Category: Politics and Regulation
Mortality and lack of health insurance
The 2012 election campaign is in full swing, and, for better or worse, health care is one of the major defining issues of the election. How can it not be, given the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), also colloquially known as “Obamacare,” was one of the Obama administration’s major accomplishments and arguably the largest remaking of the...
Obamacare and CAM II: Discrimination (or not) against CAM
Supporters of science-based medicine have expressed concern over this provision in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare,” or the “ACA.”): SEC. 2706. NON-DISCRIMINATION IN HEALTH CARE. (a) PROVIDERS.—A group health plan and a health insurance issuer offering group or individual health insurance coverage shall not discriminate with respect to participation under the plan or coverage against any health care provider...
Antivaccine versus anti-GMO: Different goals, same methods
Countering ideologically motivated bad science, pseudoscience, misinformation, and lies is one of the main purposes of this blog. Specifically, we try to combat such misinformation in medicine; elsewhere Steve and I, as well as some of our other “partners in crime” combat other forms of pseudoscience. During the nearly five year existence of this blog, we’ve covered a lot of topics in...
News flash! Doctors aren’t all compliant pharma drones!
There’s an oft-quoted saying that’s become a bit of a cliché among skeptics that goes something like this: There are two kinds of medicine: medicine that’s been proven scientifically to work, and medicine that hasn’t. This is then often followed up with a rhetorical question and its answer: What do call “alternative medicine” that’s been proven to work? Medicine. Of course, being...
The problem of nonmedical exemptions to school vaccine mandates
It’s that time of year again, namely flu vaccine time. My very own cancer institute will be offering the flu vaccine for its staff beginning October 1, and I plan on getting mine just as soon as I get back from the American College of Surgeons Clinical Congress in Chicago early next week. In the meantime, it’s always great to read Mark...
Physicians and “CAM”
In the last 20 or so years, the popularity of so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” began to lure physicians (M.D.s and D.O.s) into employing CAM treatments, or what is now rebranded as “integrative medicine.” Of course, CAM use by a physician necessarily requires some deviation from the “conventional” standard of care. Because deviation from the standard of care can be grounds for discipline by the...
The DC as PCP? Revisited
There is a disturbing effort afoot to rebrand chiropractors as primary care physicians, a subject both Harriet Hall and I have discussed in previous posts. Part of this effort includes convincing state legislatures to grant prescription privileges to chiropractors, an effort that succeeded in New Mexico, as reported in a post a couple of years ago. Let’s return to New Mexico and...
Acupuncture practice acts: legalized quackery
As Ben Kavoussi observed recently, [o]nce considered archaic and obsolete, Oriental Medicine has greatly benefited from the postmodern attitudes towards science and knowledge. This is because postmodernists consider the ‘truth’ as being relative to one’s viewpoint or stance. They do not see science as a superior process of acquiring knowledge, but as a ‘belief system,’ a ‘language game,’ which does not give...
Stem cell therapy regulation plays catch up
The burgeoning U.S. stem cell therapy industry was delivered a setback last month in the form of a U.S. District Court injunction against use of the “Regenexx™ Procedure,” which purports to treat joint, muscle, tendon or bone pain due to injury or other conditions. The court agreed with the FDA that the cell product used in the procedure is both a drug...
The mammography wars heat up again (2012 edition)
One issue that keeps coming up time and time again for me is the issue of screening for cancer. Because I’m primarily a breast cancer surgeon in my clinical life, that means mammography, although many of the same issues come up time and time again in discussions of using prostate-specific antigen (PSA) screening for prostate cancer. Over time, my position regarding how...