S-EBM (Selective Evidence Based Medicine) Takes a New Turn

Editorial note from Andrea----had to share this bit of humour with you!  In the post below this post, you will see a more serious (and a little bit snarky) response to a story about multivitamins and supplements (this is the story from USA Today).  While I will agree that multivitamins are largely a waste of money (check the labels on most multivitamins and you will see that there are very, very small amounts of vitamins in each tablet), even people who eat well and healthy are still almost always lacking in some vitamins and nutrients.  Those of us who still struggle with our eating habits (including me) definitely need to be taking supplements to stay healthy.  I take a number of different supplements, including CoQ10, Vitamins B, C, D, K and magnesium (I take others too, but would need to go check the list).  I know those supplements, along with my hormone optimization, have kept me off a whole bunch of medications (much to the chagrin of the pharmaceutical industry!)  Enjoy, and I encourage you to sign up for Orthomolecular's newsletter!

Commentary by Andrew W. Saul, Editor

(OMNS April 1, 2012) Perhaps I listened to too many Bob Newhart records while growing up, but even as a kid I knew that Abraham Lincoln did not have a PR agent. I also knew, although to this day I like their material, that neither Sherlock Holmes nor P.D.Q. Bach ever lived. Like most kids, I learned all too early that there was not really an Easter Bunny. However, I learned in school that large dinosaurs were slow moving, cold-blooded, and many mostly sat around in ponds for buoyancy to support their enormous weight. It was literally decades later that the lessons changed: the fast-stride spacing of footprints along with a lack of tail-tracks had caught up with the textbooks. Belief systems die hard. Many people have read many media reports about many dangers of many vitamins. In keeping with the media's current standard of accuracy (and noting the date of this release), here is an information leak.

Confidential Memorandum from the World Headquarters of Pharmaceutical Politicians, Educators and Reporters (WHOPPER) Most Secret: Your Eyes Only Distinguished members, our decades of disparaging nutritional therapy have paid off at last. The public, and their healthcare providers, are completely hoodwinked. By pushing "evidence based medicine" on the medical professions, we have elegantly slipped in our choice of evidence to base medicine on. And this is no mere journeyman accomplishment: this is high art. Mr. Machiavelli would be pleased. Certainly the pharmaceutical cartel is. We are well on our way to eliminating the competition, namely that increasingly irritating "orthomolecular medicine" faction. Here's how we are winning the Vitamin War: It is entirely too obvious, from our reading the nutritional literature, that vitamins and minerals are a well-proven, safe and effective therapy. Of course, anyone knows that to work they must be employed in appropriate doses, just as any drug must be given in an appropriate dose. That is the problem, but it is also our opportunity. Since high nutrient doses work all too well, we eliminate all those embarrassing positive high-dose results simply by ignoring them. By selecting, pooling and analyzing only unsuccessful low dose studies, our conclusions exactly fit what we want the public to believe. We also make certain to use either synthetic or fractional vitamin E to "prove" that that nutrient not only has no therapeutic value, but is actually dangerous and can kill! Sure, it is an onion in the ointment that there have been no deaths from vitamin E in 28 years of poison control center reporting. But that's a mere fact, and easily ignored. We are not going to rest on our proverbial laurels. Now that we have set the precedent for shaping medical practice into pharmaceutical hustling, there's even more we can accomplish. Here is our master plan. We have solidly established that research data can be selected, pooled, meta-analyzed and then dictate solidly "scientific" conclusions. It is now a mere step to do the same in other disciplines, including education, politics, and the social sciences. For example: Using data only from poorly-funded urban schools, we can prove mathematically, by statistical analysis of grade-point-averages, that inner-city kids have no academic future. By collecting data as to how many 19th century women graduated from college, we can show that women then were not as qualified to vote as men are today, and overturn the 19th amendment. If we assemble data on screen time and analyze actors' roles from Hollywood movies made in the 1920s and 1930s, we can demonstrate that some races are best qualified to be domestic workers, tap dancers or to operate laundries. By giving a large sample of the homeless 25 cents each, we can show that higher personal income is ineffective against poverty. If we tabulate inventory at Ferrari dealerships exclusively, we can prove Hondas are scarce. Repeatedly taking the temperature of thousands of cadavers is justification that funeral homes do not need central heating, at least not at night. Here is unlimited opportunity for social engineering, and we owe it all to S-EBM: Selective Evidence Based Medicine. Yes indeed: it logically proceeds from our widely-publicized analyses of vitamin supplementation, analyses that were limited to studies that used low doses. Math is a wonderful thing: when we sliced statistics into sound-byte-sized pieces, we even proved that vitamin E kills; vitamin C is worse; don't even THINK of taking those B-vitamin supplements; and even multivitamin pills are dangerous. Give us a just while longer: we will rip the carbons out of vitamin D next. There is so much to look forward to! (End of memo)

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Editorial Review Board:

Ian Brighthope, M.D. (Australia)
Ralph K. Campbell, M.D. (USA)
Carolyn Dean, M.D., N.D. (USA)
Damien Downing, M.D. (United Kingdom)
Dean Elledge, D.D.S., M.S. (USA)
Michael Ellis, M.D. (Australia)
Martin P. Gallagher, M.D., D.C. (USA)
Michael Gonzalez, D.Sc., Ph.D. (Puerto Rico)
William B. Grant, Ph.D. (USA)
Steve Hickey, Ph.D. (United Kingdom)
James A. Jackson, Ph.D. (USA)
Michael Janson, M.D. (USA)
Robert E. Jenkins, D.C. (USA)
Bo H. Jonsson, M.D., Ph.D. (Sweden)
Thomas Levy, M.D., J.D. (USA)
Stuart Lindsey, Pharm.D. (USA)
Jorge R. Miranda-Massari, Pharm.D. (Puerto Rico)
Karin Munsterhjelm-Ahumada, M.D. (Finland)
Erik Paterson, M.D. (Canada)
W. Todd Penberthy, Ph.D. (USA)
Gert E. Schuitemaker, Ph.D. (Netherlands)
Robert G. Smith, Ph.D. (USA)
Jagan Nathan Vamanan, M.D. (India)

Andrew W. Saul, Ph.D. (USA), Editor and contact person. Email:omns@orthomolecular.org Readers may write in with their comments and questions for consideration for publication and as topic suggestions. However, OMNS is unable to respond to individual emails.