Results for: homeopathy
Timothy Kreider
Timothy Kreider, MD, PhD began his residency training in psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania in June 2011, after graduating from New Jersey Medical School. His interests include child psychiatry, placebo effects, somatization, and neuroethics. Tim was introduced to complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) at campus events sponsored by the student interest group for CAM at his medical school. Guest lecturers promoted...
Healing But Not Curing
Last week I discussed the book Healing, Hype, or Harm? edited by Edzard Ernst. I was particularly struck by one of the essays in that book: “Healing but not Curing” by Bruce Charlton, MD, a reader in evolutionary psychiatry at the Department of Psychology of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. Charlton proposes a new way of looking at CAM. He describes...
Fakin’ it
Last week the Times of London revealed inside information from the General Medical Council (UK, responsible for physician licensing) of an ongoing investigation of Dr. Andrew Wakefield and from its own investigation. This revelation recalled other instances of fakery from reports of sectarian medicine (“CAM”) successes. The Medical Council information contained evidence that the data from the now famous Wakefield cases used to...
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February 19, 2009
Edzard Ernst Does It Again
Publishing one excellent book is an accomplishment; publishing two in one year is a truly outstanding achievement. In 2008 Edzard Ernst and Simon Singh published a landmark book Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts About Alternative Medicine. I reviewed it on this blog last summer. It is particularly important since Ernst is a former advocate for CAM (complementary and alternative medicine) who...
More evidence that CAM/IM advocates see health care reform as an opportunity to claim legitimacy
Four weeks ago (was it really that long?), I wrote one of my usual lengthy essays for this blog in which I analyzed two editorials published by some very famous advocates of “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM)/”integrative medicine” (IM). They included one in that credulous repository of all things antivaccine The Huffington Post (no, this isn’t about vaccines, but I can’t resist...
Some Good News on the Academic Front
There is a recent trend in UK Universities to close programs offering science degrees for various forms of so-called alternative medicine (CAM), such as homeopathy, crystal healing, and traditional Chinese medicine. This occurs amid growing scientific criticism of these programs. This is a very good thing, and something I would like to see replicated in the US. The scientific community is appropriately...
Yes We Can! We Can Abolish the NCCAM! Part II
Pseudoscience and Dishonesty, continued: “Reliable Information”? In the previous post, we examined misrepresentations by the late National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) Director Stephen Straus and Margaret Chesney, written in 2006 as a rebuttal to a critical article by Donald Marcus and Arthur Grollman in Science magazine. Here, we continue. According to Straus and Chesney: Before the establishment of NCCAM,...
Reality Deniers
“You have an irrational belief in rational thought.” ~Dr David Scholes, directed towards me. “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” ~T.S. Eliot I just finished the book Mathematical Cranks by Underwood Dudley, part of a trifecta of skeptical mathematics books. Doctor Dudley is a professor of mathematics at Depau University and a connoisseur of cranks with a mathematical bent. What is a...
Dismantling NCCAM: A How-To Primer
Two of the earliest posts I wrote for Science-Based Medicine were entitled The infiltration of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) and “integrative medicine” into academia and The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM): Your tax dollars hard at work. Both were intended as a lament over how not only is pseudoscientific quackery, much of it based on a prescientific understanding...
Yes We Can! We Can Abolish the NCCAM!
…and in so doing, President Obama, you and we would abolish the NIH’s second most prodigious squanderer of precious research funds! Surprise: The National Cancer Institute (NCI) spends slightly more on humbug than does the Center created for that purpose. All told, the NIH squanders almost 1/3 of a billion dollars per year promoting pseudoscience. I’ve decided to add my two cents to the recent groundswell of demand...