Results for: acupuncture
Agnotology: The Study of Ignorance
A comment from the blog: Every single time – bar none – I have had a conversation with someone about CAM and its modalities, they are absolutely astonished when I explain to them what the modality really is. One story I love telling comes from my friend in the year behind me. His parents are professional chemists and he came home one...
A tale of quackademic medicine at the University of Arizona Cancer Center
NCI-designated comprehensive cancer centers like the University of Arizona should provide rigorously science-based treatment. Unfortunately, magical mystical "treatments" like reiki are offered to UA patients, as I learned from a father of a child treated there.
Has science-based medicine already lost to pseudoscience?
After writing Saturday’s 5,000-word magnum opus about misguided “right to try” bills that are proliferating in state legislatures like so much kudzu, I thought I’d try something a bit different—and more concise. Fear not. This doesn’t mean that I’m going to become Harriet Hall as a writer, because no one does concise and insightful as well as she does, but I do...
Tylenol May Not Be As Safe and Effective As We Thought
I’ve always thought of Tylenol (AKA acetaminophen in the US and paracetamol in the UK) as one of the safest drugs around, with essentially no side effects when used as directed. But it has been in the limelight lately. Several SBM articles have addressed it here, here, and here. We know there is a risk of liver damage and death with acetaminophen...
How to Think
Robert Todd Carroll, the author of The Skeptic’s Dictionary, has a new book out: The Critical Thinker’s Dictionary: Biases, Fallacies, and Illusion and what you can do about them. Since some of our commenters and most of the CAM advocates we critique are constantly committing logical fallacies, a survey of logical fallacies is a good idea both for us and for them,...
I Visited a Chickasaw Healer and All I Got Was an Elk Sinew and Buffalo Horn Bracelet
Which headline is real? I Visited a Alchemist. As American alternative chemistry grows in popularity, I decided to experience an even older style of nontraditional transmutation of metals. I Visited an Astrologer. As American alternative astronomy grows in popularity, I decided to experience an even older style of nontraditional stargazing. I Visited a Bloodletter. As American alternative medicine grows in popularity, I...
Treating Pain Psychologically
One of the goals of rigorous science is to disentangle various causes so we can establish exactly where the lines of cause and effect are. In medicine this allows us to then optimize the real causes (what aspect of treatments actually work) and eliminate anything unnecessary. Eliminating the unnecessary is more than just about efficiency – every intervention in medicine has a...
Urinary Tract Infections Cause Depression. Directors Cut.*
As some may know I am infectious disease doctor. Urinary tract infections (UTI) butter my bread. Figuratively speaking. There is an enormous amount known about the pathophysiology of UTI’s. It is both a common and complex problem. But for all our knowledge, chronic and recurrent UTI’s remain a vexing issue for the patient and the doctor. One reason people develop recurrent UTI’s...
Top 10 Chiropractic Studies of 2013
ChiroNexus recently listed the top 10 chiropractic studies of 2013. In my experience, chiropractic studies tend to be of poor quality. A media report says “study shows chiropractic works for X,” and when I look for the study it turns out to be a single case report or an uncontrolled study. When Simon Singh was sued by the British Chiropractic Association for...
Placebo effects are not the “power of positive thinking”
Here we go again. I once said that, in the wake of study after study that fails to find activity of various “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) beyond that of placebo, CAM advocates are now in the midst of a “rebranding” campaign in which CAM is said to work through the “power of placebo.” Personally, I’ve argued that in reality this new...