Touched by a Touched Healing Toucher
Recent posts by Drs. Sampson and Hansen and some recent comments have got me to thinking for the umpteenth time about this issue: quackery is quackery, even if it seems harmless and even if some people seek it. This is the first of a series that will discuss it. I’m afraid I will ramble a bit; it may be that not every post will support that premise. Nevertheless,...
Connections
I have a friend who’s an artist and he’s some times taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say, “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree, I think. And he says, “you see, I as an artist can see how beautiful this is, but you as a scientist, oh, take this all...
Stem Cell Therapy and the Need for Transparency
Dr. Geeta Shroff is an Indian physician who is running a New Delhi clinic offering embryonic stem cell therapies for a large number of various medical conditions. The only thing these medical conditions have in common is that they are incurable. Indian law allows for the use of unproven treatments for terminal or incurable diseases. I cannot know Dr. Shroff’s intentions, but...
Diagnostic Dilemmas
Sometimes diagnosis is straightforward. If a woman has missed several periods and has a big belly with a fetal heartbeat, it’s pretty easy to diagnose pregnancy. But most of the time diagnosis is much more difficult. Alzheimer’s can’t be diagnosed for sure until the patient dies and you do an autopsy. If only we had one of those Star Trek gadgets to...
Early detection of cancer, part 2: Breast cancer and MRI
Note: If you haven’t already, you should read PART 1 of this two-part series. It defines several terms that I will be using in this post, and I don’t plan on explaining them again, given that they were explained in detail in Part 1. Of course, if you’re a medical professional and already know what lead time bias, length bias, and stage...
The TACT is at least as Bad as We Predicted
I had wanted to follow Dr. Sampson’s discussion of “Healing Touch” with one of my own, because I had an interesting experience with one of its proponents years ago, and I’ll do that soon. I had also wanted to begin a series of posts about acupuncture, which I’ll also do eventually. Just yesterday, however, Liz Woeckner, co-author of our recently published critique of...
Touch – a Trojan Horse
Touch – Ouch. here they are again. I had planned to post contents of a letter written a decade ago to a Washington Post reporter on why med schools would entertain associating with quacky methods and their advocates. But an article in the SF Chronicle intruded on May 25 on a research project at Stanford on “Healing Touch” (HT). The project is...
/
May 28, 2008
The Media and Vaccines
As the name of this blog makes clear, the authors believe that the public is best served when the institutions of medicine and health care are science-based. The basis of medicine has many levels and institutions in our society. They include not only the practitioners of medicine, but hospitals, medical schools and other academic institutions, government and regulatory agencies, industry, insurance companies,...
Christiane Northrup, MD: Science Tainted with Strange Beliefs
After her daughter left for college, Christiane Northrup, MD, went for a morning walk one day. About halfway through her walk she developed an ache in her throat radiating up into her jaw. It felt like a fist was squeezing her esophagus. It persisted even after she returned home. What would you have done? I think even the average layperson knows that...
A real “Era III Emergency Room”
Due to the holiday, I have not had time to compose the usual lengthy and analytic post that readers have come to know and (hopefully) love. However, Dr. Atwood’s Weekly Waluation of the Weasel Words of Woo #6 so perfectly brought a famous (or infamous) parody back from the depths of my memory that I had to go straight to YouTube and...