Category: Neuroscience/Mental Health
Revisiting Daniel Moerman and “placebo effects”
About three weeks ago, ironically enough, right around the time of TAM 9, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) inadvertently provided us in the form of a new study on asthma and placebo effects not only material for our discussion panel on placebo effects but material for multiple posts, including one by me, one by Kimball Atwood, and one by Peter...
Angell’s Review of Psychiatry
Marcia Angell has written a two-part article for The New York Review of Books: “The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why?” and “The Illusions of Psychiatry.” It is a favorable review of 3 recent books: The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth by Irving Kirsch Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America...
Antidepressants and Effect Size
Antidepressant drugs have been getting a bad rap in the media. I’ll just give 3 examples: On the Today show, prominent medical expert 🙂 Tom Cruise told us Brooke Shields shouldn’t have taken these drugs for her postpartum depression. In Natural News, “Health Ranger” Mike Adams accused pharmaceutical companies and the FDA of covering up negative information about antidepressants, saying it would be considered...
The Value of Replication
Daryl Bem is a respected psychology researcher who decided to try his hand at parapsychology. Last year he published a series of studies in which he claimed evidence for precognition — for test subjects being influenced in their choices by future events. The studies were published in a peer-reviewed psychology journal, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. This created somewhat of...
Autism and Prenatal Vitamins
Science has found no evidence that vaccines cause autism; but the true cause(s) of autism have not yet been determined. So far the available evidence has pointed towards a largely genetic cause with possible interaction with environmental factors. A new study supports that interpretation. It also supports previous evidence that autism is triggered prior to birth, rather than at the time of...
Anti-vaccine warriors vs. research ethics
Three weeks ago, the anti-vaccine movement took a swing for the fences and, as usual, made a mighty whiff that produced a breeze easily felt in the bleachers. In brief, a crew of anti-vaccine lawyers headed by Mary Holland, co-author of Vaccine Epidemic: How Corporate Greed, Biased Science, and Coercive Government Threaten Our Human Rights, Our Health, and Our Children, published a...
Delusional Parasitosis
A new study looks into the disorder known as delusional parasitosis, which many dermatologists believe is the true diagnosis behind the controversial disorder called Morgellon’s disease. Morgellons is a controversial disorder because many patients with symptoms believe they are being infected by an unusual organism, causing excessive itching, but no offending organism has been found. Some patients claim they have strange fibers...
Fungus yields new prescription drug for multiple sclerosis
The following post appeared earlier this week at my Chemical & Engineering News CENtral Science blog, Terra Sigillata. For some odd reason – perhaps this week’s frantic academic schedule of commencement activities – it was not highly read there. I thought that our Science-Based Medicine readers would appreciate it because this new prescription drug is derived from a family of fungi that...
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May 13, 2011
When you can’t win on science, invoke the law…
Late last week, the anti-vaccine underground was all atwitter. The reason was the announcement of an impending press conference, scheduled for yesterday at noon in Washington, DC that proclaimed: Investigators and Families of Vaccine-Injured Children to Unveil Report Detailing Clear Vaccine-Autism Link Based on Government’s Own Data Report Demands Immediate Congressional Action Directors of the Elizabeth Birt Center for Autism Law and...
Autism Prevalence Higher than Thought
Crossposted from NeuroLogica Blog Over the last 20 years the prevalence of autism (now part of autism spectrum disorder, ASD) has been increasing. The medical community is largely agreed that this increase is mostly due to expanding the diagnostic category and greater efforts at surveillance. There remains some controversy over whether or not these factors explain all of the measured increase, or...