Bee Venom Therapy Update
I wrote previously about bee venom therapy (BVT), also called apitherapy or bee sting therapy, as an emerging “alternative” therapy. Both use and research into BVT continue, providing an excellent example of the many things that are wrong with the CAM movement. A recent Reuters article on the topic is also an excellent example of the frequent complete failure of the mainstream media in...
Followup: Benedetti on Placebo Ethics
A few months ago I wrote about Fabrizio Benedetti’s research on the neurobiology of the placebo response, and a discussion about placebos and ethics ensued in the comments. Now Dr. Benedetti has written about that issue in a “Perspective” article in the journal World Psychiatry, “The placebo response: science versus ethics and the vulnerability of the patient.” We have learned that verbal...
Cantron: A tale of false hope for cancer
A couple of months ago, a reader sent me an article that really disturbed me. In fact, I had originally been planning to write about it not long after I received it. It is, as you might imagine given my specialty and what disturbs me the most wehen I encounter quackery, a story of a cancer patient. Worse, it’s the story of...
Science, Evidence and Guidelines
Disclaimer: I am a paid Medscape blogger and writer, and since they are in part supported by advertisements from the Pharmaceutical companies, indirectly I am in the thrall of Big Pharma. I found Harriet’s post on the Medscape Connect topic of How do you feel about Evidence-Based Medicine? interesting. I wondered about the breakdown of the comments by both specialty and opinions...
Legislative Alchemy: 2012.5
Legislative alchemy, as faithful SBM readers know, is the process by which state legislatures and Congress take scientifically implausible and unproven treatments and diagnostic methods and turn them into licensed health care practices and legally sold products. Previous posts have explored this phenomenon in naturopathy, chiropractic and acupuncture. Our last report on the legislative efforts of CAM providers appeared almost six months ago,...
Liberation Procedure for Multiple Sclerosis
It has been very instructive, from a science-based medicine perspective, to watch the story of alleged chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency (CCSVI) and multiple sclerosis (MS) unfold over the last three years. In 2009 Dr. Paolo Zamboni, an Italian vascular surgeon, published a paper in which he claimed that 100% of MS patients he investigated showed signs of blockage in the veins that...
What Would It Take?
I recently wrote a SkepDoc column on fantasy physics in Skeptic magazine in which I mentioned a study that had allegedly measured 2 milligauss emanations from a healer’s hands. A reader inquired about it and went on to ask “what criteria is [sic] necessary for gaining acceptance in the scientific community in regards to purported healing processes using energy fields generated in...
Quackademic medicine trickles out to community hospitals
One of the major themes of this blog has been to combat what I, borrowing a term coined (as far as I can tell) by Dr. R. W. Donnell, like to refer to as “quackademic medicine.” Quackademic medicine is a lovely term designed to summarize everything that is wrong with the increasing embrace of so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) or, as...
Foolishness or Fraud? Bogus Science at NCCAM
Voodoo science is a sort of background noise, annoying but rarely rising to a level that seriously interferes with genuine scientific discourse… The more serious threat is to the public, which is not often in a position to judge which claims are real and which are voodoo. Those who are fortunate enough to have chosen science as a career have an obligation...
How do we avoid harming the elderly with prescription drugs?
Is the best medicine no medicine at all? Sometimes. My past posts have emphasized that the appropriateness of any drug depends on an evaluation of benefits and risks. There are no completely safe interventions, and no drug is free of any side effects. Our choice is ideally informed by high-quality data like randomized controlled trials, with lots of real-world experience so we...