Results for: The Weekly Waluation of the Weasel Words of Woo

Academics

Coming Soon This page is under construction. We’re reviving this project over the summer of 2013. Please check back later this year. Meanwhile, see the index for reference page index that are more developed.     Topic Editor: Sections: Topic Overview Index of SBM Posts Outside Resources Summary of Key Research Topic Overview Index of SBM Posts A Meeting of Incompatibles Collision...

/ June 13, 2013

Integrative Medicine: “Patient-Centered Care” is the new Medical Paternalism

Integrative Pitchmen Several of us have written about how contemporary quacks have artfully pitched their wares to a higherbrow market than their predecessors were accustomed to, back in the day. Through clever packaging,* quacks today can reasonably hope to become professors at prestigious medical schools, to control and receive substantial grant money from the NIH, to preside over reviews for the Cochrane...

/ December 9, 2011

The End of Chiropractic

An article written by 3 chiropractors and a PhD in physical education and published on December 2, 2009 in the journal Chiropractic and Osteopathy may have sounded the death knell for chiropractic. The chiropractic subluxation is the essential basis of chiropractic theory. A true subluxation is a partial dislocation: chiropractors originally believed bones were actually out of place. When x-rays proved this was...

/ December 11, 2009

Lies, Damned Lies, and ‘Integrative Medicine’

Last week, two events took place in Washington that ought to inspire trepidation in the minds of all who value ethical, rational, science-based medicine and ethical, rational, biomedical research. One was the Senate Panel titled Integrative Care: A Pathway to a Healthier Nation, previously discussed by my fellow bloggers David Gorski, Peter Lipson, and Steve Novella, and also by the indefatigable Orac (here and...

/ March 6, 2009

Misleading Language: the Common Currency of “CAM” Characterizations Part II

Background I promised readers the “Advanced Course” for this week, which undoubtedly has you shaking in your boots. Fear not: you’ve already had a taste of advanced, subtle, misleading “CAM” language, and most of you probably “got” it. That was R. Barker Bausell’s analysis of how homeopathy is “hypothesized to work.” In the interest of civility, let me reiterate that I don’t...

/ March 14, 2008

Misleading Language: the Common Currency of “CAM” Characterizations. Part I

The Best Policy From time to time I have been reiterating that correct use of the language has much to do with logic; I should add that it entails also honesty. I use the word “honesty” in its broadest sense… Concision is honesty, honesty concision—that’s one thing you need to know. —John Simon. Paradigms Lost: Reflections on Literacy and its Decline. New York, NY:...

/ March 7, 2008

Functional medicine: The ultimate misnomer in the world of integrative medicine

Functional medicine. It sounds so...scientific and reasonable. It's anything but. In fact, functional medicine combines the worst features of conventional medicine with a heapin' helpin' of quackery.

/ April 11, 2016

A very special issue of Medical Acupuncture

Every so often, our “friends” on the other side of the science aisle (i.e., the supporters of “complementary and alternative medicine”—otherwise known as CAM or “integrative medicine”) give me a present when I’m looking for a topic for my weekly bit of brain droppings about medicine, science, and/or why CAM is neither. It’s also been a while since I’ve written about this...

/ April 22, 2013

The American Medical Student Association: On “integrating” quackery with science-based medicine

There’s a saying in medicine that we frequently hear when a newer, more effective therapy supplants an older therapy or an existing therapy is shown not to be as efficacious as was once thought, and it has to do about how long it takes for the use of that therapy to decline. The saying basically says that the therapy won’t die out...

/ October 22, 2012

Quackademic medicine trickles out to community hospitals

One of the major themes of this blog has been to combat what I, borrowing a term coined (as far as I can tell) by Dr. R. W. Donnell, like to refer to as “quackademic medicine.” Quackademic medicine is a lovely term designed to summarize everything that is wrong with the increasing embrace of so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) or, as...

/ June 11, 2012