Survey says, “Hop on the bandwagon of ‘integrative medicine’!”
A Brief Clinical Vignette In researching this post, I found an article published nearly two years ago in The Hospitalist entitled Growth Spurt: Complementary and alternative medicine use doubles, which began with this anecdote: Despite intravenous medication, a young boy in status epilepticus had the pediatric ICU team at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison stumped....
Chemotherapy doesn’t work? Not so fast…
A favorite claim made by cancer quacks (and quacks of all varieties, actually) is that chemotherapy doesn't work. One variant of this claim is what I call the "2% gambit." Basically, this gambit claims that chemotherapy is only 2% effective. Not surprisingly, the evidence backing up the "2% gambit" is a highly flawed study, as is the evidence used by quacks to...
Quoth the anti-vaccine group SANE Vax: Beware HPV DNA in Gardasil!
Every so often, there’s a bit of misinformation that starts spreading around the Internet that shows up in enough places that our readers take notice and e-mail us about it. What happens is that these in essence become “requests.” We at SBM are, of course, happy to consider all requests and sometimes will actually take them on, particularly when doing so will...
Seven Deadly Medical Hypotheses revisited
Back in February, Mark Crislip and I both deconstructed an article written by Dr. Reynold Spector that appeared in the March/April issue of Skeptical Inquirer (SI), the flagship publication for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI). The article was entitled Seven Deadly Medical Hypotheses, and, contrary to the usual standard of articles published in SI, it used a panoply of spin, bad...
The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario’s muddled draft policy on “non-allopathic” medicine
Detroit is my hometown, and three and a half years ago, after nearly twenty years away wandering between residency, graduate school, fellowship, and my first academic job, I found myself back in Detroit minted as surgical faculty at Wayne State University and practicing and doing research at the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute. One thing that I had forgotten about while I...
“Integrative medicine”: A brand, not a specialty
Back in the mists of time, what used to be considered quackery became "alternative medicine." Thus began the rebranding. The latest iteration is "integrative medicine," which advocates the "integration" of quackery with science-based medicine, which it portrays as the "best of both worlds." It's been a very effective campaign, unfortunately.
Revisiting Daniel Moerman and “placebo effects”
About three weeks ago, ironically enough, right around the time of TAM 9, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) inadvertently provided us in the form of a new study on asthma and placebo effects not only material for our discussion panel on placebo effects but material for multiple posts, including one by me, one by Kimball Atwood, and one by Peter...
Answering another criticism of science-based medicine
In the three and a half years that the Science-Based Medicine blog has existed, we contributors have come in for our share of criticism. Sometimes, the criticism is relatively mild; often it’s based on a misunderstanding of what SBM is; but sometimes it’s quite nasty. I can’t speak for the rest of the SBM crew on this, but I’ve gotten used to...
Consumer Reports drops the ball on alternative medicine
Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve intermittently read Consumer Reports, relying on it for guidance in all manner of purchase decisions. CR has been known for rigorous testing of all manner of consumer products and the rating of various services, arriving at its rankings through a systematic testing method that, while not necessarily bulletproof, has been far more organized and consistent...
On the Orwellian language and bad science of the anti-vaccine movement: “SmartVax” versus “MaxVax”?
If there’s one thing that’s true of the human race, it’s that when it comes to persuasion language is has power. Words have power. Just ask the advertising industry or politicians, who rely on their skills manipulating language to persuade for their very livelihood and authority. In the specific bailiwick of this blog, Science-Based Medicine, many of us have spent considerable verbiage...