Category: Politics and Regulation
The CAM Docket: Boiron I
Author’s note: This will inaugurate a series of occasional posts observing the wheels of justice grind slowly over “CAM.” In a previous post, I posited that CAM practitioners might well subject themselves to liability for the tort of fraudulent misrepresentation. This misrepresentation could be based on both the lack of scientific evidence of effectiveness and the lack of scientific plausibility for their...
Disparities in Regional Health Care Costs
In 2009, during the “Obamacare” debate that was dominating the news, Atul Gawande wrote an article in the New Yorker that was widely praised and cited, including by president Obama himself. The article is a thought-provoking discussion of why some communities in the US have much higher health care costs than other regions. I took two main conclusions from the article. The...
An antivaccine tale of two legal actions
I don’t know what it is about the beginning of a year. I don’t know if it’s confirmation bias or real, but it sure seems that something big happens early every year in the antivaccine world. Consider. As I pointed out back in February 2009, in rapid succession Brian Deer reported that Andrew Wakefield had not only had undisclosed conflicts of interest...
FDA versus Big Supp: Rep. Burton to the Rescue (Again)
The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA) has been aptly described here at SBM as a travesty of a mockery of a sham. The supplement industry’s slick marketing, herb adulteration due to lack of pre-market controls, Quack Miranda Warning, and the many supplements for which claims of effectiveness failed to hold up under scientific scrutiny (e.g., antioxidants, collagen, glucosamine...
Bravewell Bimbo Eruptions
This is yet another response to the recent “Integrative Medicine in America” report published by the Bravewell Collaborative. Drs. Novella and Gorski have already given that report its due, so I won’t repeat the background information. Inevitably, I’ll cover some of the same points, but I’ll also try to emphasize a few that stand out to me. Most of these have been...
“Obama Promises $156 Million to Alzheimer’s…But where will the money come from?” That’s easy: the NCCAM!
The quoted language above is part of the headline of this story in today’s The Scientist: Citing the rising tide of Americans with Alzheimer’s—projections suggest 10 million people will be afflicted by 2050—the Obama administration and top National Institutes of Health officials are taking action. On February 7, they announced that they will add an additional $80 million to the 2013 NIH...
Night of the living naturopaths
Colorado’s “degreed” naturopaths (NDs) are nothing if not persistent. Starting in 1994 they have tried seven times to convince legislators that the Colorado’s public needs protection from what “traditional” naturopaths (traditionals) do, and that the best way of providing that protection, they claim, is to bestow licensure on the guys with the college degrees. The irony in this is that the NDs...
NIH Director Francis Collins doesn’t understand the problem with CAM
As the sole cancer surgeon among our stable of Science-Based Medicine (SBM) bloggers, I’m probably the most irritated at the infiltration of pseudoscience into academia (or, as we sometimes like to call it, quackademic medicine) in the realm of cancer. Part of the reason, of course, is that cancer is so common and that the consequences of adding pseudoscience to cancer therapy...
The New England Journal of Medicine Sinks a Bit Lower
I suppose it was bound to happen, but it still rankles. Here is the back cover of last week’s issue of the decreasingly prestigious New England Journal of Medicine: Here’s the front cover: It’s the 200th Anniversary issue, no less. Some might protest that ‘probiotics’—live bacteria of ‘good’ varieties, as far as the gut is concerned—aren’t all that implausible, and that...
Legislative Alchemy: The New Year
A new year brings new opportunities for practicing the magic of legislative alchemy, the process by which state legislatures transform implausible and unproven diagnostic methods and treatments into perfectly legal health care practices, such as naturopathy, chiropractic and acupuncture. Different states have different legislative calendars, but many begin a new session soon after the first of the year. This gives “complementary and...