Category: Medical Academia

Acupuncture CME

Some Universities have more cachet than others. On the West coast it is Stanford that has the reputation as the best. There is Oxford, Yale, MIT, and maybe Whatsamatta U. I would wager that in most people’s mind the crème de la crème is Harvard. Harvard is where you find the best of the best. If Harvard is involved, a project gains...

/ July 2, 2010

The price of opposing medical pseudoscience

When quacks can’t answer with science (which is most commonly), they fall back on their favorite ad hominem attack. They call their critics “pharma shills.” Then they try to silence them by almost any means they view as necessary. Those means can include attempts to get critics fired by going to their bosses and falsely accusing them of serious misdeeds. Dr. Gorski...

/ June 28, 2010

Dedicated to Jake Crosby and Age of Autism…

I'm still standing, better than I've ever been.

/ June 27, 2010

Professional Integrity for Sale? “Sure,” Says Medscape!

Some chiropractors also practice homeopathy. According to Frank King, D.C., many more should be doing just that: Homeopathy is an energetic form of natural medicine that corrects nerve interferences, absent nerve reflexes, and pathological nerve response patterns that the chiropractic adjustment alone does not correct. The appropriate homeopathic remedies will eliminate aberrant nerve reflexes and pathological nerve responses which cause recurrent subluxation...

/ June 25, 2010

Certainty versus knowledge in medicine

I don’t want knowledge. I want certainty! — David Bowie, from Law (Earthlings on Fire) If there’s a trait among humans that seems universal, it appears to be an unquenchable thirst for certainty. It is likely to be a major force that drives people into the arms of religion, even radical religions that have clearly irrational views, such as the idea that...

/ June 7, 2010

A homeopathy supporter notices our visit with the director of NCCAM

On April 2, Steve Novella, Kimball Atwood, and I visited the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) to meet with its director, Dr. Josephine Briggs. I’m not going to rehash what was said because we agreed that Steve would handle that task, and he did so admirably last week. I agree with Steve that it was encouraging that Dr. Briggs...

/ April 12, 2010

CAM on campus: Ethics

In a previous post I described a lecture given by a faculty member to first-year medical students on my campus introducing us to integrative medicine (IM). Here I describe his lecture to the second-year class on legal and ethical aspects of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). Dr. P began his lecture by describing CAM using the now-familiar NCCAM classification. He gave the...

/ April 8, 2010

Looking for quackademic medicine in all the wrong places

One advantage of having a blog is that I can sometimes tap into the knowledge of my readers to help me out. As many readers know, a few of the SBM bloggers (myself included) will be appearing at the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism (NECSS) on Saturday, April 17. Since the topic of our panel discussion is going to be the...

/ April 8, 2010

Is there a role for speculative journals like Medical Hypotheses in the scientific literature?

The core information supporting science-based medicine resides in the scientific literature. There, scientists and physicians publish the results of experiments and clinical trials that seek to understand the biological mechanisms by which the human body functions and through which disease forms and to apply this understanding to test new treatments for diease. Consequently, the quality and integrity of the biomedical literature are...

/ March 15, 2010

CAM on campus: Integrative Medicine

My previous posts have described guest lecturers at my medical school campus, invited by a student interest group in CAM. Those events continue; currently ongoing is an 8-weekend certification course in Ayurveda for the subsidized cost of $1500 (includes “tuition, syllabus, and personal guru”). I could pick on this student group, but what’s the point? There will always be medical students who...

/ March 11, 2010