Tag: true

  • How true is the recurring claim that lemon peels cure cancer better than chemotherapy?

    How true is the recurring claim that lemon peels cure cancer better than chemotherapy?

    A recurring social media post on alternative medicine has claimed that lemon peels can eradicate toxic elements and miraculously kill cancer cells.

    Read about the lemon peel & it pains me to hear about these facts & proves that the drug companies would rather profit on our pains & suffering than educate us on alternative medicines & natural remedies,” reads the beginning of the long post which claims lemon peels are 10,000 times stronger than chemotherapy when treating cancer cells.

    In an emotion-ridden attempt to prove the authenticity of the claim, some part of the opening text in the post says, “feel sorry for those dead & gone that couldn’t afford or get hold of the chemo or whatever medicines they prescribe, and didn’t know about these facts, thank goodness for social media”.

    Claims on Facebook that lemon peels are a better cure for cancer than chemotherapy (Left, centre, right) (Source: Facebook)

    Facebook claim has been existing far back as 2012

    TheCable used CrowdTangle, an open-source investigation tool from Meta, and determined that the post has been on Facebook since December 2012. It was posted by a group named, Indians in Leicester with 1,000 followers and 996 likes. The page was created in July 2010. 

    Search results of Facebook posts with similar claims (Source: CrowdTangle)

    Checks by TheCable revealed that since 2012, the long post had been reposted frequently on several online platforms for about a decade.

    Search results of Facebook posts show the claim has been shared far back as 2010 (source: CrowdTangle)

    A copy of the post by annabarnes69, a biology graduate who introduced the post with the caption “cancer killer”, appeared on Instagram on July 12, 2022. It only received 16 likes.

    Same claims about lemon peels, shared by annabarnes69 on Instagram (source: Instagram)

    An extensive keyword tweet search revealed that the post was also shared on Twitter as far back as January 2018, by a user named Kwanele Asante, with the username @breastlessAfrik. According to the account bio, the user is a breast cancer survivor who has been declared NED – no evidence of disease, by her medical doctor. 

    The most recent appearance of the post on Twitter was published in March 2021.  

    Post sharing lemon peel as alternative medicine on Twitter (source: Twitter)

    Further online investigations led to a publication published in 2013 by Hope4Cancer, a non-governmental organization offering alternative therapy to strengthen and heal cancer patients. The report by Subrata Chakravarty, PhD, was titled “Lemons and Cancer: Is Lemon a Cancer Cure?”

    Excerpts from an article by Chakravarty on the benefits of lemons in curing cancer (source: hope4cancer.com)

    Are lemons 10,000 times more effective than chemotherapy in cancer treatment?

    Chakravarty is a researcher with dozens of peer-reviewed papers. He earned his M.S./PhD degrees from the Indian Agricultural Research Institute and completed a second PhD in medicinal chemistry from Stony Brook University in the United States.

    Chakravarty’s twenty-plus years of research involve the medicinal and computational design of potential drug candidates, including taxane chemotherapeutics and antiviral and also antithrombotic agents.

    His report highlights conflicting reports purporting that lemons can treat cancer.  However, their effectiveness is questionable. 

    The report admits that lemons and other citrus fruits contain cancer-fighting properties, but it is yet to be accurately determined how effective they are against specific types of cancer. 

    Aside from making a case for lemon extract and its capability to destroy some malignant cells, the alternative medicine platform points to some studies claiming that lemons can destroy cancer much more effectively than chemotherapy and more safely and healthily.

    However, Hope4Cancer disagrees that lemons are 10,000 times better than chemotherapy. The author could not find any authoritative scientific work that established that as a fact, adding that the statement is unscientific and unfounded.

    In 2015, the website added an editor’s note after being inundated with questions from readers asking if lemons can treat cancer. The footnote says the article only describes the health benefits of lemons and the fact that they could be an excellent addition to an anti-cancer diet.

    It further adds a disclaimer, discouraging cancer patients from using nutritional measures as the only tool against the disease. It distances itself from the frozen lemon treatment, adding that there is no such thing.  

    False claim makes it to India

    In India, the social media post was widely circulated on WhatsApp, the popular instant messaging app. 

    In 2022, at least two fact-checking platforms in India – Boomlive and Thehindu debunked the claim, tagging it false. Also, Vishvasnews, an Indian publication, ran the fact-check in 2019 and concluded that the claim was false.

    What do experts have to say?

    The National Academies, a non-profit institution that provides scientific advice on pressing world challenges, debunked the central claim in the circulating post in a report published in February 2019. 

