Tag: randomized controlled trials
Is watchful waiting for ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS) safe? Preliminary results of the COMET trial
Ductal carcinoma in situ is a precursor of breast cancer that is usually treated with surgery, radiation therapy, and estrogen blockade. A new study suggests that watchful waiting might be safe for some women with DCIS.
Why Are Sensible Medicine Doctors Indifferent to the Nonsense Comments of Sensible Medicine Commentators? As Instructed, I Consider the Dualities of Interest and Motivating Biases.
Sensible Medicine doctors often utter the words "do an RCT". So why are their readers so ignorant about RCTs?
2023: The year that the evidence-based medicine (EBM) paradigm was weaponized against vaccines and public health
Evidence-based medicine (EBM) has been a very useful paradigm for assessing evidence in medicine. However, like any other framework, it can be misused, particularly when fundamentalist EBM methodolatry leads to its inappropriate application to questions for which it is ill-suited, a misuse that has been weaponized against public health during the pandemic.
The Cochrane mask fiasco: How the evidence-based medicine paradigm can produce misleading results
Last week, the Cochrane Collaborative was forced to walk back the conclusions of a review by Tom Jefferson et al that had been spun in the media as proving that "masks don't work." Tom Jefferson himself has been problematic about vaccines for a long time, but the rot goes deeper. What is it about the evidence-based medicine paradigm that results in misleading...
Peer review fail: Vaccine publishes antivax propaganda disguised as “reanalyses” of Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccine clinical trial data
In order portray COVID-19 vaccines as dangerous, Peter Doshi has now managed to get poorly designed and performed "reanalyses" of the clinical trial data used by the FDA to grant emergency use approval of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines published in two reputable journals, The BMJ and Vaccine? What happened?
Methodolatry and COVID
Doctors who call for an RCT for everything generally haven't run a single RCT on anything. Why is this?
Science-based medicine isn’t just for CAM. The case of ivermectin shows that it never was.
Another large randomized controlled trial for ivermectin showed no efficacy for the early treatment of COVID-19. This is not a surprise to science-based medicine advocates. Here's why the story of ivermectin shows that SBM isn't just for "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) —and never was.
Ivermectin: The acupuncture of COVID-19 treatments
As high-quality evidence increasingly and resoundingly shows that ivermectin does not work against COVID-19, advocates are doing what acupuncture advocates do: Turning to lower quality "positive" studies to claim incorrectly that their favorite ineffective treatment actually does "work".
The Yoga RCT
Back in December, 2020, Chief Scientist for the WHO Dr. Soumya Swaminathan tweeted about a study that suggested yoga helped improve various blood markers in people with diabetes. However, a major flaw prevents the study from being rigorous enough to believe its conclusions.
Ian Harris on “Surgery, the Ultimate Placebo”
Ian Harris explains that more than half of commonly performed surgical operations may be placebos. Adequate studies using a blinded control group are essential.