Wednesday, July 13, 2016

ADDENDUM::Another loon from down under has gravitated upward

Normally cranks come and go; a dime-a-dozen.  Some have more longevity than others or are just too stubborn to realize that they peddle shit.  Such is the case of one Monika Milka/Claudia Cummings.  After my last update and re-reading the information I have on file as well as new perspective, a few subsequent points became apparent.

1] She is still passing off homeopathy as medicine, it is not.  However you want to slice it, homeopathy does not work and as Dr. David Gorski notes, "This makes as much sense as allowing the sale of batteries that don’t produce electricity." [FYI Gorski also notes, "one excellent review of homeopathic product regulation is reprinted on Quackwatch."]

2]  Milka is a public figure with a public FB profile (Monika's Entity) making her and her beliefs (homeopathy) fair game for critique.  As I have shown in my last entry, Claudia Cummings (whose FB profile is also public) claims to be Monika Milka of Monika's Entity.

For the most part if you are dealing with a "private" individual who has their privacy settings set as public, all content is considered public and shareable. This includes comments to the page. The legal standards of defamation and libel do hold.
"When you publish content or information using the Public setting, it means that you are allowing everyone, including people off of Facebook, to access and use that information, and to associate it with you (i.e., your name and profile picture)." [https://www.facebook.com/legal/terms, see 2.4]
Basically, "Also, lodging a DMCA take-down notice necessitates that the claimant is signing a legal document. If they sign that legal document, knowing that they are making a false claim, then, they are open to prosecution under the Criminal Code Act 1995. Ignorance of the law is not an excuse." (See below for citation)

As I do have friends in AU, refer to the Commonwealth Copyright Act 1968. This blog post lays out the details quite nicely if interested.

I mention this only because of what I have stated before, Milka does not like any criticism and makes veiled legal threats (example here of what she typically spreads) that hold no water.  Regretfully if one, such as Monika's Ghost has discovered, gets caught up in Milka's bullshit it can and is a PITA.  This is partly why I have again taken this up, the more voices the better.


3]  While I am aware of an imposter ME page, it is quite clear as to which page is the original and which is the imposter or Poe page.  As with celebrity figures, a business page is "verified" and that is readily seen when one visits the page.


4]  While her past legal issues are troublesome and appear resolved, it is the issue of a 2016 HCSCC statement that I am concerned with and I am awaiting clarification.
Legalities aside, as I am not one to determine whether Milka is following the law, lets look at some of what she is "sharing".
Up first, vaccines cause brain damage.
This notion is so vague it is difficult but centers around the belief that vaccines are neurotoxins.  The underlying premise, before vaccines autism was unheard of.  For brevity sake, that vagueness will remain.

There is no evidence that any currently recommended vaccine causes brain damage or other mental disorders in otherwise healthy children. Severe reactions do occur but are extremely rare.  (In essence, a cause-and-effect relationship cannot be determined: see for example here and here.)

From the Institute of Medicine, August 2011:
Vaccines offer the promise of protection against a variety of infectious diseases. Despite much media attention and strong opinions from many quarters, vaccines remain one of the greatest tools in the public health arsenal. Certainly, some vaccines result in adverse effects that must be acknowledged. But the latest evidence shows that few adverse effects are caused by the vaccines reviewed in this report.
Again, for the sake of keeping things short and simple, this 2013 study by DeStefano, et al   shows that  increasing exposure to the compounds found in vaccines does not raise the risk of autism spectrum disorders.

As usual with common AV tropes, this issue is much larger than a simple meme.  Something that is lost on an individual such as Milka.  It is not a black and white snapshot, but one with many nuances that ultimately comes out on the side of vaccines.  One must be willing to look at all the evidence, not just the echo chamber.


Although Monika's Ghost is also dealing with this posting as well, I thought I'd throw my two-cents in concerning the whole leaky gut bullshit.  If your gut is permeable, you got big problems - like inflammatory bowel disease, celiac disease, or Crohn's.



For those that have read my previous writings, I consider leaky gut (as used by modern day woowoodoctors) bullshit and here is why   [Crislip's section on culture specific syndromes is fascinating]

One caveat I will make, research concerning the entire gut biome and its many intricacies, is exceedingly important; I in no way want to present the idea that it is not.  What I am against is crap such as Milka presents; from David Avocado Wolfe no less.


Now I going to do some assuming.  I am too lazy to look into what this documentary is about and as with the gut biome, legitimate research must be done.  Like the leaky gut bullshit, what I am against what is called "stem cell tourism" which is a favorite of the bio-med crowd.  So I read with interest this article by David Gorski, not that this method of treatment would ever be available to myself as I am dirt poor.

