Tag: integrative medicine
Integrative Medicine: “Patient-Centered Care” is the new Medical Paternalism
Integrative Pitchmen Several of us have written about how contemporary quacks have artfully pitched their wares to a higherbrow market than their predecessors were accustomed to, back in the day. Through clever packaging,* quacks today can reasonably hope to become professors at prestigious medical schools, to control and receive substantial grant money from the NIH, to preside over reviews for the Cochrane...
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...
“Integrative medicine”: A brand, not a specialty
Back in the mists of time, what used to be considered quackery became "alternative medicine." Thus began the rebranding. The latest iteration is "integrative medicine," which advocates the "integration" of quackery with science-based medicine, which it portrays as the "best of both worlds." It's been a very effective campaign, unfortunately.
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...
For Good Reason…
This one crept up on me by surprise. You see, I recorded an interview with D.J. Grothe, President of the James Randi Educational Foundation and host of the podcast For Good Reason back in November. I wasn’t sure when it would appear. Well, it turns out that it popped up on my iTunes podcast feeds sometime over the last few days. (It’s...
Integrative Medicine is the Butt of a Sokal-Type Hoax
In 1996, Alan Sokal got a bogus paper published in the journal Social Text. It was a parody full of meaningless statements in the jargon of postmodern philosophy and cultural studies. The editors couldn’t tell the difference between Sokal’s nonsense and the usual articles they publish. Now a British professor of medical education, Dr. John McLachlan, has perpetrated a similar hoax on...
New CMS Chief Donald Berwick: a Trojan Horse for Quackery?
NB: I posted this on Health Care Renewal a couple of days ago, figuring that Dr. Gorski’s post would suffice for the SBM readership (he and I had discussed the topic while at TAM8 last week). But Managing Editor Gorski has asked me to repost it here, which I’m happy to do. I am especially pleased to demonstrate that I am capable...
Looking for quackademic medicine in all the wrong places
One advantage of having a blog is that I can sometimes tap into the knowledge of my readers to help me out. As many readers know, a few of the SBM bloggers (myself included) will be appearing at the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism (NECSS) on Saturday, April 17. Since the topic of our panel discussion is going to be the...
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...