What is Shivambu?
An anti-vaccine doctor I trained with interviewed a man who claimed to have cured his cancer by drinking his own urine. Everything about this is sad and disgusting. The point of this article is not to debunk Shivambu, but rather to explain why it may.
People who believe drinking urine cures cancer are unlikely to have their minds changed by it. Writing about Shivambu isn't worth it because it might convince a few people that it's not true.
Several intelligent people have argued that Science Based Medicine is a waste of time. Skeptics do nothing other than bash people outside of your tribe, who ignore you. Skeptics are just reaching to the converted, and so do nothing beyond making themselves feel superior. They feel that alternative medicine should only be discussed after mainstream medicine fixes all its flaws and world peace is declared.
I don't claim to speak on anyone's behalf, but I think that when skeptics discuss Shivambu, their main aim is not to debunk that specific nonsense. Skeptics have many larger goals in mind, and discussions of Shivambu are just a template for them to make their main points.
People are seriously hurt and killed by alternative medicine all the time.
One reason to debunk Shivambu is because of this. Critics of skepticism portray alternative medicine as harmless. They ask if the harm is if someone believes in crystals.
Many alternative treatments are not harmless. People can be harmed by alternative therapies if they use them in lieu of evidence-based treatments. One study found that breast or colorectal cancer patients who used an alternative therapy were five times more likely to die than patients who used conventional treatment. People are killed and hurt by medical misinformation all the time. The fallacy of relative privation is a flawed line of thought that says war doesn't mean we shouldn't try to save lives in other ways.
Doctors warn people about the dangers of bogus treatments. Doctors should educate people about the benefits of evidence-based treatments. This is controversial.
Some people are persuadable if they are given accurate information.
Critics of skepticism infantilize anyone who uses alternative medicine and treat them all as naifs. You can't waste all your time arguing with people who don't accept evidence and rationality as a precondition to debate.
It is wrong that this claim was made without any evidence. Some people are persuadable if they are presented with accurate information. Some Shivambu devotees might change their minds by reading this article. There are multiple accounts of people deciding to have their children vaccinations after learning the facts. It is a big deal when people are steered away from quackery. Science Based Medicine has done that. My friend said something in response to this.
I think the long-time writers here would say stories like the ones ofAmanda are worth all of their effort.
Doctors treat people who use alternative medicine, but are wary of evidence-based treatments. Many of them are open to facts, and few are as far down the rabbit-hole as Dr. Doctors need to help their patients make good decisions. We can only do this if we understand where they are coming from, especially during a Pandemic where millions of people are refusing to be vaccineed. I know how to help people who are skeptical about vaccines. I hope I have helped my patients reject the myths they encounter online, some of them inspired by contrarian doctors. Doctors who thought that learning about alternative medicine wasn't important are not prepared to do this.
Skeptics have to be thoughtful in how they talk about these issues. It is appropriate to mock Dr. Brogan. Doctors who actually care for patients view her as an object of ridicule. mocking someone who is confused about alternative medicine isn't going to help anyone Ordinary people who believe, use, and even spread false medical beliefs are victims. They do not deserve our condemnation. Many people are confused about whether or not the vaccine is beneficial for young people because some doctors have spread misinformation, minimized the virus and hyping every vaccine side-effect. Skeptics need to be cautious of the use of pseudoscience that would have gone undetected. Ignore it and let it die on its own, that's the best way to refute a lot of nonsense.
I wonder if the medical community would be willing to listen to the Disinformation Dozen if they had their way. If ethical doctors said nothing, the countless grifters, frauds, and quacks would have the internet to themselves.
This is the end point of skepticism's critics' position and it is not the desired goal. Either they don't care about it or they don't recognize it. This too is amazing.
Skepticism is a method of inquiry not to answer.
A true skeptic would not try to debunk Shivambu. A true skeptic would realize that her preconceived notions could be wrong even if it was just Shivambu. Stool transplants are the standard of care for treatment-resistant C. difficile infections. Our true skeptic would first acknowledge her biases and then do her best to investigate Shivambu with an open mind. She would look at the evidence and report her findings fairly. She would adjust her opinion if new evidence supports her initial conclusions.
Skepticism is about loyalty to a method of inquiry. The first article I wrote argued that children should bevaccinated. In my second article, I reported that there was evidence that the death toll from vaccine-related myocarditis may be inflated. The case to vaccine children was weakened by the subsequent articles. I reported it as thoroughly and honestly as possible, even though the evidence showed that. I have tried to keep the harms of the virus or understate the flaws with the vaccine out of sight. People have been called out for overstating the harms of COVID-19 to children. I have written about my mistakes. My loyalty is to a process.