What is irritating, Milka's assertion that "this looks amazing,,, someone is not going to like this very much".  Might it be the medical doctors and surgeons who have to try and "fix" the potential messes left by Rader.
Though it takes some time for the movie to reveal this, all of the patients it interviews are clients of a single Tijuana clinic run by William C. Rader, who has been stripped of his American medical license. Merola acknowledges the revocation, painting it as the result of a too-cautious establishment persecuting a medical innovator. But he ignores some of the claims against Rader, and when showing his background as a famous TV medical-expert-for-hire in the '70s and '80s, he doesn't tell us Rader's training was in psychiatry and his specialty was eating disorders. How, one wonders, does this qualify him to experiment with the building blocks of the human organism?
While I can personally understand the enthusiasm behind such treatment, (I would very much like to have the complete use of the right side of my body, the difficulty in speech and cognition fixed)  I would prefer it to be done by someone better qualified than an ex-pat, eating disorder specialist.  The hubris Milka embraces is galling and like Wakefield, who is embraced as a martyr of the AV crowd, we now have another ex doctor, stripped of his license to practice touting a miracle cure.  Milka in her ignorance, refuses to understand the pitfalls of such research and possible treatment.
Given that the traits that make stem cells so desirable as a regenerative treatment, their plasticity and immortality (ability to divide indefinitely), are shared with cancer, scientists doing legitimate stem cell research have always tried to take precautions to stop just this sort of thing from happening in clinical trials. Clearly, “stem cell tourist” clinics, which intentionally operate in countries where the regulatory environment is—shall we say?—less than rigorous are nowhere near as cautious, as they charge tens of thousands of dollars a pop for stem cell treatments that might or might not actually have real stem cells in them.
Sorry but not sorry, the Galileo Gambit just doesn't fly.  [I thought this article, noted by Gorski, interesting as it points out the prevalence of for profit, stem cell clinics in the US.]
The goal of stem cell advocates, including myself, is to find a regulatory sweet spot where science-based, innovative stem cell medicine can advance expeditiously. On the other side we have largely physicians and lawyers along with some patients arguing for drastically-reduced regulation and acceleration of for-profit stem cell interventions to patients, even without concrete data supporting safety or efficacy.

The latter group is a key part of a rapidly-proliferating stem cell clinic industry in the US. It consists of for-profit stem cell clinics that collectively have already conducted stem cell transplants on potentially thousands of patients without federal regulatory approval. These clinics have in effect thrown down the gauntlet to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) with their use of non-FDA approved stem cell products on patients.
And finally, there is this,

What can I say that I haven't already stated concerning the acid/alkaline fad.  Simply put, foods can influence our urine pH.  No, foods don’t influence our blood pH (overall body pH).
I honestly wonder if pseudoscience sellers deliberately find pieces of science that they can deliberately twist and take out of context in order to sell their products and ideas; or if they genuinely believe in their own intellectual dishonesty. Here for instance, the fact that the acidic microenvironment caused by cancer cells has been hypothesised to lead to more aggressive invasive behaviour during carcinogenesis (9); is used dishonestly in two ways. Firstly, to lead people to believe that their “acidic” body pH has caused them to develop cancer in the first place, and secondly, to believe that they will be able to create an alkaline environment in their body that will be unfavourable to cancer cells, causing them to grow more slowly or perish selectively, leaving healthy cells untouched.

Leaving aside the fact that results from in vitro experiments cannot just be translated to what occurs in a living organism; most studies on cancer cells are done in a medium with a pH of 7.2-7.4 (10) which is not acidic. The reason that these conditions are used is that this also conveniently happens to be very close to the pH of extracellular fluid (blood plasma, interstitial fluid) (11) experienced within the human body. The human body also conveniently has a number of mechanisms that ensure this pH does not go outside a very strict range (7.35-7.41) – if it does, the consequences are dire, as in, death. A blood pH level of 8.5 would be a very bad thing. Lets be honest- whether or not cancer cells can be killed by an extreme environment is irrelevant if the extreme environment is going to lead to the death of a patient. This is really no different from saying “Hey, I can destroy these cancer cells in this test tube with napalm. Who wants in?”.
You see Monika, it's not you per se, but what you "teach".  You espouse bullshit and pass it out like candy with no critical thinking what-so-ever.  Like Bill Maher you are a contrarian.  You are a spoiled, petulant child!


You distrust authority for authorities sake.  You can not or will not carry on a conversation with a dissenter without descending in to ad homs and name calling; a veiled "fucktard" being your choice word.

As Monika's Ghost has noted in her work, your education is from a now defunked school of dubious quality.  You where suckered and suckered good by the glare of "ancient" wisdom when the root of homeopathy has no basis in reality or modern science.  For homeopathy to work, it would have to bypass all known laws of physics and chemistry.  To say it is beyond those measurements or qualities, you have just relegated your practice to one of religion.

You have been asked time and again for peer reviewed material to back your claims and you have none to offer outside of some homeopathic journal.  That is no better than a Christian or Muslim apologist offering the Bible or Quran as proof of God.  What's worse, at the same time you present "your" supporting evidence, you reject all others and delete then ban them from commenting in the process.

PS.

As I was writing this piece up Milka shared another piece of derp, black salve:

I will  have more on that in another posting.

PSS.  For reference purposes, below is a listing of numerous articles and blog postings related to Monika Milka.
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