    According to the report, the idea that lemons could treat cancer is mainly based on a molecule called limonene, usually found in the oil in lemon peels and other citrus fruits. It also mentioned that studies are ongoing to test the potency of limonene when treating cancer patients. However, the report says there is no consistent evidence that people with cancer who consume limonene either in supplement form or by eating citrus fruits get better or are more likely to be cured.

    TheCable spoke with Dapo Agunbiade, a medical doctor, to confirm if there is any recent research to reinforce the effect of lemon peel on cancer treatment.

    In his response, Agunbiade said, “in medicine, the dosage is everything”, adding that the dose-effect relationship of modified flavonoids in citrus peel is still under investigation.

    “There’s a difference between the effect of a citrus-peel extract on a tumour inside a petri-dish and the effect of that extract when introduced into a living human system,” he said.

    Osunsanya Olajumoke, a nutritionist and founder of Khairo Diet Clinic, told TheCable that many would have been cured of the disease if the claim that lemons cure cancer were true.

    The dietician also mentioned that a laboratory review and animal studies showed that D-limonene and a few other compounds found in lemon and other citrus peels kill mutated cells and prevent the growth of tumours. 

    She added that the antioxidants in lemon had been shown to boost immune cells, reduce the risk of cancer and enhance the body’s ability to fight off cancer. 

    However,  no clinical trial shows the effectiveness in humans or that these compounds are 10,000 stronger than chemotherapy. 

    Investigations reveal that the misleading claim must have emerged,  and is being strengthened by some ongoing studies suggesting that limonene can kill mutated cells and prevent the growth of tumours in laboratory dishes. 


    This article was produced with mentorship from the African Academy for Open Source Investigations (AAOSI), to tackle disinformation that undermines our democracies, as part of an initiative by the International Centre for Journalists (ICFJ) and Code for Africa (CfA). Visit https://disinfo.africa/ for more information.

  • COVID-19 funds may mask rural hospitals’ true outlook

    COVID-19 funds may mask rural hospitals’ true outlook

    By Clarissa Donnelly-DeRoven

    Between the start of the pandemic and February 2021, rural hospitals nationwide received nearly $15 billion in federal relief dollars, according to researchers at UNC’s Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research

    But while the money helped slow the pace of rural hospital closures and enabled these facilities to care for critically ill patients during COVID-19 surges, it did little to address the financial crises facing them before the pandemic. The temporary federal funding may in fact make many rural hospitals appear more financially stable than they really are, according to four different analyses of rural hospital finance data. 

    These unrelated analyses come from the Sheps Center, the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform, the Bipartisan Policy Center, and Chartis, a health care advisory group. 

    For instance, the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform – an independent center that does policy analysis – estimates that 13 of North Carolina’s 54 rural hospitals might be at risk of closing, nearly a quarter.

    While the exact numbers differ, the latter three studies estimate that hundreds of rural hospitals nationwide could be at risk of closure once the federal dollars stop flowing and hospital balance sheets return to normal. 

    What solutions exist?

    Some of the most common policy proposals offered to stem the tide of closures include expanding Medicaid, so hospitals care for fewer people without insurance, and eliminating Medicare sequestration — a payment policy whereby the federal government reimburses facilities either 98 or 99 percent of the actual cost of care, rather than the full 100 percent. 

    Many rural hospitals see more uninsured patients, more patients who are covered by Medicare or Medicaid, and fewer private insurance patients than urban hospitals do. Any changes to those federal programs can have a disproportionate impact on rural hospitals’ ability to stay financially afloat.

    “There is a lot of evidence about if you’ve expanded Medicaid, that it becomes a bigger source of revenue for these hospitals and helps sustain them,” said Julia Harris, a policy analyst at the Bipartisan Policy Center and co-author of the organization’s analysis about how the pandemic impacted rural hospitals

    “We’ve heard that from states that had expanded and had a lot of hospitals in trouble before,” she said. “They really felt that [Medicaid expansion] was a way that got a lot of their rural small hospital sites out of trouble.” 

    Brock Slabach, the director of the National Rural Health Association, worked for 20 years as the CEO of a rural Mississippi hospital. He estimated that between 13 and 15 percent of the people at his hospital had private insurance plans, meaning the other 85 percent had either Medicare, Medicaid, or no other payer but themselves. 

    “In my facility, 65 percent of my business was due to one payer and that’s Medicare,” Slabach said. In 2013, because members of Congress couldn’t agree on the budget, the federal government implemented automatic cuts to Medicare reimbursements through a policy called sequestration. The cuts have never been permanently resolved. 

