Book Reviews: “The Cure for Everything” and “Which comes first, cardio or weights?”
Do you have any skeptical blind spots? I’ve had a skeptical perspective for a long time (my teenage cynicism wasn’t just a phase) but the framework for my thinking has developed over years. Professionally, the blind spot that the pharmacy profession has towards supplements and alternatives to medicine was only clear after I spent some time working in a pharmacy with thriving...
Brief Announcement
My book Women Aren’t Supposed to Fly: The Memoirs of a Female Flight Surgeon is now available as a Kindle file for $3.99. If you don’t have a Kindle device, there is a free download so you can play Kindle files on your computer or iPad. Some readers may remember my mentioning it on SBM 4 years ago in the context of an article...
Antifluoridation Bad Science
A new review of research out of Harvard University suggests fluoridating drinking water above the EPA limit is a bad idea - which we already knew.
Therapy or Injury? Your Tax Dollars at Work.
The U.S. Army Medical Command recently announced a job opening in the Interdisciplinary Pain Management Center at the San Antonio Military Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston, Texas. Two GS-12 positions were advertised for acupuncturists at a salary of $68,809 to $89,450. As a licensed acupuncturist, a candidate would be expected to offer a full array of the most current and emerging evidenced based...
The perils and pitfalls of “patient-driven” clinical research
Dying of cancer can be a horrible way to go, but as a cancer specialist I sometimes forget that there are diseases that are equally, if not more, horrible. One that always comes to mind is amyotropic lateral sclerosis (ALS), more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. It is a motor neuron disease whose clinical course is characterized by progressive weakness, muscle...
Journal Club
There is a tradition in medical training called Journal Club. The first rule of Journal Club is you do not talk about Journal Club. In Journal Club, at least in the iterations in which I have participated, one article is selected by an attending, everyone reads it, then the strengths, weakness and applicability are discussed by the group. Usually a top notch,...
NCCAM manipulates spinal manipulation
“Complementary and alternative medicine,” as pediatrician and fellow blogger John Snyder aptly stated in a recent journal article on CAM and children, is a term used to describe a disparate, poorly defined set of practices and treatment modalities presumed to be distinct from so-called ‘conventional medicine’. As we have discussed here at Science-Based Medicine, this amorphous concept facilitates a convenient fluidity in delineating...
Olympic Pseudoscience
Pseudoscience is rife within the sporting world, and reaches its apogee with the Olympic Games.
Red Yeast Rice and Cholesterol
While much of CAM is ridiculous or implausible, herbal remedies are an exception. Plants produce pharmacologically active substances; in fact, the science of pharmacology grew out of herbalism. Some herbal remedies have not been scientifically tested, but others have been tested and are clearly effective. Nevertheless, these are seldom if ever the best choice for treatment. One natural remedy stands out. Red...
Meet the new drugs, same as the old drugs?
“Targeted therapy.” It’s the holy grail of cancer research these days. If you listen to its most vocal proponents, it’s the path towards “personalized medicine” that improves survival with much lower toxicity. With the advent of the revolution in genomics that has transformed cancer research over the last decade, including the petabytes of sequence and gene expression data that pour out of...