Quackery, pseudoscience, and just generally bad information.

I love the irony -- the U.S. Senate can chastise Dr. Oz for being a demagogue. By contrast, the Senate is filled with paragons of moral virtue!

THANK YOU for sharing this! I have a number of friends who like to share Food Babe's posts (and other sensationalists like her) and it drives me batty. While I do believe in eating better and educating yourself about food, her approach has always rubbed me the wrong way.

The other day, she even shared a post she'd written TWO YEARS ago about how Starbucks' food is bad for you. Newflash = they've changed their menu and even bigger newsflash = they've NEVER positioned themselves to be healthy! Here's an idea - instead of trying to expose and bring down every single company that doesn't make food the way you like how about supporting the businesses you do enjoy? Or saving a buck and making your own food? Even more maddening at the end of that article was a picture of the blogger, enjoying the free WiFi at Starbucks. Typical.

Again, thank you. Bookmarking this for later!

I disagree with coloring all concepts black. It might be true.. Microwaves for example. Just common sense: think that everything has electrons moving around protons and you hit them . It may be changed. Do we have enough methods to detect? Most likely not . We even don't know what property to look for . The fact is we don't know. Time will show?

I am all for evidence-based approaches to almost everything. However, in scrolling through the first 4 pages of SBM's blogs, it is clear he has an ax to grind about integrative medicine. Fair enough. The guy can't appreciate the benefits of a great massage. His loss.

My issue is that there is a lot going on in traditional medicine that should be addressed - including the pushing of pharmaceuticals on the medical community (docs too lazy to keep up with medical advances who rely on pharma sales reps for their information and treatment protocols) and the over-prescription of things like statins which were recently recommended for an astronomical percentage of the population by the American Heart Association. None of this is mentioned in those pages, but pose a far more catastrophic risk to people than reiki and acupuncture.

I disagree with coloring all concepts black. It might be true.. Microwaves for example. Just common sense: think that everything has electrons moving around protons and you hit them . It may be changed. Do we have enough methods to detect? Most likely not . We even don't know what property to look for . The fact is we don't know. Time will show?

Common sense != science. Personally I'll take science over common sense any day, because common sense is how we arrive at a lot of the diet myths that have been proven false.

I get that people are concerned about things that are new, especially if hard to understand the workings of. However, microwaves have been around for 70 years and sold commercially for over 50.

I would argue, however, that the vast majority of people will not be pursuing spiritual healing or reiki for cancer treatments. They will be following the advice of their doctors, who are very often blindly following recommendations based on pharma and flawed studies that are the basis of those websites you posted.

Medications that are approved by the FDA must have two studies showing that they are at least as effective as current treatment. The studies are published in peer-reviewed journals and are subject to scrutiny by journal editors and expert reviewers. There *are* problems inherent in drug company funded studies (mostly in that negative studies are not published, not that the positive studies are flawed), however that does not mean that there is no scientific evidence behind the FDA approval process. Alternative therapies would need to show evidence that is as rigorously obtained to qualify as being based in science and worthy of being considered on the same level as allopathic treatments.

Just at the blogger complains about a lack of consistency and quality with herbs, there is also a huge lack of consistency and quality in medical care/treatments. On balance, I think a bigger bang for the buck would be to address bigger issues like health care delivery vs. herbs. But the blogger probably doesn't want to bite the hand that feeds him - the medical establishment.

I think it has been failures in the medical community that have motivated people to seek alternative therapies. Maybe they are barking up the wrong tree with herbs, acupuncture and the like, but the movement evolved for a reason. People were sick of their docs practicing defensive medicine.

"defensive medicine" is a catch phrase. Please define what you mean by it and what place it has in this paragraph.

When you have a medical community prescribing, willy nilly, Perc 30's, to former and active addicts, without ANY protocol in place to inquire of the patient about a history of addiction, you know there is a problem with modern medicine.

Please cite evidence. The "medical community" is not prescribing opioids "willy nilly." There are physicians who overprescribe, but this does not justify this glaring oversimplification and overgeneralization to include the entire community of physicians. Also, this does not sound like "defensive medicine" as docs can get their DEA numbers revoked and also be sent to jail for overprescription of controlled substances.

THANK YOU for sharing this! I have a number of friends who like to share Food Babe's posts (and other sensationalists like her) and it drives me batty. While I do believe in eating better and educating yourself about food, her approach has always rubbed me the wrong way.

The other day, she even shared a post she'd written TWO YEARS ago about how Starbucks' food is bad for you. Newflash = they've changed their menu and even bigger newsflash = they've NEVER positioned themselves to be healthy! Here's an idea - instead of trying to expose and bring down every single company that doesn't make food the way you like how about supporting the businesses you do enjoy? Or saving a buck and making your own food? Even more maddening at the end of that article was a picture of the blogger, enjoying the free WiFi at Starbucks. Typical.

Again, thank you. Bookmarking this for later!

I agree, because I did like Food Babe at first and then I feel like she went off the deep edge, and I can truly see that there are chemicals and harmful GMOS in everything we eat; however, how many people can really sustain the type of lifestyle she promotes. Case in point, I made one of her cookie recipes, once. I had to go to Sprouts to track down all the ingredients and I don't know $30 later I had bird seed cookies, that tasted like, well bird seed. Don't get me wrong, I like chia seeds and flax oil, but sometimes it's just too much and then I wonder how much she profits from her promotions like Dr. Oz, I wonder what's the motive? Are people like her looking out for our a$$es or her own?

On the rise of opiod scripts:

http://smhs.gwu.edu/news/researchers-find-significant-increase-painkillers-prescribed-us-adults-visiting-emergency

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/acem.12328/abstract

But what does the rise mean? Opioids happen to be the best pain killers we have available to us. 20 years ago, doctors wouldn't much prescribe them because they had been were overly concerned about their addictive qualities. Many people who genuinely needed them had to suffer unnecessarily. In more recent years, the tide has turned toward more compassionate care and pain relief (thankfully). I would argue that THAT is why opioid scrips are on the rise, not because some people perceive them as being prescribed willy nilly and for no reason.