/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ en-us derekb.lowe@gmail.com 2013-02-22T09:14:52-05:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/02/22/nativis_returns.php Well, since it's Friday, I thought I'd quickly revisit one of the favorite companies I've written about here: Nativis. You'll recall that this is the outfit that claimed "photonic signatures" of drugs were as effective as the physical molecules themselves.... 76230@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Snake Oil 2013-02-22T09:14:52-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/02/08/the_name_of_a_cure.php Here's an excellent article at Slate on "natural" medicines versus pharmaceuticals. You won't see too many mainstream articles that suddenly break out into chemical structures, but this one does, and to excellent effect.... 76201@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Snake Oil 2013-02-08T15:25:27-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/01/30/scamorama.php One more on quackery, and then back to science. You may have seen this story, which broke in Sports Illustrated, on a strange little outfit that called themselves Sports With Alternatives To Steroids, or S.W.A.T.S. They seem to have had... 76173@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Snake Oil 2013-01-30T07:27:01-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/01/29/dr_ozs_problem.php Red palm oil. Green coffee beans. Raspberry ketone. Some of you are wondering what the heck I'm making for dinner, but some of you will recognize the common characteristic: all of these have been promoted by Dr. Mehmet Oz, the... 76171@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Snake Oil 2013-01-29T07:40:38-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/09/12/honking_squawking_chemical_ignorance.php If you would like to see one of the most idiotic, cloth-headed attempted "explanations" of a chemical structure ever, take yourself to this wonder-rejuvenating-skin-treatment site. And learn what can be accomplished if you take the time, and the effort, to... 75860@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Snake Oil 2012-09-12T07:29:32-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/05/29/luc_montagnier_is_not_losing_it_luc_montagnier_has_lost_it.php I don't see any alternative. My question from last year is answered, as I'd feared. Word comes of an autism conference featuring the likes of Jenny McCarthy and Andrew Wakefield, which should be all any well-informed person needs to hear.... 75667@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Snake Oil 2012-05-29T11:51:13-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2012/03/23/nativis_update.php Longtime readers will remember the interaction I had with Nativis Pharmaceuticals. That's the outfit that claims to be working with "drug signatures" instead of the drug molecules themselves. I found it interesting to see a company with all the outward... 75542@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Snake Oil 2012-03-23T07:03:42-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/12/14/burzynski_revisited.php Here, courtesy of Science-Based Medicine, is a comprehensive look at the Burzynski cancer clinic's methods. If you have any interest at all in cancer quackery or semi-quackery, or especially if you know of anyone desperate enough to approach the Burzynski... 75330@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Cancer 2011-12-14T13:25:27-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/11/29/the_burzynski_cancer_treatment.php There seems to have been a recent surge in interest in the Burzynski cancer therapy in the UK. A family publicly raised a good deal of money to have their daughter flown over to Texas for the treatment, and this... 75296@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Snake Oil 2011-11-29T08:51:21-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/11/14/translation_needed_from_execulinga.php And Google Translate is no help at all for this sort of thing. A reader who attended the recent TEDMED conference sent along a quote transcribed from one of the speakers, a high-ranking Pfizer executive: "We’ve moved from a [two-dimensional]... 75272@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Snake Oil 2011-11-14T09:50:29-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/10/31/very_likely_not_real_but_still_the_ecat.php I occasionally cover odd attempts at alternative - very alternative - energy sources here, because there's a chemistry angle to many of them. The various cold fusion claims have always gotten a slightly less frosty reception among professional chemists than... 75247@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ General Scientific News 2011-10-31T08:09:36-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/08/11/in_which_we_learn_lots_about_wine_swirling.php Well, we could use some comedy around here these days, and here's someone from the Napa Valley wine business to help us out. Let's work up to this one slowly: do you drink wine? If you do, do you swirl... 75130@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Snake Oil 2011-08-11T10:15:20-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/06/30/transcendental_meditation_hold_that_paper.php I couldn't resist mentioning this one: the Archives of Internal Medicine was set to publish a paper showing a benefit for transcendental meditation in heart attack and stroke. Word was already out in the press - in the UK, the... 75071@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ The Scientific Literature 2011-06-30T06:12:33-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/06/21/senator_hatch_and_his_wonderful_industry.php Now, I try to help discover drugs for a living. And boy, do we not discover all that many of them. But you'd get a different impression if you listen to the radio here in the US. So many drugs!... 75055@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Snake Oil 2011-06-21T11:19:38-05:00 http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2011/06/15/the_failure_of_modern_medicine.php I was going to take a shot at this article myself, a piece in The Atlantic called "The Triumph of New Age Medicine". But Matthew Herper at Forbes has done the job for me. The original article advances the thesis... 75047@/home/corante/public_html/pipeline/ Press Coverage 2011-06-15T11:17:03-05:00