I have argued with people who are in my tribe, and I have defended people who are not in my tribe. They argued back. Skeptics disagree with each other all the time, but they bash quacks like Dr. Brogan. Richard Dawkins was called out by Dr. Gorksi for embracing the lab leak theory. I have a tribe of people who are not afraid to call me out when they think I am wrong.
Dr. Brogan starts with the answer they want, and works backwards to find the evidence. She said, "It's time to decide what you believe." It is about belief, not about facts, not about science, and it is the final objective. Anyone that threatens her beliefs is not welcome. She feels she is incapable of being wrong because she defines what is true as what she wants to be true. There is no evidence or study that would convince Dr. Brogan to change her mind. That is a problem, but not one that is unique to Dr.
Understanding the Flaws in Alternative Medicine can help us identify flawed medical practices.
Skeptics hope that they can identify and avoid flawed medical practices elsewhere, after learning to evaluate the claims of alternative medicine. Someone who knows how to spot defects in studies published in prestigious medical journals will be prepared to spot defects in a wide swath of medicine. Skepticism's methods can be used for problematic drug approvals, useless medical procedures, and flawed research methodology. Skeptics talk about these topics despite what their critics say.
I believe my exposure to skepticism helped me become a more thoughtful doctor. When the medicine service asked me to run a COVID-19 team, I had one demand: I would not practice alternative medicine. As I wrote before.
No patient on my team received any experimental treatments. It's difficult for doctors to do nothing, but it's better to give out treatments if patients are dying or in a clinical trial.
Many doctors were practicing alternative medicine at that time. I understand why. We were desperate to save lives because of the new disease. I knew that doctors who used hydroxychloroquine were no different from alternative medicine practitioners, and I wanted no part of that. I believe that learning about the flaws in practices like Shivambu helped me make better choices for my patients, and I believe that fewer doctors would have used questionable treatments early in the Pandemic if they had a better understanding of alternative medicine.
There is no such thing as a harmless alternative treatment.
The overall practice of science-denial is not harmless at all, and that is one of the main goals of skepticism. There is a significant price to be paid for the lack of scientific knowledge and critical thinking skills needed to evaluate the claims of alternative medicine. The same distorted thinking that allows people to believe in Shivambu leads them to reject evidence-based treatments such as vaccines. The anti-vaccine movement can't be disentangled from alternative medicine. Believing in things that are harmless until it leads tens of millions of people to reject vaccines and embrace quack therapies in the middle of a raging epidemic is harmless.
Skeptics would argue that there is no such thing as an alternative treatment. It is dangerous to weaken people's ability to think critically about medicine and health. The comparison of vaccines to the Holocaust today is being made bywellnessinfluencers who promoted crystal-healing and clean-eating in 2019.
Many skeptics sounded the alarm prior to the outbreak. Dr. Hoofnagle said that science communicators have been warning about the dangers of conspiracy theorists for a long time. All the same, AGW, antivax, evolution denial. We are here. When conspiracy theorists take over, this is what it looks like. They are the worst people. The biggest danger to my kids isn't the measles, but the thought process that leads people to reject the vaccine in the first place. We didn't know much.
Our pollyannaish oncologist thought a long time ago that the risk of covid will decline after all adults are vaccine free. Only a person with complete knowledge of the depths of anti-vaccine sentiment in the US would think that adult vaccination rates would be high enough to not need to vaccine children. Before the Delta variant arrived, I was under no illusions.
Rachel Moran explained the scope of the problem when she said it.
Medical misinformation can result in people making bad personal and community health choices, but it can also cause community and family divisions. Misinformation narratives have a big impact on people's ability to make safe health choices.
She is absolutely correct. There are many reasons why people refuse to get a vaccine against a deadly disease, but at the end of the day, 1,000 Americans die every day because they don't get a vaccine. Science denial is a leading cause of death, and children have died because their parents refused to have them vaccine against COVID-19. Skepticism's detractors are perturbed that someone might use an hour of their free time to debunk Shivambu.
Doctors mocked skeptics who discussed Shivambu. They thought it was a waste of time and easy to do, likening it to dunking on a 7-foot hoop. They felt that the warning about bogus cancer cures took time away from more challenging tasks, such as dunking on bad studies on coffee.
It is easy to debunk Shivambu, I agree with skepticism's critics about that. A doctor who is focused on research would not tackle this topic. I am certain my teenagers could quickly discover that there is no evidence that drinking your own urine cures cancer.
