By Jonathan Jarry, February 26, 2018
How can we fight back against the tsunami of quackery? There is one trick that has worked again and again and to learn it, we must turn to Georgian College. What happened to its homeopathy program is a lesson in small victories.
My latest video for the McGill Office for Science and Society!
By Jonathan Jarry, October 11, 2017
After countless hours of idea generating, explorations, and post-production work, here is the new iteration of the biweekly show I do for the McGill Office for Science and Society: Cracked Science.
In the vein of Last Week Tonight, the show tackles important topics (mine having to do with science and pseudoscience) with humour. This episode explores the seventh largest donation ever to a single American public university and why it should worry us.
And just what is integrative medicine?
By Jonathan Jarry, January 22, 2017
Every month, the podcast will conclude with a segment entitled Cracked Science in which I criticize bad science and talk pseudoscience. Here's the transcript from the latest segment:
Here's a quote. Listen carefully: there will be a quiz.
"What I will stand up and scream is that newborns without intact immune systems and detoxification systems are being over-burdened with PRESERVATIVES AND ADJUVANTS IN THE VACCINES."
Quiz time: what are the credentials of the author of this diatribe, which was published on Cleveland.com?
You may not have guessed it, given the uneducated statement and the use of all caps at the end, but this was written by Daniel Neides, a medical doctor who is the medical director and chief operating officer of the Cleveland Clinic Wellness Institute.
On January 6, website Cleveland.com published an article by Dr. Neides entitled, "Make 2017 the year to avoid toxins (good luck) and master your domain: Words on Wellness". This ill-judged, unscientific, and potentially damaging rant went from freaking out over trace amounts of formaldehyde in the flu vaccine, to exposing the "toxic soup" in which we live, to "just asking questions" about the link between vaccines and autism, to suggesting a delayed vaccination schedule.
The following day, the article was picked up by paediatrician Clay Jones and others on...read more
By Jonathan Jarry, September 11, 2016
Every month, the podcast will conclude with a segment entitled Cracked Science in which I criticize bad science and talk pseudoscience. Here's the transcript from the latest segment:
You may remember that in the 1950s, the founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard, inaugurated "Project Celebrity", which asked Scientologists to recruit celebrities, like Walt Disney and Marlene Dietrich. "If you bring one of them home," he wrote in a Scientology magazine, "you will get a small plaque as a reward."
Ordinary people listen to celebrities. Timothy Caulfield is building a science communication career out of this phenomenon. If institutionalized nonsense is endorsed by someone everyone aspires to be, then it can't be nonsense, right?
Cupping has been in the news these past few weeks because of the Rio Olympics. We have all seen the giant hickeys on American swimmer Michael Phelps' arms and back. If you follow the athlete on Instagram, you have seen his, ahem, backside covered in steampunk-ish suction cups, with the tagline, "Thanks @arschmitty for my cupping today!!!". He was not alone at the Olympics bearing the marks of credulity.
The practice of cupping consists of placing a glass cup against the skin and creating a vacuum inside of it, which tents the skin upwards and forces the blood closer to it. If you've ever been ravaged by the lips of a partner,...read more
By Jonathan Jarry, July 23, 2016
One of the harms of integrative medicine is the acquisition of academic imprimatur. You may not think it matters much, but it can sway a decision-making body over financial matters.
Here's a recent example.
A person I know is involved with an organization whose goal is to facilitate transitions into a second career. They receive partial funding from the government and this money is allocated to a subset of applicants who wish to leave one career behind to study a different discipline.
Given the limited funding and the number of applicants, a committee needs to evaluate the submissions and only a fraction will receive funding.
I was told by my acquaintance that two of the current seven applications are from people who wish to pursue studies in alternative medicine: acupuncture, chiropractic, homeopathy, etc. Knowing that these disciplines are generally not science based, he raised the philosophical question as to whether such applicants should or should not be funded. He asked me to send him a few peer-reviewed publications, as well as lay summaries concerning these disciplines, so he could pass them on to the committee to effectively "make them see the light."
