More Fear-Based Practice Building: Shaken Baby Syndrome and Chiropractic
During my first clinical rotation in medical school, I found myself at the pediatric nurse station one afternoon waiting for a patient to arrive from the emergency department. An adorable older infant was there sitting in a bouncy chair, smiling and drooling as babies tend to do, and looking rather well for an inpatient. The nurse watching her explained that she had...
Naturopathy vs. Science: Fake Diseases
you consult with a naturopath, you could walk out diagnosed with something called Wilson’s Temperature Syndrome. But the naturopath would be wrong, because Wilson’s Temperature Syndrome is a fake disease. One of the hallmarks of alternative medicine is the “fake disease”. Fake diseases don’t actually exist – they are invented without any objective evidence showing that they are real. Fake diseases tend...
False Memory Syndrome Alive and Well
It is disheartening that we have to return to pseudosciences that have been debunked decades ago, because they continue to linger despite being eviscerated by scientific scrutiny. Belief systems and myths have incredible cultural inertia, and they are difficult to eradicate completely. That is why belief in astrology, while in the minority, persists. Professions, however, should be different. A healing profession should...
Can Airrosti Really Resolve Most Chronic Pain in Just Three Visits?
A correspondent asked me to look into Airrosti because her employer’s insurance company had started covering it, and she was skeptical. She had tried to look up its effectiveness and safety record on the Internet and hadn’t found much. The information on their website didn’t tell me what I wanted to know, so I did a little digging. Like my correspondent, I...
Conspiracy theories and Ebola virus transmission
Yesterday, I spiffed up a post that some of you might have seen, describing how a particular medical conspiracy theory has dire consequences in terms of promoting non-science-based medical policy. Specifically, I referred to how the myth that there are all sorts of “cures” for deadly and even terminal diseases that are being kept from you by an overweening fascistic FDA’s insistence...
Using the fear of Ebola to promote the placebo legislation that is “right to try”
Libertarians and free market fundamentalists generally detest the FDA and want to dramatically decrease its power in the belief that the free market can guarantee the safety of drugs better than a government agency that requires strong scientific evidence of efficacy and safety before approval. Not surprisingly, they're at it again, this time in the service of promoting "right-to-try" laws and using...
Infinite Variety? So many styles of acupuncture.
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale. Her infinite variety. – William Shakespeare This is not a typical post for me, but something I have been meaning to do to satisfy my own curiosity. I have wondered, how many variations of acupuncture are there? I suspected a lot, but I thought I would go looking and make a list. Since acupuncture is...
“Quackery: A $10 Billion Scandal”
Who would you guess authored a 250-page report which begins with this Preface? This report marks the culmination of an intensive four-year review of quackery and its impact on the elderly. . . As this report details, quackery has traveled far from the day of the pitchman and covered wagon to emerge as big business. Those who orchestrate and profit from the...
SBM on Wikipedia in Every Language
One of the most interesting aspects of living through the second half of the 20th century and into the first half of the 21st century is the profound change in access to information. I remember in the 1980s there was a buzz (at least among technophiles and science fiction nerds) about how computers were going to be connected in a worldwide network...
Salk’s swansong: renaissance of the injected polio vaccine
Picture a lab scientist. White coat, pensive expression, microscope in hand. Glasses, perhaps. The person you have in mind (providing you are willing to humour a stereotype or two) may have a striking resemblance to Jonas Salk, the archetypal laboratory researcher, born in New York City on Wednesday 28th October 1914 — one hundred years ago today. The name will be familiar...