Results for: supplement quality
The perils and pitfalls of “patient-driven” clinical research
Dying of cancer can be a horrible way to go, but as a cancer specialist I sometimes forget that there are diseases that are equally, if not more, horrible. One that always comes to mind is amyotropic lateral sclerosis (ALS), more commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. It is a motor neuron disease whose clinical course is characterized by progressive weakness, muscle...
Olympic Pseudoscience
Pseudoscience is rife within the sporting world, and reaches its apogee with the Olympic Games.
Steve Novella vs. Julian Whitaker on vaccines at FreedomFest
While I and some of the others in the SBM crew were at The Amazing Meeting (TAM) in Las Vegas, our fearless leader Steve Novella got an interesting challenge: To debate Dr. Julian Whitaker about vaccines at a libertarian confab known as FreedomFest, which just so happened to be going on up the strip a piece at the same time TAM was....
The Spirit of St. Louis Renault
Summer time is finally here in Oregon, and I will confess that I have spent little time on blogging. The sun is out, my kids are out of school and home from college, and really, who wants to spend their time writing when you could be on the golf course or at the beach with the kids. I say this as a...
Why Do They Do Studies Like This?
A recently published study claims to have shown that a proprietary mixture of velvet bean and Chlorophytum borivilianum improves sleep quality. The journal, Integrative Medicine Insights, is online, peer-reviewed, PubMed indexed, open-access, and it charges authors $1848.00 to publish their article. It advertises editorial decisions in 3 weeks and publication in 2 weeks after acceptance. I can see two reasons why authors...
Vital Signs: Buteyko Breathing
As I have mentioned in the past, almost all of my practice is inpatient medicine, doing infectious disease consults in acute care hospitals. I only spend three hours a week in the outpatient clinic, so I have a skewed perception of medicine and disease. The patients I see are sick, really sick, often trying to die and are a complicated collection of...
No, sugar pills won’t repel insects, and other consequences of regulating nonsense
As a group blog, Science-Based Medicine brings a variety of perspectives to issues of science in medicine. However we align around a few core principles which define what science-based medicine is, and how it should be practiced. One principle we emphasize is the importance of subjecting the evaluation of all health interventions and treatments to a single, science-based standard. One of the...
Legislative Alchemy: 2012.5
Legislative alchemy, as faithful SBM readers know, is the process by which state legislatures and Congress take scientifically implausible and unproven treatments and diagnostic methods and turn them into licensed health care practices and legally sold products. Previous posts have explored this phenomenon in naturopathy, chiropractic and acupuncture. Our last report on the legislative efforts of CAM providers appeared almost six months ago,...
Quackery Then and Now
“The forces of graft and unrighteousness are peculiar to no country or clime, and they have their champions in the high places and the low. Until the people themselves are better educated concerning the danger and iniquity of quackery, they must be protected from the forces that prey. The popular understanding of these matters is becoming better every day, and, aided by...
POM: Not So Wonderful
“POM Wonderful” is a brand of pomegranate juice. It is manufactured by a company owned by Linda and Stewart Resnick, California billionaires who pretty much single-handedly created a multi-million dollar market for pomegranate juice where none existed before. Or, as LA Times columnist Michael Hilzik wrote, It has long been clear that the most wonderful thing about Pom Wonderful pomegranate juice is...