Category: Science and Medicine
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...
Testing the “individualization” of CAM treatments
One of the common claims of alternative medicine practitioners is that they individualize their treatment while conventional medicine treats all patients the same. This is nonsense on several levels, but it is also a common excuse for why randomized clinical trials cannot be performed, or cannot be viewed as reliable evidence, in evaluating some alternative therapies. However, some trials have been done...
Vital Signs: Buteyko Breathing
As I have mentioned in the past, almost all of my practice is inpatient medicine, doing infectious disease consults in acute care hospitals. I only spend three hours a week in the outpatient clinic, so I have a skewed perception of medicine and disease. The patients I see are sick, really sick, often trying to die and are a complicated collection of...
No, sugar pills won’t repel insects, and other consequences of regulating nonsense
As a group blog, Science-Based Medicine brings a variety of perspectives to issues of science in medicine. However we align around a few core principles which define what science-based medicine is, and how it should be practiced. One principle we emphasize is the importance of subjecting the evaluation of all health interventions and treatments to a single, science-based standard. One of the...
Bee Venom Therapy Update
I wrote previously about bee venom therapy (BVT), also called apitherapy or bee sting therapy, as an emerging “alternative” therapy. Both use and research into BVT continue, providing an excellent example of the many things that are wrong with the CAM movement. A recent Reuters article on the topic is also an excellent example of the frequent complete failure of the mainstream media in...
Science, Evidence and Guidelines
Disclaimer: I am a paid Medscape blogger and writer, and since they are in part supported by advertisements from the Pharmaceutical companies, indirectly I am in the thrall of Big Pharma. I found Harriet’s post on the Medscape Connect topic of How do you feel about Evidence-Based Medicine? interesting. I wondered about the breakdown of the comments by both specialty and opinions...
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...
There’s an app for that ?!?
There is no shortage of technology in my household: computers, smart phones and tablets of one kind or another. The nice thing about being a blogger and an app developer is I can justify it all. Well, mostly. The “It’s probably tax deductible” gambit can only be used so many times. It is remarkable how much of my life is filtered through...
“How do you feel about Evidence-Based Medicine?”
That was the question asked on a Medscape Connect discussion I did a double-take. How do you feel? Could anybody object to the idea of basing treatments on evidence? The doctor who started the discussion asked: Besides using EBM, a lot of my prescribing comes from anecdotal experience and intuition. How about you? Where do you get your information from that you...
What to make of Medical Dogs
For thousands of years we have guided the evolution of dogs to fulfill our needs for work and companionship. Service dogs are pretty remarkable. I love to watch herd dogs mimicking the dance of predator and prey. When you see a guide dog help someone navigate a building or street, you can’t help but to be impressed by the dogs “devotion” and...