Results for: placebos
A systematic review about nothing
There is dubious content in PubMed that you won’t find unless you look for it, or stumble across it inadvertently. It’s the entire field of alternative medicine which is abstracted and complied along with the actual medical literature. In this world, the impossible is accepted as fact, and journal articles focus on the medical equivalent of counting angels on pinheads. I’ve been...
MEND Protocol For Alzheimer’s Disease
The medical profession is currently engaged in a simmering debate about what is the best overall approach to take toward the relationship between science and health care. I would say that the current dominant model is Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM). We, of course, advocate for a number of tweaks to EBM we call Science-Based Medicine (SBM). SBM essentially advocates for an ironic-sounding holistic...
Is there a reproducibility “crisis” in biomedical science? No, but there is a reproducibility problem
Reproducibility is the key to scientific advancement. It has been claimed that we suffer from a "reproducibility crisis," but in reality it is a chronic problem in reproducibility. Here we will look at the scope of the problem and strategies to address it.
Therapeutic Touch Pseudoscience: The Tooth Fairy Strikes Again
A study out of Iran titled “Therapeutic touch for nausea in breast cancer patients receiving chemotherapy: Composing a treatment” was recently published in the journal Complementary Therapies in Clinical Practice. It is a great example of the Tooth Fairy science that permeates much of the research in complementary and alternative medicine. In Tooth Fairy science, researchers attempt to study a phenomenon without...
Supplements, Lies, and a Lengthy Transcript
On October 21, 1993, there was a hearing before the U.S. Senate Committee for Labor and Human Resources, with the long-winded title: Examining How the Federal Government Should Regulate the Marketing and Use of Dietary Supplements and Related Measures, Including S. 784, To Strengthen Federal Standards with Respect To Dietary Supplements. S. 784, sponsored by Sen. Orrin Hatch, would eventually be enacted...
American Journal of Public Health article touts “potential public health benefits” of homeopathy
An article in the April, 2016 issue of the American Journal of Public Health caught my eye: “Homeopathy Use by US Adults: Results of a National Survey.” I was pleased to see that homeopathy use is actually quite low. The 2012 National Health Survey found that only 2.1% of U.S. adults used homeopathy in the last 12 months, although that was a...
Patient Beware: Off-label drug promotion by pharmaceutical companies
Pharmaceutical companies and their sales reps can distribute information, such as medical journal articles, about unapproved (“off-label“) uses of their drugs as long as they adhere to FDA guidelines. However, the FDA takes the position that this information must be distributed separately from information that is “promotional in nature,” i.e., for marketing purposes, a position that is now open to question. Off-label...
Is “harnessing the power of placebo” worthwhile to treat anything?
We frequently write about placebo effects here on Science-Based Medicine. The reason is simple. They are an important topic in medicine and, at least as importantly, understanding placebo effects is critical to understanding the exaggerated claims of advocates of “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), now more frequently called “integrative medicine” (i.e., integrating pseudoscience with science). Over the years, I (and, of course,...
Continued Battle over Homeopathy
The battle to rid modern scientific societies from the blatant and harmful pseudoscience of homeopathy continues. This past year has been overall a good one – in the US both the FDA and FTC decided to review their regulation of homeopathy. They have gathered their testimony and are now apparently reviewing everything. Their decisions on this topic are eagerly anticipated and could...
The “It Worked for Me” Gambit
It is almost inevitable that whenever we post an article critical of the claims being made for a particular treatment, alternative philosophy, or alternative profession, someone in the comments will counter a careful examination of published scientific evidence with an anecdote. Their arguments boils down to, “It worked for me, so all of your scientific evidence and plausibility is irrelevant.” Both components...