Category: Clinical Trials
The Science of Clinical Trials
Science-based medicine is partly an exercise in detailed navel gazing – we are examining the use of science in the practice of medicine. As we use scientific evidence to determine which treatments work, we also have to examine the relationship between science and practice, and the strengths and weaknesses of the current methods for funding, conducting, reviewing, publishing, and implementing scientific research...
When urgency to cure beats research ethics, bad things happen
Editor’s note: Just for your edification, here’s a “bonus” post. True, you might have seen this recently elsewhere, but it’s so appropriate for SBM that I couldn’t resist sharing it with those of you who might not read the other source where this was published recently. 🙂 I’ve written a lot about Stanislaw Burzynski and what I consider to be his unethical...
Survey Says… Infectious Disease Docs and CAM
Surveys are evidently a popular way to get a paper published. Put “complementary alternative medicine survey” into Pubmed and get 2,353 hits. I would have trouble coming up with a hundred groups about whom I would be interested in their use of SCAMs, but I tend to be a lumper rather than a splitter. But if you want to know about SCAM...
A Different Perspective: Placebo, SCAM, and Advertising
Summertime, time, time Child, the living’s easy. Fish are jumping out And the handicap, Lord Handicaps high, Lord so high ~ Janis Joplin It is summer. Time for the kids and the outside, not the computer. What follows is a summertime blog entry, for which I admit to feeling guilty for the comparatively little time I have spent on it, but as...
Integrative Medicine Invades the U.S. Military: Part Three
Nobody seems to know exactly how to define “integrative medicine” (“IM”) or to demonstrate what it does that is superior to the “conventional” kind. There is a lot of talk about addressing the “whole person” and not just the disease, patient-centeredness and the like, all of which are already aspects of conventional medicine. But, however defined, the central idea seems to be...
The difference between science-based medicine and CAM
There is a huge difference between science-based medicine (SBM) and so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or, as it's increasingly called, "integrative medicine." That difference is that SBM changes with new science. The change might be messier and slower than we would like, but eventually science and evidence win out.
Integrative Medicine Invades the U.S. Military: Part One
Integrative medicine proponents claim superiority over physicians practicing “conventional” medicine. (Which I will refer to as “medicine” so as not to buy into integrative medicine’s implied claim that medicine can be practiced with two separate standards.) While conceding that medicine is good for treating conditions like broken arms and heart attacks, physicians who purport to practice integrative medicine argue it ignores “the...
Stanislaw Burzynski: The Early Years, part 1
It’s been a week now since I got back from TAM, where Bob Blaskiewicz and I tag-teamed a talk about a man who has become a frequent topic of this blog, namely Stanislaw Burzynski. I’ve been meaning to come back to the topic of Burzynski, but from a different angle. There hasn’t been much in the way of news lately other than...
Do clinical trials work? It depends on what you mean by “work”
Introduction (Skip to the next section if you want to miss the self-referential blather about TAM.) As I write this, I’m winging my way home from TAM, crammed uncomfortably—very uncomfortably—in a window seat in steerage—I mean, coach). I had been thinking of just rerunning a post and having done with it, sleeping the flight away, to arrive tanned, rested, and ready to...
Homeopathy Ramblings
There needs to be a SCAM index, some quantitative tool, a formula for ranking the SCAMs, so one SCAM could reign supreme, to be definitely declared the the goofiest of all SCAMs. Perhaps (number of adherents)x(number of Pubmed publications)x(age of SCAM) all divided by a plausibility factor. Homeopathy would win and any SCAM index that did not rank homeopathy at number one...