Fake News Warning: Gluten Free Diet

The last few days we have seen a flurry of FAKE NEWS headlines about gluten free diets.

FOX News: A gluten-free diet may raise your risk of heart disease
GLOBAL: Going gluten-free to ward off heart disease might have opposite effect: study
CBC: Healthy hearts: Gluten-free diets don't help people without celiac disease, study finds
MedicalNews.Net: Study finds no link between gluten intake and heart disease risk in people without celiac disease
Irish Mirror: Eating a gluten free diet when you're not coeliac could damage your health
NEJM: (email teaser) Low-Gluten Diet Not Tied to Lower Coronary Risk. (article header) Gluten-Restricted Diets Seem Not to Lower Coronary Risk

Are these reports fake news?  Yes, every one of them.  Let's check the facts.

Placebo Effect Ignorance

I was recently asked this question on Quora: "What is the true impact of placebo effect on science?" My answer:

Ignorance. The true effect, at present, of placebo effect on science is ignorance. Ignorance of cause, ignorance of consequences.

I am talking about the actual impact of placebo effect on science, and doing so in the hope that someday we can change that effect to something as powerful and useful as placebo effect actually is.

First, we need to clearly define some terms. I'll use Webster's. It's a a good place to start. Placebo effects don't “work”. We know that placebos work. But the question is about placebo effects, not placebos.

When Doctors hate Doctors We all Lose Health

Medicine is broken. Fractured. We need medicine based on love, on caring, on helping each other.  Instead, much of modern medicine is based not just on competition, but on hatred.

Of course it's not everyone, and for the most part, I don't believe it's personal. Few, doctors, hate other types of doctors.

It's the system. The so called 'conventional medicine' system. It's a paradigm that hates other paradigms.

Is Wikipedia Fake News: Can Wikipedia be Cured?

Is Wikipedia 'fake news'? Does Wikipedia contain 'fake news'? How would we know?  Well, first of all, we need to understand the concept of fake news, and distinguish clearly between fake news and lies, truths, facts, non-facts, and bullshit. Perhaps we should begin with 'bullshit'.  Harry Frankfurt's essay, "On Bullshit" explores that concept in detail, and also in a nutshell.  "Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about." Frankfurt distinguishes clearly between lies - the presenter clearly does not believe what they are saying, and bullshit, where the speaker is simply talking about which they know little.

The Death of Skepticism and The Rise of Fake News

Skepticism is dead.  Skepticism has been captured and converted to dogmatism. When I was young, I remember one of my cousins commenting "You are such a skeptic." It made me feel proud to be skeptical, to search for the truth.  But today's, skeptics don't search for the truth. Most claim to have found it.

Skepticism has become the new religion. It's not a religion of analysis, nor thoughtfulness, nor of skepticism.  It's the religion of dogma. Skepticism has been co-opted, in service of the prevailing dogma, the invisible dogma.

Freedom: Why all Our Bosses are Idiots

Did you ever wonder why your boss is an idiot? I mean, really.  It's a universal concept.  Do only idiots become bosses? Are bosses more likely to become idiots because of the pressures make them stupid? What's going on?

Actually, it's very, very complicated - but relatively easy to explain. Let's begin before the first boss, with the first sign of life.

Dead things, after all, don't have bosses.

How Healthy are Your Freedoms?

Are our freedoms healthy?  In healthicine, we say "Everyone has a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of healthiness" because healthiness includes all freedoms and more, and is therefore superior to freedoms. We often think of freedoms with the phrase "life and liberty", but there is much more to freedom.

A True Placebo has No Effects

Do clinical studies lie? A true placebo has no effect. Is the Gold Standard of medicine, the double blind placebo controlled trial, scientific nonsense, based on "fools gold"?

A placebo effect, is defined by Webster's dictionary as: "improvement in the condition of a patient that occurs in response to treatment but cannot be considered due to the specific treatment used".

In other words, a placebo is not caused by a placebo. If it is a true placebo, then it did not cause the placebo effect. Only false placebos can cause placebo effect.