Results for: oz
Potential market for alternative medicine left untouched
A few days ago, I had the good fortune to share lunch and ideas with David Gorski and Kimball Atwood. Kimball was on his way from a talk at Michigan State to one at Brigham and Women’s, one of the country’s best-known teaching hospitals. David was planning a future talk for a group in Florida. These guys have been thinking and writing...
CAM practitioners react to Andrew Weil’s proposal for a board certification for integrative medicine. It isn’t (all) pretty.
About a month ago, I discussed a rather disturbing development, namely the initiative by Dr. Andrew Weil to set up something he was going to call the American Board of Integrative Medicine, all for the purpose of creating a system of board certification for physicians practicing “integrative medicine” (IM), or, as I prefer to call them, physicians who like to integrate pseudoscience...
“And one more thing” about Steve Jobs’ battle with cancer
Did Steve Jobs' delay in undergoing surgery for his cancer cost him his life? The new Walter Isaacson biography provides more information, but does not resolve the question.
Dummy Medicine, Dummy Doctors, and a Dummy Degree, Part 2.2: Harvard Medical School and the Curious Case of Ted Kaptchuk, OMD (cont. again)
“Strong Medicine”: Ted Kaptchuk and the Powerful Placebo At the beginning of the first edition of The Web that has no Weaver, published in 1983, author Ted Kaptchuk portended his eventual academic interest in the placebo: A story is told in China about a peasant who had worked as a maintenance man in a newly established Western missionary hospital. When he retired...
Steve Jobs’ cancer and pushing the limits of science-based medicine
Editor’s note: There is an update to this post. An Apple fanboy contemplates computers and mortality I’m a bit of an Apple fanboy and admit it freely. My history with Apple products goes way back to the early 1980s, when one of my housemates at college had an Apple IIe, which I would sometimes use for writing, gaming, and various other applications....
Understanding and Treating Colic
Parenting an infant can be totally overwhelming. One of the earliest challenge many face is learning to deal with periods of intractable crying. I often speak with sleep deprived parents when they’re looking for something — anything — to stop their baby from crying. They’ve typically been told by friends of family that their baby must have “colic” and they’ve come to...
Andrew Weil and “integrative medicine”: The ultimate triumph of quackery?
A board certification in woo? I’ve been harshly critical of the entire concept of “integrative medicine” (IM), which has over the last few years nearly supplanted the former term used for non-science-based medicine or medicine based on prescientific ideas represented as though it were scientific medicine, “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM). Indeed, just last week I pointed out how IM is far...
Survey says, “Hop on the bandwagon of ‘integrative medicine’!”
A Brief Clinical Vignette In researching this post, I found an article published nearly two years ago in The Hospitalist entitled Growth Spurt: Complementary and alternative medicine use doubles, which began with this anecdote: Despite intravenous medication, a young boy in status epilepticus had the pediatric ICU team at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison stumped....
Pseudoscience Sells
It is an unfortunate truth that there is money in pseudoscience, particularly medical pseudoscience. Money both attracts charlatans and also funds their activities, which includes marketing pseudoscience and defending their claims from scientific scrutiny. In this way the game is rigged in favor of pseudoscience. With0ut effective regulation, sites like ours are forced to play whack-a-mole with the medical pseudoscience du jour....
Chemotherapy doesn’t work? Not so fast…
A favorite claim made by cancer quacks (and quacks of all varieties, actually) is that chemotherapy doesn't work. One variant of this claim is what I call the "2% gambit." Basically, this gambit claims that chemotherapy is only 2% effective. Not surprisingly, the evidence backing up the "2% gambit" is a highly flawed study, as is the evidence used by quacks to...