yakymenko, who has previously published biased information about how radiation from phones cause oxidative stress (PDF of one of his papers is here). In his current published review, he claims that the published evidence (including his own studies) conform to say that low intensity radio frequency causes oxidative stress, causing an increase in risk of disease such as cancer, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s.  The pathology and origin as to why Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s occur in the human body is actually still relatively unknown, if he had found credible evidence to suggest a cause, surely this story would have been taken up more than by the worlds worst newspaper. 

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The Literature

There are ample studies out there that dispelled this myth years ago, when the suggestion was first made. There is no evidence, at least convincing evidence, that there is a link for disease and mobile phones. In 1012, a systematic review published in the Journal of Bioelectromagnetics found that of all the evidence that is currently available, there is no statistically significant risk from mobile phones and that there was certainly no statistically significant relationship between in vivo studies and the exposure of radio-frequency fields causing tumours.

Again last year, we have a study out of Epidemiology looking at the long-term mobile use and acoustic neuroma risk. They concluded that there was no link found between long-term mobile phone use and increased risk of neuroma. These are again, systematic reviews in which both of these studies correlate studies that have been conducted over the course of 20 years. Both of which look at studies, which state there is a link between disease and the studies that don’t have a link, not one or the other to prove a point, hence, there is no bias. In fact, as mobile phones are becoming evermore prominent in this technologically growing world, there hasn’t been an increase at all in brain tumours over the previous thirty years.  As people are using them more and more, if they caused tumours, then surely that number would have increased dramatically.

Fundamentally, the radiation used is non-ionising; this basically means that there is not enough energy in the radiation to alter our cells in any way. The main end of the article states that this fact, combined with the ‘unstable evidence’ is not enough to ‘rule out the risk’ of mobiles causing cancer. They also state last year that another ‘study’ had published its results saying that people who use their phones more than 15 hours each month appear to have higher risks of developing certain types of brain cancer. Where is this study? Another case of the media frivolously saying what it likes without backing up with any evidence.

Conclusion

The Daily Mail isn’t the only one to blame here. It’s just where I saw it again, and where I chose to base this off. Every major newspaper website had a headline sensation about how it was revealed that mobile phones cause cancer, from what I had noticed, not of them had bothered to actually see that it was a review rather than a study and that it was fundamentally incorrect.

Journalists should be weary of this type of misinformation. There is a trend that is noticed in the Skeptic community and should be noted in the general population. This claim has been around since mobile phones have been around. When researchers find information 20 years later that are diametrically opposite to scientific consensus, why is this not questioned? You need to look at the person who is communicating this study (if it is indeed, a study) and looking at why and how. Checking out their other work for conflicts of interest should also become second nature.

The only solace here is that most people, from what I have gathered, aren’t buying into this newsbreak. On the comment section of many of the paper articles online there are people who are rightly saying that this is ridiculously incorrect and like me ‘thought this was put to bed years ago’. And then there’s the odd one:

“Cue all those who are addicted to their phones saying this research is wrong. Never mind. What could possibly go wrong when you put a device that releases radiation, capable of disrupting the DNA in your cells, next to your brain for many hours per day for decades?” – D. Andre

I think we all know what that D is short for. Sometimes, the stupid is too much for even me to continue reading.

Food Babe: Hypocritical As Well As Scientifically Illiterate

‘The only thing worse than a liar is a liar that’s also a hypocrite’ 

– Tennessee Williams

When I feel a bit down, I have a routine. I check The FoodBabe blog for a bit of a laugh, which usually turns into a laugh riot more often than not. I have written about her before, when she was lobbying for subway to remove chemicals from bread and her accuracy in the science of how Starbucks was killing us with their carcinogenic PSL. However, I was more than annoyed with a title of a post she posted this week entitled ‘These Hired “Experts” are infiltrating the media to confuse you about food’ – My initial reaction: ‘Yes someone’s hacked the food babe blog and posted a hilarious blog’. However, It turns out she’s a hypocrite as well as unable to understand irony. Who’d have thought, eh?

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What’s so bad about it?

Where to start. At the beginning, with the first scientifically illiterate pesticides. Now, pay attention to the title of this blog and read the following sentence:

"Every day more people are becoming aware of the chemical pesticides, synthetic food additives, antibiotics, and growth promoting drugs that are used to make conventional food products, and are choosing cleaner organic food thanks to you!"

Chemical pesticides…didn't really need the work chemical there? Synthetic…didn’t really call for that either. Fearmongering much? So in her first sentence she’s managed to create a level of hypocrisy which pissed me off, straight off the bat. Even further: ‘Antibiotic’ – What? I genuinely don't know what shes getting at there, vaccines probably. Although, to her credit, people are becoming more aware of things in food. Only, this awareness stems from something called a ‘scientific education’, something, I point out with as much emphasis as I can, Vani has zero of. This woman believes microwaves put ‘bad’ energy into water, for the love of science.

HELL NO, GMO

Yeah, back on these. GMOS are bad. They will kill us. We have to do something. Organic is better than everything ever made. No, it really isn’t. What happens here is we ignore scientific consensus and then that becomes a fact. Ignorance, truly, is bliss. But hey, as long as people are following this quackery, let’s go with it. 

"They are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on stealth public relations (PR) campaigns, using deceptive front groups to push coordinated messages that attack organic food, and activists like me, while defending the continued use of synthetic pesticides, antibiotics, GMOs, and chemical food additives."

Okay, deceptive whilst attacking ‘activists’ (which I can only assume she means ‘moron’) so they can push an ‘agenda’ of GMO and ‘chemical’ food additives. I’d love to see a food additive that isn’t made up of chemicals. Oh yeah, it’s called ‘nothing’.

