The impact of modern fake news as it relates to the recent American presidential election is something that struck a lot of people as unconscionable and ridiculous – but try telling that to the misinformation experts or the new president who concocted all sorts of lies for their own profit or ego.
Fake news isn’t new and has been around practically forever – as examples: to promote Christianity, Jesus was constantly misrepresented as a white man (this still continues even today), and politicians, businesses and espionage agencies have always used subtly managed misinformation.
Regardless of politically-influenced fake news, the world has also been ploughing through another barrage of contemporary fake news for decades – and this heap of plausible half-truths, aptly termed as pseudoscience, can influence the diets, medications and health of millions.
Pseudoscience
Let’s start by asking why pseudoscience is often believed. There are several answers, all of them relatively simple, but mainly it is because pseudoscience targets and validates people’s desperation, fears, personal beliefs or aspirations.
Other reasons are ignorance, sheer gullibility, lack of objectivity, inability to think critically, laziness and stuff like that.
There is also the Dunning-Kruger Effect where people with inadequate knowledge develop a delusional superiority about subjects they do not understand – this is possibly a worthy subject for another article.
The main intention of pseudo-science, as with fake news, is to invoke either hope, outrage or fear so that people would become less sceptical and more inclined to believe in the following waves of pseudoscience – the second, more sinister aim is usually to sell people something they do not need.
The exact origins of these odious lumps of pseudoscience are not always obvious – once a pseudoscience wave starts, hundreds of websites may suddenly appear in google searches and even your social media might get flooded.
The only certainty about most pseudoscience is that it is a strategy to make money, especially from gullible or desperate people.
The cosmetic industry is one riddled with pseudoscience – there are creams with “diamond peptides”, for example, which cost small fortunes even though there is clearly no such thing for peptides are short biological chains of amino acids whereas a diamond is pure carbon and the two cannot react as there are no free hydrogen bonds in diamonds.
Whereas the food industry is often keen to hide various artificial ingredients in its labelling, the cosmetic industry seems to love labelling all sorts of spurious meaningless items added in tiny proportions, especially if they have complex or fake (self-invented) chemical names.
Just be informed that most cosmetic creams are based on simple emollients which are either oil- or water-based and ridiculously cheap to produce.
Bad science
Pseudoscience is often confused with bad science – but there is a significant difference. A couple of cases of bad science are the Eskimo diet and its alleged efficacy against heart disease, and also the supposed link between ingesting saturated fats and heart disease.
Both these subjects were covered recently in this column and the connections were found to be erroneous and examples of confirmation bias and imprecise scientific analysis.
Basically, they were examples of less than brilliant science, but somewhat forgivable given the technology and the data available at the time.
However, with pseudoscience, the intent from the outset is to suggest something special, a golden benefit, a wondrous remedy which is hidden and outside the remit of “normal” science.
A classic example of pseudoscience is the marketing of “ionised” water or alkaline water or alkaline “ionised” water and their related machinery which can cost over US$3,000 (RM13,000) each.
It doesn’t matter how they call it – the facts are that water (unless it is distilled) is ALWAYS ionised and alkalinity is (unnecessarily) introduced via hydroxides catalysed from mineral salts in the water or introduced by the machines themselves via packets of salt.
I have written about these machines before – the only perceivable advantage is that people would drink more water and hydrate themselves better after spending so much money on them.
But there is no scientifically verifiable data that these simple, cheap, easily-produced, overpriced contraptions and their alkaline waters have any health benefits.
This vitamin called ‘B17’
One particularly odious branch of pseudoscience targets desperate people who have, or fear, cancers or other major illnesses – there are so many of these “alternative treatments” that they are investigative items for science researchers dedicated to debunking them.
However, as a little example, we can briefly dissect a surprising and very recent one shared by friends on social media. You may have come across pills or treatments involving “vitamin B17” for curing and preventing cancers.
The name itself is problematic for there is no such thing as “vitamin B17”, at least, not in medical nomenclature. Laetrile is the commercial name for “vitamin B17” and is a synthetic form of a natural compound called amygdalin which is found in the raw seeds of some nuts and fruits.
Amygdalin is a glycoside (a compound which has a sugar attached via a glycosidic bond), had been discovered by French scientists in 1830 and had been trialled as a cancer treatment in 1892 in Germany – it was found to be too toxic and discarded.
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You may have come across pills or treatments involving ‘vitamin B17′ for
curing and preventing cancers; there is no such thing as ‘vitamin B17′,
at least, not in medical nomenclature.
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The reasons for the toxicity was not discovered until later – it was due to the action of a family of enzymes called glucosidases on amygdalin, resulting in two further compounds called gentiobiose and mandelonitrile.
The problem compound is mandelonitrile when it is further hydrolysed by the body into benzaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide – it was well-known that hydrogen cyanide in relatively small doses simply kills mammalian cells, including both cancerous and normal cells, resulting in poor health and eventually death.
As an aside, the words “amygdala” is Latin for almonds and “mandel” is German for almonds – and bitter almonds contain significant quantities of amygdalin. However, don’t worry – bitter almonds are never sold in the shops simply because they are too poisonous. It is plausible that some plants evolved amygdalin as a deterrent against mammals eating their seeds.
