Woo/Science /antivax/other stuph

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2014/04/02/i-do-not-think-that-study-shows-what-you-think-it-shows

I just read the article above. It’s about a guy named Sayer Ji who runs a website, GreenMedInfo, and Kelly Brogan MD, a psychiatrist much like Peter Breggin. She doesn’t like vaccines or drugs and she thinks you can detox and diet your way to happiness.

I guess there was an article about the HPV vaccine in the Lancet and Dr. Brogan wrote about that on Sayer Ji’s website. But some people said she didn’t represent the article accurately. One blogger made a meme to make fun of either Sayer Ji or Dr. Brogan or the GreenMedInfo site. I really don’t know what was in the meme because lawyers got involved and made the meme go away.

So now I’m curious about this meme that caused so much butthurt. But my Google fu has failed me. That’s the part that annoys me. Surely some search engine bot must have cached something.

Maybe one of you Internet bosses can help.

Way too complicated.

Do they have a cult?

Eh I dunno if you can call that vitalism stuff a cult or not. Mercola is kinda the head guy right now for that particular tribe, but there are a lot of other big names.

Vitalism is the belief in an intelligent healing power of Nature. Not necessarily a problem, except for those vitalists who view much of modern medicine as a block to the vital force of Nature. Then you get anti-vax and conspiracy talk.

I’m thinking I will never know about that meme that made the moonbats so butthurt. That is so wrong. But I will try to let it go.

Weird. Kelly Brogan MD likes one of those sites that has CCHR stuff on it: http://reviveprimarycare.com/psychiatry-fraud

You can see her name at the bottom as one of the “tags.” From her pics she looks young. She got her board certification in 2009 I think. So she might be in her late 20s.

How did she handle the cognitive dissonance when she was studying all that BigPharma that she must have viewed as just lies?

Heh, she’s pimping a brain stimulator thing for depression for some company which she’s involved with. I found a video where she talked about the seriousness of post partum depression --“I don’t like my patients to take a break” from the brain stimulator, due to how bad the depression can be. But then on her Facebook she has all that CCHR stuff which claims depression and other psych diagnoses are mostly bullshit.

Weird.

Here she is pimping the thing:

Facebook profile pic from 2014:




Facebook profile pic from 2013:



Edit (reversed dates) WTF, she got a lot older. Or that first pic is someone else. But that’s a professional Facebook page so I don’t know why she’d want another person’s pic as her profile.

She thinks vaccines are a big conspiracy. WTF, don’t they make MDs take immunology?



She’s wrong about shingles. I know about that because my mom got shingles last year. When you get chicken pox the virus stays in a nerve root for the rest of your life. You make antibodies and that keeps the virus from spreading. If you go on steroids or chemo or you have some immune problem the virus replicates and you get a rash on your skin in the area served by that nerve root --i.e., shingles.

So if you get the vaccine and you never get chicken pox you won’t get shingles. You have to get chicken pox first to get shingles, basically.

July 2013 she starts a YouTube channel and she looks like this:

Found the older one:

I sympathize very strongly, The Internet. I was nearly going to try to make a meme for you, but I concluded that it would not meet the need.

Scientology can help you with that. Squeeze the cans please.

Take off your wedding ring. It's interfering with the E-meter reads.

^ needs to become a mod. Oh wait.

How long has she been practicing? I worry about her patients.

You'd think.

WTF is a "holistic psychiatrist"‽‽‽

Is she a real board-certified psychiatrist in the state that she practices (can be checked online), or is this yet another POS like "naturopathic doctor"? (And which Crackerjack Box institution gave her an MD?)

Edit: So she really is certified as a psychiatrist? Good God.

http://www.whiteoutpress.com/timele...s-autism/?goback=.gde_723357_member_261277909

Lady Gaga on the sidebar.

Yeah, reputable moonbat press.

Her secondary (subspecialty) license is in "psychosomatic medicine", and falls under the psychiatric umbrella. I'd never heard of it, so had to do some googling. It's where the "holistic psychiatry" comes from, it appears. If the ABPN licenses it, it's less woo than it appears.

http://www.psychiatryunplugged.com/2010/11/what-is-psychosomatic-medicine.html

All the big name MDs, like the ones on Huffington Post and Dr. Oz, they’re all in this Integrative Medicine shtick now. And their companies donate mega-millions to medical schools so they can poop out sciency papers.

When I ask doctors about people like Dr. Oz pimping homeopathy, they mostly shrug their shoulders. Our local hospital has an “integrative medicine” department and last time I was in the ER I asked about that. The nurse was like, “Lol, we are in the ER and we don’t have to deal with that."

WTF, either there are evidential rules or not. And if the rules become optional, then black is white and up is down and totalitarian dictatorship what are your crimes.

Plain old ordinary medical care included vaccines, appropriate medical therapies, and science, long before the “integrators” appeared. The whole point of including the evidenced based stuff under the “integrative” umbrella is to make the woo seem legit.

If “integrative” meant 100% woo, I would be fine with it because it would be honest. It would mean, “unproven, implausible, and disproven stuff.”

By integrating the unproven with stuff that has passed a minimal evidential standard, you basically prove that the standard doesn’t matter. You change the culture of medicine on a fundamental level.

I predict that doctors who can think critically will leave the profession because the cognitive dissonance of working in hospitals promoting woo will slowly take its toll.

Yes, but there has to be a balance with patient autonomy, as RickyBobby argued to me in another thread. So if a patient is seriously deluded or in a cult we can’t just bend them to our will. Let them chase after their past life engrams or whatever. But be honest about the evidence. I think that is the best we can do.

Integrative medicine is sneaky. The integrative doctor goes, “Good advice, good advice, good advice, stupid advice,” and the poor patient doesn’t know which part is not legit. Plus they talk out of both sides of their mouth when it comes to vaccines, depending who is listening.

Communicating with patients and encouraging lifestyle changes has long been the bread and butter of regular primary care medicine and health psychology. The idea that medicine = pills and surgery is propaganda.

This journal, Health Psychology, has online editions back to the early 1980s: http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/hea/