Results for: NCCAM
Spinal Manipulation and the JAMA Meta-Analysis: An Analysis of Fuel.
Association of Spinal Manipulative Therapy With Clinical Benefit and Harm for Acute Low Back Pain: Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. It is even worse than I thought it would be.
Junk science helps homeopathic remedy company win class action
Junk science from two of homeopathy's biggest apologists help Hyland's defeat a class action lawsuit for consumer false advertising claims, and nixed refunds for ineffective homeopathic remedies.
Dietetics: Embracing Integrative and Functional Medicine?
The Accreditation Council for Education in Dietetics is planning on changing the accreditation standards for requirements Registered Dietitians to include integrative and functional nutrition as core components. This should worry science-based practitioners, and the general public.
In the tradition of Chairman Mao, traditional Chinese medicine gets a new boost by the Chinese government
Despite a lack of evidence for its efficacy and safety, traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has made major inroads into US medical centers, both academic and community. I've told the story of how Chairman Mao Zedong created the myth of TCM and promoted it to credulous Westerners to facilitate the "integration" of TCM and "Western medicine." Over the holiday break, I learned that...
Son of (the unethical and unscientific) Trial To Assess Chelation Therapy rears its ugly head to the tune of $37 million
First, the NCCIH and NHLBI spend $30 million on a clinical trial of quackery for cardiovascular disease that produces predictably negative to at best equivocal results. Then that result, apparently, is enough to justify wasting another $37 million on a followup study—while dozens of other deserving studies go unfunded. Meanwhile STAT News lionizes the principal investigator of both trials as a brave...
Can the mind really heal the body? The false narrative of placebo “healing” revisited
Placebo effects are inextricably bound to the question of whether the alternative medicine modalities that are being “integrated” into medicine actually have any useful therapeutic effects or not; i.e., whether they are merely placebos. Here, I examine an article in National Geographic that peddles the false narrative that placebo effects have real "healing" powers against diseases like Parkinson's disease.
Milestones on the path to integrating quackery with medicine
The "integration" of quackery with real medicine occurring in academia and now private hospitals and practices didn't occur overnight. It began decades ago. Here, we examine what an advocate of "integrative medicine" views as key milestones on the path towards adding pseudoscience and quackery to your medicine.
In which we are accused of “polarization-based medicine”
A little over a month ago, I wrote about how proponents of “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), now more frequently called “integrative medicine,” go to great lengths to claim nonpharmacological treatments for, well, just about anything as somehow being CAM or “integrative.” The example I used was a systematic review article published by several of the bigwigs at that government font of...
NCCIH funds sauna “detoxification” study at naturopathic school
It is no secret that we at SBM are not particularly fond of the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Medicine (NCCIH; formerly, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine). We’ve lamented NCCIH’s use of limited public funds for researching implausible treatments, the unwarranted luster NIH/NCCIH funding bestows on quack institutions, the lack of useful research it has produced, and its...
“Non-pharmacological treatments for pain” ≠ CAM, no matter how much NCCIH wishes it so
When it comes to pain, in the mythos of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), which in recent years has morphed into "integrative medicine," anything that isn't a drug is automatically rebranded as CAM, whether it's in any way "alternative" or not.