Category: Science and Medicine
Patients Still Respect Evidence
A recent survey about patient attitudes and desires with regard to health care demonstrate that respect for scientific evidence is still the dominant factor in preferring treatments. (Full study) This is good news, although the numbers could be better. Researchers asked subjects what factors were important in determining which treatments they would prefer, the scientific evidence, the experience of the clinician, or...
Iron supplements for fatigue
How are you feeling today? Tired? Is it your active lifestyle wearing you down? Or is it a sign of something more serious? Complaints about fatigue seem ubiquitous. Perhaps it’s a product of a culture with little downtime. Yet from a medical perspective, fatigue can’t be dismissed with a simple instruction to “get more sleep”. When approached in the pharmacy, I take...
XMRV Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Update
Sometimes science works the way it’s supposed to. Scientists make hypotheses, test them by gathering preliminary evidence, and then argue about the inevitable conflicting results. Eventually better and better evidence is gathered until a consensus is achieved. Actually, I think that is how science usually works, it’s just that most questions in science are narrow and technical and don’t command media or...
Protect Yourself
Every year influenza makes the rounds, and every year people refuse to get vaccinated for very bad reasons. Don't be a Dumb Ass - get vaccinated.
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...
Guiding Lights
This is, I admit, a content free post. July and August are the sunny days here in the great Pacific Northwest, and rather than spend time in front of the computer, I am outside with the kids. To compound matters, I was on call the labor day weekend (I usually write the first draft the weekend before the posts are due) and...
Questioning Whether Psychotherapy and Support Groups Extend the Lives of Cancer Patients
What a wonderful world it would be if cancer patients could extend their survival time by mobilizing their immune systems by eating the right foods, practicing yoga, and venting their emotions in a support group. The idea that patients can enlist their immune systems to fight the progression of cancer is deeply entrenched in psychosomatic medicine and the imagination of the lay...
The Power of Replication – Bems Psi Research
I love reading quotes by the likes of Karl Popper in the scientific literature. A recent replication of Bem’s infamous psi research, Feeling the Future, gives us this quote: Popper (1959/2002) defined a scientifically true effect as that “which can be regularly reproduced by anyone who carries out the appropriate experiment in the way prescribed.” The paper is the latest replication of Daryl Bem’s...
The “central dogma” of alternative/complementary/integrative medicine
There is something in molecular biology and genetics known as the “central dogma.” I must admit, I’ve always hated the use of the word “dogma” associated with science, but no less a luminary than Francis Crick first stated it in 1958, and it has been restated over the years in various ways. Perhaps my favorite version of the central dogma was succinctly...
Low Level Lasers: N-Rays in action.
I do not want to get all angsty and omphaloskeptic, but I have been thinking more of late about the purpose of the blog and my role in it. Blogs,and the people who write them, are ephemeral. It takes a unique personality and commitment to churn out these essays and commit them to the ether. Especially since Michelson and Morley. I have never...