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Health care and the Stimulus Plan
In my last post, I told you a little story about using science- and evidence-based medicine to improve health care. The focus was primarily on preventing an iatrogenic illness, namely intravenous catheter infections. A researcher came up with a plausible idea for an intervention, studied it, and found it to be successful—the intervention was science-based in that it was proposed based...
Keeping ’em alive
One of the frequent complaints I hear about science-based medicine is that it is dangerous. Of course, it’s true—so is riding in a train, but it sure beats walking. And that’s the danger of this particular fallacy—yes, medicine is a sharp tool, but it’s also an effective tool, so we must use it properly. And this is where the tools of evidence-...
What will January 20th do for science-based medicine?
Make no little plans; they have no power to stir men’s blood. —Daniel Burnham Politics is deadly to science-based medicine, and while I don’t often go for politics, the last eight years have seen subtle and not-so subtle predations on the practice of medicine. Will the new administration be able to promote the kind of change we need? Let’s review some of...
Reality is unfair
This space has often hosted musings on the nature of scientific knowledge, on how medical science is based in methodological naturalism (MN), rather than supernaturalism. MN requires that our acquisition of knowledge about the natural world be based on natural phenomena. The reason for this should be quite obvious: the natural world is the only one that exists, for all intents and...
Put your fears in perspective
I’m having a helluva Sunday. My father-in-law’s in the hospital, it’s 2 degrees out with a wind chill of 40 below, my clothes all smell like latkes, my daughter is having a melt-down, and I screwed up the .xml file for my podcast. The last part reminds me of something—science is hard, and when we step out of our areas of expertise,...
Credulous medical reporting
Science and medicine reporting is hard. In this space and otherswe’ve dealt with some of the problems that arise when “generalist” reporters try to “do” science and medicine. And now, CNN has shut down its science unit. Given the increasing complexity of medical and scientific knowledge, this is very bad news. As a fine example of poor medical reporting, let’s look at...
H. influenzae—it ain’t the flu, but it’s still pretty cool
I’ve been thinking about an interesting organism lately, an organism that illustrates some basic principles in science-based medicine. The organism is called Haemophilus influenzae (H flu), a gram-negative bacterium discovered in the late 19th century. H flu has a great story, both in historic and modern times. The brilliant microbiologist Richard Pfeiffer isolated H flu from influenza patients in the late 1800’s...
The science of purging, or the purging of science?
It’s Thanksgiving in the U.S., one of my favorite holidays. Thanksgiving habits get set down early in life, and the while I may find your lima bean casserole execrable, to you it’s just not Thanksgiving without it. And speaking of excrement, you can expect to see adds encouraging you to “detox” from all of your holiday excesses. Outside the field of substance...
NCCAM: the not-even-wrong agency
The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) is a government agency tasked with (among other things), “[exploring] complementary and alternative healing practices in the context of rigorous science.” In this space we have talked about NCCAM quite a bit, but I have to admit that I don’t think about them very much. The other day, though, I was reading though...
Does alternative medicine have alternative ethics?
Kimball Atwood has an interesting series of posts on the ethics of alternative medicine which I strongly encourage you to read. He does a great job examining the ethical implications of certain alternative medicine practices, and has a terrific dialog with Peter Moran, a frequent commenter here. At my other online locale, I make frequent forays into the morass of medical...