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Wow: Incredible two-part deep dive by @unbiasedscipod.
Cohost and #Lyme expert Dr. Andrea C. Love @doctor_love87 separates fact from fiction:
https://www.unbiasedscipod.com/episodes/in-the-lyme-light-beyond-the-tick-bite-part-one
A lot of these fraudsters also sell bogus treatments for so-called chronic #Lyme, including a naturopath-owned web site called ChronicLymeTreatments,com.
The alternative medicine community leverages fear and uncertainty to sell health misinformation and pseudoscience.
The FDA has issued 173 warning letters since March 6, 2020 to firms for selling fraudulent products.
https://www.fda.gov/consumers/health-fraud-scams/fraudulent-coronavirus-disease-2019-covid-19-products #ScienceUpFirst
A commenter on Reddit on being sucked into the harmful chronic #Lyme movement as a teenager.
“Lyme literate” quacks are notorious for abusing children, and members of CLD advocacy groups encourage the abuse.
Dr. Clay Jones: How quackery harms children
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/adverse-events-linked-to-pediatric-alternative-medicine-in-the-netherlands/
Free: Important C. Diff advocacy summit next week
https://hopin.com/events/2021-national-c-diff-advocacy-summit
Thankful to this very honest Reddit commenter for sharing their story of being sucked down the rabbit hole of naturopathic and chronic #Lyme pseudoscience
Arizona: where a quack can murder a toddler with cyanide and keep her medical license
https://arizonadailyindependent.com/2016/05/07/prosecutors-continue-to-examine-toddlers-death-by-cyanide-poisoning/
Kate Fridkis: If It Isn’t Chronic #Lyme, What Is It? Women like me often get lost in a maze of misdiagnosis.
https://www.self.com/story/chronic-lyme
Dr. Jen Gunter's first law of the medical Internet: If the person giving you health information is also selling supplements, you cannot trust their health information.
The Scientology cult is paying Twitter to promote anti-psychiatry propaganda
Anyone know of good ways to illustrate how we tend to emphasize similarities between things but forget about the differences? This aspect of our psychology feeds the Forer Effect and belief in astrology. It also tends to make people wrongly believe they have "symptoms of #Lyme".
Expertise is important!
Good advice from "Common sense versus Homeopathy", an 1855 book condemning homeopathic quackery
https://archive.org/details/b22311968/page/42/mode/2up
James Hamblin: There aren’t many absolutes in medicine but one is never trust a doctor who has their own line of dietary supplements.
Pandemic charlatan Vladimir Zev Zelenko: 👀
The only Fake Medicine we endorse! 👇
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Fake_Medicine/_TMXEAAAQBAJ
Yes, smart and educated people fall for—and perpetuate—health scams all the time
https://www.reddit.com/r/antiMLM/comments/mkedch/she_went_to_harvard_ffs/
Like the Scientology cult, the chronic #Lyme movement harms its members by demonizing psychiatry.
All of life's problems are falsely blamed on Lyme and "coinfections".
Fake diagnoses and unnecessary treatments delay appropriate care.
https://academic.oup.com/cid/article/72/1/e1/6010652#225942717
Dr. Brad McKay: Whether you call it alternative, complementary, holistic, integrative, or any other name used as a branding exercise, the practice of combining unproven remedies with modern medicine is widespread and sneaking into our lives.
https://medicalrepublic.com.au/where-are-the-holistic-integrative-lawyers/42785
Must read: How children with neuropsychiatric issues receive fake PANDAS/PANS diagnoses. The facilitators of these diagnoses are often integrative/functional/"Lyme literate" quacks.
One child was abused with azithromycin for two years!
https://www.spectrumnews.org/features/deep-dive/how-a-controversial-condition-called-pandas-is-gaining-ground-on-autism/
Ian Smith @iansmithfitness is consistently dangerous
How it started: How it’s going:
Why are there so many culty groups claiming to be chronic #Lyme support groups?
Other fake diagnoses like adrenal fatigue, blocked qi, and chiropractic subluxations do not have this type of network.
"Deciding it was better to be safe than sorry, local 25-year-old Michael Locke reportedly uploaded a picture of his rash to a different subreddit Friday in order to get a second opinion on a series of bumps that erupted on his arm overnight." https://local.theonion.com/picture-of-rash-uploaded-to-different-subreddit-for-sec-1846500311
Some of these reviews on Glassdoor about the predatory publisher MDPI are quite damning.
Note that they are unverified, however
https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/MDPI-AG-Reviews-E1027844.htm?sort.sortType=OR&sort.ascending=true&filter.iso3Language=eng
Science relies on constructive criticism. Here’s how to keep it useful and respectful
https://www.sciencemag.org/careers/2021/03/science-relies-constructive-criticism-here-s-how-keep-it-useful-and-respectful
Fake acupuncture treatment promoted by @JAMA_current and @sloan_kettering
Once again, we see patients being scammed and unethically treated by "integrative medicine" (pseudoscience) departments in mainstream medical centers
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/a-worthless-acupuncture-study-in-cancer-patients/
Medical boards never took action against ILADS ozone quack and convicted felon Robert Rowen or his partner Teresa Su, but there is an ongoing tax fraud case against them
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/santa-rosa-doctors-indicted-tax-fraud
The Encyclopedia of American Loons profiles Arizona "toxic mold" charlatan Mary Ackerley.