I don't think my children would be able to communicate about Shivambu in a way that would be understood by a newly diagnosed cancer patient. That is a different skill set. My children wouldn't be able to think about the bigger implications of Shivambu. They wouldn't be interested in why some people think drinking urine cures cancer. Shivambu would not be placed in the context of the rampant science-denial and institutional distrust in the world today. They would not be able to link Shivambu to 1,000 people dying everyday of a vaccine-preventable disease, to violence in the anti-vaccine movement, or to an anti-vaccine doctor being arrested for her role in the January 6th insurrection. They wouldn't be able to see it as a symptom of the dangerous world of alternative facts that surrounds us. They wouldn't understand that a world where drinking urine cures cancer is also a world where there is no reason to get vaccine.
There are doctors who care enough to push back against the misinformation that creates such delusions and who can see these connections.
We are all in danger of becoming 7-foot hoops.
The final goal of the skeptic is to examine the cognitive flaws and distorted thinking that leads smart people to believe that drinking urine can cure cancer. She studied systems neuroscience at MIT. She graduated from NYU residency with me. She is many things, but she is not stupid even though she has come to believe really stupid things. The goal of the skeptic is not to just understand what is wrong with Shivambu, but also to understand what is wrong with Dr. Since we all have biases, we need to understand what is wrong with Dr.
If skeptics read an article debunking Shivambu, they would see it as an article debunking Shivambu and nothing else. I think the critics missed out on the larger points skeptics were trying to make, and that's why they missed out on what skepticism has to offer. People who think they are above learning about 7-foot hoops are at risk of becoming 7-foot hoops.
We are all in danger of becoming 7-foot hoops if skepticism is correct. It is easy to find examples of smart people who have suffered this fate. Think about Dr. Oz or Dr. Joseph Lapado. Highly-educated doctors at prestigious medical centers offer pseudoscientific treatments. Doctors who were praised for their vaccine work have since minimized the virus and ridiculed those who warned about its dangers. Even brilliant Nobel Prize Laureates have claimed that vitamins C and COVID-19 are safe, that HIV doesn't cause AIDS, that Black people are less intelligent, and that COVID-19 is less dangerous than it was made out to be. Really smart people can believe horrible things.
intelligent people may think they are less vulnerable to biased thinking than other people Skeptics are aware that this is a bias. Skeptics enjoy optical illusions. They love learning how easy it is for us to be fooled. Dr. Novella defined humility as awareness of the vulnerabilities.
Being a functional skeptic requires knowledge of the various ways in which we deceive ourselves, the limits and flaws in human perception and memory, the inherent biases and fallacies in cognitive abilities, and the methods that can help mitigate all these flaws and biases.
We all need to be open to the possibility that we could be wrong. Adam Grant shared two thoughts on this topic.
The hallmark of an open mind is not letting your ideas become your identity. Questioning your opinions is a threat to your integrity. Changing your mind is a moment of growth if you see yourself as a curious person.
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Humility is needed to consider information that disagrees with your opinions. You are willing to concede that you might be wrong. It takes a lot of curiosity to find evidence that challenges your views. You want to find out if you are right.
He is correct. It doesn't mean I'm good at that process because I brag that my loyalty is to a process, not a result. I know I have fallen short.
We need to be humble and listen to our critics. They can show us our mistakes. It is a mistake to think that you are safe in an echo chamber of sycophants. It is very easy to let your beliefs replace facts and science, especially when these beliefs lead to financial rewards, TV appearances, and social media adulation. We need to be on guard against this.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and that you are the easiest person to fool. This is the most important lesson skeptics can offer.
The first part of a series on contraceptive doctors.
Several contrarian doctors seem to have fallen into the same cognitive traps as Dr. Brogan because they haven't grasped skepticism's lessons. They need to be different no matter what the evidence is. The need to be contradictory no matter what the mainstream stance is was called out by a commentator.
They claim that anyone who challenges them is trying to quiet them. Instead of engaging with those who disagree with them, they ask to be left alone because they conflate criticisms of their ideas with personal attacks. They don't like people who disagree with them, they only like people on social media. They mock people who are afraid of the virus, implying that they are addicted to doom and being on TV, and that life is passing them by. Many people have declared the Pandemic over many times. Some of them make a lot of videos, so they feel like they are the real victims of this epidemic, because some of their videos were taken down by YouTube. Several of them have connections to right-wing think tanks.
Several contrarians started the epidemic with the belief that COVID-19's harms were overstated, and have spent the past 20 months justifying this initial, flawed premise. One contrarian has peddled conspiracy theories that death certificates have been unreliable and the death toll is inflated. He wants you to believe that many people died with COVID-19, not from COVID-19, and that healthcare workers have perverse financial incentives to put COVID-19 on death certificates. He repeatedly claimed that doctors killed patients by intubating them too quickly. This is to make sure that I don't say, "I underestimated COVID-19."
