Year: 2011
Legislative Alchemy III: Acupuncture
Acupuncture is typically depicted as sticking needles at various points on the body prescribed (inconsistently, it turns out) by charts indicating purported “meridians” through which “qi” flows in the human, or animal, body. However, from one of the many SBM posts on acupuncture, this one by Dr. Novella , we in fact know that: the consensus of the best clinical studies on...
Statistical Errors in Mainstream Journals
While we frequently on SBM target the worst abuses of science in medicine, it’s important to recognize that doing rigorous science is complex and mainstream scientists often fall short of the ideal. In fact, one of the advantages of exploring pseudoscience in medicine is developing a sensitive detector for errors in logic, method, and analysis. Many of the errors we point out...
Artificial Sweeteners: Is Aspartame Safe?
Note: This was originally published as a “SkepDoc” column in Skeptic magazine under the title “Aspartame: Safe Sweetener or Perilous Poison?” and is reprinted here with the kind permission of Michael Shermer. There are other artificial sweeteners not specifically addressed here, but as far as I know there are no convincing health concerns about any of them, just this same kind of...
The wrong way to “open up” clinical trials
Science-based medicine rests on twin pillars that are utterly essential to the development of treatments that are safe and efficacious. Both of these pillars depend on science, but in different ways. The first of these is, of course, the basic science that provides the hypotheses to test about the mechanisms behind the diseases and malfunctions that plague the human body. This basic...
Understanding and Treating Colic
Parenting an infant can be totally overwhelming. One of the earliest challenge many face is learning to deal with periods of intractable crying. I often speak with sleep deprived parents when they’re looking for something — anything — to stop their baby from crying. They’ve typically been told by friends of family that their baby must have “colic” and they’ve come to...
Does Weight Matter?
Determining the net health effects of independent factors can be tricky, especially when those factors cannot be controlled for in experimental studies. For things like body mass index (BMI) we must rely on observational data and triangulate with multiple studies to isolate the contributions from BMI. But it can be done. The data, however, are likely to be complex and noisy, and...
Benedetti on Placebos
There has been an ongoing debate about placebos on SBM, both in the articles and in the comments. What does it mean that a treatment has been shown to be “no better than placebo?” If our goal is for patients to feel better and they feel better with placebos, why not prescribe them? Do placebos actually do anything useful? What can science...
Andrew Weil and “integrative medicine”: The ultimate triumph of quackery?
A board certification in woo? I’ve been harshly critical of the entire concept of “integrative medicine” (IM), which has over the last few years nearly supplanted the former term used for non-science-based medicine or medicine based on prescientific ideas represented as though it were scientific medicine, “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM). Indeed, just last week I pointed out how IM is far...
Recycle
Like most people who grew up after April 22, 1970, I think it is important to be as environmentally responsible as possible. Like many I fail miserably much of the time, but at least I feel guilty about it. Recycling offers the opportunity to feel good about my environmental impact with little effort, since the garbage collection infrastructure in Portland makes recycling...
Legislative Alchemy II: Chiropractic
As we learned in Legislative Alchemy I: Naturopathy, legislative alchemy is the process used by state legislatures to transform implausible and unproven diagnostic methods and treatments into legal health care practices. Today, we review how chiropractors are faring in the 2011 state legislative sessions. Chiropractic 101 In 1895, a self-described “magnetic healer,” Daniel David Palmer, claimed to have discovered that every person...