Results for: publication bias
Peer Review and the Internet
Peer-review has been the cornerstone of quality control in academia, including science and medicine, for the past century. The process is slow and laborious, but a necessary filter in order to maintain a certain standard within the literature. Yet more and more scholars are recognizing the speed, immediacy, and openness of the internet as a tool for exchanging ideas and information, and...
Does peer review need fixing?
One of the most important aspects of science is the publication of scientific results in peer-reviewed journals. This publication serves several purposes, the most important of which is to communicated experimental results to other scientists, allowing other scientists to replicate, build on, and in many cases find errors in the results. In the ideal situation, this communication results in the steady progress...
Venous Insufficiency in Multiple Sclerosis
There is an interesting controversy raging in the multiple sclerosis (MS) world that reflects many of the issues we discuss at science-based medicine. Dr. Paolo Zamboni, and Italian vascular surgeon, has now published a series of studies claiming that patients with clinically defined MS have various patterns of chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency (CCSVI). Further Dr. Zamboni believes CCSVI is a major cause...
Risibility. The Superior Therapeutic Intervention?
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis. ~Jack Handey, “Deep Thoughts“ We have a saying in medicine that you can’t kill a jerk. Not that we try to kill anyone, but that particularly unpleasant individuals, rife with psychopathology, survive whatever illness comes their way. The corollary is that particularly nice...
Homeopathy – Failing Randomized Controlled Trials Since 1835
I’m sad to say that this is the last day of World Homeopathy Awareness Week. We’ve tried to give homeopathy its due honor, providing it the attention its practitioners clearly desire, while continuing to cover pertinent news in the world of homeopathy and providing a somewhat more sober, rational discussion of it on our homeopathy reference page. Of course, most of this...
My NCCAM Wish List
For a number of reasons, well-argued many times here on SBM, it would be beneficial to American citizens if the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) were abolished. This does not seem to be in the cards anytime soon. Here, then, are my suggestions for making the Center less dangerous and less of a marketing tool for pseudomedicine than it...
The case of John Lykoudis and peptic ulcer disease revisited: Crank or visionary?
One of the themes of SBM has been, since the very beginning, how the paradigm of evidence-based medicine discounts plausibility (or, perhaps more appropriately, implausibility) when evaluating whether or not a given therapy works. One of our favorite examples is homeopathy, a therapy that is so implausible on a strictly scientific basis that, for it to work, huge swaths of well-established science...
The 2nd Yale Research Symposium on Complementary and Integrative Medicine. Part II
The Main Event: Novella vs. Katz The remainder of the Symposium comprised two panels. The first was what I had come to see: a Moderated Discussion on Evidence and Plausibility in the Context of CAM Research and Clinical Practice, featuring our Founder, Steve Novella, who is also Assistant Professor of Neurology at Yale; and David Katz, the speaker who had borne the...
A nutritional approach to the treatment of HIV infection—same old woo?
I get all sorts of mail. I get mail from whining Scientologists, suffering patients, angry quacks—and I get lots of promotional material. I get letters from publishers wanting me to review books, letters from pseudo-bloggers wanting me to plug their advertiblog—really, just about anything you can imagine. Most of the time I just hit “delete”; it’s obvious that they’ve never read my...
Changing Climate, Changing Infections
I will state my bias up front. I am convinced by the preponderance of data in favor of man made global warming. At the most simplistic level, I can’t see how converting humongous tons of fossil fuel into C02 and dumping it into the the atmosphere cannot have effects on the climate. To my mind its like determining vaccine efficacy or evolution....