Warts
As this is published I am finishing the last day of a 12 day stretch covering my partner while he is off trying to get MDRTB and typhoid fever. He is in India. I may have to autoclave him when he returns before I let him in the hospital. Double the work means double the fun, but free time goes down by...
A Final Word: On T-Shirts and Teapot Tempests
I wore a T-shirt at The Amazing Meeting 2012 that generated a lot of controversy. You can see a picture of it on my Wikipedia article. I didn’t want to talk about the T-shirt, but I’ve been repeatedly challenged to explain myself, and I’m afraid I can no longer avoid it. Steven Novella has recommended that we try to give other people’s...
Legislative Alchemy: Chiropractic 2013
Via the magic of legislative alchemy, chiropractors are already licensed health care providers in all 50 states. Thus their legislative efforts tend to focus on expanding their scope of practice and forcing public and private insurers to cover their services, in some cases at the same rate as medical doctors. Those efforts continue in 2013 with 65 bills impacting chiropractors introduced so...
SBM e-Books
[NEW POSTS JUST BELOW THIS POST] I am happy to announce that Science-Based Medicine has published three e-Books: Science-Based Medicine’s Guide to Naturopathy Kindle | iBooks | Nook Science-Based Medicine’s Guide to Miscellaneous CAM Kindle | iBooks | Nook Science-Based Medicine’s Guide to Homeopathy Kindle | iBooks | Nook
I Am Not Your Enemy: An Open Letter to My Feminist Critics
Note: The previous post is my usual weekly contribution to SBM. I am taking the liberty of posting this additional entry today on an issue that is peripheral to Science Based Medicine. If you are not interested in the recent squabbles within the skeptical movement, you will probably want to skip it. But it does respond to a detailed critique of an...
Sex, Gender, and Sexuality: It’s Complicated
When a baby is born, the obstetrician or midwife announces “It’s a boy” or “It’s a girl.” As toddlers, children learn to classify everyone as either boy or girl. When our firstborn was very young, we overheard her talking to herself as she grappled with the concept: Let’s see… I’m a girl, and Kimberly [her baby sister] is a girl, and Mommy’s...
Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski’s cancer “success” stories
The year 2012 was rung out and the year 2013 will be rung in by news that Eric Merola, propagandist for “brave maverick doctor” Stanislaw Burzynski who claims to have developed a cancer treatment far superior to current conventional science- and evidence-based cancer treatments, is releasing releasing a sequel to his wildly successful documentary (in the “alternative cancer” underground, that is) Burzynski...
Picking Cherries in Science: The Bio-Initiative Report
by Kenneth R. Foster & Lorne Trottier Science-based medicine is great, but it all depends on how you evaluate the scientific evidence. A bad example is the BioInitiative Report (BIR), an egregiously slanted review of health and biological effects of electromagnetic fields (EMF) of the sort that are produced by power lines, cellular telephones, Wi-Fi, and other mainstays of modern life. When first...
Who takes dietary supplements, and why?
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, I’ll bet you’re not a regular consumer of vitamins or supplements. I’m in that group. Aside from sporadic vitamin D in winter, I don’t take any vitamins or supplements routinely, nor do I give any to my children. Your reasons may be close to mine: There is little to no evidence suggesting that dietary deficiencies...
Mouse Model of Sepsis Challenged
A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences calls into question the standard mouse model of sepsis, trauma, and infection. The research is an excellent example of how proper science investigates its own methods. Mouse and other animal models are essential to biomedical research. The goal is to find a specific animal model of a human disease...