Results for: chiropractic
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...
Please Don’t Define “Complementary and Alternative Health Practices”!
Since I have a master’s and doctoral degree in health education and since I’m a professor in a department of public health with an undergraduate curriculum that includes substantial attention to health education, I participate in the email discussion group of HEDIR, the Health Education Directory. On August 16th, I received a message to the discussion group from the American Association for...
The Cure
Legislative Alchemy In Legislative Alchemy I: Naturopathy, II: Chiropractic and III: Acupuncture, we learned how state legislatures transform scientifically implausible and unproven diagnostic methods and treatments into legal health care practices. Examples typical of the sheer nonsense found in both proposed and actual legislation include: Naturopathic health care [is] a system of health care practices for the prevention, diagnosis, evaluation and treatment...
Dummy Medicine, Dummy Doctors, and a Dummy Degree, Part 2.2: Harvard Medical School and the Curious Case of Ted Kaptchuk, OMD (cont. again)
“Strong Medicine”: Ted Kaptchuk and the Powerful Placebo At the beginning of the first edition of The Web that has no Weaver, published in 1983, author Ted Kaptchuk portended his eventual academic interest in the placebo: A story is told in China about a peasant who had worked as a maintenance man in a newly established Western missionary hospital. When he retired...
Legislative Alchemy III: Acupuncture
Acupuncture is typically depicted as sticking needles at various points on the body prescribed (inconsistently, it turns out) by charts indicating purported “meridians” through which “qi” flows in the human, or animal, body. However, from one of the many SBM posts on acupuncture, this one by Dr. Novella , we in fact know that: the consensus of the best clinical studies on...
Understanding and Treating Colic
Parenting an infant can be totally overwhelming. One of the earliest challenge many face is learning to deal with periods of intractable crying. I often speak with sleep deprived parents when they’re looking for something — anything — to stop their baby from crying. They’ve typically been told by friends of family that their baby must have “colic” and they’ve come to...
Jann Bellamy, JD
Jann J. Bellamy is a Florida attorney and lives in Tallahassee. She is a former law clerk to a federal judge, Florida Assistant Attorney General and long-time partner in a Tallahassee law firm, where she practiced mainly in the civil litigation area. Jann became interested in so-called “complementary and alternative” medicine (CAM) when the Florida Legislature tried to establish a chiropractic school...
Survey says, “Hop on the bandwagon of ‘integrative medicine’!”
A Brief Clinical Vignette In researching this post, I found an article published nearly two years ago in The Hospitalist entitled Growth Spurt: Complementary and alternative medicine use doubles, which began with this anecdote: Despite intravenous medication, a young boy in status epilepticus had the pediatric ICU team at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison stumped....
Are Prenatal Ultrasounds Dangerous?
Several questionable sources are spreading alarms about the possible dangers of prenatal ultrasound exams (sonograms). An example is Christine Anderson’s article on the ExpertClick website. In the heading, it says she “Never Liked Ultrasound Technology.” [She] has never been sold on the safety using Ultrasounds for checking on the fetuses of pregnant women, and for the last decade her fears have been confirmed...
Legislative Alchemy I: Naturopathy
Via the magic of “legislative alchemy,” state legislatures transform implausible and unproven diagnostic methods and treatments into perfectly legal health care practices.[1] Without the benefit of legislative alchemy, chiropractors, naturopaths, homeopaths, acupuncturists and other assorted putative healers would be vulnerable to charges of practicing medicine without a license and consumer fraud. Thus, they must seek either their own licensing system or exemption...