Results for: meditation
“Patient-Centered Care” and the Society for Integrative Oncology
Should Medical Journals Inform Readers if a Book Reviewer can’t be Objective? At the end of last week’s post I suggested that book reviewer Donald Abrams and the New England Journal of Medicine had withheld information useful for evaluating Abrams’ review: that he is the Secretary/Treasurer of the Society for Integrative Oncology (SIO), the organization of which Lorenzo Cohen, the first editor of the...
Touched by a Touched Healing Toucher
Recent posts by Drs. Sampson and Hansen and some recent comments have got me to thinking for the umpteenth time about this issue: quackery is quackery, even if it seems harmless and even if some people seek it. This is the first of a series that will discuss it. I’m afraid I will ramble a bit; it may be that not every post will support that premise. Nevertheless,...
Diagnostic Dilemmas
Sometimes diagnosis is straightforward. If a woman has missed several periods and has a big belly with a fetal heartbeat, it’s pretty easy to diagnose pregnancy. But most of the time diagnosis is much more difficult. Alzheimer’s can’t be diagnosed for sure until the patient dies and you do an autopsy. If only we had one of those Star Trek gadgets to...
Touch – a Trojan Horse
Touch – Ouch. here they are again. I had planned to post contents of a letter written a decade ago to a Washington Post reporter on why med schools would entertain associating with quacky methods and their advocates. But an article in the SF Chronicle intruded on May 25 on a research project at Stanford on “Healing Touch” (HT). The project is...
The Real ID
Stein: When we just saw that man, I think it was Mr. [PZ] Myers, talking about how great scientists were, I was thinking to myself the last time any of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to do they were telling them to go to the showers to get gassed.Stein (speaking about the Holocaust): …that was horrifying beyond words, and that’s...
My Woo: A Confession
It’s a case of mind over matter. I have no mind but it doesn’t seem to matter. — George Burns I should be working on my taxes. Instead, I’ll dwell on the other, more pleasant, inevitability. Its been a bad couple of months for death. Everyone dies, and people often die of infection, but the flu season has been busy and with...
The ultimate in “integrative medicine”: Integrating the unscientific into the medical school curriculum
For the second week in a row I find myself throwing out the original post that I had planned on doing in favor of a different topic. The reason this week is, quite simply, having read Dr. Atwood’s excellent two part post Misleading Language: The Common Currency of “CAM” Characterizations (Part I; Part II). I don’t at this time intend to expand...
Alternative Flight
The following commentary is the first contribution to SBM by guest author, Mark Crislip. The airline industry in the United States is often used as an example of a complex technological system that provides high volume, inexpensive and reliable transportation to millions of people every year, that, despite sending tons of aluminum five miles into the air, has an amazing safety record....
The infiltration of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) and “integrative medicine” into academia
A few years back, my co-blogger Wally Sampson wrote a now infamous editorial entitled Why the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) Should Be Defunded. When I first read it, I must admit, I found it to be a bit harsh and–dare I say?–even close-minded. After all, plausibility aside, I believed at the time that the only way to demonstrate...