Month: April 2010
Outbreaks
There have been, in the last 20 years, natural, or perhaps unnatural, experiments that have helped shed light on the efficacy of vaccines. Many societies, for reason of political unrest, religion, or a lack of understanding of science and medicine have seen the rates of vaccination decline and, with that decline, an increase in the cases of vaccine-preventable diseases. Infectious disease spread...
CAM on campus: Ethics
In a previous post I described a lecture given by a faculty member to first-year medical students on my campus introducing us to integrative medicine (IM). Here I describe his lecture to the second-year class on legal and ethical aspects of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). Dr. P began his lecture by describing CAM using the now-familiar NCCAM classification. He gave the...
Looking for quackademic medicine in all the wrong places
One advantage of having a blog is that I can sometimes tap into the knowledge of my readers to help me out. As many readers know, a few of the SBM bloggers (myself included) will be appearing at the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism (NECSS) on Saturday, April 17. Since the topic of our panel discussion is going to be the...
Our Visit with NCCAM
Over the past two plus years of the existence of Science-Based Medicine (SBM) we have been highly critical of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) – going so far as to call for it to be abolished. We are collectively concerned that the NCCAM primarily serves as a means for promoting unscientific medicine, and any useful research it funds...
Taking Control of Death
Science isn’t the only game in town. Literature can teach us things about the world that science can’t. It can give us vicarious experience and insight into other minds. Two recently published novels illuminate why perfectly rational people might reject the help of scientific medicine and prefer to die a little sooner but to die on their own terms.
The continuum of surgical research in science-based medicine
Editor’s note: Three members of the SBM blogging crew had a…very interesting meeting on Friday, one none of us expected, the details of which will be reported later this week–meaning you’d better keep reading this week if you want to find out. (Hint, hint.) However, what that means is that I was away Thursday and Friday; between the trip and the various...
Our fearless leader Steve Novella gets the best responses to his posts!
You may recall that Steve has been criticizing a certain homeopath named John Benneth for his incredible flights of–shall we say?–fancy used in defending homeopathy. As a result, Mr. Benneth (whose website is called The Science of Homeopathy) has produced a series of amazing videos that he’s posted on YouTube. Although we have a very serious mission here at SBM, we are...
Mercola, Gardasil, and Toyota?
Joseph Mercola, D.O. should be well known to readers of SBM for reflexively opposing science-based medicine while providing an endless stream of misinformation on his blog, advocating detoxification, homeopathy, the tapping of meridians chiropractic and more at his clinic, and peddling a treasure trove of vitamin supplements, foods, and Mercola-endorsed devices (on sale at his site for your convenience, no conflict of...
My NCCAM Wish List
For a number of reasons, well-argued many times here on SBM, it would be beneficial to American citizens if the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) were abolished. This does not seem to be in the cards anytime soon. Here, then, are my suggestions for making the Center less dangerous and less of a marketing tool for pseudomedicine than it...
Cartoon: The Omnipresence Of Pharma Advertising
Happy April Fool’s Day everyone. Here’s a cartoon that I made a few years back… Enjoy!