Year: 2011

Woo-omics

Every so often, I come across studies that leave me scratching my head. Sometimes, these studies are legitimate scientific studies that have huge flaws or come from an assumption that is very off-base. Other times, they involve what Harriet Hall has termed “tooth fairy science,” wherein the tools of science are used to study a phenomenon that is fantastical, whose very existence...

/ November 21, 2011

November Hodgepodge

There have not been a lot of topics of late that warrant extensive analysis and discussion.  But there are a number of little topics of interest, each worthy of a few paragraphs of discussion, archetypes of issues in medicine, science based and otherwise. Xigirs. No, it is not whale vomit, but close. Last month Xigris  was pulled from the market by Lilly. ...

/ November 18, 2011

Pediatrics & “CAM” I: the wrong solution

Oh no!  Not again! The venerable medical journal Pediatrics devotes an entire supplement this month to Pediatric Use of Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Legal, Ethical, and Clinical Issues in Decision-Making. We sense from the very first sentence that we are in familiar territory: Rapid increases the use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) raise important legal, ethical, clinical, and policy issues. (S150)...

/ November 17, 2011

Chiropractic Neurology

Chiropractic is a diverse collection of beliefs and practices occurring under a broad regulatory label. The differences among various chiropractics are so stark that it is difficult to make general statements about chiropractic practice. At one end of the spectrum, however, are so-called “straight” chiropractors who adhere to the original philosophy of D.D. Palmer – that a vital force they call innate...

/ November 16, 2011

Lessons Learned

I just returned from a trip to Montreal where I spoke at the Lorne Trottier Public Science Symposium, an annual event that David Gorski spoke at a year ago. My topic was “Puncturing the Acupuncture Myth” and the other speakers were Paul Offit, Edzard Ernst, and Bob Park. I was honored to be in such august company; and we were wined, dined, and...

/ November 15, 2011

Reporting back on my Grand Rounds experience at FSU

I'm no Neil deGrasse Tyson, but I think my talk at Florida State University went pretty well.

/ November 14, 2011

Defining what a “physician” is

It takes more than a stethoscope and a white coat to be a physician. A generous dose of reality and a lot of training are also required.

/ November 14, 2011

Dummy Medicine, Dummy Doctors, and a Dummy Degree, Part 2.3: Harvard Medical School and the Curious Case of Ted Kaptchuk, OMD (concluded)

A Loose End In the last post I wondered if Ted Kaptchuk, when he wrote the article titled “Effect of interpretive bias on clinical research,” had understood this implication of Bayes’s Theorem: that interpretations of most scientific investigations are exercises in inverse probability, and thus cannot logically be done without consideration of knowledge external to the investigation in question. I argued that...

/ November 11, 2011

Collagen: An implausible supplement for joint pain

I’m one of those odd people that enjoys distance running. I end up spending a lot of time in the company of other runners. And when we’re not running, we’re usually griping about our running injuries. As the cohort that I run with ages, the injuries are getting more prevalent. Besides the acute conditions, the chronic problems are starting to appear. Our...

/ November 10, 2011

Premature Claims for Neurotrophic Factors

Scientific medicine is not easy. By this point we have largely picked the low hanging fruit, and continued improvements are mostly incremental and hard won. In order to get the most out of our limited research dollars, and optimize medical practice with the safest and most effective treatments, we need to use all available scientific evidence in the proper way. That is...

/ November 9, 2011