Complementary Meds

Advocate of science and science based medicine. Challenges misleading claims, particularly those in complementary and alternative medicine

[TheLiverDoc™ @theliverdoc]

@chiragbarjatya Plugging this here!

[Complementary Meds @compandalt]

A worrying trend over recent years has been the increasing use of nonsensical pseudoscientific "treatments" for animals. Animal #chiropractic is one example. It's nonsense with no evidence of effectiveness for any condition

[𝔐𝔞𝔪𝔪𝔬𝔫 @c_ceranowicz]

Don't do this. Do not have chiropractic treatment done on your dogs, it is negligible at best and has led to cranial and spinal injuries for uncountable dogs.

[Complementary Meds @compandalt]

Antivax doctors are thankfully not that common because they present a significant risk to their patients and the public. It is good to see that there is now one less of them

[Edzard Ernst @EdzardErnst]

DOCTOR STRUCK OFF FOR FAKE MASK AND VACCINE CERTIFICATES. https://t.co/HUr3q6nmLS via @edzardernst

[Stephanie Simoes @critikids]

Survivorship bias might be the most misunderstood bias. Not every flawed argument about survival are the result of survivorship bias, and not every example of survivorship bias is about literal survival.

Survivorship bias is a kind of selection bias. It happens when we draw conclusions based on the "successful" cases that made it through a visibility filter, while ignoring information about the cases that didn't.

This kind of argument often gets mislabeled as survivorship bias:

"Car seats are unnecessary. My kids never used car seats, and they survived."

Information about kids who weren't okay is not less visible (and is actually probably more visible because it is newsworthy), so this is not survivorship bias. It's the anecdotal fallacy, as it draws a sweeping conclusion from a personal story.

In some famous examples, the filter *is* survival (e.g., the famous WWII planes example), but not always. Here's a non-survival example of survivorship bias:

A teen scrolls through social media and thinks, "Most creators I see have a huge following. It must be easy to become an influencer." But successful creators are more visible than less successful ones. The creators who don't gain much of a following are also important evidence, but they're just much less likely to show up on your feed.

[Neil Stone @DrNeilStone]

Before vaccines existed, one in five babies didn't survive their first year

[Dr. Jonathan N. Stea @jonathanstea]

Many alternative medicine treatments are rooted in vitalism: the belief in a magical energy force that cannot be scientifically measured.

Energy healing: biofield
Homeopathy: vital force
Acupuncture: Qi
Ayurveda: prana
Thought field therapy: fields
Chiropractic: innate

Etc.

[Simon Maechling @simonmaechling]

1990s scientists:
We cloned sheep.
We landed robots on Mars.

Scientists today:
For the thousandth time:
The Earth is round.
Vaccines don’t cause autism.

The joke isn’t that science stopped advancing.

It’s that society started believing propaganda bots on X.

[Complementary Meds @compandalt]

This article highlights really important points about integrative medicine, which is often misunderstood. It's really a marketing term rather than a valid treatment approach. It's a rebranding of complementary and alternative medicine. None of these things are effective.

[Edzard Ernst @EdzardErnst]

"Proven interventions should be called medicine. Unproven interventions should be called unproven" https://t.co/OpIbL8L3W4 via @edzardernst

[Simon Maechling @simonmaechling]

Natural doesn't always mean safer.

Toxicity depends on dose, not on whether something is natural or synthetic.

Even common substances like caffeine, vitamin D, and salt can be lethal at certain levels.

Understanding toxicology is key to rational risk assessment.

[Dr. Jonathan N. Stea @jonathanstea]

One consequence of tolerating pseudoscience is that people die when its legitimatization becomes baked into our culture, health care systems, and institutions.

[Sentient Quantum Fluctuations™ l 🦅🦋 ⧖♻️⚛🗿 @QuantumHawk666]

<shocked>

[Complementary Meds @compandalt]

Yet another study showing that #homeopathy doesn't work. The thing is, we knew that before the study was conducted because homeopathy is a fake treatment

[Edzard Ernst @EdzardErnst]

Homeopathy for Chronic Non-specific Low Back Pain? https://t.co/61BQFtA2lk via @edzardernst

[Complementary Meds @compandalt]

#reiki is pseudoscientific nonsense. There is no possible way it could ever work. It is time to stop wasting time and money on such ridiculous studies

[Edzard Ernst @EdzardErnst]

The effects of Reiki in children with leukemia on pain, vital signs and quality of life https://t.co/wDTLKQMjhN via @edzardernst

[IntegralAnswers @IntegralAnswers]

One of the most misunderstood documents in medicine may be the vaccine package insert.

