Comparative Clinical Effectiveness Research: Good News In Shades Of Gray

When I first heard about the new emphasis on comparative clinical effectiveness research (CCER) in Obama’s economic stimulus bill I thought, “Thank goodness! Maybe now science will truly regain its rightful place and we’ll end the CAM, ‘me-too’ drug, and excessive-use-of-technology madness that is wasting so much money in healthcare.” In fact, I was so excited about the new administration’s apparent interest...

/ February 19, 2009

Obama and Stem Cells

In 2001 George Bush signed an executive order banning federal funding for embryonic stem cell research, except for those lines that were already established. As a result such research ground to a halt in the US. While the order was presented as a compromise, the effect was chilling in its application. No researcher receiving federal dollars (even for a separate project) could...

/ February 18, 2009

Edzard Ernst Does It Again

Publishing one excellent book is an accomplishment; publishing two in one year is a truly outstanding achievement. In 2008 Edzard Ernst and Simon Singh published a landmark book Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts About Alternative Medicine. I reviewed it on this blog last summer.  It is particularly important since Ernst is a former advocate for CAM (complementary and alternative medicine) who...

/ February 17, 2009

Health care and the Stimulus Plan

In my last post, I told you a little story about using science- and evidence-based medicine to improve health care.    The focus was primarily on preventing an iatrogenic illness, namely intravenous catheter infections.  A researcher came up with a plausible idea for an intervention, studied it, and found it to be successful—the intervention was science-based in that it was proposed based...

/ February 16, 2009

Another challenge to surgical dogma

Better late than never with this one. The dogma that I’m referring to is the remaining practice of using NG tubes in anyone with upper gastrointestinal surgery (liver, stomach, pancreas, duodenum, proximal small intestine) and then placing a jejunostomy tube (a tube, also often called a J-tube, that goes into the jejunum, or the proximal part of the small intestine, through which...

/ February 16, 2009

Live Blood Analysis: The Modern Auguries

I saw a patient last week who was self referred. He had been seeing a DC/ND for a variety of symptoms that turned out to be asthma. Not that the DC/ND made that diagnosis. His DC/ND diagnosed him with an infection, based on live blood analysis, and offered the patient a colonic detox as a cure. My patient thought he should get...

/ February 13, 2009

Research, Minus Science, Equals Gossip

“A person is smart. People are stupid.” – Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones), Men In Black Regular readers of my blog know how passionate I am about protecting the public from misleading health information. I have witnessed first-hand many well-meaning attempts to “empower consumers” with Web 2.0 tools. Unfortunately, they were designed without a clear understanding of the scientific method, basic statistics,...

/ February 12, 2009

Another Negative Study of Vitamins

Perhaps one of the most common questions I receive from those who wish to utilize science-based medicine for their own health is what I think about vitamins. Even among hard-nosed skeptics, this question is often perplexing. On the one hand, vitamins themselves were discovered by medical and biological science, they play a vital role (by definition) in the healthy functioning of our...

/ February 11, 2009

Chiropractic’s Pathetic Response to Stroke Concerns

The chiropractic industry must be feeling the pressure. Billboards, signs on the sides of buses, chiropractic victims’ organizations, and lawsuits are telling the world that chiropractic neck adjustments can cause strokes. The risk is very small, but it is very real. We have addressed the subject before on this blog here, here, and here. Chiropractors are in denial and are trying to...

/ February 10, 2009

More evidence that CAM/IM advocates see health care reform as an opportunity to claim legitimacy

Four weeks ago (was it really that long?), I wrote one of my usual lengthy essays for this blog in which I analyzed two editorials published by some very famous advocates of “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM)/”integrative medicine” (IM). They included one in that credulous repository of all things antivaccine The Huffington Post (no, this isn’t about vaccines, but I can’t resist...

/ February 9, 2009