Category: Public Health
Let President-Elect Obama know that NCCAM should be defunded!
As you may or may not know, Change.gov is being used by Obama’s team to solicit policy ideas. Americans submit ideas, along with supporting rationale, and people “vote up” or vote down” the proposals. “Up” votes increase the score of the proposals, and “down” votes decrease the score. It is described thusly on the Change.gov website: Share your ideas on any issue...
Who Should Ascend To The Office Of Surgeon General?
President-elect Obama’s nomination of CNN medical correspondent, Sanjay Gupta, for the Office of Surgeon General of the United States has ignited a firestorm of debate across the Internet. Some argue that he is not qualified for the position, others say that his charisma would be a boon to public health communications, though the lay majority appear to have mixed feelings. It is...
Christine Maggiore and Eliza Jane Scovill: Living and dying with HIV/AIDS denialism
On Science-Based Medicine, we strive to apply the light of science and reason on all manner of unscientific belief systems about medicine. For the most part, but by no means exclusively, we have concentrated on so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) because there is an active movement to infiltrate faith-based, rather than science-based, modalities into “conventional” medicine. Indeed, such efforts are well-financed,...
The $150,000 Vaccine Challenge
A man named Jock Doubleday has offered $150,000 to any physician who gives vaccines to drink the chemicals in a vaccine. It's a profoundly dishonest challenge, so full of conditions that it's clear it was meant never to be honored, much less paid.
Influenza Deaths
“There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.”- Donald Rumsfeld How do we know what we know? It is said by some anti-vaccine proponents that vaccines...
The Infection Schedule versus the Vaccination Schedule
Antivaccination activists have claimed that when it comes to there are "too many, too soon". They apparently do not grasp the number of bacteria and viruses (and fungi and parasites) that we are exposed to every day for our entire life.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., vaccines, the EPA, and the interface with science-based medicine and public policy
This blog is entitled Science-Based Medicine for a reason, and that’s because we here at SBM believe that the best method to result in the most efficacious treatments for the most people is through the application of science to the evaluation of the biology, pathophysiology, and treatment of disease and disorders. I may (or may not) be departing a bit from the...
Wyeth vs. Levine: Should Drug Label Standards Be Determined By Juries?
It is with some degree of trepidation that I enter the fray on the Wyeth vs. Levine case. I’ve been watching the media frenzy about the lawsuit with interest – mostly because (for the first time in a while) I think that the pharmaceutical company is in the right on this one – and that most journalists (and even medical journal editors)...
Knowledge Versus Expertise: The View From Consumer Land
“The internet, in democratizing knowledge, has led a lot of people to believe that it is also possible to democratize expertise.” – SBM Commenter, yeahsurewhatever I’ve spent the last few years of my life in Internet “Consumer Land,” doing what I can to bring accurate health information directly to patients. Of course, I have been surprised by the push-back, and the demand...
Dr. Jay Gordon and me: Random encounters with an apologist for the antivaccine movement
Although he doesn’t detest me nearly as much as antivaccine honcho and founder of Generation Rescue J. B. Handley does, Santa Monica celebrity pediatrician Dr. Jay Gordon doesn’t like me very much at all. Actually, I’m not sure whether that’s entirely true or not, but Dr. Gordon sure doesn’t like it when I criticize him for his antivaccine rhetoric. He affects an...