Results for: placebo
Dr. Vinay Prasad vs. a VAERS study finding more reports of vaccine injury in red states
Dr. Vinay Prasad attacks an epidemiological study published in JAMA Open Network reporting that people in red states are more likely to report vaccine injuries, claiming that a more rigorous study would "not be difficult," when he knows that it would be very difficult.
Best Hospital Eye Roll
Science: Figuring things out is better than making things up. A tee shirt I recently saw. Except… In a recent post Mayo Clinic Promotes Reiki, Steve seemed surprised that the Mayo was offering Reiki. I don’t know. Maybe he was channeling Louie. I know the Mayo is a top hospital, but I trained in Minneapolis at Hennepin County and we would have...
Doctors Who Performatively Fetishized RCTs Aren’t Out to Advance Medical Research, But Rather to Sow Doubt & Mistrust
Actually running an RCT is a lot harder than merely calling for one. Those who recognized this obvious fact are not against RCTs.
How antivaxxers weaponize vaccine safety studies to falsely portray vaccines as dangerous
Antivaxxers have weaponized a huge multinational vaccine safety study of 99 million patient records that found rare adverse events and concluded that the risks of COVID-19 vaccines outweigh the benefits. How? A combination of the Nirvana fallacy and spin.
Adios Aduhelm
The controversial and never-proven-effective drug to treat Alzheimer's disease, aducanumab (Aduhelm) has been discontinued.
Mayo Clinic Promotes Reiki
The Mayo Clinic is a prestigious medical institution with a deserved international reputation. It also promotes rank pseudoscience. It does this, apparently, for all the reasons we have explored here at SBM over the years. I have seen first hand how one or a few true believers can promote so-called alternative medicine at their institutions, meeting little resistance from colleagues and administrators...
Why Are Sensible Medicine Doctors Indifferent to the Nonsense Comments of Sensible Medicine Commentators? As Instructed, I Consider the Dualities of Interest and Motivating Biases.
Sensible Medicine doctors often utter the words "do an RCT". So why are their readers so ignorant about RCTs?
Cameroon Begins First Malaria Vaccine Program
Despite massive efforts to reduce the disease burden of malaria, it remains a significant cause of disease and death in parts of the world, most notably Sub-Saharan Africa. Now we have a new tool in the fight against malaria – two safe and effective vaccines. Cameroon is just beginning a program to give the vaccine for free to children in four doses...
What Is Somatic Therapy?
Is modern medicine descending into pseudoscience, or is scientific medicine still going strong? Unfortunately, I think both of these things can happen at the same time. On the one hand, scientific research in medicine is progressing nicely. We are seeing the results of scientific breakthroughs made decades ago, with monoclonal antibody therapies, new therapeutic targets, the beginning of real genetic therapy, brain-machine...