Safe and Effective, Inaccurate health studies, CDC Whistle-blower crickets, Colorado vaccine mandate, MIT spaghetti mystery, Dr. Rashid Buttar, Advanced Medicine, Opioids vs guns, Prozac brain ageing, ER doc vaccine damage, CA soda kids, Banning drive thru’s and MORE!

Aug 20, 2018 7-9PM ET

Monday on The Robert Scott Bell Show:

“Safe and Effective” – What Does That Mean?

This Drug Is Safe and Effective. Wait. Compared With What? We spend many billions of dollars each year on the discovery and development of new drugs, but almost none of it addresses two crucial questions: How do these new therapies compare with already known ones? What are the relative benefits and harms in a particular situation, for a person like you? Such questions can best be answered by comparative effectiveness research. To get approval from the Food and Drug Administration, drugs must be proved both effective and safe. The costs of doing this are significant, and they are most often borne by the pharmaceutical industry. But the F.D.A.’s bar, while meaningful, often isn’t very useful for what physicians and patients really care about every day: how effective and safe drugs are compared with one another.

Always Read Between The Lines…

Covering health research? Choose your studies (and words) wisely Many of the most popular news stories about health research include overstated findings or substantial inaccuracies, according to a study led by Noah Haber, a postdoctoral researcher at the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Haber and his colleagues had a panel of 21 reviewers, all of whom had master’s degrees, and the majority of whom were enrolled in or had completed a doctoral degree, look at the 64 most-shared news articles about health research on Facebook and Twitter in 2015, and the 50 studies that spawned these stories. The reviewers focused on the methodology and language used in the research papers. They were interested in whether the studies could plausibly claim a “causal” connection – that the topic of interest caused or contributed to the health outcomes studied. The reviewers looked at how the authors described their results. Did they say or imply that one variable was a direct result of another variable when, in actuality, the authors had found only a correlation – a relationship of some sort? Haber and his colleagues found widespread problems with the language used to describe the research findings, both in the studies and the resultant media coverage. Twenty percent of academic papers strongly implied causal results; 34 percent used language that was stronger than what the reviewers deemed appropriate.

4 Years Later…..CRICKETS….

4 Years After CDC Whistleblower Reveals Vaccine Fraud Still Nothing Happens It was four years ago, August 2014, that a senior CDC scientist—Dr. William Thompson–claimed whistleblower protection by claiming that the CDC had committed fraud by hiding and manipulating data that showed the MMR vaccine was associated with a higher risk of autism. According to the CDC, we are currently suffering through an exponential increase in autism since the 1970s.  In 1970, the autism rate was 1 in 10,000.   In 2018, the rate of autism epidemically increased to 1 in 59 children.   That is a 169-fold increase in autism in U.S. children over nearly 50 years! You would think a senior CDC scientist who claims malfeasance at the CDC is responsible for the rapid rise in autism would immediately trigger Congressional investigations to find out the truth. However, our dysfunctional Congress would prove you wrong. Four years later, there have been no investigations by Congress.  There has been no presidential vaccine safety commission studying the matter. Four years later, there has been nothing.

Colorado Goes With Vaccine Mandates

Memorial Regional Health: U.S. vaccination supply safest in history — Without a proper exemption, Coloradolaw requires all students attending Colorado schools to be vaccinated against certain diseases Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show the current U.S. vaccine supply is the safest in history. As children get ready to head back to school, the subject of vaccination is often front and center. In recent years, a growing number of parents have questioned the safety of vaccinations, however scientific research has debunked many of these concerns. On Wednesday, the CDC reported that more than 100 cases of measles have been diagnosed this year in 21 states and the District of Columbia. The majority of cases affected people who were unvaccinated. The World Health Organization reports that measles is one of the most deadly of all childhood rash/fever illnesses, so why would parents choose to not vaccinate against it? One concern raised by parents relates to autism spectrum disorder, for which about 1 in 68 U.S. children has been diagnosed. A 1998 study by British researchers involved only 12 children and made the claim that the measles-mumps-rubella, or MMR, vaccine caused autism, however countless studies since have found no evidence of a link.

Yes….It Took MIT To Figure This Out….

