CAM, DCA and double standards.

There are an excellent set of blog posts by Orac and Dr. Novella today.

Dr. Novella’s post, The CAM Double Standard, causes me to fear for the future of health care in the U.S. I really hate that we taxpayers are shelling out money to anti-scientific research through the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. It sure seems to me that a lot of people want to take us back to the 19th century for our health care model. Read his article for the worrying details.

Orac posted “Clinical research” on dichloroacetate by TheDCASite.com: A travesty of science, it is his latest update on the, too long running, DCA is a miracle cure crap. I feel so badly for the patients and their loved ones who are grasping at straws with DCA sold through the BuyDCA website.

Reading through these posts and the linked pages I spotted a quote that can be an example for those trying to determine if something is bogus. A good way to spot bogus claims is to simply use a dictionary. The term I encountered is “aerobic oxygen”, without even looking in a dictionary I was pretty sure that adjective doesn’t go with that noun. Looking up aerobic on Webster’s site gives:

Main Entry: aer·o·bic
Pronunciation: “er-‘O-bik
Function: adjective
1 : living, active, or occurring only in the presence of oxygen

So the definition for the phrase “aerobic oxygen” is, oxygen that is active, or occurring only in the presence of oxygen. Clearly any thinking person will see that is ridiculous.

Over at Wikipedia they say:

Aerobic is an adjective that means “requiring air” (where “air” usually means oxygen).

This gives the phrase a definition of, oxygen requiring oxygen, or, oxygen requiring air. This is equally silly, perhaps the purveyors of “aerobic oxygen” mean something else but if they do they should really look up the correct adjective in a dictionary.

Nope, I just did a Google search for “aerobic oxygen” and the second two sites are clearly frauds looking to confuse prospective targets by mis-using the English language. The third result is an FDA notice from 2003 entitled “Cyber Warning Letter to Aerobic Oxygen USA”. Sadly, this FDA letter seems to be just a notice for them to change their site a little so that the fall under the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act becoming exempt from FDA regulation.

BTW – the first site in the Google search gives a malware warning, thank you Google.