Failed Flaxseed and Bad News Brownies
Well, it’s been a tough month for herbs since my last monthly soiree here at SBM. Just last week at the American Society for Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting, a group out of the Mayo Clinic presented data from a study showing that a well-characterized flaxseed extract was ineffective against hot flashes in postmenopausal women. But as Steve Novella noted here earlier this...
Placebos as Medicine: The Ethics of Homeopathy
Is it ever ethical to provide a placebo treatment? What about when that placebo is homeopathy? Last month I blogged about the frequency of placebo prescribing by physicians. I admitted my personal discomfort, stating I’d refuse to dispense any prescription that would require me to deceive the patient. The discussion continued in the comments, where opinions seemed to range from (I’m paraphrasing) ...
Black Cohosh and Hot Flashes
Black Cohosh, an herbal “supplement” (i.e. unregulated drug) remains popular for the treatment of hot flashes and other autonomic symptoms resulting from menopause. This product is yet another good example of the double standard that the supplement industry and ideological promoters are allowed to employ. The NCCAM website gives this summary: Black cohosh, a member of the buttercup family, is a plant...
Another Anti-Vaccine Book
I was asked to review the book Make an Informed Vaccine Decision for the Health of Your Child by Mayer Eisenstein with Neil Z. Miller. Fortunately my public library had it so I didn’t have to buy a copy. Reading it was a painful déjà vu experience. I can honestly say it met all my expectations: I expected that its concept of...
The ultimate in “integrative medicine,” continued
It’s been a recurring theme on this blog to discuss and dissect the infiltration of quackademic medicine into our medical schools. Whether it be called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) or “integrative medicine” (IM), its infiltration into various academic medical centers has been one of the more alarming developments I’ve noted over the last several years. The reason is that “integrative” medicine...
Ambiguity
Some people have made the mistake of seeing Shunt’s work as a load of rubbish about railway timetables, but clever people like me, who talk loudly in restaurants, see this as a deliberate ambiguity, a plea for understanding in a mechanized world. The points are frozen, the beast is dead. What is the difference? What indeed is the point? The point is...
Anti-vaccine warriors vs. research ethics
Three weeks ago, the anti-vaccine movement took a swing for the fences and, as usual, made a mighty whiff that produced a breeze easily felt in the bleachers. In brief, a crew of anti-vaccine lawyers headed by Mary Holland, co-author of Vaccine Epidemic: How Corporate Greed, Biased Science, and Coercive Government Threaten Our Human Rights, Our Health, and Our Children, published a...
Pragmatic Studies – More Bait and Switch
The course of research into so-called alternative medicine (CAM) over the last 20 years has largely followed the same pattern. There was little research into many of the popular CAM modalities, but proponents supported them anyway. We don’t need science, they argued, because we have anecdotes, history, and intuition. When media attention, which drove public attention, was increasingly paid to CAM then...
The Believing Brain
A common question of skeptics and science-based thinkers is “How could anyone believe that?” People do believe some really weird things and even some obviously false things. The more basic question is how we form all our beliefs, whether false or true. Michael Shermer’s book Why People Believe Weird Things has become a classic. Now he has a new book out: The...
Measles outbreaks, 2011
We frequently write about the consequences and costs of not vaccinating and how the anti-vaccine movement is causing real harm to real people through its assaults on public health. For example, through his fear mongering in the U.K., Andrew Wakefield, aided and abetted by a credulous and sensationalistic British media, managed to reverse decades of progress that had resulted in measles having...