Month: January 2014

Announcing the Society for Science-Based Medicine

We are proud to announce a new organization: The Society for Science-Based Medicine. A Society for a community of like-minded individuals, both in and out of health care, who support the goals of Science-Based Medicine. People should not suffer, die, go bankrupt, and lose time and hope because of complementary and alternative pseudo-medicine.

/ January 6, 2014

Expanding the scope of practice of advanced practice nurses will not endanger patients

One of my New Year’s resolutions for 2014 for the blog, besides looking for talented bloggers to add to our pool of awesome bloggers, was to try to look at areas of science-based medicine that we don’t often cover (or haven’t covered before), such as the delivery of health care. Fear not, I’ll certainly do enough posts on the usual topics, but...

/ January 6, 2014

Corporal Punishment in the Home: Parenting Tool or Parenting Fail…

One of the most commonly practiced strategies used by parents to alter long term behavior of their children is corporal punishment, commonly referred to as spanking. But use of the term spanking is problematic in that how caregivers interpret it varies widely, and there is frequent overlap with what pediatricians consider to be abuse. Despite a great deal of evidence showing that...

/ January 3, 2014

The Detox Scam: How to spot it, and how to avoid it

Note to SBM’s regular readers: Today’s post revisits some older material you may have seen before. Happy New Year! New Year, New You, right? 2014 is the year you’re finally going to get serious about your health. You’re winding down from a week (or more) of celebrations and parties. You’re pretty much recovered from New Year’s Eve by now. It’s time to...

/ January 2, 2014

Facebook’s reporting algorithm abused by antivaccinationists to silence pro-science advocates

This is not what I had wanted to write about for my first post of 2014, but unfortunately it’s necessary—so much so, in fact, that I felt the obligation to crosspost both here and on my not-so-super-secret other blog in order to get this information out to as wide a readership as possible. I’ve always had a bit of a love-hate relationship...

/ January 2, 2014

Reverse Ageing Hype

There are a number of annoying clichés of science reporting, prime among them being the need to make a connection from any research to a specific application. It must be deeply embedded in the journalism culture, or written in a handbook somewhere. In medicine this means that any study that involves viruses or the immune system’s ability to fight off infection might...

/ January 1, 2014