Category: Science and Medicine
Vaccines and the Media: No Room for Balance
© 2009 msnbc.com Matt Lauer and NBC have continued the ignominious media tradition of feigning to bring “balance” to the issue of vaccine safety. In the Dateline episode A Dose of Controversy, which aired on Sunday night, Matt Lauer interviewed Andrew Wakefield, the originator of the MMR-causes-autism myth, and highlighted his work at Thoughtful House, the autism treatment center he created in Texas after...
IVF and CAM Use
Perhaps the biggest hurdle to broader acceptance of the need for a consistent scientific basis for medical interventions is the attitude that worthless treatments are harmless. I often have the experience, after reviewing the evidence showing lack of efficacy for a specific intervention, of getting the head-tilt and shrug along with some variation of the dismissive attitude, “Well, if people feel better,...
If you’re sick, even the ridiculous can seem sublime
Let’s say you have cancer. And let’s say you’re really, really sick of having cancer. And let’s say that you’re also pretty tired of scans, chemo, radiation, hair loss, nausea. And let’s say you’re not really sick and tired of living, but actually pretty happy to be alive. Finally, let’s say someone says that they can get rid of your cancer, without...
“There must be a reason,” or how we support our own false beliefs
For a change of pace, I want to step back from medicine for this post, although, as you will see (I hope), the study I’m going to discuss has a great deal of relevance to the topics covered regularly on this blog. One of the most frustrating aspects of being a skeptic and championing science-based medicine is just how unyielding belief in...
Oriental Medicine or Medical Orientalism?
The following is the second adapted excerpt of an upcoming article called “The Untold Story of Acupuncture.” It is scheduled to be published in December 2009 in Focus in Alternative and Complementary Therapies (FACT), a review journal that presents the evidence on alternative medicine in an analytical and impartial manner. This section argues that the current flurry of interest in acupuncture and...
SBM in primary practice: one student’s experience
EDITOR’S NOTE: Dr. Jones is off this week; fortunately, we have this guest post by Tim Kreider, our science-based medical student. Enjoy! My first clerkship of my third year of medical school was Family Medicine, and I had a great experience. After the first two years spent mostly with books and then a three-year interlude in a basic science lab, these past...
The perils and pitfalls of doing a “vaccinated versus unvaccinated” study
The anti-vaccine movement is nothing if not plastic. It “evolves” very rapidly in response to selective pressures applied to it in the form of science refuting its key beliefs. For instance, when multiple studies looking at the MMR vaccine and autism failed to confirm the myth that the MMR causes autism or “autistic enterocolitis,” most recently late last year, it was not...
Science versus pseudoscience
I know this one’s been floating around the blogosphere for a while, but it finally made its way to me at a time when I needed something lighthearted and amusing (warning: some profanity and at least one use of the “F” word): Best quotes: “Well, science doesn’t know everything.” Well, science knows it doesn’t know anything, otherwise it would stop … But...
Functional Medicine IV
When I started this series on Functional Medicine, David Gorski suggested looking at Mark Hyman’s web page, which I had seen months before, but thought did not reveal much. That was a wrong. It shows a lot, and I suggest bloggers et al review it. So I decided on a fourth “functional medicine” (FM) installment, in search of what it FM really...
Science-Based Medicine 101: Reproducibility
So far I have explained why most research (if not carefully designed) will lead to a false positive result. This inherent bias is responsible for many of the illusionary treatment benefits that we hear about so commonly through the media (whether they’re reporting about CAM or Western medicine), because it is their job to relay information in an entertaining way more so...