Category: Energy Medicine
Electrodermal Testing Part I: Fooling Patients with a Computerized Magic Eight Ball
Remember the Magic Eight Ball toy? You could ask it a question and shake it and a random answer would float up into a window: yes, no, maybe, definitely, etc. There is even a website where you can ask an Eight Ball questions online. I have been meaning to write about bogus electrodiagnostic machines for a long time. These devices supposedly diagnose...
SOS DD
What does it take to become a doctor? Endurance and perseverance help. It is a long haul from college to practice. But the skill that is most beneficial is the ability to consume prodigious amounts of information, remember it, and recall it as needed. Although I often relied on ‘B’ to get me through some of the exams. Thinking, specifically critical thinking,...
“CAM” Education in Medical Schools—A Critical Opportunity Missed
Mea culpa to the max. I completely forgot that today is my day to post on SBM, so I’m going to have to cheat a little. Here is a link to a recent article by yours truly that appeared on Virtual Mentor, an online ethics journal published by the AMA with major input from medical students. Note that I didn’t write the...
Steve Novella and Banachek on Power Balance bracelets
First Oz, now this. Too bad his appearance was so short: At least they got Banachek to do a quick and dirty trial that helped to demonstrate that these bracelets do not work.
Parasites
I saw a patient recently for parasites. I get a sinking feeling when I see that diagnosis on the schedule, as it rarely means a real parasite. The great Pacific NW is mostly parasite free, so either it is a traveler or someone with delusions of parasitism. The latter comes in two forms: the classic form and Morgellons. Neither are likely to...
Cochrane is Starting to ‘Get’ SBM!
This essay is the latest in the series indexed at the bottom.* It follows several (nos. 10-14) that responded to a critique by statistician Stephen Simon, who had taken issue with our asserting an important distinction between Science-Based Medicine (SBM) and Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM). (Dr. Gorski also posted a response to Dr. Simon’s critique). A quick-if-incomplete Review can be found here. One...
The Forefather of Acupuncture Energetics, a Charlatan?
Not only his name and his titles of nobility were forged, but parts of the teachings of the man who introduced acupuncture to Europe were also invented. Even today, treatments are provided based on his fantasies. — Hanjo Lehmann1 Decades before President Nixon’s visit to communist China, and before the articles in the Western popular press on the use of acupuncture in...
Frequencies and Their Kindred Delusions
The word “frequency” ranks right up there with “quantum” and “energy” as a pseudoscientific buzzword. It is increasingly prevalent in product advertisements and in CAM claims about human biofields and energy medicine. It doesn’t mean what they think it means. I have written about Power Balance products, the wristbands and cards that allegedly improve sports performance through frequencies embedded in a hologram....
The Hazards of “CAM”-Pandering
Steven Salzberg, a friend of this blog and Director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of Maryland, is on the editorial boards of three of the many journals published by BioMed Central (BMC), an important source of open-access, peer-reviewed biomedical reports. He is disturbed by the presence of two other journals under the BMC umbrella: Chinese Medicine...
Of SBM and EBM Redux. Part IV: More Cochrane and a little Bayes
NB: This is a partial posting; I was up all night ‘on-call’ and too tired to continue. I’ll post the rest of the essay later… Review This is the fourth and final part of a series-within-a-series* inspired by statistician Steve Simon. Professor Simon had challenged the view, held by several bloggers here at SBM, that Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) has been mostly inadequate...