Month: January 2014
Preventing Tooth Decay in Kids: Fluoride and the Role of Non-Dentist Health Care Providers
The following post is a collaborative effort between myself and science-based dentist Grant Ritchey DDS. Dr. Ritchey is a co-host of the always excellent The Prism Podcast, most recently interviewing Dr. Robert Weyant and discussing how to teach critical thinking to dental and medical students. He can also be found on Twitter at @SkepticalDDS. Dr. Ritchey has written for SBM before on...
The New Cough and Cold Products for Children: Evidence is Optional and Science is Marketing
It’s the time of year where if you’re not sick, someone you know probably is. The influenza season in the Northern hemisphere started out slowly, but seems to be accelerating and hasn’t peaked yet. Add that to cold viruses circulating, and you get the peak purchasing period for cough and cold remedies. John Snyder gave a nice summary of the evidence base...
Quantum Snake Oil – A Primer
Let’s conduct a little thought experiment. First, for the sake of this thought experiment let’s assume that you have no morals, ethics, or conscience. You are comfortable lying to people, even if they are sick, and even if it will harm their health. Your task is to get as many people as possible to believe that small bits of plastic can improve...
Tribalism and Medical Ethics
Science is intended to discover the “is”, not the “ought;” facts, not values. Science can’t tell us whether an action is moral; it can only provide evidence to help inform moral decisions. For instance, some people who believe abortion is immoral reject birth control methods that prevent implantation of a fertilized ovum on the grounds that it constitutes abortion; science can determine...
Placebo effects are not the “power of positive thinking”
Here we go again. I once said that, in the wake of study after study that fails to find activity of various “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) beyond that of placebo, CAM advocates are now in the midst of a “rebranding” campaign in which CAM is said to work through the “power of placebo.” Personally, I’ve argued that in reality this new...
Even in 2014, influenza kills
I don’t think it can be repeated too many times during flu season: People can die of the flu. The flu vaccine is one of the two vaccines most easily demonized by the antivaccine movement. The first, of course, is Gardasil (or Cervarix), the vaccine against HPV. The reason why Gardasil is so easily demonized is because it protects against an infection...
Acupuncture Whac-a-Mole ™
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. – George Santayana Most people don’t have that willingness to break bad habits. They have a lot of excuses and they continue to produce bad clinical studies. – Carlos Santana (Well, not the last 4 words.) One is a guitar player, one is a philosopher. I get them confused. I think...
2013 Legislative Review: placenta take out
It’s official in Oregon now. You can take your placenta, along with your new baby, home from the hospital. This was already a practice among the CAM set but apparently new mothers were running afoul of laws designed to protect us from bio-hazards. New legislation exempts “the removal from a health care facility . . . of a placenta by a postpartum...
The Limits of Neuroplasticity
I am daily annoyed by overhyped headlines reporting medical and other science news. I think news outlets and the public would be better served if they fired all their headline writers and let the authors and editors craft headlines that actually reflect the story. Of course, often the story is overhyped as well, so this would not be a panacea to annoying...
Vitamin E for Alzheimer’s
Recently you may have seen headlines like “Vitamin E slows decline in patients with mild Alzheimer’s” or “There’s still no cure for Alzheimer’s disease, but the latest hope for slowing its progression is already on drugstore shelves.” They were referring to an article in the January 1, 2014 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) announcing the results of...