Category: Science and Medicine
Edzard Ernst Does It Again
Publishing one excellent book is an accomplishment; publishing two in one year is a truly outstanding achievement. In 2008 Edzard Ernst and Simon Singh published a landmark book Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts About Alternative Medicine. I reviewed it on this blog last summer. It is particularly important since Ernst is a former advocate for CAM (complementary and alternative medicine) who...
Health care and the Stimulus Plan
In my last post, I told you a little story about using science- and evidence-based medicine to improve health care. The focus was primarily on preventing an iatrogenic illness, namely intravenous catheter infections. A researcher came up with a plausible idea for an intervention, studied it, and found it to be successful—the intervention was science-based in that it was proposed based...
Another challenge to surgical dogma
Better late than never with this one. The dogma that I’m referring to is the remaining practice of using NG tubes in anyone with upper gastrointestinal surgery (liver, stomach, pancreas, duodenum, proximal small intestine) and then placing a jejunostomy tube (a tube, also often called a J-tube, that goes into the jejunum, or the proximal part of the small intestine, through which...
Live Blood Analysis: The Modern Auguries
I saw a patient last week who was self referred. He had been seeing a DC/ND for a variety of symptoms that turned out to be asthma. Not that the DC/ND made that diagnosis. His DC/ND diagnosed him with an infection, based on live blood analysis, and offered the patient a colonic detox as a cure. My patient thought he should get...
Research, Minus Science, Equals Gossip
“A person is smart. People are stupid.” – Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones), Men In Black Regular readers of my blog know how passionate I am about protecting the public from misleading health information. I have witnessed first-hand many well-meaning attempts to “empower consumers” with Web 2.0 tools. Unfortunately, they were designed without a clear understanding of the scientific method, basic statistics,...
More evidence that CAM/IM advocates see health care reform as an opportunity to claim legitimacy
Four weeks ago (was it really that long?), I wrote one of my usual lengthy essays for this blog in which I analyzed two editorials published by some very famous advocates of “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM)/”integrative medicine” (IM). They included one in that credulous repository of all things antivaccine The Huffington Post (no, this isn’t about vaccines, but I can’t resist...
Yes We Can! We Can Abolish the NCCAM! Part III
A Reminder… …of why we keep harping on this. A couple of days ago The Scientist reported that the “economic stimulus package” may include a windfall for the NIH: Senate OKs big NIH bump Posted by Bob Grant [Entry posted at 4th February 2009 04:12 PM GMT] The US Senate, which is furiously debating the details of the economic stimulus package making its...
Keeping ’em alive
One of the frequent complaints I hear about science-based medicine is that it is dangerous. Of course, it’s true—so is riding in a train, but it sure beats walking. And that’s the danger of this particular fallacy—yes, medicine is a sharp tool, but it’s also an effective tool, so we must use it properly. And this is where the tools of evidence-...
Yes We Can! We Can Abolish the NCCAM! Part II
Pseudoscience and Dishonesty, continued: “Reliable Information”? In the previous post, we examined misrepresentations by the late National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) Director Stephen Straus and Margaret Chesney, written in 2006 as a rebuttal to a critical article by Donald Marcus and Arthur Grollman in Science magazine. Here, we continue. According to Straus and Chesney: Before the establishment of NCCAM,...
Reality Deniers
“You have an irrational belief in rational thought.” ~Dr David Scholes, directed towards me. “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” ~T.S. Eliot I just finished the book Mathematical Cranks by Underwood Dudley, part of a trifecta of skeptical mathematics books. Doctor Dudley is a professor of mathematics at Depau University and a connoisseur of cranks with a mathematical bent. What is a...