Real Science, Stem cells, Vitamin E, and MindBody Techniques

Practically every day, we read in the newspapers and hear on the television contradictory information about our health. Cancer rates are going up. Cancer rates are going down. These sensational and confusing reports occur where media, politics and real science meet. I plan to use this blog to invite people to comment regarding media reports about health issues that concern them. Each week I will choose one subject based on your input, and carefully evaluate the real science behind it (as opposed to the often hyped and/or confused media reports) and then I’ll write a SIMPLE blog on what I think is true.

I am a scientist, not a physician. Specifically I have been trained to understand and evaluate a scientific paper. What happens is that a paper is published in a scientific journal and then a press release prepared by the company or university is distributed to the media, each member of whom writes or talks a story if it sounds catchy. This three step process is what causes problems. Also, the mainstream media tends not to be familiar with what I’ve called new paradigm physiology—where our thought patterns are at least as important as our blood pressure.

Recently a company made an important discovery showing that all of the stem cells, which are sure to be useful for therapies in the future, can be created from one cell taken from the 8 cell stage of a human embryo. The non-scientist who wrote the press release said that the experiment had not destroyed a human embryo because they took only one cell. (It is known that the embryo can still survive and go on to grow flawlessly if one cell is removed at the 8 cell stage.) Unfortunately for the poor scientist and the poor company, the whole matter wound up under the glare of a Congressional investigation which got sidetracked by the misleading press release. (The scientist had in fact used all 8 cells from the embryo to get more data and the real medical promise of the discovery was lost.)

In another example about a year ago, a large study appeared to find that Vitamin E was actually damaging – that high doses seemed to cause illness and even death in folks with

heart conditions. I remember reading the news accounts of this study feeling intuitively that it made no sense. Before I found the time to check out the actual scientific publication, fate intervened and I heard a Director from the NIH Office of Complementary & Alternative Medicine lecture at Georgetown on this study. Actually, the study suffered from a serious logical flaw that trained scientists can easily find: it’s called post hoc analysis. AFTER the data was already in, dosage groups were chosen and compared. The highest dose of vitamin E showed more deaths! It’s pretty likely the self-selected, high dose group with the worst heart conditions to begin were desperately buying and using the most Vitamin E!. The sad thing is that the burst of publicity which followed probably caused many people to stop taking Vitamin E, despite a large number of good studies that shows that it can be helpful. It’s certainly safe or avocadoes would be illegal. The government scientist wondered who had actually funded this study – that’s important information that is not always available. In this case, I suspect it was a mainstream medical society that had a strong bias against alternative nutritional, supplemental, and mindbody techniques for heart disease and a strong bias towards surgery and drugs.

That’s all for now.