Dr. Paul Offit recently discussed how package inserts are often interpreted by the public—and weaponized online—as proof that vaccines “cause” every listed adverse event.

But that’s not how these documents work.

In large placebo-controlled trials involving tens of thousands of participants, many events occur simply because life happens:
• seizures
• autoimmune disease
• fractures
• hospitalizations
• deaths

If an event occurs after vaccination, it may appear in the insert even when it occurs at the SAME rate in the placebo group.

Example:
In the ~72,000 participant rotavirus vaccine trial, seizures appeared in both vaccine and placebo recipients at statistically indistinguishable rates.

Ironically, after licensure, widespread vaccination actually REDUCED seizures overall because natural rotavirus infection itself can trigger seizures.

The transcript also highlights an important concept many people struggle with:

Temporal association ≠ causation.

“Occurred after” does not mean “caused by.”

This distinction becomes critically important in massive databases like VAERS, where millions of people naturally experience illness, injury, heart attacks, strokes, cancer diagnoses, and death every day independent of vaccination.

That does NOT mean vaccines can’t cause adverse events.

Some rare vaccine complications are very real:
• myocarditis after mRNA COVID vaccines
• clotting syndromes after adenovirus vector vaccines
• vaccine-associated paralytic polio with oral polio vaccine

These risks were identified precisely because large-scale post-marketing surveillance systems exist.

The core challenge is distinguishing:
• random coincidence
from
• true biological causation

That requires:
• placebo controls
• statistical analysis
• mechanistic biology
• epidemiology
• risk-benefit assessment

Not screenshots of package inserts circulating on social media.

Medicine becomes dangerous when people confuse signal with noise.

@IntegralAnswers

[Neil Stone @DrNeilStone]

Vaccine Anti vaccine
research research

[Ken Milne MD @TheSGEM]

"Questioning the science" is important, but so is accepting the answers science provides."

[Complementary Meds @compandalt]

The most important piece of information in the below post is underlined. Please remember that chiropractors are not doctors.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Caitlin Jensen, 28, walked into a Georgia chiropractor in June 2022. She came out with four dissected arteries, a stroke, cardiac arrest, and a traumatic brain injury. It took her nine months to say "Mom" again.

She had come in for lower back pain.

Your brain runs on four arteries. Two carotids in front, two vertebrals in back. The vertebrals don't run free. They thread up through narrow bone tunnels inside each cervical vertebra, C6 to C1, then loop around the top vertebra in a tight horizontal curve called the V3 segment.

When a chiropractor performs a high-velocity rotational thrust on the upper neck, V3 gets stretched and snapped against bone. The inner artery wall tears. Blood seeps between the layers. A flap forms. Flow blocks, or clots break off and travel to the brainstem.

In Caitlin's case all four vessels tore. Paramedics worked 12 minutes restoring her pulse. Surgeons placed a stent in one artery and repaired what they could in the rest. The brain injury came from the bleed that followed the stroke that followed the dissection.

One in 20,000 spinal manipulations triggers this. Arterial dissection causes 2% of strokes overall but 8 to 25% of strokes in patients under 45. In 55% of cases symptoms start within 12 hours of the adjustment. No screening test identifies who's at risk beforehand.

The American Chiropractic Association's own spokesman told the New York Times patients should get vascular scans before neck manipulation. Almost none do. Informed consent matching a surgical risk disclosure isn't standard. The average victim is 40.

Caitlin's back pain lived four vertebrae below the artery the thrust tore.

[Catherine de Jong @Cath77777]

“Unpasteurized milk, consumed by only 3.2% of the population, and cheese, consumed by only 1.6% of the population, caused 96% of illnesses caused by contaminated dairy products.” - CDC
Raw Milk Litigation: Curse or Canary? https://t.co/b1ltZVgDUT