Regardless of the actual chemical reactions in the body to laetrile and amygdalin, it is a cheap compound to produce – and deceitful or misguided people (who may not really understand any science) are still peddling the stuff today as a remedy for cancer.
The story of laetrile is interesting for this compound is probably the foundation stone of modern “alternative treatments”. It precipitated the eventual formation of the American “Committee for Freedom of Choice in Medicine” (CFCM) in 1972 – an organisation dedicated to promoting and marketing questionable cures for cancers and other serious diseases under the guise of freedom of choice.
The convoluted tale of how laetrile became a cancer treatment started long ago in 1902. Based on observations of placenta tissues through a microscope, Scottish embryologist John Beard developed the idea that cancer cells and cells developed during pregnancy called trophoblasts are one and the same thing.
He further suggested that trophoblasts were destroyed by an enzyme called chymotrypsin secreted by the pancreas – and if not enough chymotrypsin was produced to kill off and manage trophoblasts, cancers would form and grow.
In 1945, “Doctor” Ernst Theodore Krebs, Jr. founded the John Beard Memorial Foundation to develop and apply Beard’s ideas. When the initial experiments did not work out well, Krebs decided that a compound developed by his father, laetrile, was more effective than chymotrypsin.
He then patented laetrile, and to boost his claims for the compound, unilaterally announced laetrile as “vitamin B17”, claiming that a deficiency in this “vitamin” is the cause of cancer.
You can still read these same claims restated daily on the internet. You should also know that Krebs had failed medical school and also flunked science courses in other colleges – his “doctor of science” degree was from a defunct bible college in Oklahoma which had no science department. And in a final piece of irony, the word “krebs” in German actually means cancer.
Regardless, some doctors at the time saw laetrile as a way to becoming instant cancer treatment experts – there was poor medical regulation during that period in the United States.
One such doctor was Dr John Richardson, a GP with no specialist training and a nondescript reputation. However, his practice suddenly took off when he became a “cancer specialist” offering laetrile treatment – his declared personal income went from US$10K in 1971 to US$173K in 1973, eventually reaching several million dollars by 1976 when he finally lost his medical licence.
By the 1970s, the role of amygdalin and laetrile in the creation of hydrogen cyanide in the body was known, eventually resulting in the arrest of Dr Richardson for his illegal treatments (though he was not convicted due to legal technicalities).
By then, there were more casuistic people involved in the “cancer cure” business and after the arrest of Dr Richardson, they founded the Committee for Freedom of Choice in Cancer Therapy, later becoming the CFCM – they had realised a lot of money can be made from desperate, terminally-ill patients and wanted to give very sick people the choice of how they can spend their money.
It appears that several similar shady confederations have existed ever since then, promoting untested and unreliable products in waves of media self-marketing – this happens mostly on the internet these days.
As a footnote, in 1980 the US National Cancer Institute undertook a second trial using laetrile – this time it was a full clinical trial and out of over 170 patients,
not one was cured or even stabilised long-term. Those that did not die during the trial had increased tumours, as also observed in patients without any treatment.
Laetrile is now banned in both the United States and the European Union as a cancer treatment. A 1981 paper published in an oncology journal reviewed the history and pharmacology of laetrile and concluded that it is “the slickest, most sophisticated, and certainly the most remunerative cancer quack promotion in medical history”.
An often quoted fallacy is that doctors and pharmaceutical companies don’t accept simple cures for diseases like cancer because they won’t make big money from it, especially if the treatments involved cheap “natural” compounds.
If that is the case, then poorer countries would be using these cheap treatments and the cancer survival rates there would be significantly better than developed Western countries.
However, where data is available, the notable trend is a higher incidence of deaths for the same cancers in the poorer countries. Also the exigencies of life in poorer countries should have forced the doctors there to use the best low-cost alternative treatments and statistics would then be readily available for how they worked on patients – however, it seems that even doctors in poor countries prefer to stay away from such alternative treatments and a plausible reason may be that these treatments have been tried and simply do not work.
This is not to say that the most expensive, newest treatments are automatically the best – there is always a degree of cost-recovery (by the pharmaceutical company) and experimentation with any new medication, so for the people who need treatment for complicated conditions, there is sometimes a (difficult) decision to make, hopefully based on the best advice from competent medical professionals.
Also it is admitted that some pharmaceutical companies intentionally overcharge outrageously – a classic case is Turing Pharmaceuticals over the drug Daraprim. Regrettably, there is not much that can be done apart from naming and shaming these excessively greedy corporate practices.
At the same time, the alternative treatment industry not long ago charged a British girl US$77,000 (RM340,000) for cancer treatments that involved intravenous transfusions of solutions of
baking soda into her bloodstream – each intravenous drip costed her US$550 (RM2,450) for a cooking compound that is sold for pennies. And sadly, she died as well, after several expensive trips to the US for treatment.
The circumstances leading to her death is the subject which will be investigated further in the next part – for it has a lot to do with food and practically nothing to do with good science, despite being the basis of the diets of millions of people.
Read Part 2
