Results for: homeopathy
780.6. What is a fever?
You can tell what a doctor does for a living by the ICD-9 codes they have memorized. There is an ICD-9 code for nearly every medical condition. Weightlessness is 994.9. Must be there for NASA, I have yet to see a weightless patient. Decapitation by guillotine is E978. There, I suppose, in case Marat returns from the dead. There is an ICD-9...
Naturopathy Embraces the Four Humors
The ancient Greeks posited a system of health and disease based on the four humors: blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile. According to this system, health is defined as a harmony of these four humors and disease is caused by an imbalance among them. Restore the balance, and health is restored. Bleeding is a familiar example of humoral medical treatment based...
Why Do People turn to Alternative Medicine
Any sociological question is likely going to have a complex answer with many variables that are not easy to tease apart. We should therefore resist the temptation to make simplistic statements about X being the cause of Y. We can still, however, identify correlations that will at least inform our thinking. Sometimes correlations can be triangulated to fairly reliable conclusions. When the...
Bodytalk: Medical theater
If there were an icon of Science-Based Medicine, I think it should be Sisyphus: pushing a boulder uphill, only to watch it roll down again. Forever. Blogging about pseudoscience in medicine can feel that way at times. There is no end to the variations of nonsense, most health professionals are indifferent at best, and sometimes I wonder if blogging is just preaching...
Disingenuous: Deconstruction of a naturopathic white paper
Science is the Concept by which we measure our reality I don’t believe in magic I don’t believe in I-ching… I just believe in science…and that reality. John Lennon. Sort of. As regular readers of the blog are aware, I am science/reality based. I think the physical and basic sciences provide an excellent understanding of reality at the level of human experience....
The CAM Docket: Boiron III, et al.
Despite denying wrongdoing, Boiron was still required to reimburse consumers for their products after losing a consumer fraud lawsuit.
Down the Virtual Rabbit Hole: Kangan water®
The interwebs are more than a series of tubes, it has the power of endless distraction and tangents, a series of clickable rabbit holes that can drag you deeper and deeper into the alternative universes that are parallel with our own. One moment you can be on Science Based Medicine, grounded on the terra firma of reality, and then with a click...
Oregon Naturopaths v. Evidence-Based Medicine
Like every state, Oregon is struggling with the unsustainable costs of taxpayer-funded health care programs. In an attempt to tame this beast, Oregon recently established a system of coordinated care organizations, or CCOs, to (as the name suggests) coordinate medical, mental health, and dental care for residents enrolled in Oregon Health Plan, the state’s Medicaid program. The new system requires supervision of...
Homeopathic Vaccines Revisited
One of the core fictions of “complementary” or “integrative” medicine is that they are primarily offered in addition to science-based medicine and only to fill gaps in what SBM can offer. The original marketing label used to promote treatments that are not adequately supported by evidence , “alternative medicine,” was a bit more accurate in that at least it acknowledged that such...
Chiropractic “Research” on Tourette Syndrome: The Trouble with Case Reports…..
I can think of few conditions with clinical features more ideal for establishing a pattern of abuse at the hands of practitioners of so-called alternative medicine than Tourette syndrome. Tourette syndrome (TS), which first manifests itself in early childhood in the overwhelming majority of patients, is a neurological disorder with infamous motor and vocal manifestations and a troubled past. Historically the condition...