One of the counterarguments he received came in the form of a Wikipedia entry on Helene Langevin. Dr. Langevin is the director of the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at...read more
By Jonathan Jarry, July 10, 2016
Every month, the podcast will conclude with a segment entitled Cracked Science in which I criticize bad science and talk pseudoscience. Here's the transcript from the latest segment:
A workshop entitled "Spoon Bending and the Power of the Mind" was to be given at the University of Alberta on June 28 before it was cancelled, presumably due to media coverage. This seminar was neither a prank nor an initiation to sleight of hand, but rather a dead-serious presentation aimed at "an academic/clinical audience" in the context of Paediatric Integrative Medicine Rounds. The presenter, a Reiki master who coordinates education for a program at the university, was to teach meditation, energy healing, and how to bend spoons using psychokinesis. The poster boasted that "typically 75% or more of workshop participants can bend the spoon."
How did something out of a Stephen King novel, psychokinesis, formally enter the domain of medicine? It did so because of a concept called "integrative medicine", which is embraced by major universities in North America, including the University of Alberta with its own Integrative Health Institute of more than 100 associated researchers and scholars and a scientific advisory board that includes 2 co-chairs and 11 members. Or, I should say, 10 members, as virologist Dr. Lorne Tyrrell recently resigned in light of what is...read more
By Jonathan Jarry, June 19, 2016
It gives me no pleasure to report that one of my almae matres, McGill University, has fallen for the siren song of integrative medicine (IM). In the last decade, we have been witness to many laudable academic institutions embracing the woo in the name of open-mindedness: Harvard, the Mayo Clinic, MD Anderson, the University of Toronto.
The Complementary Health Symposium, held at McGill on June 3rd, 2016, with the support of the university's own Departments of Medicine and Family Medicine, reveals that a lack of critical thinking has claimed another institutional victim.
The full-day event showcased IM institute and research directors affiliated to universities such as Harvard and the University of Arizona. These speakers were selected by the local organizing committee, comprised of the chair of the Department of Family Medicine at McGill and professors researching pain management, preventative health measures, and muscle wasting in cancer, among other topics. A quick look at the biographies of the members of this local committee did not reveal obvious adopters of quackery.
The sole exception may be Dr. Adam Gavsie who, while an assistant professor at McGill, is also listed as a medical practitioner at the Montreal Centre for Integrative Medicine, which offers services such as homeopathy and acupuncture according to its website. Dr. Gavsie completed a...read more
By Jonathan Jarry, June 9, 2016
You may have heard of #SpoonGate.
A workshop on bending spoons with the power of the mind was scheduled for the end of the month at the University of Alberta as part of their Pediatric Integrative Medicine Rounds. Law professor, science-based medicine supporter and friend of The Body of Evidence, Timothy Caulfield, shared the poster for the event on social media to bring awareness to the absurdity of the claim.
The workshop was cancelled and a virologist who was serving as a scientific advisor to the integrative medicine institute that had organized the planned workshop resigned, saying "I have resigned... as this has not been an institute of critical scientific evaluation."
Timothy Caulfield was interviewed on this very subject by former leader of the opposition in Alberta and radio talk show host Danielle Smith. And the program decided to play clips from my video on integrative medicine throughout and have Tim comment on them.
You can listen to the show here.
4:53: Segment starts.
9:41: Tim Caulfield is introduced.
13:13: First clip from my video start playing.
You can watch the whole video on integrative medicine by clicking here.
Go...read more
By Jonathan Jarry, May 11, 2016
There's a revolution happening called integrative medicine. Take a tablespoon of conventional medicine and a tablespoon of alternative medicine, and you get the best of both worlds, right? Watch as I bring Dr. Crislip's "apple pie + cow pie" analogy to life... and taste it.
