Results for: homeopathy
The drug expiry date: A necessary safety measure, or yet another Big Pharma conspiracy?
Consider this scenario: You’re in good health and take no prescription drugs. You use the following remedies occasionally: Excedrin for the rare migraine Arnica 30CH for bumps and bruises Echinacea capsules, when you feel a cold coming on Today you look in your cupboard, and notice all three products expired last year. Would you still consider taking any of them? Why or...
Pseudoscience is not Cost Effective
Industrialized nations are in the middle of a health care crisis (some more than others), or at least a dilemma. As our medical technology advances, people are living longer, they are living with chronic diseases, and they are consuming more health care. The cost of this health care is rising faster than economic growth, so it is becoming a greater and greater...
Plausibility bias? You say that as though that were a bad thing!
On Friday, you might have noticed that Mark Crislip hinted at a foreshadowing of a blog post to come. This is that blog post. He knew it was coming because when I saw the article that inspired it, I sent an e-mail to my fellow bloggers marking out my territory like a dog peeing on every tree or protecting my newfound topic...
Stop Making Sense
I usually rely on the Secret. Every two weeks or so the Universe offers up some bit of wacky whimsey and I have a topic for an SBM blog entry. This week the Universe has failed me. Nothing has crossed my LCD so I have no studies to evaluate and I have been unusually busy at work preventing my browsing the Interwebs...
Funding CAM Research
Paul Offit has published a thoughtful essay in the most recent Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in which he argues against funding research into complementary and alternative therapies (CAM). Offit is a leading critic of the anti-vaccine movement and has written popular books discrediting many of their claims, such as disproved claim for a connection between some vaccines or ingredients...
Spring Update on Prior Posts
Although I write the definitive entries on topics in this blog, new information trickles in after publication. The new studies are often not worth an entire entry, recapitulating prior essays, but the new information is still worth a mention. What follows are updates on topics covered in prior SBM posts. Raw Milk In Oregon we are having a small outbreak of infections...
The CAM Docket: Boiron II
Five consumer lawsuits are pending in the U.S. against Boiron, the world’s largest manufacturer of homeopathic products. One lawsuit is also pending in Canada. As reported in a previous post, the U.S. plaintiffs claim they purchased homeopathic products, such as Coldcalm, Oscillo, Arnicare and Chestal Cough Syrup, based on Boiron’s misleading and false statements that they are effective for various ailments. Therefore,...
The “CAM” Consumer: Misled and Abused
There is a disturbing lack of protection for the consumer of “complementary and alternative” products and services. I can think of no other area of commerce where misleading, as well as out and out false, information is so regularly employed, without consequence, to entice the consumer into forking over his hard-earned cash. Nor do I know of any other manner of goods...
Integrative Fire-Fighting
Having a housefire is a one of the most stressful, dehumanizing experiences a family can experience. Like cancer, fires appear unexpectedly, and fill victims with fear, grief, and hopelessness. Western firefighting methods do not adequately meet the needs of these victims. No one knows your house as well as you do, yet firefighters take a very paternalistic approach, removing you from the...
Feet of Clay
It has been tough in Portland this year. The Trailblazers, our NBA, and only professional team, started out on a tear, then went right down the toilet. It is painful to see such promise dribbled away. Sigh. Why is elation always followed by disappointment? Everyone and everything has feet of clay. Except Cassius Marcellus. At the beginning of March the NEJM had...