Skeptical Raptor

>In the bottom comment I provided links to resources dealing with food toxicity.

You just provided general resources about food and nutrition (based on the links I'm familiar with -- others could be pseudo-science). Give some specific excerpts about "toxins" and we can discuss them.

All food has side effects (e.g. too much sugar and diabetes, micro-allergies, cured meat and cancer, etc). This is not the same as some unspecified BS "toxins".

It also has nothing to do with "I eat less calories and I get fatter compared to eating more" which was the original claim we disputed -- which is absolutely incorrect.

http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/the-detox-scam/

http://www.skepticalraptor.com/skepticalraptorblog.php/colon-detoxification-myth-vs-science/

https://sciencebasedpharmacy.wordpress.com/2013/01/04/the-detox-delusion/

http://firstwefeast.com/eat/2014/12/sorry-but-theres-no-such-thing-as-a-detox

http://www.livescience.com/34845-detox-cleansing-facts-fallacies.html

https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-detox-scam-how-to-spot-it-and-how-to-avoid-it/

http://skepdic.com/detox.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detoxification_(alternative_medicine)

Some time back I came across these articles..

https://sciencewithdrdoug.com/2020/11/27/will-an-rna-vaccine-permanently-alter-my-dna/

https://sciencewithdrdoug.com/2021/02/15/breaking-study-sheds-more-light-on-whether-an-rna-vaccine-can-permanently-alter-dna/

I tried to find some "debunking" articles, but so far I could only find [1] which does not appear to do a good job of responding to the concerns raised in the article, and just reiterate what has been said already.

It also appears that similar question has been asked in Quora and there are people there that concludes.

>So is it theoretically possible to integrate the mRNA vaccine, but we know such integrations are extremely rare events. This is like worrying that a meteor will fall on your head and kill you - possible but so unlikely r we can ignore it.

[1] https://www.skepticalraptor.com/skepticalraptorblog.php/doug-corrigan-pushing-bad-science-and-anti-vax-tropes-about-mrna-vaccines/

[2] https://www.quora.com/Re-COVID-MRNA-Vaccines-knowing-that-the-human-body-contains-reverse-transcriptase-how-do-we-know-that-consequent-changes-to-our-DNA-are-not-possible

From what I know, there's no sure way of diagnosing Chronic Lyme. There is no real proof that it exist. That doesn't mean that the symptoms attributed to Chronic Lyme doesn't exist.

http://www.skepticalraptor.com/skepticalraptorblog.php/chronic-lyme-disease-myth-reviewing-the-evidence/

Now, attributing any symptoms like this to hypochondria should of course only be done by a licenced medical doctor. However I also think that there is a great deal of misunderstanding about hypochondria. I believe that hypochondria is quite akin to synesthesia. It's not really by choice as it affects the perception. Emotional or mental states feed back into the perception in a way that can't be distinguished from "real" perceptions. The pain is felt, not "imagined". But triggered in an unconscious way by the imagination. It might be an evolutionary artefact from developing ways to identify bodily problems in moments of distress. And when the cause of the distress is hard to identify it is attributed to something close by.

> This is a classic example of poor scientific journalism and I believe it became so popular due to widespread deficits in scientific literacy. You don’t have to be a neuroscientist to see that there are huge problems with his story. You simply have view this story objectively have a healthy dose of skepticism without quickly deferring to the authority figure. There are simple questions which are never addressed here. What experiment was being done during each PET scan? If the psychopaths and Dr. Fallon were both completing a morality task and they both had low activity in certain regions, THEN that would be something more tangible. This is simply showing a brain picture and not asking questions. We know that people are much more likely to believe something if there is a brain picture associated with it and this is further proof.

-- http://www.skepticalraptor.com/skepticalraptorblog.php/pseudoscience-psychopathy/

It's also extremely suspect that a completely irrelevant measure ("hypocampus shape") was selected for this correlation rather than memory function.

In the absence of a randomized trial, the dose-response relationship is one of the most important tools available for teasing out causality. If you can't show that increased dose strongly correlates with increased response, you likely are looking at population variables, not drug/lifestyle effects.

It turns out that almost everything that gets people's hands wringing from fatty foods to chemicals with complicated names have almost flat dose-response curves. The ones that stand out as having strong dose-response curves are alcohol and especially smoking, which meets all of the causal criteria you want to see in a correlative relationship: http://www.skepticalraptor.com/skepticalraptorblog.php/correlation-does-not-imply-causation-except-when-it-does/

You linked a crap paper published in some open access journal. It was written by anti-vaxers with little or no research credentials.

http://www.skepticalraptor.com/skepticalraptorblog.php/antivaccination-cults-idea-constitutes-peer-reviewed/

In addition to impugning the credibility of the authors (which maybe we can wave our hands in the air and say isn't fair), that blag says silly things like this:

For example, for the Verstraeten study, the Geiers reference an article that is more of a summary, and complain that it shows no data. In fact, the real Verstraeten study, published in Pediatrics, included all of the data. The Geiers absolutely cherry-picked a short summary of the Verstraeten study rather than examining the fully published article.