Month: March 2009

Welcome another new blogger for SBM

I’d like to take this opportunity to announce the arrival of another new blogger for SBM. Please wecome Dr. John Snyder. John Snyder, M.D., is Chief of the Section of General Pediatrics and Medical Director of Pediatric Ambulatory Care at Saint Vincent’s Hospital in New York City. He is also Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at New York Medical College. Since 1994 Dr....

/ March 23, 2009

CAM on campus: Naturopathy

The latest event sponsored by “integrative medicine” proponents on my medical school campus featured the naturopath “Dr.” PB, a 2003 graduate and valedictorian from Bastyr University. Advertisements all over campus billed the lecture as “Stress, nutrition, and the GI tract,” which seemed innocuous enough. However, the lecture title as written on PB’s slide show was “Naturopathic apologetics for treating the gut.” He explained “treating the gut” to mean that...

/ March 22, 2009

Naturopathy and Liberal Politics: Strange Bedfellows

Yesterday’s post by Wally Sampson and an offline discussion with David Gorski have moved me to post something that I wrote in 2001. At the time, I was a member of the Massachusetts Special Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medical Practitioners. I’ve previously mentioned that experience here. During that tenure I wrote a treatise on the tenets and practices of ‘naturopathic medicine,’*...

/ March 20, 2009

A View to the Past

The quackery political map has changed over the last three decades. I recently took a historial look over the landscape at characteristics and forms of quackery that could yield some perspective, and understanding. Pseudoscience and quackery were identifiable long before we were here. Mesmer was deposed by Franklin and Lavoisier & Co.  Samuel Hahnemann’s homeopathy was recognized as false by contemporaries, and by 1840s Oliver...

/ March 19, 2009

Placebo Therapies: Are They Ethical?

Is it ethical to overstate the efficacy of a treatment option, if it might lead to a patient’s enhanced experience of that treatment? Your response to this question may reveal the degree to which you favor Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM). Let me explain. As far as I can tell, no CAM treatment has been proven effective beyond placebo. (If you’re not...

/ March 18, 2009

Acupuncture – Disconnected from Reality

The primary goal of science-based medicine (SBM) is to connect the practice of medicine to the best currently available science. This is similar to evidence-based medicine (EBM), although we quibble about the relative roles of evidence vs prior plausibility. In a recent survey 86% of Americans said they thought that science education was “absolutely essential” or “very important” to the healthcare system....

/ March 18, 2009

Shame on PBS!

I used to have a high opinion of PBS. They ran excellent programs like Nova and Masterpiece Theatre and I felt I could count on finding good programming when I tuned into my local PBS channel. No more. It was bad enough when they started featuring Deepak Chopra, self-help programs, and “create your own reality” New Age philosophy, but at least it...

/ March 17, 2009

How not to think

Thankfully, I don’t receive all that much blog-related mail.  But this weekend I received several communications about a piece in popular liberal blog.  The piece is (ostensibly) about Lyme disease, which coincidentally happens to be one of the topics of my first post here at SBM.  In fact, I’ve written about Lyme disease a number of times, and Dr. Novella has a...

/ March 16, 2009

When fraud undermines science-based medicine

The overriding them, the raison d’être if you will, of this blog is science-based medicine. However, it goes beyond that in that we here at SBM believe that science- and evidence-based medicine is the best medicine. It’s more than the best medicine, though; it’s the best strategy for medicine to improve therapy for our patients. We frequently contrast science-based medicine with various...

/ March 16, 2009

I Work with Steve Martin

Partly as an antidote to the previous, depressing post, and partly because it is so deserving of exposure, I now present—verbatim except for names and other ‘identifiers’—a recent email exchange between one of my colleagues and a correspondent. It has nothing to do with SBM. My colleague, known to his friends as T-Bone, is the reluctant owner of a vacation house in Florida. He must rent...

/ March 13, 2009