Category: Science and Medicine
Caffeine for ADHD
“I don’t want to give my child any drugs or chemicals for their ADHD,” says a parent. “Instead, I’m thinking about using caffeine. Sound strategy?” It may be dispensed by a barista and not a pharmacist, and the unit sizes may be small, medium and large, but caffeine is a chemical and also a drug, just as much as methylphenidate (Ritalin) is....
Chemotherapy doesn’t work? Not so fast…
A favorite claim made by cancer quacks (and quacks of all varieties, actually) is that chemotherapy doesn't work. One variant of this claim is what I call the "2% gambit." Basically, this gambit claims that chemotherapy is only 2% effective. Not surprisingly, the evidence backing up the "2% gambit" is a highly flawed study, as is the evidence used by quacks to...
Quoth the anti-vaccine group SANE Vax: Beware HPV DNA in Gardasil!
Every so often, there’s a bit of misinformation that starts spreading around the Internet that shows up in enough places that our readers take notice and e-mail us about it. What happens is that these in essence become “requests.” We at SBM are, of course, happy to consider all requests and sometimes will actually take them on, particularly when doing so will...
Seven Deadly Medical Hypotheses revisited
Back in February, Mark Crislip and I both deconstructed an article written by Dr. Reynold Spector that appeared in the March/April issue of Skeptical Inquirer (SI), the flagship publication for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI). The article was entitled Seven Deadly Medical Hypotheses, and, contrary to the usual standard of articles published in SI, it used a panoply of spin, bad...
The Annals of Internal Medicine Qualifies for Fail Blog.
As most readers of the blog know, I am mostly an Infectious Disease doc. I spend my day diagnosing and treating infections and infectious complications. It is, as I have said before, a simple job. Me find bug, me kill bug, me go home. Kill bug. It is the key part of what I do everyday, and if there is karmic payback...
Legislative Alchemy I: Naturopathy
Via the magic of “legislative alchemy,” state legislatures transform implausible and unproven diagnostic methods and treatments into perfectly legal health care practices.[1] Without the benefit of legislative alchemy, chiropractors, naturopaths, homeopaths, acupuncturists and other assorted putative healers would be vulnerable to charges of practicing medicine without a license and consumer fraud. Thus, they must seek either their own licensing system or exemption...
Dummy Medicine, Dummy Doctors, and a Dummy Degree, Part 2.0: Harvard Medical School and the Curious Case of Ted Kaptchuk, OMD
Review The recent albuterol vs. placebo trial reported in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) found that experimental subjects with asthma experienced substantial, measured improvements in lung function after inhaling albuterol, but not after inhaling placebo, undergoing sham acupuncture, or “no treatment.” It also found that the same subjects reported having felt substantially improved after either albuterol or each of the...
Oh yeah? Thalidomide! Where’s your science now?
Online discussions on the merits of alternative medicine can get quite heated. And its proponents, given enough time, will inevitably cite the same drug as “evidence” of the failings of science. Call it Gavura’s Law, with apologies to Mike Godwin: As an online discussion on the effectiveness of alternative medicine grows longer, the probability that thalidomide will be cited approaches one. A...
Wishing Away Warts
Common warts (verruca vulgaris) are more of a nuisance than a serious health problem, but they are interesting. There is a whole mythology surrounding their cause (touching toads?) and treatment (everything from banana peels to vitamin C). Many people believe they can be made to vanish by suggestion or hypnosis. I used to believe that too. Every doctor has wart stories. Here...
“Integrative medicine”: A brand, not a specialty
Back in the mists of time, what used to be considered quackery became "alternative medicine." Thus began the rebranding. The latest iteration is "integrative medicine," which advocates the "integration" of quackery with science-based medicine, which it portrays as the "best of both worlds." It's been a very effective campaign, unfortunately.