Conscious Discipline – More Dubious Neuroscience
I did not coordinate my topic for today with Harriet’s excellent review yesterday of Satel and Lilienfeld’s excellent book; the timing is just fortuitous. Harriet discussed popular abuses of neuroscience, which often amount to an oversimplification and hyperreductionism of a complex area of study. I was recently asked to comment on a claim that I feel falls squarely into this realm –...
Brainwashed: Neuroscience and Its Perversions
Sally Satel and Scott Lilienfeld have written a new book, Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience. Its purpose is not to critique neuroscience, but to expose and protest its mindless oversimplification, interpretive license, and premature application in the legal, commercial, clinical, and philosophical domains. The brain is a wondrous thing: “…the three pound universe between our ears has more connections than...
E-cigarettes: The growing popularity of an unregulated drug delivery device
This post is not about vaccines (for a change). However, I deem it appropriate to mention that one of the topics that I blog most frequently about is vaccines and how the antivaccine movement pushes pseudoscience and quackery based on its apparently implacable hatred of vaccines. (You’ll see why very shortly.) It seems almost as long as my interest in the topic...
Science-Based Satire: Improperly Performed Acupuncture Linked to Spontaneous Human Combustion
Experts in traditional Chinese medicine are warning patients to avoid unlicensed acupuncture practitioners after an apparent case of spontaneous human combustion. Baton Rouge, LA-When investigators climbed from out of the smoldering debris that was the home of Hank Thomas, the looks on their faces told the gathering crowd what these hardened veterans of the Baton Rouge Fire Department couldn’t put into words....
The facts of the alternative medicine industry
People have been living on earth for about 250,000 years. For the past 5,000 healers have been trying to heal the sick. For all but the past 200, they haven’t been very good at it. – Dr. Paul Offit Twenty years is a long time in medicine. I celebrated my 20th pharmacy class reunion last weekend. Of course reunions are time to...
Autism and Induced Labor
A recently published epidemiological study in JAMA Pediatrics looked at the association between induction and enhancement of labor and the risk of autism. The researchers found a positive association, especially with males. The study has been variously reported in the popular press with causal interpretations not justified by the data. The study itself is very robust – the authors looked at 625,042...
Homeopathy First Aid Kits
$55 for a box of sugar pills? How on earth can anyone sell homeopathic first aid kits?
When doctors betray their patients and science-based medicine for money
We spend a lot of time on this blog discussing failures of the medical system. Usually, we such discussions occur in the context of how unscientific practices and even outright quackery have managed to infiltrate what should be science-based medicine (SBM) in the form of so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) or “integrative medicine,” in which the quackery of alternative medicine is...
New help page for commenting and login issues
Earlier this year, after getting hacked, we made some major changes. It all had to be done, but of course there are some new headaches. We’ve published a new help page explaining the changes, why you do not have to have a Facebook or Twitter account, and why some comments are held for moderation (one normal reason, one buggy reason). Obviously we...
A Different Perspective: Placebo, SCAM, and Advertising
Summertime, time, time Child, the living’s easy. Fish are jumping out And the handicap, Lord Handicaps high, Lord so high ~ Janis Joplin It is summer. Time for the kids and the outside, not the computer. What follows is a summertime blog entry, for which I admit to feeling guilty for the comparatively little time I have spent on it, but as...