As I mentioned in my March 4 2017 post, Dr. Michal Heger, University of Amsterdam, wrote a strong rebuttal to the “Essential Medicinal Chemistry of Curcumin” review, which was recently published in the journal “Nature.”

Interestingly, Dr. Heger and I, independently from each other, wrote our rebuttals based mainly on the fact that the review authors hadn’t looked at (or worse, had ignored) all the PubMed curcumin clinical trial results. If they had only checked out PubMed, which wouldn’t have been all THAT difficult, they would have found evidence negating their theory…

But in that case, they couldn’t have written anything so  negative, right?

Bleah.

I left Dr. Heger a comment on his March 4 Facebook post (on this topic, of course), and he replied, although. for some odd reason, I didn’t read his reply until yesterday. Anyway, here is the pertinent part of his reply: “That piece in the JMC deserved a scolding rebuttal, particularly since it was replete with alternative facts and had broad international implications. Our as well as your ‘quarantine’ of the fallout was therefore warranted.”

Alternative facts, indeed. Lately, we seem to be surrounded by lots of “alternative facts”……

At this point, I might as well announce that, based on the fact that Dr. Heger and I had the same reactions to this review, which was clearly biased and incomplete (on purpose, it seems), I have decided not to waste any more of my time on it. I am putting it aside, at least for now, and focusing instead on other, more important things…such as feeding and watching the birds hopping around the daisies in full bloom now in my backyard, preparing exams for my students, and most of all, as of a few days ago (see my polydatin post), getting into more research…I have already found some interesting stuff to write about…I just need to get to work…

PubMed, darling, here I come!

Margaret’s back!  😎