The Detox Scam: How to spot it, and how to avoid it
Note to SBM’s regular readers: Today’s post revisits some older material you may have seen before. Happy New Year! New Year, New You, right? 2014 is the year you’re finally going to get serious about your health. You’re winding down from a week (or more) of celebrations and parties. You’re pretty much recovered from New Year’s Eve by now. It’s time to...
Facebook’s reporting algorithm abused by antivaccinationists to silence pro-science advocates
This is not what I had wanted to write about for my first post of 2014, but unfortunately it’s necessary—so much so, in fact, that I felt the obligation to crosspost both here and on my not-so-super-secret other blog in order to get this information out to as wide a readership as possible. I’ve always had a bit of a love-hate relationship...
Reverse Ageing Hype
There are a number of annoying clichés of science reporting, prime among them being the need to make a connection from any research to a specific application. It must be deeply embedded in the journalism culture, or written in a handbook somewhere. In medicine this means that any study that involves viruses or the immune system’s ability to fight off infection might...
Doctors Are Not “Only Out to Make Money”
There’s an old joke about the doctor whose son graduates from medical school and joins his practice. After a while the son tells his father, “You know old Mrs. Jones? You’ve been treating her rash for years and she never got better. I prescribed a new steroid cream and her rash is gone!” The father responds, “You idiot! That rash put you...
Science-based medicine throughout time
As 2013 comes to a close, because this probably will be my last post of 2013 (unless, of course, something comes up that I can’t resist blogging about before my next turn a week from now), I had thought of doing one of those cheesy end-of-year lists related to the topic of science-based medicine. Unfortunately, I couldn’t come up with anything I...
Motivations
We received the following letter: Your blog, the SBM page, has come up for me several times in my research. I’m an RN trying to research cancer treatment, for myself, I am the patient. I’m also a licensed massage practitioner with a 30 year history using “alternative” or “complementary” medicine successfully to treat myself for various things. When your blog has come...
The Exciting Conclusion
On the slim chance that you’ve been perched on the edge of your seat wondering how the New Mexico appellate court ruled on chiropractic prescription privileges, whether the Council on Chiropractic Education got approved for another three years as an accrediting agency, if NCCAM ever came clean about spinal manipulation, and the fate of Brandon Babcock, DC, at the hands of the...
Garcinia Probably Works But Is Far From a Weight Loss Miracle
Women make up a majority of Dr. Oz’s audience. The majority of women would like to lose weight. That is a match made in heaven, a marketer’s dream. And Oz has never hesitated to exploit that fact to increase audience share, playing fast and loose with sensationalized evidence instead of giving his viewers science-based advice. Dr. Oz has promoted a series of...
An experiment in paying through the nose for “unnecessary care”
Rats. Harriet stole what was going to be the title of this post! This is going to be something completely different than what I usually write about. Well, maybe not completely different, but different from the vast majority of my posts. As Dr. Snyder noted on Friday, it’s easy to find new woo-filled claims or dangerous, evidence-lacking trends to write about. Heck,...
You can’t beat the common cold, and that’s a fact
The common cold is very, very common, with a lot of treatments proposed to control its symptoms or shorten its course. Most don't work.
Don’t Blame the Patient