The NIH funding process according to John Ioannidis: “Conformity” and “mediocrity”?
John Ioannidis published a paper that concluded that the NIH study section process prioritizes "safe" science and "conformity." Is he correct, or is this an exaggeration that uses a view of science that "brave mavericks" advance science far more rapidly than teams collaborating to make incremental progress?
Now that Burzynski has gotten off in 2012, Burzynski The Movie will spawn a sequel in 2013
About a year ago, I became interested in a physician named Stanislaw Burzynski who has been treating cancer with compounds that he calls “antineoplastons” for over three decades without, in my opinion, ever having ever produced any compelling evidence that antineoplastons have significant anticancer activity. Although I had been vaguely aware of Burzynski and his activities, it was the first time that...
A holiday round in the mammography debate
There are times when the best-laid blogging plans of mice and men often go awry, and this isn’t always a bad thing. As the day on which so many Americans indulge in mass consumption of tryptophan-laden meat in order to give thanks approached, I had tentatively planned on doing an update on Stanislaw Burzynski, given that he appears to have slithered away...
Getting NCCAM’s money’s worth: Some results of NCCAM-funded studies of homeopathy
As hard as it is to believe, the Science-Based Medicine blog that you’re so eagerly reading is fast approaching its fifth anniversary of existence. The very first post here was a statement of purpose by Steve Novella on January 1, 2008, and my very first post was a somewhat rambling introduction that in retrospect is mildly embarrassing to me. It is what...
“Moneyball,” the 2012 election, and science- and evidence-based medicine
Regular readers of my other blog probably know that I’m into more than just science, skepticism, and promoting science-based medicine (SBM). I’m also into science fiction, computers, and baseball, not to mention politics (at least more than average). That’s why our recent election, coming as it did hot on the heels of the World Series in which my beloved Detroit Tigers utterly...
The result of the Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy (TACT): As underwhelming as expected
Chelation therapy. It’s one of the most common quackeries out there, used by a wide variety of practitioners for a wide variety of ailments blamed on “heavy metal toxicity.” Chelation therapy, which involves using chemicals that can bind to the metal ions and allow them to be excreted by the kidneys, is actually standard therapy for certain types of acute heavy metal...
The American Medical Student Association: On “integrating” quackery with science-based medicine
There’s a saying in medicine that we frequently hear when a newer, more effective therapy supplants an older therapy or an existing therapy is shown not to be as efficacious as was once thought, and it has to do about how long it takes for the use of that therapy to decline. The saying basically says that the therapy won’t die out...
Mortality and lack of health insurance
The 2012 election campaign is in full swing, and, for better or worse, health care is one of the major defining issues of the election. How can it not be, given the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), also colloquially known as “Obamacare,” was one of the Obama administration’s major accomplishments and arguably the largest remaking of the...
The antivaccine lie that just won’t die: The claim that shaken baby syndrome is really due to “vaccine injury”
One of the vilest ideas that antivaxers promote is the claim that shaken baby syndrome is in reality a "misdiagnosis" for vaccine injury. Come down the rabbit hole with me and see just how low antivaxers will go to promote this idea and use it to try to exonerate child abusers.
Mouse “avatars”: New predictors of response to chemotherapy?
Over the years, I’ve written a lot about “personalized medicine, mainly in the context of how the breakthroughs in genomic medicine and data pouring in from the Cancer Genome Atlas is providing the raw information necessary for developing truly personalized cancer therapy. The problem, of course, is analyzing it and figuring out how to apply it. Another problem, of course, is developing...