Category: Politics and Regulation
NCCAM manipulates spinal manipulation
“Complementary and alternative medicine,” as pediatrician and fellow blogger John Snyder aptly stated in a recent journal article on CAM and children, is a term used to describe a disparate, poorly defined set of practices and treatment modalities presumed to be distinct from so-called ‘conventional medicine’. As we have discussed here at Science-Based Medicine, this amorphous concept facilitates a convenient fluidity in delineating...
Steve Novella vs. Julian Whitaker on vaccines at FreedomFest
While I and some of the others in the SBM crew were at The Amazing Meeting (TAM) in Las Vegas, our fearless leader Steve Novella got an interesting challenge: To debate Dr. Julian Whitaker about vaccines at a libertarian confab known as FreedomFest, which just so happened to be going on up the strip a piece at the same time TAM was....
Obamacare and CAM
Practitioners of so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” currently enjoy a certain measure of government largesse in the form of state laws mandating coverage of their services by private health insurance plans. The federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (often referred to as the Affordable Care Act, or “ACA,” and sometimes as “Obamacare”) has the potential of putting a significant dent in this forced...
GSK Pays $3 Billion Fine
The following article is reposted from NeuroLogicaBlog. Happy Independence Day to all our American readers. The pharmaceutical giant, GlaxoSmithKline, has agreed to pay three billion dollars in fines to settle three charges of fraud brought by the FDA. This is the largest health fraud settlement in US history. What are the implications of this settlement for how the pharmaceutical industry is regulated in...
NCCAM on “integrative medicine”: What’s in a word?
I don’t know how I’ve missed this, given that it’s been in existence now for a month and a half, but I have. Regular readers (and even fairly recent readers, given that I write about this topic relatively frequently) know that I’m not a big fan of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). (Come to think of it, neither...
Dept. of Education to Council on Chiropractic Education: “Straighten Up!”
Our last look at the Council on Chiropractic Education (CCE), about 18 months ago, found the CCE deeply embroiled in a heated dispute among various chiropractic factions over new accreditation standards for chiropractic colleges. Today we offer an update on that situation. Update: the CCE is deeply embroiled in a heated dispute among various chiropractic factions over new accreditation standards for chiropractic...
California Acupuncture Board: a Mockery of Consumer Protection
Many of the specific issues that the Governor and the Legislature asked the Commission to review have festered because the [California] Acupuncture Board has often acted as a venue for promoting the profession rather than regulating the profession. — Little Hoover Commission, Regulation of Acupuncture: A Complementary Therapy Framework: September 2004, page 63. On March 12, 2012, during a brief Sunset Review...
Legislative Alchemy: 2012.5
Legislative alchemy, as faithful SBM readers know, is the process by which state legislatures and Congress take scientifically implausible and unproven treatments and diagnostic methods and turn them into licensed health care practices and legally sold products. Previous posts have explored this phenomenon in naturopathy, chiropractic and acupuncture. Our last report on the legislative efforts of CAM providers appeared almost six months ago,...
Foolishness or Fraud? Bogus Science at NCCAM
Voodoo science is a sort of background noise, annoying but rarely rising to a level that seriously interferes with genuine scientific discourse… The more serious threat is to the public, which is not often in a position to judge which claims are real and which are voodoo. Those who are fortunate enough to have chosen science as a career have an obligation...
POM: Not So Wonderful
“POM Wonderful” is a brand of pomegranate juice. It is manufactured by a company owned by Linda and Stewart Resnick, California billionaires who pretty much single-handedly created a multi-million dollar market for pomegranate juice where none existed before. Or, as LA Times columnist Michael Hilzik wrote, It has long been clear that the most wonderful thing about Pom Wonderful pomegranate juice is...