Category: Politics and Regulation
Pitfalls in Regulating Physicians. Part 1
I had intended today’s posting to be a summary of a real case faced by a state medical board. It is a case of licensed physicians treating patients with a substandard, dangerous, and unequivocally illegal method. My intent was to use it as an illustration of how difficult it can be for medical boards to discipline such practitioners, even when the treatment...
Bisphenol A in Plastics – Should We Worry?
Is Bisphenol A a health hazard? We can't say for certain, but more research will help us know either way.
Threats to science-based medicine: When clinical trials for new drugs are designed by the marketing division
When the marketing division designs clinical trials, scientific medicine loses.
Science, Reason, Ethics, and Modern Medicine, Part 5: Penultimate Words
My Discussion with Dr. P After last week’s post, Dr. Peter Moran answered with more salient points. I’ll spend this week discussing those, because I share Dr. Moran’s “interest in examining the kind of messages we are putting out.” Acknowledging the inequality inherent in his not being the blog author, I’ll offer the last word to Dr. Moran by ending this series* and letting whatever comments he...
Politics of N of 1 pseudoscience
More Politics Medicine’s ethics and basis in science hang by a thread at times. At least in the US of A. I will present a few examples and illustrate them with correlates from other fields in which decisions with wide effects are sometimes made by the whim of one person. And that’s not just the declaring of war or whatever we call...
Animal rights terrorists endanger science-based medicine
Animal rights terrorists strike again at the University of California Santa Cruz. This time it's firebombing.
HPV vaccination misinformation and bias in Medscape
Like many physicians, I often peruse Medscape. It’s generally been a convenient and quick way to catch up on what’s going on in my field not directly related to my research, for which I tend to rely on pre-configured RSS feeds for PubMed searches to highlight any articles related to my areas of interest. Since these searches routinely flag hundreds of articles...
Parody beats political analysis
When out of town this past week I was bereft of tantalizing subjects, with our 5 other bloggers covering so many topics so well. I was about to toss in an empty towel, when two news absurdities fell into my driveway in the pages of the SF Chronicle. One was this morning’s (7/23) report that one Dragan Dabic, an alternative medicine healer...
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,...
Another State Promotes the Pseudoscientific Cult that is “Naturopathic Medicine.” Part 4
The “Science” and Ethics of “Natural Medicines” (and Nutrition) cont. This is the continuation of a discussion concerning the explicit claim of “naturopathic physicians”* to being experts in the use of “natural medicines,” defined as “medicines of mineral, animal and botanical origin.” Last week’s post established that the cult has chosen to profit from the “retail selling of medications,” as evidenced by the relevant...