Month: March 2010

An update on our search for new SBM bloggers

Three and a half weeks ago, Amy Tuteur announced her departure from SBM. Three weeks ago, I announced that we were recruiting new bloggers to replace Amy, to bolster areas of weakness among our bloggers, and expand our repertoire. I thank those of you who have responded. Given that none of you have heard anything from us other than perhaps an acknowledgment...

/ March 22, 2010

J.B. Handley and the anti-vaccine movement: Gloating over the decline in confidence in vaccines among parents

UPDATE, 4/25/2011: I can’t resist pointing you to a hilariously misguided attack against me that proves once again that, for the anti-vaccine activists, it’s all about the ad hominem. Clifford Miller, a.k.a. ChildHealthSafety, was unhappy that I showed up in the comments of Seth Mnookin’s post complaining about J.B. Handley’s attacking him solely based on his having once been a heroin addict,...

/ March 22, 2010

KA at Boston Skeptics in the Pub March 29

Yers truly will speak at Tommy Doyle’s, Harvard Square, Cambridge. 7:00 PM on March 29. Title: Implausible Health Claims and Human Studies Ethics: A Collision Course Description: A broad international consensus regarding protections for subjects in human trials emerged during the 2nd half of the 20th century. It can be summarized in several tenets, most of which pertain explicitly or implicitly to scientific...

/ March 21, 2010

The Evolving Science and Guidelines of CPR

Pearl of wisdom for the day: If given the option, don’t let your heart stop.  Very Bad Things soon follow if your heart stops. In spite of what the entertainment industry would have you believe, it is extremely difficult to save the life of someone in cardiac arrest.  A few random breaths, slow rocking chest compressions, even the ever-so-dramatic overhand blow to...

/ March 19, 2010

Mainstream Media’s Sub-Par Health Coverage, Part 2

I recently wrote about an experience that I had with a reporter (Erica Mitrano) who interviewed me about energy healing at Calvert Memorial Hospital in southern Maryland. Erica was very friendly and inquisitive, and we had a nice conversation about the lack of scientific evidence supporting any energy healing modality. I thought it would be fun to post what we had discussed at SBM,...

/ March 18, 2010

How bad can health reporting get?

A couple of years ago, a number of us raised concerns about an “investigative reporter” at a Detroit television station.  At the time I noted that investigative reporters serve an important role in a democracy, but that they can also do great harm, as when Channel 7’s Steve Wilson parroted the talking points of the anti-vaccine movement.  Wilson has since been canned...

/ March 17, 2010

Diagnosis, Therapy and Evidence

When Dr. Novella recently wrote about plausibility in science-based medicine, one of our most assiduous commenters, Daedalus2u, added a very important point. The data are always right, but the explanations may be wrong. The idea of treating ulcers with antibiotics was not incompatible with any of the data about ulcers; it was only incompatible with the idea that ulcers were caused by...

/ March 16, 2010

Is there a role for speculative journals like Medical Hypotheses in the scientific literature?

The core information supporting science-based medicine resides in the scientific literature. There, scientists and physicians publish the results of experiments and clinical trials that seek to understand the biological mechanisms by which the human body functions and through which disease forms and to apply this understanding to test new treatments for diease. Consequently, the quality and integrity of the biomedical literature are...

/ March 15, 2010

Just the Facts

Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please. —Mark Twain There is an educational approach to becoming a doctor. It involves learning massive amounts of basic science, followed by massive amounts of pathophysiology, which barely prepares you for the clinical years of the last half of medical school and subsequent residency, with the massive knowledge...

/ March 12, 2010

CAM on campus: Integrative Medicine

My previous posts have described guest lecturers at my medical school campus, invited by a student interest group in CAM. Those events continue; currently ongoing is an 8-weekend certification course in Ayurveda for the subsidized cost of $1500 (includes “tuition, syllabus, and personal guru”). I could pick on this student group, but what’s the point? There will always be medical students who...

/ March 11, 2010