Results for: naturopathy
Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book
I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However, after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a book that contains science-based nutrition information I decided to agree to the...
Following the Guidelines of Science: A Chiropractic Dilemma
Preamble: When my book Bonesetting, Chiropractic, and Cultism [full text] was published in 1963, renouncing chiropractic vertebral subluxation theory and recommending that chiropractic be developed as a subspecialty of medicine in the treatment of mechanical-type back pain, the chiropractic profession refused to acknowledge or review the book. I was labeled “an enemy of chiropractic.” If it had not been for the support...
The War Against Chiropractors
In 2011, chiropractor J.C. Smith published The Medical War Against Chiropractors: The Untold Story from Persecution to Vindication. He promises an exposé comparable to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s exposé of slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. His thesis is that the AMA waged a shameless attack on competition, motivated only by money. I think the reality is closer to what he quoted from Dr....
The American Medical Student Association: On “integrating” quackery with science-based medicine
There’s a saying in medicine that we frequently hear when a newer, more effective therapy supplants an older therapy or an existing therapy is shown not to be as efficacious as was once thought, and it has to do about how long it takes for the use of that therapy to decline. The saying basically says that the therapy won’t die out...
Don’t call CAM “cost-effective” unless it’s actually effective
Before deciding CAM is cost-effective, it is important to determine if is just effective. That low bar has not been surmounted.
Rejecting cancer treatment: What are the consequences?
There have been several studies of people who have refused scientific treatments for cancer. The results have not been good.
Andrew Weil’s Seasonal Supplements
Dr. Andrew Weil has teamed with Innate Response Formulas to develop a series of seminars and a line of products for “seasonally appropriate integrative strategies.” Seasonal Therapeutics is a system for adjusting diet supplement recommendations according to the season of the year. To kick off the program, a one-day seminar was presented by Weil’s colleague Tierona Low Dog in Boston on August...
The “central dogma” of alternative/complementary/integrative medicine
There is something in molecular biology and genetics known as the “central dogma.” I must admit, I’ve always hated the use of the word “dogma” associated with science, but no less a luminary than Francis Crick first stated it in 1958, and it has been restated over the years in various ways. Perhaps my favorite version of the central dogma was succinctly...
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...
The Spirit of St. Louis Renault
Summer time is finally here in Oregon, and I will confess that I have spent little time on blogging. The sun is out, my kids are out of school and home from college, and really, who wants to spend their time writing when you could be on the golf course or at the beach with the kids. I say this as a...