Results for: chiropractic stroke
The Marshall Protocol
Revised 7/23/09 to correct an error. While there are many taxonomies of alternative medicines, one thing almost all alternative therapies have in common is they are originally the de novo discovery of one lone individual. Working outside of the mainstream, they are the gadflies who see farther because those around them are midgets. Hanneman conceives of homeopathy, the treatment of all disease....
Risks Associated With Complementary And Alternative Medicine (CAM): A Brief Overview
Having grown up on a dairy farm, I am one of the least likely people to object to the deification of yogurt. However, as a critical thinker, I cannot help but resist the idea (promoted by some health sites) that probiotics are a reasonable alternative to chemotherapy in the treatment of colon cancer. And there are many other equally unhelpful claims being...
Harvard Medical School: Veritas for Sale (Part VI)
Loose Ends: Dr. Koh and More After Dr. Federman’s letter and my reply, posted in Part V of this series,† there seemed little point in pursuing the matter further. Although Dr. Federman never answered my reply, he did send, at my request, a copy of Commissioner of Public Health Howard Koh‘s written “construction of the events in the Massachusetts Special Commission.” As you may recall, those events...
Harvard Medical School: Veritas for Sale (Part II)
In Part I of this series† we saw that in 2001 Dr. David Eisenberg, the Director of the Harvard Medical School Center for Alternative Medicine Research and Education (CAMRE), and Atty Michael Cohen, the CAMRE’s Director of Legal Programs, had contributed to a report commissioned by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts that would, if accepted as valid by the legislature, provide state protection for a...
Harvard Medical School: Veritas for Sale (Part I)
Several years ago I stumbled upon disturbing information regarding my alma mater, the Harvard Medical School (HMS).† Its professed commitment to investigate implausible medical claims had somehow metamorphosed into the advocacy of such claims. I’ve previously mentioned some of this on SBM (here and here). A couple of pertinent essays appeared in the public domain in 2002 and 2003, but the full...
Prepare for Surgery, Heal Faster?
Quacks and their apologists often cite surgery and emergency treatments of traumatic injury and a few other catastrophic or potentially catastrophic events as the only “conventional” or “allopathic” methods that they consistently recommend. Explicitly or implicitly, for most problems they tout “holistic” or “CAM” treatments. In modern medicine, however, there are plenty of non-surgical and non-emergency treatments whose outcomes are so manifest that even the most exuberant advocates of implausible medical claims (IMC) seem careful to steer...
Science, Reason, Ethics, and Modern Medicine Part 1: Tu Quoque and History
Several weeks ago I argued here that a physician’s primary ethical obligation is to science and truth. In retrospect I probably should have put it a slightly different way: a physician’s primary ethical obligation is the same as everyone else’s. It is to honesty and integrity. For physicians, however, that means being true to real medical knowledge, among other things, and real medical...