Category: Critical Thinking
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...