Results for: tcm
The Hazards of “CAM”-Pandering
Steven Salzberg, a friend of this blog and Director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of Maryland, is on the editorial boards of three of the many journals published by BioMed Central (BMC), an important source of open-access, peer-reviewed biomedical reports. He is disturbed by the presence of two other journals under the BMC umbrella: Chinese Medicine...
How popular is acupuncture?
Everybody’s Doing It One argument that often comes up when skeptics and proponents of so-called complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) debate is the question of the popularity of various CAM practices. Advocates of CAM often claim these practices are widely used and growing rapidly in popularity. Obviously, CAM proponents have an interest in characterizing their practices as widely accepted and utilized. Even...
Asian Bear Bile Remedies: Traditional Medicine or Barbarism?
Imagine living 20 years spending 24 hours a day in a cage that tightly fits your body, not giving you room to stand up, stretch out, turn around, or move at all. Imagine that twice a day during these years you would have a metal catheter inserted into a hole which has been cut into your abdomen, allowing the catheter to easily...
Eating Placentas: Cannibalism, Recycling, or Health Food?
After giving birth, most mammals eat the afterbirth, the placenta. Most humans don’t. Several hypotheses have been suggested as to why placentophagy might have had evolutionary survival value, but are there any actual benefits for modern women? Placentophagy has been recommended for various reasons, from nutritional benefit to preventing postpartum depression to “honoring the placenta.” In other cultures, various rituals surround the...
Naturopathy and science
Naturopathy has been a recurrent topic on this blog. The reasons should be obvious. Although homeopathy is the one woo to rule them all in the U.K. and much of Europe, here in the U.S. homeopathy is not nearly as big a deal. Arguably, some flavor of naturopathy is the second most prevalent “alternative medical system” here, after chiropractic of course, and...
The Good Rewards of Bad Science
All the world sees us In grand style wherever we are; The big and the small Are infatuated with us: They run to our remedies And regard us as gods And to our prescriptions Principles and regimens, they submit themselves. Molière, The Imaginary Invalid (1673)1 The passage above is part of a burlesque doctoral conferment ceremony, where the French playwright Molière (1622-1673)...
NEJM and Acupuncture: Even the best can publish nonsense.
I realize that the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) review of acupuncture has already been covered by Drs. Gorski and Novella. But my ego knows no bounds; so I thought I would add my two cents, especially since this review, more than any paper I have read, generates a deep sense on betrayal. There was a time when I believed my...
Another overhyped acupuncture study misinterpreted
Perhaps the most heavily studied of “alternative medicine” modalities is acupuncture. Although it’s hard to be sure as to the reason, I tend to speculate that part of the appeal to trying to do research in this area is because acupuncture is among the most popular of actual “alt-med” modalities, as opposed to science-based medical modalities co-opted by believers in alt-med and...
CAM on campus: Integrative Medicine
My previous posts have described guest lecturers at my medical school campus, invited by a student interest group in CAM. Those events continue; currently ongoing is an 8-weekend certification course in Ayurveda for the subsidized cost of $1500 (includes “tuition, syllabus, and personal guru”). I could pick on this student group, but what’s the point? There will always be medical students who...
The 2nd Yale Research Symposium on Complementary and Integrative Medicine. Part I
March 4, 2010 Today I went to the one-day, 2nd Yale Research Symposium on Complementary and Integrative Medicine. Many of you will recall that the first version of this conference occurred in April, 2008. According to Yale’s Continuing Medical Education website, the first conference “featured presentations from experts in CAM/IM from Yale and other leading medical institutions and drew national and international...