Category: Critical Thinking

Tribalism and Medical Ethics

Science is intended to discover the “is”, not the “ought;” facts, not values. Science can’t tell us whether an action is moral; it can only provide evidence to help inform moral decisions. For instance, some people who believe abortion is immoral reject birth control methods that prevent implantation of a fertilized ovum on the grounds that it constitutes abortion; science can determine...

/ January 14, 2014

Acupuncture Whac-a-Mole ™

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. – George Santayana Most people don’t have that willingness to break bad habits. They have a lot of excuses and they continue to produce bad clinical studies. – Carlos Santana (Well, not the last 4 words.) One is a guitar player, one is a philosopher. I get them confused. I think...

/ January 10, 2014

Science-based medicine throughout time

As 2013 comes to a close, because this probably will be my last post of 2013 (unless, of course, something comes up that I can’t resist blogging about before my next turn a week from now), I had thought of doing one of those cheesy end-of-year lists related to the topic of science-based medicine. Unfortunately, I couldn’t come up with anything I...

/ December 30, 2013

The Nuances of Informed Consent

Modern medical ethics are built upon the concept of informed consent. This is not, however, as straightforward a concept as it may seem. Physicians and health care providers have a duty to provide informed consent to their patients or their patients’ guardians, which means that they have to inform them appropriately about the risks and benefits of their recommendations and interventions. This...

/ November 13, 2013

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...

/ August 23, 2013

Human Sex Determination: Psychic Sperm and the Gambler’s Fallacy…..

Carl Sagan supposedly once said that randomness is clumpy. Those three words have become one of my favorite go-to quotes, particularly when teaching residents and medical students who are often overly impressed with improbable runs of similar diagnoses or exam findings. I love this quote because it is so simple and yet reveals so much about our experience with observing the natural...

/ July 19, 2013

Researching SBM Online

The internet is a fabulous resource of information. It is one of those technological innovations for which you soon can no longer imagine how you lived without it. I certainly cannot imagine a project like science-based medicine prior to the web. The web, however, is also a tremendous source of misinformation, opinion, and ideology. Also the volume of information, good and bad,...

/ July 17, 2013

Who you gonna believe, me or you own eyes?

Mrs. Teasdale: Your Excellency, I thought you’d left! Chicolini: Oh no, I no leave. Mrs. Teasdale: But I saw you with my own eyes! Chicolini: Well, who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes? Duck Soup. Funniest movie ever. If I could choose a super power, it would be neither flight nor invisibility, but the ability, like Triad, to separate into...

/ July 12, 2013