Researchers Solve Mystery of the Universe, Break Piece of Uncooked Spaghetti in Half When you study physics, you’re bound to brush up against some of the universe’s larger mysteries. What came before the Big Bang? What lies inside a black hole? Is it possible to break a stick of dry spaghetti into exactly two pieces? Perhaps you’ve found yourself asking that last question in your own kitchen. Why is it that, when you try to snap a single piece of uncooked spaghetti in half, you almost always end up with three or more pieces of pasta clattering across your counter? It’s a logic-defying phenomenon that has baffled chef and scholar alike for decades; even Nobel physics laureate Richard Feynman, who helped develop the atomic bomb during World War II, is said to have spent the better part of a night sitting in his kitchen, snapping spaghetti sticks and searching for an explanation. Feynman came up dry, so to speak — but finally, a new study published Monday (Aug. 13) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides some closure. With the help of some mathematical models and a spaghetti-bending robot, researchers at MIT have found that, yes, it is possible to break a piece of uncooked spaghetti into just two pieces, but there’s a twist … literally. To prevent bent spaghetti from splintering into a half dozen pieces, the researchers wrote, one end of the pasta first has to be twisted nearly 360 degrees.

Hour 2 – Advanced Medicine with Dr. Rashid Buttar!

Dr. Buttar is back to talk about what’s happening in the world of health news. Here’s what we have in store for you today:

More people died from opioid overdoses than by guns or car crashes in 2017, preliminary data shows Preliminary data released by the Centers for Disease and Control paints a grim picture of America’s opioid crisis. Even as awareness has increased across the nation and opioid makers have vowed to stop pushing the drugs to physicians as they face lawsuits, estimates updated on Aug. 15 by the CDC show that there has been a 6.6 percent increase from 2016 – a year that had the highest opioid overdoses ever recorded. As the estimate stands today, that means more people died from opioid overdoses than by guns or car crashes in one year in the U.S. To put 2017 estimates into a bleaker perspective, overdose deaths from opioid prescriptions were fives times higher in 2016 than they were in 1999.

Antidepressants may counter effects of brain ageing A commonly used antidepressant medication Prozac can counter some of the effects of brain ageing, such as sensory and cognitive decline, an MIT study suggests. The research published in the Journal of Neuroscience provides fresh evidence that the decline in the capacity of brain cells to change – called ‘plasticity’ – rather than a decline in total cell number, may underlie some of the sensory and cognitive declines associated with normal brain ageing, Scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US showed that they could restore a significant degree of lost plasticity to the cells by treating mice with the commonly used antidepressant medication fluoxetine, also known as Prozac. “Despite common belief, loss of neurons due to cell death is quite limited during normal ageing and unlikely to account for age-related functional impairments,” researchers said.

Are Front-line Emergency Room Doctors the Key to Identifying Vaccine Injuries and Reporting Them? At least one ER doctor thinks so. David Denton Davis MD, a former Emergency Physician, claims neither our Centers for Disease Control (CDC) nor our Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has requested help from the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) in identifying illnesses and deaths occurring hours, days and weeks following childhood vaccinations. In his soon-to-be-published book “Who Can Parents Trust? Vaccines: Avoidable and Unsafe,” he claims the vast majority of serious vaccine related illnesses coming into Emergency rooms will continue to go unrecognized, unless nurses and physicians ask the last vaccination date (LVD). He believes during the past thirty years several million serious Adverse Events (AE’s), including deaths presenting nationwide to more than 5,000 Emergency rooms have never been recognized, documented or submitted for investigation, in accordance with our National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA). All suspicions of a vaccine related adverse event are required by law to be submitted using our Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).

California bill seeks to restrict restaurants serving kids sugary drinks A California bill seeking to limit restaurants to serving children water or unflavored milk with their meals passed the Assembly this week and is now making its way to Gov. Jerry Brown’s (D) desk. The bill, aimed at combating childhood obesity, would not preclude children or parents from ordering alternatives, however, according to ABC 7. If Brown signs the bill into law, California would be the first state to have such a law, CBS Sacramento affiliate KOVR reported. According to CBS, several California cities have already passed similar restrictions, as have other cities across the U.S. The American Cancer Society was a fervent supporter of the bill, CBS reports. “Some of these kids are drinking up to three sodas a day. This is setting them up for tremendous cancer risks down the road,” Stephanie Winn of the American Cancer Society told KOVR. “Because now we know that 20 percent of all cancers are tied to being overweight.”

Why banning drive-throughs could make communities healthier Noise and litter are two big reasons communities have banned drive-through windows in restaurants, but one University of Alberta researcher hopes it also helps put the brakes on unhealthy eating. As of 2016, 27 local governments across Canada, including two in Alberta, have either fully or partially banned fast food drive-throughs. And though the decisions were based on esthetic concerns, U of A public health researcher Candace Nykiforuk said they also open the door for promoting public health as a larger issue in urban planning. “This is a real opportunity to encourage options for healthy eating,” said Nykiforuk, a professor in the School of Public Health. She conducted a study—the first of its kind in Canada—to identify communities across the country that have adopted bylaws banning fast-serve windows. “We wanted to understand what policy levers could be used across the country to help people obtain better health,” said Nykiforuk. “If we know bylaws are put into place for other reasons, we also have an opportunity to assess them from a public health perspective.”