Category: Science and Medicine
Lies, Damned Lies, and ‘Integrative Medicine’
Last week, two events took place in Washington that ought to inspire trepidation in the minds of all who value ethical, rational, science-based medicine and ethical, rational, biomedical research. One was the Senate Panel titled Integrative Care: A Pathway to a Healthier Nation, previously discussed by my fellow bloggers David Gorski, Peter Lipson, and Steve Novella, and also by the indefatigable Orac (here and...
Prevention—science vs. nonsense
There are many ways in which cult medicine believers try to insinuate themselves into the health care system. As Dr. Gorski has pointed out, “prevention” is one of their metaphorical feet in the door. The cult medicine literature often says things like, “mainstream medicine is fine for treating acute illness, but what we do is prevention.” What they often leave out is...
Bad Books
In the interests of fairness and intellectual honesty, I’ve forced myself to read a lot of really bad books. The True Believer tells me his guru’s book is the Real Stuff. He tells me I have a closed mind and won’t look at anything outside establishment dogma, and if I only read the book and understood Dr. Quack’s evidence and arguments, I...
Tom Harkin’s War on Science (or, “meet the new boss…”)
This was cross-posted at White Coat Underground, despite the topic having been covered by Dr. Gorski yesterday. The topic is important enough that many of us in the medical blogosphere are going to be talking about this. Remember when President Obama said something about returning science to it’s rightful place? Well, our new president has a real tough climb ahead of him....
Senator Tom Harkin: “Disappointed” that NCCAM hasn’t “validated” more CAM
Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) owes me a new irony meter. I’ll explain in a minute, but first you have to know why I even care about what Harkin says or does, given that he’s not my Senator. As you may recall, arguably no single legislator in the U.S. has done more to harm to the cause of promoting science- and evidence-based medicine...
A Medical-Skeptical Classic
The medical literature slowly becomes outdated. As a result there are not that many ‘classics’ in the field, since their content becomes less relevant. The medical aphorism is that 10 years after graduation from medical school, half of everything you learned will no longer be valid. The problem for medical students is trying to figure out which half of their curriculum is...
How To Get Physicians To Use The Same Science-Based Playbook
Pretty much everyone agrees that we need to improve the quality of healthcare delivered to patients in the US. We’ve all heard the frightening statistics from the Institute of Medicine about medical error rates – that as many as 98,000 patients die each year as a result of them – and we also know that the US spends about 33% more than...
Healing But Not Curing
Last week I discussed the book Healing, Hype, or Harm? edited by Edzard Ernst. I was particularly struck by one of the essays in that book: “Healing but not Curing” by Bruce Charlton, MD, a reader in evolutionary psychiatry at the Department of Psychology of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Charlton proposes a new way of looking at CAM. He describes...
2009: Shaping up to be a really bad year for antivaccinationists
I will begin this post with a bit of an explanation. Between one and two weeks ago, there appeared two momentous news about the manufactroversy regarding vaccines and autism. No doubt, many SBM readers were expecting that I, as the resident maven of this particular bit of pseudoscience, would have been here last week to give you, our readers, the skinny on...
Colorado is Nearer to Promoting Naturopathic Pseudomedicine—Aided by the Colorado Medical Society
This week we’ll take a break from lambasting the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, as worthy as that task is, in order to confront some of the latest events involving the pseudomedical cult that calls itself “naturopathic medicine.”* Intrepid nurse and anti-healthfraud activist Linda Rosa reports that Colorado is dangerously close to becoming the next state to endorse “NDs” as health...