Results for: publication bias
Alternative Vaccination Schedules
Evidently the 7 billionth human is going to be born on October 31. Happy birthday and welcome to the Earth. If you were unfortunate enough to be born into a developing country or a affluent California family, you may not receive your vaccinations, and may join one the 57 million who die each year of vaccine preventable diseases (VPD). I totally misread...
Dummy Medicine, Dummy Doctors, and a Dummy Degree, Part 2.1: Harvard Medical School and the Curious Case of Ted Kaptchuk, OMD (cont.)
Rave Reviews In 1983, Ted Kaptchuk, the senior author of the recent “albuterol vs. placebo” article, and soon to become the long-time Second-in-Command of the Harvard Medical School “CAM” program, published The Web that Has No Weaver: The book received rave reviews: A major advance toward the synthesis of Western and Eastern theory. It will stimulate all practitioners to expand their understanding...
Homeopathy and Plausibility
The fundamental concept of science-based medicine (SBM) is that medical practice should be based upon the best available science. This may seem obvious, but there are many important details to its application, such as the relationship between clinical and basic science. Clinical claims require clinical evidence, but clinical evidence can be tricky and is often preliminary. It is therefore helpful (I would...
Testing a Chinese Herbal Flu Remedy
During the early days of the 2009 H1N1 influenza A pandemic, the popular herbal formula maxingshigan–yinqiaosan was used widely by TCM practitioners to reduce symptoms. (It’s hard to pronounce and spell, so I’ll refer to it as M-Y.) A new study was done to test whether M-Y worked and to compare it to the prescription drug oseltamivir. It showed that M-Y did...
On the Orwellian language and bad science of the anti-vaccine movement: “SmartVax” versus “MaxVax”?
If there’s one thing that’s true of the human race, it’s that when it comes to persuasion language is has power. Words have power. Just ask the advertising industry or politicians, who rely on their skills manipulating language to persuade for their very livelihood and authority. In the specific bailiwick of this blog, Science-Based Medicine, many of us have spent considerable verbiage...
Anti-vaccine propaganda in The Baltimore Sun
The hypothesis that vaccines cause autism has been about as thoroughly falsified through research as any health hypothesis can be. Even if, by bending over backward into a back-breaking contortionist pose to be “open-minded”, some people will concede that there’s still a bit of room for reasonable doubt about whether there is no link between vaccines and autism in “susceptible” populations, there...
Et tu, Biomarkers?
Everything you know may be wrong. Well, not really, but reading the research of John Ioannidis does make you wonder. His work, concentrated on research about research, is a popular topic here at SBM. And that’s because he’s focused on improving the way evidence is brought to bear on decision-making. His most famous papers get to the core of questioning how we...
Vaccines and infant mortality rates: A false relationship promoted by the anti-vaccine movement
The anti-vaccine movement is a frequent topic on the Science-Based Medicine blog. There are a number of reasons for this, not the least of which being that the anti-vaccine movement is one of the most dangerous forms of pseudoscience, a form of quackery that, unlike most forms of quackery, endangers those who do not partake of it by breaking down herd immunity...
Cochrane is Starting to ‘Get’ SBM!
This essay is the latest in the series indexed at the bottom.* It follows several (nos. 10-14) that responded to a critique by statistician Stephen Simon, who had taken issue with our asserting an important distinction between Science-Based Medicine (SBM) and Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM). (Dr. Gorski also posted a response to Dr. Simon’s critique). A quick-if-incomplete Review can be found here. One...
CAM and Evidenced-Based Medicine
Mark Tonelli, MD has problems with evidence-based medicine (EBM). He has published a few articles detailing his issues, and he makes some legitimate points. We at science-based medicine (SBM) have a few issues with the execution of EBM as well, so I am sympathetic to constructive criticism. In an article titled: Integrating evidence into clinical practice: an alternative to evidence-based approaches. The...