Category: Science and Medicine
Applied Kinesiology: Nonsense on Full Automatic
I start these entries about a week before their due date, and when I saw Dr Hall’s Applied Kinesiology (AK) post from Tuesday, I thought the heck, there goes my post for Friday. After reading Harriet’s post, I think mine will be both complementary and alternative, and perhaps even integrative, to her entry. I do have one quibble with her post. She...
“Obama Promises $156 Million to Alzheimer’s…But where will the money come from?” That’s easy: the NCCAM!
The quoted language above is part of the headline of this story in today’s The Scientist: Citing the rising tide of Americans with Alzheimer’s—projections suggest 10 million people will be afflicted by 2050—the Obama administration and top National Institutes of Health officials are taking action. On February 7, they announced that they will add an additional $80 million to the 2013 NIH...
What is Science?
Consider these statements: …there is an evidence base for biofield therapies. (citing the Cochrane Review of Touch Therapies) The larger issue is what constitutes “pseudoscience” and what information is worthy of dissemination to the public. Should the data from our well conducted, rigorous, randomized controlled trial [of ‘biofield healing’] be dismissed because the mechanisms are unknown or because some scientists do not...
IgG Food Intolerance Tests: What does the science say?
I spend a lot of time as a pharmacist discussing side effects and allergies to drugs. For your own safety, I won’t recommend or dispense a drug until I know your allergy status. I don’t limit the history to drugs—I want to know anything you’re allergic to, be it environmental, food, insects, or anything else. Allergies can create true therapeutic challenges: We...
Placebo Again.
Medicine is simultaneously both easy and hard. As an Infectious Disease doctor, my day can be summed up with the phrase “me find bug, me kill bug, me go home.” Sometimes it is just that simple. A lot of the time it isn’t. I may not be certain what the infection is, or even if the patient has an infection, or allergies...
What Is Traditional Chinese Medicine?
Traditional Chinese Medicine is not actual medicine, and should not be treated as such. It has more in common with Galen's theory of the four humors than anything a doctor would recognize today.
An Owner’s Manual for the Heart
In writing about science-based medicine, we give a lot of attention to medicine that is not based on good science. We use bad examples to show why science is important and how it is frequently misapplied, misinterpreted, misreported, or even wholly rejected. It’s a pleasure, for a change, to write about a straightforward example of the best of science-based medicine in action....
The New England Journal of Medicine Sinks a Bit Lower
I suppose it was bound to happen, but it still rankles. Here is the back cover of last week’s issue of the decreasingly prestigious New England Journal of Medicine: Here’s the front cover: It’s the 200th Anniversary issue, no less. Some might protest that ‘probiotics’—live bacteria of ‘good’ varieties, as far as the gut is concerned—aren’t all that implausible, and that...
The rebranding of CAM as “harnessing the power of placebo”
If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the past seven years or so that I’ve been blogging, first at my other “super secret” (or, more accurately, super “not-so-secret”) blogging location, and then the four years I’ve been blogging here at Science-Based Medicine (SBM), it’s that the vast majority of “alternative medicine,” “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), and “integrative medicine” (IM) treatments (or...