Category: Science and Medicine
Guest Book Review of “Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Ethics, the Patient, and the Physician”
The following book review was written not by your poster (although I’ve added the hyperlinks), but by his friend Cees Renckens, who is a gynecologist in the Netherlands and the chairman of the Dutch Society against Quackery. A short bio of Dr. Renckens, including references to several articles in English, follows the review. Most impressive to me is that he is, as far as I...
Let President-Elect Obama know that NCCAM should be defunded!
As you may or may not know, Change.gov is being used by Obama’s team to solicit policy ideas. Americans submit ideas, along with supporting rationale, and people “vote up” or vote down” the proposals. “Up” votes increase the score of the proposals, and “down” votes decrease the score. It is described thusly on the Change.gov website: Share your ideas on any issue...
Probiotics
The Wall Street Journal has an assessment of probiotics in the Jan 13, 2009 issue entitled “Bug Crazy: Assessing the Benefits of Probiotics.” For some reason when I wander around the hospital on rounds people show me articles such as this and ask, so whatcha think about this? Probiotics are interesting. They are live bacteria given to treat and prevent diseases. It...
How Is Alternative Medicine Like Earmark Spending?
I recently watched a special news report about John McCain leading the charge towards making legislative earmarks illegal. The Economist defines earmarks this way: Earmarks, for the uninitiated, are spending projects that are directly requested by individual members of Congress and are not subject to competitive bidding. Most Americans are rightly upset about the practice of slipping pet projects into larger, well-vetted,...
Chopra and Weil and Roy, oh my! Or: The Wall Street Journal, coopted.
When the unholy Trinity of Woo attacks! Deepak Chopra, Andrew Weil, and Rustum Roy join forces to fool the Wall Street Journal.
Our own slippery grounds
When we were forming the National Council against Health Fraud I wondered aloud to the president, Bill Jarvis, what we would do if society solved the chiropractic problem. Bill laughed and said there would never be an end to quackery claims. How right he was. But why? Many express surprise that at this time of remarkable intellectual and scientific advance, so many...
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January 8, 2009
2008 Medical Weblog Awards
I am pleased to announce that Science-Based Medicine is a finalist for a 2008 Medical Weblog Award in the New Medical Blog category. You can see all the categories and finalists here: http://www.medgadget.com/archives/2009/01/the_2008_medical_weblog_awards_the_polls_are_open.html Of note, our blogging friend, Orac, is also a finalist for Respectful Insolence in the health policies/ethics category, along with our own Dr. Val Jones for her excellent blog,...
Reality is unfair
This space has often hosted musings on the nature of scientific knowledge, on how medical science is based in methodological naturalism (MN), rather than supernaturalism. MN requires that our acquisition of knowledge about the natural world be based on natural phenomena. The reason for this should be quite obvious: the natural world is the only one that exists, for all intents and...
Christine Maggiore and Eliza Jane Scovill: Living and dying with HIV/AIDS denialism
On Science-Based Medicine, we strive to apply the light of science and reason on all manner of unscientific belief systems about medicine. For the most part, but by no means exclusively, we have concentrated on so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) because there is an active movement to infiltrate faith-based, rather than science-based, modalities into “conventional” medicine. Indeed, such efforts are well-financed,...