Month: April 2016
Acupuncture does not work for menopause: A tale of two acupuncture studies
Arguably, one of the most popular forms of so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) being “integrated” with real medicine by those who label their specialty “integrative medicine” is acupuncture. It’s particularly popular in academic medical centers as a subject of what I like to refer to as “quackademic medicine“; that is, the study of pseudoscience and quackery as though it were real...
Chiropractic- Ignoring the Precautionary Principle Since 1895
Bleh. I turned from a short trip to the city of angles with a bad man cold that just isn’t going away. Those who do primary care all tell me that whatever is going around lasts 2-3 weeks. Great. I am not sick enough to get out of work but I am not well enough to have any enthusiasm to do anything....
Academic Consortium plan: force medical residents to practice integrative medicine
“Integrative medicine” (IM) is an ideological movement within medicine driven in large part by those whose livelihoods depend on its continued existence. This includes both those with positions in academic medicine and individual practitioners who use the IM brand to attract patients. Despite IM and its antecedents (alternative, complementary, alternative and complementary, complementary and integrative) having been around for about a quarter...
Beetroots Don’t Cure Cancer
Alternative medicine, like all good marketing, is largely about creating a narrative. Once you have sold people on the narrative, products essentially market themselves. That narrative has been evolving for literally centuries, although it seems to have accelerated with the advent of mass media and now the internet. It is optimized to push emotional buttons in order to sell products. There are...
Cervicogenic Headache and Cervical Spine Manipulation
NOTE: Today we offer a double feature on the treatment of cervicogenic headache: this post and Dr. Harriet Hall’s post, “When Headaches Are a Pain in the Neck: Spinal Manipulation vs. Mobilization for Cervicogenic Headache.” They complement each other, as well as Dr. Hall’s post from last week on the possible risk of stroke with neck manipulation. A cervicogenic headache has been...
When Headaches Are a Pain in the Neck: Spinal Manipulation vs. Mobilization for Cervicogenic Headache
NOTE: Today we offer a double feature on the treatment of cervicogenic headache. My article is about a study that compared manipulation to mobilization; it is followed by retired chiropractor Sam Homola’s guest article on manipulation for cervicogenic headache. The two posts complement each other and also complement my post from last week on the possible risk of stroke with neck manipulation....
Functional medicine: The ultimate misnomer in the world of integrative medicine
Functional medicine. It sounds so...scientific and reasonable. It's anything but. In fact, functional medicine combines the worst features of conventional medicine with a heapin' helpin' of quackery.
Science-Based Satire: Hiring a Doula for Dental Procedures
Suzy Flanders had always dreamed of having a natural tooth extraction without pain medications, sedation, or local anesthesia, just like in the Bible or on an episode of Keeping Up With Kardashians. “When the day finally came on April 1st 2011, and my dentist recommended the removal of an impacted third molar, I almost couldn’t believe it,” Flanders explained. “After reading everything...
Statins for everyone? Not so fast.
People love the idea of preventive medicine. Preventing a disease, before it occurs, seems intuitively obvious. But when it comes to taking medicine to prevent a disease before it occurs, people tend to be much less comfortable. Not only are there the concerns about the “medicalization” of healthy people, there are good questions about benefits, risks, and costs. Cardiovascular disease will kill...
Chronic Lyme Disease – Another Negative Study
While Lyme disease itself is a real and often serious infectious illness, the existence and proper treatment of so-called chronic Lyme disease is dubious, and some would say controversial. However, like many controversies we cover, the science itself is not very controversial, but the topic is made so by a persistent minority of outliers who refuse to accept the scientific consensus. The...