Results for: mark hyman

Yahoo News spews NaturalNews anti-vaccine (and other) propaganda

Yahoo News appears to have confused NaturalNews with actual news. It’s not. NaturalNews is the in-house propaganda organ for Mike Adams, whom I’ll introduce in a minute (although he needs no introduction for most readers here). A couple of recent examples:     A recycled story, over a year old, from NaturalNews, appearing on Yahoo News last week. It starts out as...

/ October 2, 2014

Quackademia update: The Cleveland Clinic, George Washington University, and the continued infiltration of quackery into medical academia

Quackery has been steadily infiltrating academic medicine for at least two decades now in the form of what was once called “complementary and alternative medicine” but is now more commonly referred to as “integrative medicine.” Of course, as I’ve written many times before, what “integrative medicine” really means is the “integration” of quackery with science- and evidence-based medicine, to the detriment of...

/ September 29, 2014

A Misguided Apology

A new book by Thomas Schneider, MD, offers A Physician’s Apology. The subtitle asks, “Are WE making you sick?” I was eager to read it, because I could think of many things doctors might be apologizing for: overdiagnosis, overtreatment, ordering unnecessary tests, pathologizing the vicissitudes of everyday life, offering misleading low-fat diet advice, misrepresenting inadequately tested treatments, not putting enough emphasis on...

/ July 29, 2014

Telemedicine: Click and the doctor will see you now

Think you need to see a doctor? How about seeing him (or her) on your computer (or tablet or smart phone) screen instead of in the doctor’s office? The technology of telemedicine, or telehealth, is here. So far, there is no single definition of what it does, and does not, encompass. For example, in some definitions, one of which we discuss today,...

/ May 1, 2014

The return of the revenge of high dose vitamin C for cancer

Vitamin C is back in the news as a cancer cure. Is it? No, no it is not.

/ February 10, 2014

Cancer Treatment Centers of America: Revisiting the epitome of “integrative” cancer care

Three weeks ago, I mentioned in a post that the week of October 7 to 14 was declared by our very own United States Senate to be Naturopathic Medicine Week, which I declared unilaterally through my power as managing editor of Science-Based Medicine (for what that’s worth) to be Quackery Week. One wonders where the Senate found the time to consider and...

/ October 7, 2013

Blame and magical thinking: The consequences of the autism “biomed” movement

That the myth that vaccines cause autism is indeed nothing more than a myth, a phantom, a delusion unsupported by science is no longer in doubt. In fact, it’s been many years now since it was last taken seriously by real scientists and physicians, as opposed to crank scientists and physicians, who are still selling the myth.  Thanks to them, and a...

/ February 25, 2013

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,...

/ March 19, 2012

Surprise, surprise! Dr. Andrew Weil doesn’t like evidence-based medicine

Dr. Andrew Weil is a rock star in the “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) and “integrative medicine” (IM) movement. Indeed, it can be persuasively argued that he is one of its founders, at least a founder of the its most modern iteration, and I am hard-pressed to think of anyone who did more in the early days of the CAM/IM movement, back...

/ May 16, 2011

Hope and hype in genomics and “personalized medicine”

“Personalized medicine.” You’ve probably heard the term. It’s a bit of a buzzword these days and refers to a vision of future medicine in which therapies are much more tightly tailored to individual patients than they currently are. That’s not to say that as physicians we haven’t practiced personalized medicine before; certainly we have. However it has only been in the last...

/ April 11, 2011