Naturopathy and Liberal Politics: Strange Bedfellows
Yesterday’s post by Wally Sampson and an offline discussion with David Gorski have moved me to post something that I wrote in 2001. At the time, I was a member of the Massachusetts Special Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medical Practitioners. I’ve previously mentioned that experience here. During that tenure I wrote a treatise on the tenets and practices of ‘naturopathic medicine,’*...
A View to the Past
The quackery political map has changed over the last three decades. I recently took a historial look over the landscape at characteristics and forms of quackery that could yield some perspective, and understanding. Pseudoscience and quackery were identifiable long before we were here. Mesmer was deposed by Franklin and Lavoisier & Co. Samuel Hahnemann’s homeopathy was recognized as false by contemporaries, and by 1840s Oliver...
Placebo Therapies: Are They Ethical?
Is it ethical to overstate the efficacy of a treatment option, if it might lead to a patient’s enhanced experience of that treatment? Your response to this question may reveal the degree to which you favor Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM). Let me explain. As far as I can tell, no CAM treatment has been proven effective beyond placebo. (If you’re not...
Acupuncture – Disconnected from Reality
The primary goal of science-based medicine (SBM) is to connect the practice of medicine to the best currently available science. This is similar to evidence-based medicine (EBM), although we quibble about the relative roles of evidence vs prior plausibility. In a recent survey 86% of Americans said they thought that science education was “absolutely essential” or “very important” to the healthcare system....
Shame on PBS!
I used to have a high opinion of PBS. They ran excellent programs like Nova and Masterpiece Theatre and I felt I could count on finding good programming when I tuned into my local PBS channel. No more. It was bad enough when they started featuring Deepak Chopra, self-help programs, and “create your own reality” New Age philosophy, but at least it...
How not to think
Thankfully, I don’t receive all that much blog-related mail. But this weekend I received several communications about a piece in popular liberal blog. The piece is (ostensibly) about Lyme disease, which coincidentally happens to be one of the topics of my first post here at SBM. In fact, I’ve written about Lyme disease a number of times, and Dr. Novella has a...
When fraud undermines science-based medicine
The overriding them, the raison d’être if you will, of this blog is science-based medicine. However, it goes beyond that in that we here at SBM believe that science- and evidence-based medicine is the best medicine. It’s more than the best medicine, though; it’s the best strategy for medicine to improve therapy for our patients. We frequently contrast science-based medicine with various...
I Work with Steve Martin
Partly as an antidote to the previous, depressing post, and partly because it is so deserving of exposure, I now present—verbatim except for names and other ‘identifiers’—a recent email exchange between one of my colleagues and a correspondent. It has nothing to do with SBM. My colleague, known to his friends as T-Bone, is the reluctant owner of a vacation house in Florida. He must rent...
Scientific Fraud Hits Home
Last week the story broke that Scott Reuben, an anesthesiologist and clinical researcher at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, MA, had falsified data in at least 21 publications over a period of at least 12 years—making it one of the most enduring examples of scientific fraud in memory. Almost all of Reuben’s papers had reported innovative methods for providing post-operative pain relief...
Evidence-Based Legislation? Lessons From Abroad
President Obama appears to be refreshingly pro-science in his outlook, publicly lauding objectivity and careful analysis. He has even been credited with saying that “we need evidence-based legislation” in regards to public policy. The New York Times reports: Agencies will be expected to pick science advisers based on expertise, not political ideology, the memorandum said, and will offer whistle-blower protections to employees...
Don’t Blame the Patient