    “Any impact that decreases my payment from that source inhibits my ability to maintain solvency as a hospital. So, when you look at sequestration, that’s the prime example.”

    The role of Medicare Advantage plans

    But, some experts disagree on the level of impact these changes could really have. 

    Harold Miller, the director of the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform and a professor of public policy at Carnegie Mellon, argues that while expanding Medicaid and eliminating sequestration would both be good policy changes for rural hospitals, neither would generate enough new funding to impact a facility’s bottom line. 

    “The people who are newly getting Medicaid are only a very small proportion of the thing that’s causing the hospital the loss,” Miller said. “That’s not the problem. The problem is [rural hospitals] actually in many cases are losing money on their privately insured patients.”

    Miller’s data show the situation in North Carolina is slightly more complicated than the nationwide trend. It is one of two states where small rural hospitals — meaning facilities with less than $30 million in annual expenses — did not see a decline in payments from private insurers between 2019 and 2020. 

    Nationally, though, Miller said small rural hospitals lose money caring for people with private insurance. This includes people who have Medicare Advantage plans.

    “Medicare Advantage started many, many years ago because of the notion that private health plans could do a better job of managing people’s health care than the government could,” Miller explained. “A Medicare Advantage plan is required to cover everything that traditional Medicare covers but it has the ability to charge different cost sharing amounts. It has the ability to have networks. It has the ability to do prior authorization.” 

    A chart from the researchers at the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform shows the change in margins between the two years calculated. They found that in every state except North Carolina and Pennsylvania small rural hospitals lost more money caring for patients with private health insurance plans between 2019 and 2020. Their analysis includes Medicare Advantage plans. Credit: Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform.

    In other words, it looks and acts more like a private health insurance plan than traditional Medicare does.

    Traditional Medicare covers 80 percent of costs for most services, potentially leaving a consumer on the hook for 20 percent. That 20 percent gets more expensive as people age and have more health problems. One way people on Medicare get around that cost is by purchasing a supplemental plan, which will cover the 20 percent. The supplemental plan comes with a monthly premium. 

    For seniors who don’t have any medical problems, any additional monthly cost can seem like an unnecessary expense, Miller explained. Instead, many will opt for Medicare Advantage plans that often don’t have any premium. But his analysis shows that in many states these plans — along with regular private insurance plans — don’t pay small rural hospitals enough to break even.

    An analysis by the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform shows that during the pandemic small rural hospitals lost more money caring for patients who had private insurance plans — including Medicare Advantage plans – than they did prior to the pandemic. Credit: Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform.

    “One of the concerns that I have personally about small rural hospitals is that people in their communities may increasingly be signing up for Medicare Advantage plans because they think they’re paying less for that and not realizing that they’re putting their hospital out of business,” he said. 

    Miller argues that in order to keep rural hospitals financially afloat, Medicare Advantage plans must be required to pay these facilities at higher rates.

    “It would be terrific to assume that we could require Medicare Advantage plans to pay providers more,” said Slabach, from the National Rural Health Association. 

    “But that’s a really complicated set of arrangements,” he said. “Congress could say that Medicare Advantage plans have to pay rural providers more. But I guess I’m not really sure if the government would ever do that because that implies that at some point, the government is going to have to pay more because eventually that’s where the money comes from.”

    A new payment model

    Even though the funds paid by private plans to rural hospitals look better on average in North Carolina than in the rest of the country, Miller argues that the financial systems supporting rural hospitals are so dysfunctional that they need to be fundamentally reimagined.

    In his organization’s analysis, they propose a payment structure whereby rural hospitals would receive a fixed payment that would be used to keep critical services up and running, such as the emergency room or a maternity ward, regardless of how much those facilities are used. In addition, as they do now, hospitals would receive regular reimbursements from insurers for the care they provide to people.

    “Emergencies vary from year to year: you have a COVID outbreak, you have a natural disaster, a hurricane, you have whatever. All of a sudden, a lot of people need the emergency room and it needs to be there,” Miller said. “In the years when you don’t have those disasters, it may not get enough revenue to cover its costs,” but still it needs to stay open. 

    Some say Miller’s model is similar to the new federally designated Rural Emergency Hospital policy, but he says it’s not quite the same. Under the proposal, Rural Emergency Hospitals would receive a fixed amount of funding to stay open and operate their emergency services, but they wouldn’t provide in-patient care, which Miller — and many others — feel are necessary services for community hospitals to offer.