He is not the only one. The cases are falling early in the summer and the incidence of cleft lip and cleft palate is dropping with adult vaccinations. He used these numbers to justify his belief that children should not be vaccine free. He criticized the CDC for using outdated numbers when modeling the benefits of the vaccine for adolescents. He called it a lie. He said that hospitalsadmit less sick patients to make up for the spike in cases. The number of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 is an "inaccurate" metric and is instead a "fear monger tactic," he claimed. He imagined that public health measures to contain a virus could lead to communism.
The doctor wouldn't object to any of this. She believes that the entire pandemic is a fear monger tactic for profit, and that totalitarianism has already arrived, saying that COVID-19 was planned for the "entrapment of citizens worldwide." Don't believe news reports of overwhelmed hospitals. Don't believe what the doctors are saying. They are trying to scare you for profit. I will tell you the truth. Purchase a subscription or pay speaking fees to gain access to my unique insights.
The second part of the story about contraceptive doctors and Dr. Brogan.
The overlap between contrarian doctors and Dr. Brogan on the issue of whether or not children should be protected against COVID-19 is complete. The American Academy of Pediatrics, the CDC, and almost every practicing doctor in this area share similar characteristics with her. That says a lot considering that Dr. Brogan does not believe that HIV causes AIDS, or that we are experiencing a real medical epidemic.
These contrarians and Dr. Brogan all agree that measures to protect young people against the virus will likely do more harm than good. They felt that children shouldn't get the vaccine. They felt that the US should suspend all vaccinations for children under the age of 18. They agreed that children should return to their normal lives this summer and in the upcoming school year, without masks and regardless of their vaccine status. RFK Jr., an anti-vaccine crank, posted an article by some of the doctors arguing against the Emergency Use Authorization of the COVID-19 vaccine for most children. No one with real power took that idea seriously.
The article opened with the words, "The Ill-Advised Push to Vaccinate the Young."
The anti-vax idea that no one should bevaccinated is as misguided as the idea that everyone must bevaccinated. The latter is more dangerous for public health.
That is correct. The doctors think that the idea of nobody getting vaccine is better for public health than the idea of everyone getting vaccine. The doctors feel that vaccine-advocates are a bigger threat to public health than anti-vaxxers. I am curious to know what the folks at Voices for Vaccines think about the fact that over 1,000 Americans die every day from preventable diseases. The anti-vaccine movement is in a state of disrepair. What kind of evil do they think Karen is capable of? She has always been nice to me.
The future of science and public health are threatened by mandating the vaccine for young people. One of the authors spread the myth that vaccine mandates will spread the virus. These statements seem to be plagiarizing from the most deranged anti-vaccine websites. Public health measures imposed in violation of bodily sovereignty, for example, mandated vaccination in exchange for "privileges" which may actually be inalienable rights, are opposed by Dr. Brogan.
Part 3 of the story about the doctors and the doctor.
By the time this article was published, hundreds of American children had already died of COVID-19 and many thousands more had been hospitalized. Hundreds of children died after millions of children contracted the virus after this article was published, despite the fact that the mortality risk for children is extremely low. Young adults suffered more. Over 1,000 children have died of COVID-19 so far, according to the CDC. The vaccine was not the cause of death for these young people.
More children and young adults have been hospitalized. Many were very sick and needed intensive care and mechanical ventilation. Some COVID-19 survivors had strokes. Others had lung transplants or amputations. Their lives will never be the same. There is a substantial undercount of children who have had MIS-C thus far. In one study, 80% of children with MIS-C went to the intensive care unit. There have been 52 deaths of children. Many of the tragedies occurred in unvaccinated people after the vaccine was widely available. These tragedies are very rare.
The vaccine has proven effective in keeping adolescents alive and out of the hospital. Children were suffering from COVID-19, not the vaccine's side effects. One study found that hospitalization rates were 10 times higher for unvaccinated adolescents. The vaccine's efficacy was shown in a study of adolescents.
There were 179 COVID-19 case-patients and 173 were unvaccinated. Of the 77 case-patients who were admitted to an intensive care unit, 77 were admitted with at least one critically ill patient. All 77 case-patients admitted to the intensive care unit, all 29 critically ill case-patients, and both deaths occurred among unvaccinated case-patients.
There is good news about vaccine safety. Over 7 million doses have been given to children, including over 2 million second-doses, and there have only been 8 verified reports of myocarditis so far.
