Category: Medical Academia
Is medical academia just following academia?
Is Medical Academia repeating Academia’s history? In a recent essay in a small-circulation, specialized periodical, Academic Questions, Prof. John M. Ellis, emeritus Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, recounts the past 4-5 decades of changes in liberal arts departments in US colleges. (How Preferences Have Corrupted Higher Education, Acad Quest, 2008; 21(2):265-274) One modern academic controversy not needing recounting is the...
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October 2, 2008
Postmodernist attacks on science-based medicine
The postmodernist critique of science consists of two interrelated arguments, epistemological and ideological. Both are based on subjectivity. First, because of the subjectivity of the human object, anthropology, according to the epistemological argument cannot be a science; and in any event the subjectivity of the human subject precludes the possibility of science discovering objective truth. Second, since objectivity is an illusion, science...
The New England Journal of Medicine Disappoints
On July 31 of this year, a collective groan could be heard emanating from critics of pseudomedicine. The causative factors (which is medical bombast for “the cause”) were two book reviews published in the usually staid New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM): Integrative Oncology: Incorporating Complementary Medicine into Conventional Cancer Care Edited by Lorenzo Cohen and Maurie Markman. 216 pp., illustrated. Totowa, NJ, Humana...
Animal rights terrorists endanger science-based medicine
Animal rights terrorists strike again at the University of California Santa Cruz. This time it's firebombing.
Resistance is futile? Hell, no! (A call to arms)
Well, I won’t back down No, I won’t back down You can stand me up at the gates of hell But I won’t back down Gonna stand my ground Won’t be turned around And I’ll keep this world from draggin’ me down Gonna stand my ground And I won’t back down From “I Won’t Back Down” by Tom Petty, 1989 This week,...
Science, Reason, Ethics, and Modern Medicine, Part 2: the Tortured Logic of David Katz
In Part 1 of this series* I asserted that a physician’s primary ethical responsibility is to honesty and integrity, which in turn must be largely based on science and reason (I apologize if that sounded preachy; if there had been more time I might have couched it in more congenial terms). I mentioned the fallacious reasoning whereby proponents of implausible medical claims (IMC) point to real and...
Resistance is futile
Dr. Sampson’s droll post on Thursday written from the point of view of an advocate of unscientific “alternative” medicine modalites (these days known as “complementary and alternative medicine”–abbreviated “CAM”–or “integrative” medicine), coupled with Dr. Atwood’s most recent contribution to his ongoing series on how the mish-mash of a little valid herbal medicine mixed with a whole lot of woo otherwise known as...
The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons: Ideology trumps science-based medicine
The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (JPANDS) is the official journal of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS). The AAPS tries to represent itself as a legitimate medical professional society, but in reality it promotes antivaccine views, HIV/AIDS denialism, and an Ayn Randian view of the world in which doctors are supermen, Medicare is unconstitutional, and the government should...
Forks in the road
It’s been decades since the onslaught of organized quackery began against science and reason. Although most physicians are still capable of reasoning, the percentage of medical graduates whose brains have been cleansed of that ability seems to have increased. Either the brains have been cleansed or they have learned to coexist with unreason and to use both functions simultaneously. The latter is...
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June 12, 2008
Touch – a Trojan Horse
Touch – Ouch. here they are again. I had planned to post contents of a letter written a decade ago to a Washington Post reporter on why med schools would entertain associating with quacky methods and their advocates. But an article in the SF Chronicle intruded on May 25 on a research project at Stanford on “Healing Touch” (HT). The project is...
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May 28, 2008