Results for: oz
Parasites
I saw a patient recently for parasites. I get a sinking feeling when I see that diagnosis on the schedule, as it rarely means a real parasite. The great Pacific NW is mostly parasite free, so either it is a traveler or someone with delusions of parasitism. The latter comes in two forms: the classic form and Morgellons. Neither are likely to...
Hash Oil for Gliomas? What Would You Do?
A friend asked me to look at the evidence for hash oil as a treatment for glioma. His teenage daughter was recently diagnosed with brain cancer: a grade 3 anaplastic ependymoma. It recurred very rapidly after surgery and radiotherapy and the latest tissue diagnosis shows an aggressive grade IV glioma. Her prognosis is not good. No further attempts at curative therapy are...
“Motivated reasoning,” alternative medicine, and the anti-vaccine movement
One theme that we at Science-Based Medicine keep revisiting again and again is not so much a question of the science behind medical therapies (although we do discuss that issue arguably more than any other) but rather a question of why. Why is it that so many people cling so tenaciously to pseudoscience, quackery, and, frequently, conspiracy theories used by believers to...
Cochrane is Starting to ‘Get’ SBM!
This essay is the latest in the series indexed at the bottom.* It follows several (nos. 10-14) that responded to a critique by statistician Stephen Simon, who had taken issue with our asserting an important distinction between Science-Based Medicine (SBM) and Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM). (Dr. Gorski also posted a response to Dr. Simon’s critique). A quick-if-incomplete Review can be found here. One...
Conflicts of Interest
When an article is published in a medical journal, the authors must disclose any conflicts of interest. This is important, because even if they think owning stock in the drug company won’t influence their scientific judgment, we know that subtle biases can creep in to somehow affect the findings of studies. It has been shown that studies funded by drug companies are...
The curious case of Poul Thorsen, fraud and embezzlement, and the Danish vaccine-autism studies
If there’s one thing about the anti-vaccine movement, it’s all about the ad hominem attack. Failing to win on science, clinical trials, epidemiology, and other objective evidence, with few exceptions, anti-vaccine propagandists fall back on attacking the person instead of the evidence. For example, as I’ve noted numerous times, Paul Offit has been the subject of unrelenting attacks from Generation Rescue and...
The Forefather of Acupuncture Energetics, a Charlatan?
Not only his name and his titles of nobility were forged, but parts of the teachings of the man who introduced acupuncture to Europe were also invented. Even today, treatments are provided based on his fantasies. — Hanjo Lehmann1 Decades before President Nixon’s visit to communist China, and before the articles in the Western popular press on the use of acupuncture in...
Suffer the Children
Some of our readers have complained that we pick on alternative medicine while ignoring the problems in conventional medicine. That criticism is unjustified: we oppose non-science-based medicine wherever we find it. We find it regularly in alternative medicine; we find it less frequently in conventional medicine, but when we do, we speak out. A new book by Dr. Peter Palmieri is aimed...
The Image of Chiropractic: Consensus Based on Belief
EDITOR’S NOTE Today is a big grant deadline for me; at 5 PM EDT, the grant is due. As a consequence of working on my grant application into the wee hours of the morning last night, I didn’t have a chance to write my usual bit of logorrhea of the sort that I’ve laid down each and practically every Monday for the...
Asian Bear Bile Remedies: Traditional Medicine or Barbarism?
Imagine living 20 years spending 24 hours a day in a cage that tightly fits your body, not giving you room to stand up, stretch out, turn around, or move at all. Imagine that twice a day during these years you would have a metal catheter inserted into a hole which has been cut into your abdomen, allowing the catheter to easily...