Results for: homeopathy
Nine Questions, Nine Answers.
This is not an easy blog to write. Doctors Novella and Gorski want the entries to be formal, academic, referenced, with a minimum of snark. For the most part I comply. But sometimes. Sometimes. It is hard, so hard, not to spiral into sarcastic diatribes over the writings that pass for information on the interwebs. How should one respond to profound ignorance...
Nine Breakthroughs and a Breakdown
In his new book Breakthrough! How the 10 Greatest Discoveries in Medicine Saved Millions and Changed Our View of the World Jon Queijo describes what he believes are the 10 greatest discoveries. 9 of them are uncontroversial discoveries that have been on other top-10 lists, but his 10th choice is one that no other list of top discoveries has ever included. He...
CAM on campus: Ethics
In a previous post I described a lecture given by a faculty member to first-year medical students on my campus introducing us to integrative medicine (IM). Here I describe his lecture to the second-year class on legal and ethical aspects of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). Dr. P began his lecture by describing CAM using the now-familiar NCCAM classification. He gave the...
Looking for quackademic medicine in all the wrong places
One advantage of having a blog is that I can sometimes tap into the knowledge of my readers to help me out. As many readers know, a few of the SBM bloggers (myself included) will be appearing at the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism (NECSS) on Saturday, April 17. Since the topic of our panel discussion is going to be the...
Our Visit with NCCAM
Over the past two plus years of the existence of Science-Based Medicine (SBM) we have been highly critical of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) – going so far as to call for it to be abolished. We are collectively concerned that the NCCAM primarily serves as a means for promoting unscientific medicine, and any useful research it funds...
Mercola, Gardasil, and Toyota?
Joseph Mercola, D.O. should be well known to readers of SBM for reflexively opposing science-based medicine while providing an endless stream of misinformation on his blog, advocating detoxification, homeopathy, the tapping of meridians chiropractic and more at his clinic, and peddling a treasure trove of vitamin supplements, foods, and Mercola-endorsed devices (on sale at his site for your convenience, no conflict of...
My NCCAM Wish List
For a number of reasons, well-argued many times here on SBM, it would be beneficial to American citizens if the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) were abolished. This does not seem to be in the cards anytime soon. Here, then, are my suggestions for making the Center less dangerous and less of a marketing tool for pseudomedicine than it...
The case of John Lykoudis and peptic ulcer disease revisited: Crank or visionary?
One of the themes of SBM has been, since the very beginning, how the paradigm of evidence-based medicine discounts plausibility (or, perhaps more appropriately, implausibility) when evaluating whether or not a given therapy works. One of our favorite examples is homeopathy, a therapy that is so implausible on a strictly scientific basis that, for it to work, huge swaths of well-established science...
H. Pylori, Plausibility, and Greek Tragedy: the Quirky Case of Dr. John Lykoudis
Mark Crislip is on vacation, but through an arduous series of shakings and succussions (beating his head against the wall?) we have channeled part of his essence: This post mostly concerns itself with infectious diseases, thanks to several recent posts on SBM that discussed the plausibility of health claims† and that touched on the recent discovery that most peptic ulcer disease (PUD)...
Is there a role for speculative journals like Medical Hypotheses in the scientific literature?
The core information supporting science-based medicine resides in the scientific literature. There, scientists and physicians publish the results of experiments and clinical trials that seek to understand the biological mechanisms by which the human body functions and through which disease forms and to apply this understanding to test new treatments for diease. Consequently, the quality and integrity of the biomedical literature are...