Ackerley is a co-founder of the dangerous pseudoscience group “The International Society for Environmentally Acquired Illness” (ISEAI).
http://americanloons.blogspot.com/2021/03/2448-mary-ackerley.html
Fraudulent treatments legitimized by some academic centers:
Why are Yale, Duke, and Johns Hopkins promoting alternative medicines?
https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/m9pn2y/why_are_yale_duke_and_johns_hopkins_promoting/
Dangerous anti-vax pediatrician Paul Thomas is the worst doctor on YouTube.
https://youtu.be/Aom5-DPLMF8
New profile of Amy B. Scher, a proponent of various pseudosciences, including chronic #Lyme disease, energy medicine, astrology, and homeopathy.
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/who-is-amy-b-scher/
Mainstream medical organizations have failed to condemn health fraud marketed as functional and integrative medicine.
Some, such as Cleveland Clinic, George Washington University, and Memorial Sloan Kettering, have even legitimized it!
@phylogenomics Looking through the Internet Archive, it's interesting to see how the make up of the ubiome scientific advisory board changed over time to include a number of integrative/functional quacks.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190402140931/https://ubiome.com/science/
It was such a pleasure to listen to @DoctorYasmin share her background and passions in this conversation with @ZDoggMD
https://zdoggmd.com/seema-yasmin/
ILADS anti-science activist Leona Gilbert was found guilty of research misconduct by her university and reportedly fired.
Now she is an editor of the 14th conspiracy theorist special issue we know about published by predatory publisher MDPI!
https://www.mdpi.com/journal/tropicalmed/special_issues/Spirochetoses
ILADS leader Leona Gilbert & business partner Kunal Garg were found guilty of research misconduct over a conspiracy theorist Nature Scientific Reports paper.
Nevertheless, they cited it in a new garbage paper in a predatory MDPI special issue.
https://lymescience.org/rogues/Leona-Gilbert-Kunal-Garg-Tezted/Leona-Gilbert-Kunal-Garg-Tezted-research-misconduct.pdf
Multiple sclerosis patient talks about the bad health advice she has received from friends, family, and functional/integrative medicine charlatan Terry Wahls.
MS has no link to #Lyme disease.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MultipleSclerosis/comments/m7b7sv/so_tired_of_people_making_me_feel_like_im_not/
From the dangerous subreddit r/Lyme, a discussion of a bizarre regimen and a suggestion to try coffee enemas.
The chronic #Lyme cult forces it’s members to undergo extreme treatment rituals: often fake “detox” with cocktails of supplements and/or inappropriately-prescribed drugs
Experts recommend against testing for #Lyme disease without a good reason.
The positive predictive value of a Lyme antibody test is highly dependent on the pretest probability of infection.
https://www.ccjm.org/sites/default/files/additional-assets/PDFs/ReviewArticleExample.pdf
Dangerous charlatan Steven Phillips, MD and his conspiracy theorist patient/victim Dana Parish will apparently be on Dr. Oz tomorrow 🤦♂️
Their book attempts to connect autism, Alzheimer’s, MS, psychiatric disorders, and ALS to chronic #Lyme cult nonsense.
https://lymescience.org/lyme-is-not-multiple-sclerosis-als-alzheimers-autism-parkinsons/
Man sues shady infusion/compounding pharmacy Infuserve America, which sold him the powerful antibiotic ceftriaxone, which he injected intravenously for three years.
Long time charlatan David Kazarian runs Infuserve, which claims to specialize in #Lyme
https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flmd.387201/gov.uscourts.flmd.387201.1.0.pdf
MARCoNS is a fake diagnosis sold by integrative, functional, & naturopathic charlatans even though a PubMed search returns no results.
MARCoNS is linked to fake “toxic mold illness” (aka biotoxin illness, Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome, or CIRS.)
https://lymescience.org/marcons/
Not only do integrative/functional anti-vax quacks demonize real medicine like vaccines, but they try to convince people that fake medicine (homeopathy) is real
quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack quack
Experts: Chronic #Lyme disease is a scam that should be condemned!
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0399077X19300034
If you want to stop the anti-vaxxers, stop fake experts:
✅ Take away licenses of integrative, functional, naturopathic, chiropractic, “Lyme literate”, and Chinese medicine quacks.
✅ Stop funding student loans of schools that train quacks.
✅ Shut down the homeopathy industry
The Covid relief bill has a billion dollars earmarked for vaccine confidence. Not a typo.
Concerned friend: I think my dear friend of 12 years is being scammed by a medical center that she has 110% faith in. It has taken all of her money and I need to know how I can talk to her about it without her feeling attacked.
https://www.reddit.com/r/relationship_advice/comments/m2gao8/i_36f_think_my_dear_friend_of_12_years_45f_is/
Another garbage in vitro study of herbal potions funded by the harmful chronic #Lyme movement, in predatory publisher @FrontiersIn
Authors include conspiracy theorist Ying Zhang, fake doctor Jacob Leone (naturopath), & ILADS integrative/functional medicine quack Sunjya Schweig.
All eight of these things are seen in the chronic #Lyme cult.
Great article from @jothornely:
https://au.sports.yahoo.com/cult-details-eight-things-they-have-in-common-leadership-200036079.html
Chronic Lyme conspiracy theorists have been harassing doctors and scientists for roughly 3 decades.
The New York Times wrote about the problem in 2001.
Dr. Allen Steere, one of the discoverers of Lyme disease, had to hire security guards when he spoke:
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/17/magazine/stalking-dr-steere.html
Podcast on the new consensus babesiosis guideline.
Babesia, like SARS-CoV-2, can be a serious infection (e.g. age 50+, immunocompromised), but is mild or asymptomatic for most people.
It's also often fraudulently diagnosed by "Lyme literate" charlatans.
https://idsocietypodcast.libsyn.com/idsa-babesiosis-guideline
Morgellons is a fake diagnosis that is closely tied to the harmful chronic #Lyme movement. The AP debunks conspiracy theories about COVID testing and Morgellons.
https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-9960958416