Results for: Tom Harkin and NCCAM
Dr. Oz revisited
We here at SBM have been very critical of Dr. Mehmet Oz, who through his relentless self-promotion (and with more than a little help from his patron Oprah Winfrey) has somehow become known as “America’s doctor.” Back in the early days, when he was the regular medical expert on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Dr. Oz was at least tolerable. Much of what...
Adventures in defending science-based medicine in cancer journals: Energy chelation
My co-bloggers and I have spent considerable time and effort over the last four years writing posts for this blog (and I for my not-so-super-secret other blog) bemoaning the infiltration of quackademic medicine into what once were bastions of evidence- and science-based medicine. We’ve discussed at considerable length reasons for why this steady infiltration of pseudoscience into medical academia has been occurring....
The Prince of CAM
Prince Charles is a big supporter of “natural” medicine, which in practice means unscientific and ineffective medicine. He has no particular expertise in this area, and there is absolutely no legitimate reason why he should have any influence over the practice of medicine in the UK. But he is the Prince of Wales, and he has chosen to use that celebrity to...
Utah Senator Orrin Hatch: A pit bull in defense of the supplement industry
Editor’s note: This weekend was truly NIH grant crunch time. I have to get my final version of my R01 to our university’s grants office by Tuesday, or it might not get uploaded by the July 5 deadline. (Funny how electronic submission, which was supposed to make applicants’ lives easier, seems to have made them harder.) Consequently, I decided to take a...
Open Letter to Dr. Josephine Briggs
Josephine P. Briggs, M.D. Director, National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine Dear Dr. Briggs, As you know, we’ve met twice. The first time was at the Yale “Integrative Medicine” Symposium in March. The second was in April, when Drs. Novella, Gorski and I met with you for an hour at the NCCAM in Bethesda. At the time I concluded that you...
CAM in “Obamacare”
On March 30th, President Obama signed the final piece of healthcare reform legislation concluding an epic battle that ultimately lead to the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). The bill enforces the largest change to US healthcare for decades and has provided an opportunity for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) advocates to be federally endorsed in our future...
The Dietary Supplement Safety Act of 2010: A long overdue correction to the DSHEA of 1994?
BACKGROUND: A BAD, BAD LAW One of the themes of this blog has been how, over the last couple of decades, the law has been coopted by forces supporting “complementary and alternative” medicine (CAM) in order to lend legitimacy to unscientific and even pseudoscientific medical nonsense. Whether it be $120 million a year being spent for the National Center for Complementary and...
Be careful what you wish for, Dr. Dossey, you just might get it
If there’s one thing about the so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) movement that I’ve emphasized time and time again, it’s that its adherents have a definite love-hate relationship with science. They hate it because it is the single greatest threat to their beliefs system and the pseudoscience that underlies it. At the same time, they crave the legitimacy that science confers....
2009’s Top 5 Threats To Science In Medicine
As 2009 comes to an end, it seems that everyone is creating year-in-review lists. I thought I’d jump on the list band wagon and offer my purely subjective top 5 threats to rational thought in healthcare and medicine. Of course, it strikes me as rather ironic that we’re having this discussion – who knew that medicine could be divorced from science in...
Suzanne Somers’ Knockout: Dangerous misinformation about cancer (part 1)
If there’s one thing I’ve become utterly disgusted with in the time since I first became interested in science-based medicine as a concept, its promotion, and the refutation of quackery and medical pseudoscience, it’s empty-brained celebrities with an agenda. Be it from imbibing the atmosphere within the bubble of woo-friendly southern California or taking a crash course at the University of Google...