Results for: herbal
Chopra and Weil and Roy, oh my! Or: The Wall Street Journal, coopted.
When the unholy Trinity of Woo attacks! Deepak Chopra, Andrew Weil, and Rustum Roy join forces to fool the Wall Street Journal.
AARP and Alternative Medicine
I know I said the next entry would be about the efficacy of the influenza vaccine. The road to blogging in paved with good intentions. I will eventually write that entry, but the ADD has kicked in and my attention has wandered elsewhere. I am 51 and one of the benefits of this advanced age is you get to join AARP, the...
Between a Rock and a Hard Place: A Case Study Exploring the Battle Lines of Science Based Medicine
Editor’s Note: This is a guest post solicited by Dr. Hall, who describes Dr. Albietz thusly: He’s a skeptical young pediatrician who works in a PICU and recently had a chiropractor come into the PICU to consult on a child with intractable seizures. He was sort of coerced to allow this at the parents’ request and against his better judgment. His hospital...
Google Trends and the Interest in Alternative Medicine
USA Today has come out with a new survey – apparently, three out of every four people make up 75% of the population. –David Letterman How popular is alternative medicine? One way is to survey people and ask them. Like all surveys, the nature of the question determines the answer. The first, and probably most referenced, and misquoted, article on ‘alternative’ medicine...
NCCAM: the not-even-wrong agency
The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) is a government agency tasked with (among other things), “[exploring] complementary and alternative healing practices in the context of rigorous science.” In this space we have talked about NCCAM quite a bit, but I have to admit that I don’t think about them very much. The other day, though, I was reading though...
Why we don’t prescribe bark for cancer
My valued colleague, Dr. Antonio Baines, recently invited me to speak for his graduate course in Toxicology. Dr. Baines’ course is one of the most highly-regarded graduate classes at North Carolina Central University for M.S. students in Biology and Pharmaceutical Sciences. Antonio asked that I discuss the pharmacology and toxicology of herbal and non-botanical dietary supplements but pretty much gave me free...
Puncturing the Acupuncture Myth
Note: This is slightly revised from an article I originally wrote as a “SkepDoc” column for Skeptic magazine. It was pre-released online in eSkeptic and it has already generated a lot of comments, including “a truly amazing piece of peurile pseudo-intellectualism,” “an ad hominem attack on one form of alternative medicine so beset by poor thinking that one must come to the...
A natural product of his environment
I’m delighted to have the opportunity to join this outstanding group of medical professional bloggers in adding my natural products angle to the application of science-based medicine. With the exception of Dr. Gorski, who holds MD and PhD degrees, I believe I am the first “only a PhD” to be invited to SBM. However, I have spent much of my career training,...