All posts by Peter Lipson

Peter A. Lipson, MD is a practicing internist and teaching physician in Southeast Michigan.  After graduating from Rush Medical College in Chicago, he completed his Internal Medicine residency at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. He currently maintains a private practice, and serves as a teaching physician at a large community hospital He also maintains appointments as a Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine at Wayne State University School of Medicine and at Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine, the first being a large, established medical school, the latter being a newly-formed medical school which will soon be accepting its first class of students.  He blogs at White Coat Underground at the Scientopia blog network. A primary goal of his writing is to illuminate the differences between science-based medicine and everything else.  His perspective as a primary care physician and his daily interaction with real patients gives him what he hopes is special insight into the current "De-lightenment" in medicine.  As new media evolve, pseudo-scientific, deceptive, and immoral health practices become more and more available to patients, making his job all that much more difficult---and all that much more interesting. Disclaimer: The views in all of of Dr. Lipson's writing are his alone.  They do not represent in any way his practice, hospital, employers, or anyone else. Any medical information is general and should not be applied to specific personal medical decisions.  Any medical questions should be directed to your personal physician.  Dr. Lipson will not answer any specific medical questions, and any emails and comments should be assumed public. Dr. Lipson receives no compensation for his writing. Dr. Lipson's posts for Science-Based Medicine are archived here.

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-...

/ February 2, 2009

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...

/ January 20, 2009

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...

/ January 5, 2009

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,...

/ December 22, 2008

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...

/ December 10, 2008

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...

/ December 8, 2008

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...

/ November 27, 2008

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...

/ November 24, 2008

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...

/ November 10, 2008

Breast cancer and migraines–what is risk, anyway?

One of the questions most often asked in the medical literature is “what is the risk of x?”  It’s a pretty important question.  I’d like to be able to tell my patient with high blood pressure what their risk of heart attack is, both with and without treatment.  And risk is a sexy topic—the press loves it.  Whether it’s cell phones and...

/ November 6, 2008