Month: February 2011
Randi issues a challenge
James Randi has issued a challenge to retailers based on the 10:23 campaign to demonstrate homeopathy is nonsense.
Of SBM and EBM Redux. Part IV: More Cochrane and a little Bayes
NB: This is a partial posting; I was up all night ‘on-call’ and too tired to continue. I’ll post the rest of the essay later… Review This is the fourth and final part of a series-within-a-series* inspired by statistician Steve Simon. Professor Simon had challenged the view, held by several bloggers here at SBM, that Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) has been mostly inadequate...
Complementary and alternative medicine in hospice care
A number of news outlets (e.g. Bloomberg Business Week, MSN.Com, US News, etc) have recently reported that use of complementary and alternative therapies (CAT) is widespread in hospice care facilities. This is based on a report from the Centers for Disease Control, Complementary and Alternative Therapies in Hospice: The National Home and Hospice Care Survey, Untied States, 2007. According to most news...
Dr. Mehmet Oz completes his journey to the Dark Side
A couple of weeks ago, both Steve Novella and I criticized Dr. Mehmet Oz (a.k.a. “America’s doctor”) for not only hosting a man I consider to be a major supporter of quackery, but going far beyond that to defend and promote him. After that, I considered Dr. Oz to be a lost cause, with nothing to excuse him for his having embraced...
The Safety Checklist
During my recent stint covering the Neuro ICU I noticed for the first time a checklist posted above each patient bed. The checklist covered the steps to undergo whenever performing an invasive procedure on the patient. I was glad to see that the checklist phenomenon had penetrated my hospital, although the implementation of safety checklists is far from complete. A recent study...
Dr. Paul Offit appears on The Colbert Report
For a touch of the lighter side, here’s Dr. Paul Offit appearing on The Colbert Report to discuss his new book: The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c Paul Offit www.colbertnation.com Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive Looks like a win to me. I particularly like how Dr. Offit says that the question of whether...
Overdiagnosis
Dr. H. Gilbert Welch has written a new book Over-diagnosed: Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health, with co-authors Lisa Schwartz and Steven Woloshin. It identifies a serious problem, debunks medical misconceptions and contains words of wisdom. We are healthier, but we are increasingly being told we are sick. We are labeled with diagnoses that may not mean anything to our health....