Medical ‘Euromyths’: the UK media have an awful lot to answer for

4 Responses to Medical ‘Euromyths’: the UK media have an awful lot to answer for

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  Julian on Monday 19 November 2018 at 15:39

  Indeed!!!!!

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  Larson Creek on Tuesday 20 November 2018 at 20:13

  Why don’t you write something on the flu vaccine fallacy? This year it is 12% ‘effective’, that is far worse than a placebo and all that weasel about matches, the process being wrong etc. are rather remarkable uses of dishonesty.

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    Alan Henness on Tuesday 20 November 2018 at 20:33

    [sigh]

    Ernst is slagging off homeopathy, yet pharmaceuticals kill 100k a year

    I get comments of this nature all the time, sometimes by the dozen per day. As the argument is so very common, let me ONCE AGAIN explain what is wrong with it. Here are 10 very simple points for those who find it hard to understand the issue.

    1. My expertise is in alternative medicine and not in pharmacology. I know many pharmacologists who are competent to criticise aspects of pharmacotherapy and do so regularly. I do NOT consider myself competent to comment on pharmacotherapy.
    2. The fact that some things are not perfect in one area of health care (e. g. pharmacotherapy) does certainly not mean that one is not allowed to criticise shortcomings in other areas (e. g. homeopathy).
    3. As far as I can tell, it is not pharmaceuticals that ‘kill 100k a year’, but the issue is more complex: a sizable proportion of this tragic total is due to medical errors, for instance.
    4. The 100k figure seems to refer to the US where the vast majority of the population take pharmaceuticals but only about 2% of the population ever try homeopathy.
    5. Nobody seems to dispute that pharmaceuticals have beneficial effects beyond placebo; the general consensus regarding highly diluted homeopathics is that they have no effects beyond placebo.
    6. To judge the value of a therapy, it is naïve and dangerously misleading to consider just its risks. If we did that, aromatherapy would be preferable to surgery, reflexology would be better than chemotherapy and OF COURSE homeopathy would be better than pharmacotherapy. And if we then implemented this ‘wisdom’ into routine practice, we would hasten the deaths of millions.
    7. Any reasonable judgement of the value of any therapy must account for its documented risks in relation to its documented benefits. In other words, we must always try to weigh the two against each other and do a risk/benefit analysis.
    8. If a therapy is associated with finite risks and no benefits, its risk/benefit balance cannot possibly be positive. Where the benefit is non-existent or doubtful, even relatively small risks will inevitably tilt this balance in to the negative.
    9. This is precisely the situation that applies to homeopathy: its benefits beyond placebo are doubtful and its risks are fairly well documented.
    10. This means that homeopathy cannot be considered to be a therapy that is fit for purpose.

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    Dr Julian Money-Kyrle on Wednesday 21 November 2018 at 12:39

    “the flu vaccine fallacy? This year it is 12% ‘effective’, that is far worse than a placebo”
    Could you give the reference for the trial comparing this year’s flu vaccine against a placebo so that I can see how this figure was arrived at?

    In any case, this year’s flu season hasn’t really got going yet, so it is difficult to know how effective the vaccine is going to be. Nor does a placebo give any protection against flu whatsoever. Even if the vaccine fails to prevent flu altogether, it can shorten the illness and reduce its severity, as well as reduce the risk of spreading it to other people.

    I don’t know what country you are writing from. In the UK there are two flu vaccines being given this year, depending primarily upon the age of the recipient (since different age groups will have had previous exposure to different strains), and also upon the risk of severe disease (e.g. in the immunosuppressed).

    The flu vaccine is always a bit of a gamble. The influenza virus changes its surface proteins regularly, which makes a vaccine that is fully effective against one strain become less effective against others. It takes several months to develop a vaccine against a specific strain of flu, and then it also takes time to put it into production (which, among other things, involves growing large numbers of viruses inside eggs before inactivating them). Worldwide, epidemiologists try to work out which strains are likely to be prevalent the following winter, and the vaccine will contain the three or four strains that they are most worried about. But by the very process they are always a few months behind, which means that the effectiveness of the vaccines vary from year to year.

    What virologists are particularly concerned about is the emergence of another pandemic, which is a matter of when, rather than if. At the end of the First World War, the flu pandemic killed 3% of the world’s population. Now we have easy air travel, which means that it can spread more quickly and more widely. Some of the deaths were from flu directly and some from secondary bacterial infection, and although we now have antibiotics agains the latter, we can’t rely on them due to widespread bacterial resistance (stemming from misprescribing and widescale use in agriculture to promote the growth of livestock – banned in the EU but common practice in the USA) and to no new antibiotic groups having been developed in the last few decades (they are not profitable for Big Pharma, and governments aren’t interested).

    Although flu is naturally a disease of birds, as it mutates so readily it can move to other hosts, including humans, and further mutations can increase its transmissability (how easily it is spread) and its virulence (how ill it makes you – in 1918/19, one in ten people infected died from it). Its severity also varies widely between individuals depending on the makeup of their immune system (we are all different) and in some cases you can have flu without realising it at all, and then transmit it to someone who dies from it.

    Our primary weapon against flu is vaccination, and even if it is only partly effective, it reduces the extent of spread, reduces the severity of the illness, reduces the risk of death in those exposed to the infection and particularly reduces the risk in the most vulnerable.

    All of this information is in the public domain, and your doctor should be able to explain it to you as well. I have no idea what you mean about matches, the process being wrong and dishonesty. Perhaps you could elucidate further?

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