Sidebar: I even had this argument on GMO’s on twitter with the proactive scientist Fran Drescher. Oh wait, she’s not a scientist? Well, she seems to think she is. I found a blog that pretty much sums up the event where this abhorrently uneducated woman decided she knew better than every scientist in the world because her husband is a bad one. What is it with celebrities thinking they know absolutely everything? Our ‘conversation’ is shown below.

 

 

I then asked her ‘what question she would like me to answer’:

 

Shame on me indeed. 

‘Yoga Mat Chemicals Are Not Safe’

Still beating the dead horse, Vani shows that she hasn’t shifted her unscientific view on how chemicals can have a multitude of uses and properties, she believes that the chemicals used in yoga mats, azodicarbonamide, are also used in preservatives in bread. Come on, so is water, I bet you still drink that though? Of course, unless it’s been exposed to anything negative. 

Then she does something strange. She acknowledges that fact she doesn’t know anything:

"They accuse me of all sorts of things – “I’m not qualified”, “I’m not a scientist”, they dig up old errors on my blog that I have removed or corrected and they bring it up over and over again as a way to discredit me. The truth is (as many of you have seen through my campaigns) there are plenty of scientists and consumer organizations (including my advisory council) that back my work and there is a mountain of evidence that synthetic, carcinogenic and neurotoxic insecticides are bad for human health and the environment."

First off ‘old errors on my blog’ – this was a woman who was campaigning about them pumping nitrogen onto a pressurized air cabin. This is because she thought that the air we breathe is composed of 100% oxygen. Seriously.  However, before she could delete this blog, people had ripped her apart. If you are reading this and you are a part of the ‘food babe army’ read this carefully again: She campaigned against airplanes not pumping 100% oxygen on board a plane, because she thought that’s what we breathed. If that doesn’t scream incompetent in scientific knowledge, how about she believes water has memory. And by the way Vani, that's how the scientific world works, you write crap, you get treat like it. Get a thicker skin.

‘Plenty of scientists that support her views’ playing it fast and loose with the word scientists, not to mention, her source to that is just someone from a news article typing up information about what she believes. Most certainly not a scientist. ‘Including my advisory council’ – Once again, this is probably the advisory council she asked about oxygen on planes. One can only assume these people have banded together to troll her, and she’s just really not caught on. 

Here are her specific recommendations from that blog for health and safety when flying:

1- Drink 8 ounces of water for every hour of flying time
2- If you experience a headache, pains or aches, think about using turmeric, garlic or willow bark which are all natural alternatives to aspirin
3- Fast or eat small light carbohydrate rich whole foods.
4- Limit any heavy dairy or protein rich foods.
5- Whole grain carbohydrates are better tolerated than proteins at a high altitude.
6- Do not drink alcohol or caffeine on long flights
7- Walk or stretch every 30 mins while in flight, if you can’t get up from your seat, rotate your ankles and raise your arms over your head to stretch
8- Keep your hands clean with natural hand sanitizer spray and avoid touching your face as much as possible
9- Don’t forget to take your natural herbs that can strengthen your immune system

I mean…I can’t even. 

A Sexist Note

She complains that the ads from Monsantos (a major GMO organisation) are ‘plastered’ all over women’s magazines. Well, yes. Women do more cooking and more food shopping, statistically speaking. Which she openly acknowledges. So what is the issue? Advertising companies target their audience. It’s like moaning because they’re advertising high priced cars in a men’s magazine when you can’t drive. I don’t drive, I don’t really know anything about driving. Thus I wouldn’t look twice. But if I a saw an acronym involved in food or science I would look it up and look into it, and guess what; I did and GMOs are perfectly safe. 

Commonly, people like this go to one thing ‘you’re being paid to say this’, which is what Vani ultimate does. I had this argument with Fran Drescher whose view was ‘I don’t like what you are saying, therefore: Monsanto’. This lead to me being blocked, clearly the truth is a little too close to home. They attack how much money these corporations earn from their work, therefore it must be bad and they must be paying people to do their bidding of evils. But, is that not what you do Vani? Recently you released a book, you’re not poor, so why would this criticism not apply to you? Are you not in the hands of ‘big organic’? (See my image at the top of this page, some things just speak for themselves).

Source (I recommend this blog too)

Conclusion

I’m sure that Vani has made enough royalties off of her book to put her through a proper scientific college education, just to show her how hard it is to critically analyse information, read a scientific study that’s actually viable and use actual evidence to justify your means. But no, she decides to use uneducated fear-mongering for her ‘army’ and band of misfit quacks to promote pseudoscience at its highest form of annoyance; hypocrisy. She ends her blog with ‘The next time you read a biased piece…we all need to use increased scrutiny when reading these topics’. Does she actually see herself typing these? She posts numerous blogs on pseudoscientific nonsense, to the point where studies are thrown out and people have been disbarred from their medical professionals of their claims, and says that we need to use scrutiny when reading scientific evidence in the media whilst still being anti-vaccinations.

Yes, I encourage you all to use criticism and scrutiny when reading any article. Including this one go look and judge Vani for yourself, don’t just take my word on her biased, self-pompous, uneducated propaganda. And finally, she uses the term ‘use facts, not fear’, to which I can only say: You hypocritical bloody moron. What you have been doing is the equivalent of screaming to worn people of the dangers you know nothing about. You have 'researched' with your vacuous 'Google scholar' type of thinking and found what you want to find, anyone can do that. If I did that in my degree, I wouldn't have made it past the first year. Your fear-mongering is disgraceful at best, but to turn that round and say that 'bloggers who support GMO' and scientists are the ones who are fear-mongering is just freaking ludicrous.

PS: If you want a laugh, watch her fail at an interview. Epically:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0aweCbjVZU