Tag: Andrew Weil
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...
Blatant pro-alternative medicine propaganda in The Atlantic
Some of my fellow Science-Based Medicine (SBM) bloggers and I have been wondering lately what’s up with The Atlantic. It used to be one of my favorite magazines, so much so that I subscribed to it for roughly 25 years (and before that I used to read my mother’s copy). In general I enjoyed its mix of politics, culture, science, and other...
Surprise, surprise! Dr. Andrew Weil doesn’t like evidence-based medicine
Dr. Andrew Weil is a rock star in the “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) and “integrative medicine” (IM) movement. Indeed, it can be persuasively argued that he is one of its founders, at least a founder of the its most modern iteration, and I am hard-pressed to think of anyone who did more in the early days of the CAM/IM movement, back...
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...
The wild Weil world of woo
Dr. Weil is often seen as the smiling “mainstream” of alternative medicine. He’s a real doctor (unlike, say, Gary Null), and much of what he advocates is standard and uncontroversial nutritional advice. But Weil illustrates the two biggest problems with so-called alternative medicne: once you’ve decided science is dispensible, the door is open to anything, no matter how insane; and no matter...
Chopra and Weil and Roy, oh my! Or: The Wall Street Journal, coopted.
When the unholy Trinity of Woo attacks! Deepak Chopra, Andrew Weil, and Rustum Roy join forces to fool the Wall Street Journal.