Chemotherapy doesn’t work? Not so fast… (A lesson from history)

If there’s one medical treatment that proponents of “alternative medicine” love to hate, it’s chemotherapy. Rants against “poisoning” are a regular staple on “alternative health” websites, usually coupled with insinuations or outright accusations that the only reason oncologists administer chemotherapy is because of the “cancer industrial complex” in which big pharma profits massively from selling chemotherapeutic agents and oncologists and hospitals profit...

/ October 28, 2013

Anti-VEGF treatment of Macular Degeneration: Science-Based Success

Let's celebrate some good science with a story about some evidence-based treatments for macular degeneration!

/ October 25, 2013

Student Health Professionals and Attitudes about CAM

While I’m now two full decades out of pharmacy school, I am occasionally invited to return to give a lecture or facilitate a workshop. Pharmacy education has changed a lot since the 1990’s. For me, pharmacy was a Bachelor’s degree program you started right out of high school. Today, students must have a few years of university completed before they can apply...

/ October 24, 2013

The CAM Worldview

Harriet has written some excellent recent posts about how to talk to CAM (complementary and alternative medicine) proponents, and answers to common CAM fallacies. I have written about this myself numerous times – we deal with the same logically-challenged claims so often that it’s useful to publish standard responses. In fact, I often wonder about the seeming uniformity of poor arguments put...

/ October 23, 2013

How to Talk to People About CAM

Recently a correspondent asked me for advice about his parents. He said they use things like homeopathy, acupuncture, and copper bracelets. They use conventional medicine too, but it seems to be a 50/50 approach that gives each an equal weighting. He has tried to talk to them about things like homeopathy and the placebo effect, but the shutters come down hard and...

/ October 22, 2013

Redefining cancer

Blogging is a rather immediate endeavor. Over the last nine years (nearly), I’ve lost track of how many times I saw something that I wanted to blog about but by the time I got around to it, it was no longer topical. Usually what happens is that my Dug the Dog tendencies take over, as I’m distracted by yet another squirrel, although...

/ October 21, 2013

Scam Stud. The Food ‘Babe’ and Flu Vaccination

We have evolved in order to survive reality, not to understand it. And it is a good thing that understanding and survival are not tightly linked as many people are apparently totally disconnected from the reality I inhabit, the one described by the natural sciences. When I started writing and podcasting about the SCAMverse I was under the impression that people who...

/ October 18, 2013

Integrative Medicine’s Collateral Damage

Integrative medicine combines the practice of medicine with alternative medicine. Proponents tend to take a paragraph or two to say this, but that is what remains when boiled down to its essence. By putting this more concise definition together with Tim Minchin’s often-quoted observation about alternative medicine, you get: integrative medicine is the practice of medicine combined with medicine that either has...

/ October 17, 2013

Monochloramines in Tap Water

I recently had a clogged drain requiring the services of a plumber. While discussing the details of the job, he took out brochures and a “fact sheet” prepared by his company explaining that my city tap water was going to kill me. Fortunately, they could provide a solution – a home-wide water filtration system. The plumber seemed naively sincere, and genuinely fearful...

/ October 16, 2013

Chiropractic Education for Primary Care

Chiropractors would like to reinvent themselves as family doctors. I’ve written about that before and Jann Bellamy has written about it here, here, here, and here. A new study in The Journal of Chiropractic Education alleges that the National University of Health Sciences is nearing its institutional goal of training chiropractic students as primary care practitioners. The data they collected don’t even...

/ October 15, 2013