Evidence continues to accumulate that almost all young people with vaccine-myocarditis have a mild course of the disease. The Pfizer vaccine seems safer than the Moderna vaccine for young men, as well as using a longer interval between the two vaccine doses. It is possible to make a low-risk event even lower with this knowledge. I'm aware of one death of a young person from the vaccine, and it's all in the world. The vaccine is safer than the virus for young people.
Dr. Brogan and these doctors don't want you to know or believe anything. Most of the facts will never be mentioned since they only report information that bolsters their preconceived notions. They will claim the numbers are a "fear monger tactic" if you encounter accurate information elsewhere. If you believe the numbers, they will say that COVID-19 can't be that bad for kids because it's worse for elderly people, more children die of suicide, and the flu is worse. Others wondered if incompetent pediatricians were misdiagnosingRSV as COVID-19. Several doctors spread wrong numbers and minimized the impact of COVID-19 on children. There are 74 million kids in the USA, and some people think that hundreds of dead children from COVID-19 can't be that bad.
What is different about COVID-19 that makes it so easy for doctors to ignore the deaths of children? The COVID-19 virus is a leading cause of deaths in children this year, even though almost all children with the disease do well. A vaccine can prevent tragedies. Imagine if we could prevent accidents with a vaccine. We would do it. The doctors don't want most children to do anything to prevent COVID-19 because they don't want them to be exposed to older people.
If a doctor tried to diminish the tragedies of children with cancer, the outrage would be great. If a doctor pointed out that 99% of children won't die this way, we shouldn't try to prevent these tragedies. Skylar Herbert, Tagan White, Kimora Lynum, Wyatt Gibson, and Zyrin Foots are some of the children who have died. These were real lives that were cut tragically short. Their deaths shouldn't be diminished because of their grandparents' deaths. The only unique thing about the 1,000 COVID-19 deaths is that they can be prevented with a vaccine.
The vaccine can prevent tragic outcomes for a small percentage of young people, and the contrarians will do anything to avoid acknowledging this fact. They are eager to discuss vaccine side effects. One doctor mentioned post-vaccine symptoms as a reason not to give the vaccine to children. Doctors argued in a pre-print that the vaccine could cause more harm than the virus for adolescents. The number of children hospitalized with vaccine-related myocarditis is likely to exceed the number of times they have collectively mentioned it. Since vaccine-related myocarditis almost always has a very favorable clinical course, they are only willing to discuss the occurrence of this condition. One doctor argued that the vaccine could kill as many children as the virus because of the death of a 22-year-old. The studies showing the vaccine's benefits for adolescents are completely unmentionable.
The doctors refuse to enumerate the harms of the virus and the benefits of the vaccine because their loyalty is to a result. Their writing on COVID-19 and children is uninformative and devoid of nuance, compared to the work of doctors familiar with skepticism and critical thinking. After the Delta variant hospitalized thousands of children and killed hundreds of them, some contrarians changed their stance on vaccinations without acknowledging their previous stance and what role this vocal opposition might have had in creating vaccine-hesitancy in parents. There is no evidence or study that would lead these doctors to conclude that it was a mistake to leave tens of millions of young people vulnerable to COVID-19.
If the deaths of thousands of young people, including 1,000 children, doesn't give them pause, what possibly could?
Part 4 of the story about contraceptive doctors.
Alternative treatments, like Dr. Brogan and these contrarians, are not harmless. They have great credentials. People listen to what they say. They speak with confidence. They can speak in scientific jargon and make dangerous ideas sound reasonable to people who are ignorant of the facts.
The politicians in Florida were convinced that it was better to leave young people vulnerable to COVID-19 than to let it rip through them. She has had an impact on local schools in that state as she influences anti-vaccine schools. Children's hospitals were overwhelmed at the end of this summer thanks to their combined efforts. healthy teens who were eligible to be vaccinations died. The UK's response to vaccinations seems to have been influenced by their ideology.
The doctors are not exposed to the consequences of their words. Dr. Brogan has never cared for a patient in a hospital with COVID-19. They will not see a young person gasping for air, regretting not getting vaccine. Most of them have a computer screen. Despite this, they are still proud of their efforts and call Florida a success. If the political winds blow their way, their influence may grow significantly.
I was friendly with her. After graduating, she decided to reject science as the final objective. Some of the doctors I admired before the Pandemic were contrarian. Like Dr. Brogan, they are not stupid. It is sad that they have come to share many of her beliefs. The contrarians will be remembered only for their poor predictions, vaccine fear mongering, and relentless minimization of virus that was benign for most young people, but because it was encouraged to spread so widely, killed thousands of them.
Who knows? Maybe they could have avoided this sad fate if they hadn't thought about Shivambu.
