Category: Clinical Trials

Re-thinking Antioxidant Supplementation for Macular Degeneration

After the AREDS trial, people with moderate to severe age-related macular degeneration were advised to take dietary supplements to slow the progression of the disease. But some experts say the trial actually showed supplements don't work, and might even make some patients worse.

/ February 7, 2017

Donald Trump versus the FDA: Is the standard of evidence for drug approval actually too low rather than too high?

All of the candidates being considered by President Trump for FDA Commissioner believe that the FDA is too strict in its standards for approving new drugs. In a commentary in Nature last week, two bioethicists argued that, at least in terms of preclinical data, the standard of evidence is actually too low. Which is correct?

/ February 6, 2017

Corrigendum. The week in SBM for 1.22.2017

Not every article and study that pops up my feeds in the world of pseudo-medicine is worthy of a complete blog post. But they need to be noticed and commented upon: Liver toxicity from herbs. Popped lungs from acupuncture. Chiropractic does not help scoliosis. Yoga is just exercise. There are eight kinds of wind: Great Feathery Wind, Scheming Wind, Hard Wind, Great...

/ January 22, 2017

Chinese BioMedical Research: Sturgeon’s Law In Action

A Chinese government investigation has found that 80%, yes eighty percent, of Chinese biomedical research is fabricated. I bet that is an underestimate for Traditional Chinese Pseudo-Medicine.

/ January 20, 2017

Myths integrative medicine sells us: “We never advocate alternative medicine without conventional medicine”

"Integrative medicine" (IM) effectively integrates quackery with real medicine. The main talking point by advocates of IM meant to deflect this criticism is that IM practitioners always use alternative medicine with conventional medicine and never advocate the use of alternative medicine alone. A new book by a prominent advocate of IM suggests that this talking point is at best self-delusion among academics...

/ January 8, 2017

Acupuncture’s Big Myth

The great acupuncture myth? No spoilers from me. Read the entry or skip to the penultimate paragraph to find out.

/ January 6, 2017

Son of (the unethical and unscientific) Trial To Assess Chelation Therapy rears its ugly head to the tune of $37 million

First, the NCCIH and NHLBI spend $30 million on a clinical trial of quackery for cardiovascular disease that produces predictably negative to at best equivocal results. Then that result, apparently, is enough to justify wasting another $37 million on a followup study—while dozens of other deserving studies go unfunded. Meanwhile STAT News lionizes the principal investigator of both trials as a brave...

/ December 28, 2016

Medical science policy in the U.S. under Donald Trump

The election of Donald Trump was unexpected. Given Trump's history of antivaccine beliefs and conspiracy theories, coupled with a fervor for deregulation (a fervor shared by the Republican Congress), it is reasonable to fear what will happen to medical science policy during the next four years.

/ November 14, 2016

German alternative cancer clinics: Combining experimental therapeutics with rank quackery and charging big bucks for it

You think that Mexico has the most quack cancer clinics? Don't be so sure of that. When it comes to clinics peddling a mix of snake oil and a dash of real medicine, Mexico's got nothing on Germany.

/ October 24, 2016

A Credible Placebo Control for Chiropractic Research

The research on chiropractic has been far from rigorous. One of the problems is that studies of spinal manipulation therapy (SMT) can’t be double blinded, and it is very difficult to even do single blinding. So most studies resort to non-manipulation control groups like “usual care” or “wait list” or “pain medication.” Those studies are practically guaranteed to lead to false positive...

/ October 11, 2016