Results for: cell phone cancer
Naturopathic Prescribing: The Dark Side Beckons
I am a terrible Oregon chauvinist. I think there is no better place to live on the planet. Period. Great natural beauty, not a lot of people, best beer ever and no pro football team. Oregon is both casual and tolerant. It is safe to say that dressing up in the Pacific NW means tucking your t shirt into your jeans. And...
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 V)
September 26, 2002 Kimball Atwood, M.D. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Dear Kim, I have now had time to look into the allegations in your letter of June 14th which, incidentally, I shared with Dr. David Eisenberg and he with several others. I have sought consultation about our exchanges and the gist of my response follows. Some of your concerns and allegations are very helpful and...
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...
Knowledge Versus Expertise: The View From Consumer Land
“The internet, in democratizing knowledge, has led a lot of people to believe that it is also possible to democratize expertise.” – SBM Commenter, yeahsurewhatever I’ve spent the last few years of my life in Internet “Consumer Land,” doing what I can to bring accurate health information directly to patients. Of course, I have been surprised by the push-back, and the demand...
Resistance is futile? Hell, no! (A call to arms)
Well, I won’t back down No, I won’t back down You can stand me up at the gates of hell But I won’t back down Gonna stand my ground Won’t be turned around And I’ll keep this world from draggin’ me down Gonna stand my ground And I won’t back down From “I Won’t Back Down” by Tom Petty, 1989 This week,...
The media versus the frontiers of medicine and surgery
A couple of months ago, one of my esteemed co-bloggers, Wally Sampson, wrote an excellent article about borderlines in research in conventional medicine. Such borderlines are particularly common in my area of expertise (cancer, which is also Dr. Sampson’s area of expertise) because there are so many cancers for which we do not as yet have reliably curative therapies. Patients faced with...
Jenny McCarthy, Jim Carrey, and “Green Our Vaccines”: Anti-vaccine, not “pro-safe vaccine”
Last week, there was a rally in Washington, D.C. How many people actually attended the rally is uncertain. The organizers themselves claim that 8,500 people attended, while more objective estimates from people not associated with the march put the number at probably less than 1,000. Of course, such wide variations in estimates for the attendance at such events are not uncommon. For...
Integrative Medicine – Sectarians’ Trojan Horse
Integrative Medicine – Sectarians’ Trojan Horse leapfrogs science (Or, I can misuse language with the best of them…) I stumbled across an article from Archives of Internal Medicine, 2002 (Integrative Medicine: Bringing medicine back to its roots. Arch Intern Med. 2002 Feb 25;162(4):395-7). It is one of the first authored by Andrew Weil on “Integrative Medicine “ – another is BMJ in...