Results for: National Vaccine Information Center
The result of the Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy (TACT): As underwhelming as expected
Chelation therapy. It’s one of the most common quackeries out there, used by a wide variety of practitioners for a wide variety of ailments blamed on “heavy metal toxicity.” Chelation therapy, which involves using chemicals that can bind to the metal ions and allow them to be excreted by the kidneys, is actually standard therapy for certain types of acute heavy metal...
Is shameless self-promotion of your science a good idea?
As part of my ongoing effort to make sure that I never run out of blogging material, I subscribe to a number of quack e-mail newsletters. In fact, sometimes I think I’ve probably overdone it. Every day, I get several notices and pleas from various wretched hives of scum and quackery, such as NaturalNews.com, Mercola.com, and various antivaccine websites. I think of...
Antifluoridation Bad Science
A new review of research out of Harvard University suggests fluoridating drinking water above the EPA limit is a bad idea - which we already knew.
Keeping the customer satisfied
These days patient satisfaction is becoming more and more important in judging how well hospitals and physicians are doing. Indeed, Medicare reimbursements are linked in part to a patient satisfaction survey administered by the government. The underlying assumption is that patient satisfaction correlates with high quality care, But is that true? I have my doubts. Indeed, there is evidence that, at best,...
Adventures in defending science-based medicine in cancer journals: Energy chelation
My co-bloggers and I have spent considerable time and effort over the last four years writing posts for this blog (and I for my not-so-super-secret other blog) bemoaning the infiltration of quackademic medicine into what once were bastions of evidence- and science-based medicine. We’ve discussed at considerable length reasons for why this steady infiltration of pseudoscience into medical academia has been occurring....
On the “individualization” of treatments in “alternative medicine,” revisited
As I contemplated what I’d like to write about for the first post of 2012, I happened to come across a post by former regular and now occasional SBM contributor Peter Lipson entitled Another crack at medical cranks. In it, Dr. Lipson discusses one characteristic that allows medical cranks and quacks to attract patients, namely the ability to make patients feel wanted,...
Stanislaw Burzynski: Bad medicine, a bad movie, and bad P.R.
And the Lord spake, saying, “First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin. Then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out. Once the...
CAM practitioners react to Andrew Weil’s proposal for a board certification for integrative medicine. It isn’t (all) pretty.
About a month ago, I discussed a rather disturbing development, namely the initiative by Dr. Andrew Weil to set up something he was going to call the American Board of Integrative Medicine, all for the purpose of creating a system of board certification for physicians practicing “integrative medicine” (IM), or, as I prefer to call them, physicians who like to integrate pseudoscience...
Birth Control
From a message posted on Facebook: Is the pill safe? The International Agency for Research on Cancer in a 2007 study made by 21 scientists reported that the pill causes cancer, giving it the highest level of carcinogenicity, the same as cigarettes and asbestos. It also causes stroke, and significantly increases the risk of heart attacks. Several scientific journals have stated that...
Utah Senator Orrin Hatch: A pit bull in defense of the supplement industry
Editor’s note: This weekend was truly NIH grant crunch time. I have to get my final version of my R01 to our university’s grants office by Tuesday, or it might not get uploaded by the July 5 deadline. (Funny how electronic submission, which was supposed to make applicants’ lives easier, seems to have made them harder.) Consequently, I decided to take a...