Are guidelines for calcium and vitamin D rooted in evidence, or vested interests?
Do osteoporosis guidelines overstate the benefits of calcium and vitamin D supplements? And is their continued presence due to vested interests and conflicts of interest? That’s the provocative argument made by Andrew Grey and Marc Bolland, two endocrinologists who recently detailed their analysis in The BMJ, in a paper entitled “Web of industry, advocacy, and academia in the management of osteoporosis” [PDF]....
The Alternative Medicine Racket
ReasonTV just put out a new video called, “The Alternative Medicine Racket: How the Feds Fund Quacks,” Produced and edited by Todd Krainin. The video is a documentary about the rise of alternative medicine in the US, and is a must-watch for anyone interested in the issue. The documentary does well what a good history documentary is supposed to do – put...
Lawsuit Alleges School Wi-Fi Harmed Child with Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity
My mother had a favorite saying that rhymed: “All you need from dawn to dawn is someone else to blame it on.” WiFi involves mysterious emissions that you can’t see and that sneakily permeate our environment, and they have become a popular target for blame. A lawsuit has been filed against the Fay School in Massachusetts on behalf of a 12-year-old boy...
The price of a naturopathic education
A naturopathic education is costly with very little financial reward once training is complete - in addition to being unscientific, and possibly dangerous.
Medicine in the Magic Kingdom of Cascadia. On Naturopathy.
When the Pacific NW secedes from the Union it is to be part of a new country, Cascadia. The capital would be Portlandia, I suppose. Somehow, I think not. But when I watch the devolution of health care in Oregon, I think back to The Onion (?) when they reported that the United Kingdom was to be sold to Disney, being renamed...
Battle of the feds: FTC tells FDA to do its job regulating homeopathy
Last month, the Society for Science-Based Medicine submitted a comment to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in response to its request for public comments on the agency’s current regulation (actually, lack of regulation) of homeopathic drugs. As the SFSBM pointed out, the FDA has, without legal authority, exempted homeopathic drugs from the safety and efficacy requirements applicable to other drugs under...
Helping the Paralyzed Walk
One of our primary goals at SBM is to advocate for high standards of science in medicine. This means that we spend a lot of our time discussing claims and practices that fall short of this standard. This is very useful – exploring exactly why a claim falls short is a great way to understand what the standard should be and why....
The Science of Mom: A Science-Based Book about Baby Care
When a baby is born, parents are often awed and alarmed to find themselves responsible for this tiny new person, and they desperately want to do their very best to keep their infant safe and healthy. New mothers worry about everything from SIDS to vaccines, from feeding practices to sleep hygiene, and they are bombarded with conflicting advice about caring for their...
“Precision medicine”: Hope, hype, or both?
I am fortunate to have become a physician in a time of great scientific progress. Back when I was in college and medical school, the thought that we would one day be able to sequence the human genome (and now sequence hundreds of cancer genomes), to measure the expression of every gene in the genome simultaneously on a single “gene chip,” and...
ND Confession, Part II: The Accreditation of Naturopathic “Medical” Education
Accreditation of a school does not mean what most people think it means. In particular, it does not mean anything about the quality of education received there, or the validity of the topics studied.