Results for: NCCAM
Journal of the American Dental Association Falls for Tooth Fairy Science
Another venerable scientific journal has fallen prey to “alternative” medicine research. The Journal of the American Dental Association (JADA) has joined the New England Journal of Medicine and Annals of Internal Medicine, among others, with its publication of “A pilot study of a chiropractic intervention for management of chronic myofascial temporomandibular disorder,” in the October, 2013, issue. And what “chiropractic intervention” is...
Chemotherapy doesn’t work? Not so fast… (A lesson from history)
If there’s one medical treatment that proponents of “alternative medicine” love to hate, it’s chemotherapy. Rants against “poisoning” are a regular staple on “alternative health” websites, usually coupled with insinuations or outright accusations that the only reason oncologists administer chemotherapy is because of the “cancer industrial complex” in which big pharma profits massively from selling chemotherapeutic agents and oncologists and hospitals profit...
Student Health Professionals and Attitudes about CAM
While I’m now two full decades out of pharmacy school, I am occasionally invited to return to give a lecture or facilitate a workshop. Pharmacy education has changed a lot since the 1990’s. For me, pharmacy was a Bachelor’s degree program you started right out of high school. Today, students must have a few years of university completed before they can apply...
Integrative Medicine’s Collateral Damage
Integrative medicine combines the practice of medicine with alternative medicine. Proponents tend to take a paragraph or two to say this, but that is what remains when boiled down to its essence. By putting this more concise definition together with Tim Minchin’s often-quoted observation about alternative medicine, you get: integrative medicine is the practice of medicine combined with medicine that either has...
Answering Our Critics, Part 2 of 2: What’s the Harm?
Last week I posted a list of 30 rebuttals to many of the recurrent criticisms that are made by people who don’t like what we say on SBM. I thought #30 deserved its own post; this is it. At the end, I’ve added a few items to the original list. What’s the harm in people trying CAM? Science-based medicine has been criticized...
Chiropractic Practice Building: A Doctor’s Confession and the Report of Findings
“I’ve got to get this off my chest!” “Dear chiropractic practitioner, Confessions are tough…Real tough. They are painful, awful things. But, sometimes a confession can set the record straight, and I want to give credit where credit is due. Before I talk about my confession though, let me say a few other things first. You may want to sit down. You know,...
Survey Says… Infectious Disease Docs and CAM
Surveys are evidently a popular way to get a paper published. Put “complementary alternative medicine survey” into Pubmed and get 2,353 hits. I would have trouble coming up with a hundred groups about whom I would be interested in their use of SCAMs, but I tend to be a lumper rather than a splitter. But if you want to know about SCAM...
Integrative Medicine Invades the U.S. Military: Part Three
Nobody seems to know exactly how to define “integrative medicine” (“IM”) or to demonstrate what it does that is superior to the “conventional” kind. There is a lot of talk about addressing the “whole person” and not just the disease, patient-centeredness and the like, all of which are already aspects of conventional medicine. But, however defined, the central idea seems to be...
Integrative Medicine Invades the U.S. Military: Part Two
An unfortunate side effect (if you will) of states licensing of “CAM” practitioners is their ensuing insinuation of themselves into the nooks and crannies of the American health care system. Sometimes this is voluntary, such as their inclusion as providers of health care services in medical practices and other institutional settings in the form of integrative and quackademic medicine. Where voluntary action...