Category: Science and Medicine
Science-based medicine and Eurocentrism
A reader sent me an interesting post from her own blog. It’s well-written, compelling, and betrays an exceptional intelligence. It’s also completely wrong. The piece is called, “Bias, Racism, and Alternative Medicine”, an intriguing title. The first part tries to establish that “Western medicine” in one of many ways of understanding health and disease. She starts with some personal anecdotes—always interesting, rarely...
Medicine is hard and should be practiced with caution
It’s tempting to think that the practice of medicine should be simple and intuitive. Unlike other sciences, we all have access to the basic materials—ourselves. We feel that because we are intimately familiar with our bodies, we know a lot about how they work. Unfortunately, it’s a little more complicated than that. The biochemical processes walking around in this sack of meat...
Flu Vaccine Efficacy
I guess I will be spending the rest the flu season writing about the nonsense that is promulgated about the flu vaccine and the disease. One of the more common laments about the flu vaccine is that it doesn’t work: I got the flu vaccine and still got the flu. Well maybe. Maybe not. It takes a few weeks to get protection, so...
Monkey business in autism research, part II
Over the last couple of months, I’ve noticed something about the anti-vaccine movement. Specifically, I’ve noticed that the mavens of pseudoscience that make up the movement seem to have turned their sights with a vengeance on the Hepatitis B vaccine. The reason for this new tactic, I believe, is fairly obvious. The fact that the Hep B vaccine is administered shortly after...
Autism Prevalence
Two recent studies concerning the prevalence of autism in the US have been getting a lot of attention, because they indicate that autism prevalence may be higher than previously estimated. This, of course, fuels the debate over whether or not there are environmental triggers of autism. One study was conducted by the CDC but has yet to be published. The results were...
Petit canard, grand canard
The flu pandemic of 1918 was horrific. Millions of people died (by some estimates 4% of the world’s population), and the medical establishment worked feverishly to find a cause and a treatment. There were many dead-ends in the search for the cause of the flu. One of the most enduring errors was the attribution of the pandemic to a bacterium called Haemophilus...
The “Iron Rule of Cancer”: The dangerous cancer quackery that is the “German New Medicine”
Given that I trained as a cancer surgeon, do laboratory and translational cancer research, and spend my clinical time taking care of breast cancer patients, not surprisingly one topic that gets me the most irritated and provokes a lot of my verbiage for SBM is cancer quackery. As I was perusing my list of posts the other day, it occurred to me...
Confusing correlation with causation
These two video explains it better than anything I’ve seen in a long time: That’s right. Vaccines educate the immune system. Use them. I got my flu shot on Thursday.
Head-In-The-Sand Consumer Affairs
Editor’s Note: Please be aware that Ben is deployed in Iraq right now. What that means is that his Internet access is somewhat sporadic. He will show up from time to time to answer comments, however. ERRARE HUMANUM EST, SED PERSEVERARE DIABOLICUM – To err is human, but to persist diabolical – Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c. 4 BC – 65 AD) The...
The Need for Transparency
A recent editorial in PLOS Medicine discusses the need for transparency in the medical literature, specifically with regard to comparative effectiveness research (CER). The editorial makes many excellent points, but also puts into clear relief the double standard that is consciously being fabricated by proponents of non-science-based medicine. I wrote previously about another editorial that took a very different approach. Speaking for...