    Federal regulators are still working on rules and guidance that would govern Rural Emergency Hospital policy, which goes into effect in 2023.

    Whatever you call it, said Mark Holmes, the director of the Sheps Center at UNC, a sustainable payment model for rural facilities will probably look something both like Miller’s proposal and the new Rural Emergency Hospital, with “some chunk of money paying for fixed costs and some chunk of money paying for variable costs.” 

  • Poor research practice suggests true impact of homeopathy may be ‘substantially’ overestimated

    Poor research practice suggests true impact of homeopathy may be ‘substantially’ overestimated

    homeopathy
    Credit score: CC0 Community Area

    Inadequate investigation apply indicates that the correct impression of homeopathy could be substantially overestimated, finds an assessment of the existing physique of evidence on the effectiveness of this sort of complementary medicine, posted on the net in BMJ Proof Primarily based Drugs.

    Several clinical trials haven’t been registered, with the main outcome modified in a quarter of individuals that have been. And quite a few stay unpublished. All this indicates “a about lack of scientific and ethical expectations in the field of homeopathy and a higher risk for reporting bias,” say the scientists.

    Homeopathy was created almost 200 several years in the past, primarily based on the theory of similarity (‘like cures like’). It remains a well known substitute to standard drugs in lots of designed international locations, inspite of its performance currently being the matter of intense debate.

    The examine authors required to uncover out if the released clinical trials may not depict all the scientific research on homeopathy, but a pick out couple of reporting only optimistic results–a phenomenon acknowledged as ‘reporting bias’.

    General public clinical trial registries ended up established up to attempt and reduce this danger, and considering that 2008, registration and publication of clinical trial benefits have been regarded as an ethical, even though not required, obligation for scientists.

    The examine authors as a result established out to: discover out how several registered trials evaluating homeopathy stay unpublished no matter whether the main results of registered trials mirror people basically printed as very well as the amount of homeopathy trials that experienced been both registered and posted.

    They also wanted to assess the impression of any reporting bias on the pooled info analysis of homeopathy demo outcomes, a research system developed to reinforce the evidence base.

    They searched major worldwide registries for clinical trials registered up to April 2019, and investigate databases to observe publication of these trials up to April 2021.

    They uncovered that considering the fact that 2002, virtually 38{fe463f59fb70c5c01486843be1d66c13e664ed3ae921464fa884afebcc0ffe6c} of registered homeopathy trials keep on being unpublished, even though about fifty percent (53{fe463f59fb70c5c01486843be1d66c13e664ed3ae921464fa884afebcc0ffe6c}) of revealed randomized controlled trials have not been registered. In all, approximately a third (30{fe463f59fb70c5c01486843be1d66c13e664ed3ae921464fa884afebcc0ffe6c}) of randomized controlled trials released for the duration of the previous 5 decades haven’t been registered.

    They also observed that homeopathy trials had been extra probable to be registered right after they had started (retrospectively) than just before they had started out (future registration). What is actually much more, a quarter (25{fe463f59fb70c5c01486843be1d66c13e664ed3ae921464fa884afebcc0ffe6c}) of revealed main outcomes were not the exact as those originally registered.

    The analyze authors then assessed the opportunity effect on scientific follow by independently pooling the data from unregistered and registered homeopathy trials. This uncovered that unregistered trials tended to report larger cure consequences.

    The examine authors accept that their lookups coated 17 trial registries, so it can be highly probably that they skipped information not lined by these registries. And they pooled the info from homeopathic treatment options that were not tailored to personal requirements, so the findings may not be applicable to customized cure.

    Nonetheless, the findings “recommend a relating to deficiency of scientific and moral expectations in the field of homeopathy and a substantial threat for reporting bias,” they create.

    And they “also reveal that journals publishing homeopathy trials do not adhere to policies by the [International Committee of Medical Journal Editors], which demand that only registered [randomized controlled trials] really should be published,” they incorporate.

    The inadequate research exercise they identified “probable has an effect on the validity of the body of evidence of homeopathic literature and may possibly significantly overestimate the accurate procedure effect of homeopathic therapies,” they conclude.


    Inadequate evidence to support use of homeopathy in livestock


    Extra info:
    Gerald Gartlehner et al, Evaluating the magnitude of reporting bias in trials of homeopathy: a cross-sectional review and meta-examination, BMJ Evidence-Based mostly Medication (2022). DOI: 10.1136/bmjebm-2021-111846

    Provided by
    British Health care Journal


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    Bad study observe indicates legitimate effect of homeopathy may well be ‘substantially’ overestimated (2022, March 16)
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