Tag: quackademic medicine
The NCCAM Seeks Comments for its “Strategic Plan: 2010.” Part I
The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) has posted three essays about its latest “strategic planning process,” and has invited “stakeholders” to make comments. I have previously made my own opinions clear,* as have fellow bloggers Gorski, Novella, Lipson, and Sampson: the best strategic plan for the NCCAM would be to extinguish itself. Since politics makes that plan unlikely, there...
CFS: Viral vs somatization
If the association is confirmed, the finding will have near-revolutionary implications for our understanding disease – particularly infectious disease. If there is a confirmed model for such a vague set of symptoms signifying some occult infection limited to immune cells, which produces no repeatable cellular or antibody abnormality, no susceptibility to other infections (such as with HIV) and in which the sites...
Infiltration of Quackademic Medicine into Mainstream: A pernicious influence
Editor’s note: Kausik Datta, Ph.D. is postdoctoral research fellow at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He works in immunology, specifically as related to two major mycoses (Aspergillosis and Cryptococcosis). Rationality and skepticism have been his long-standing interests, which led him into science- and evidence-based medicine. This is his first contribution to this blog. Quackademic ‘Medicine’* is a collective of pseudoscientific, data-free,...
HIV/AIDS denialists do it too!
Remember my post from Monday about fake scientific conferences organized by the anti-vaccine movement that are designed to paint a picture of legitimate science being done, so much so that they even fool some academics into speaking there? (I realize that the server issues we had from Monday through Wednesday that rendered the site completely FUBAR may have prevented some of you...
When “CAM” is mandatory: A science-based medical student’s dilemma
Early in the history of this blog, I wrote a rather long post expressing my dismay at the infiltration of unscientific “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) or “integrative medicine” (IM) modalities into American medical schools. In it, I listed the medical schools that had embraced pseudoscience through having started a CAM/IM program (a list desperately in need of an update). Moreover, we...
“Urban Zen” and homeopathy at Beth Israel Medical Center, or: Dr. Gorski destroys his chances of ever being invited to join the faculty at BIMC or the Albert Einstein College of Medicine
I guess I never really wanted to work in Manhattan anyway. At least, that’s what I keep telling myself. I mean, why on earth would I want to? What’s the attraction? Living in the heart of it all, all those shows and all those amazing cultural activities, all those world-class restaurants? Being close to Boston, Philadelphia, and other cool East Coast cities,...