Placebo Again.

Medicine is simultaneously both easy and hard. As an Infectious Disease doctor, my day can be summed up with the phrase “me find bug, me kill bug, me go home.” Sometimes it is just that simple. A lot of the time it isn’t. I may not be certain what the infection is, or even if the patient has an infection, or allergies...

/ January 27, 2012

Night of the living naturopaths

Colorado’s “degreed” naturopaths (NDs) are nothing if not persistent. Starting in 1994 they have tried seven times to convince legislators that the Colorado’s public needs protection from what “traditional” naturopaths (traditionals) do, and that the best way of providing that protection, they claim, is to bestow licensure on the guys with the college degrees. The irony in this is that the NDs...

/ January 26, 2012

What Is Traditional Chinese Medicine?

Traditional Chinese Medicine is not actual medicine, and should not be treated as such. It has more in common with Galen's theory of the four humors than anything a doctor would recognize today.

/ January 25, 2012

An Owner’s Manual for the Heart

In writing about science-based medicine, we give a lot of attention to medicine that is not based on good science. We use bad examples to show why science is important and how it is frequently misapplied, misinterpreted, misreported, or even wholly rejected. It’s a pleasure, for a change, to write about a straightforward example of the best of science-based medicine in action....

/ January 24, 2012

Legislative alchemy (briefly) revisited: Naturopathy in Vermont and colloidal silver

A couple of weeks ago, Jann Bellamy wrote about “legislative alchemy” in the new year, in which CAM mischief works its way into state legislatures. Specifically, she mentioned the case of legislators in Vermont trying to declare in law that naturopaths are primary care physicians, who can serve as a patient’s medical home without supervision by real doctors. Rosemary Jacobs, whose life...

/ January 23, 2012

Reassessing whether low energy electromagnetic fields can have clinically relevant biological effects

It is with some trepidation that I write this, given that I realize this post might lead to charges that I’ve allowed myself to become so open-minded that my brains fell out, but I think the issues raised by what I’m about to discuss will make our readers think a bit—and perhaps spark some conversation. Because I’m in a bit of a...

/ January 23, 2012

Podcast Interlude

I’m traveling this week, checking out pharmacy practice internationally, and looking for signs of science-based medicine. Instead of a post, here are the links to two podcasts I recently recorded that will be of interest to SBM readers. Sit back, press play, and enjoy. Point of Inquiry: Dispensing Skepticism I recently spoke with Karen Stollznow for the Point of Inquiry podcast. This...

/ January 19, 2012

Aspirin Risks and Benefits

A new review published in The BMJ once again opens the question of the risks vs benefits of daily aspirin as a prevention for heart attacks and strokes. The reviewers looked at nine randomized trials involving over 100,000 patients and found that aspirin is effective in reducing heart attacks and strokes, but also increases the risk of gastrointestinal bleeding and that in...

/ January 18, 2012

Visceral Manipulation Embraced by the APTA

Many years ago, when I was a naïve and gullible teenager, I read about a home treatment for constipation that involved rolling a bowling ball around on the abdomen. I was intrigued, thought it sounded reasonable, and might even have tried it myself if I had been constipated or had had a bowling ball to experiment with. Many decades later, with the...

/ January 17, 2012

NIH Director Francis Collins doesn’t understand the problem with CAM

As the sole cancer surgeon among our stable of Science-Based Medicine (SBM) bloggers, I’m probably the most irritated at the infiltration of pseudoscience into academia (or, as we sometimes like to call it, quackademic medicine) in the realm of cancer. Part of the reason, of course, is that cancer is so common and that the consequences of adding pseudoscience to cancer therapy...

/ January 16, 2012