Month: April 2012

Cancer care in the U.S. versus Europe: Is more necessarily better?

The U.S. is widely known to have the highest health care expenditures per capita in the world, and not just by a little, but by a lot. I’m not going to go into the reasons for this so much, other than to point out that how to rein in these costs has long been a flashpoint for debate. Indeed, most of the...

/ April 16, 2012

Low-Back Pain: Causes, Care, and Consequences

Low-back problems are one of the most common reasons for visits to doctors’ offices and the most common cause of disability among persons under the age of forty five. Most of the time, acute low-back pain is the result of simple strain and is a self-limiting condition that will resolve in four to six weeks, with or without treatment. But since back...

/ April 13, 2012

Systemic Enzyme Therapy

One of the recurrent themes in alternative medicine is the practice of simplifying complex medical conditions, and then offering up equally simple solutions which are positioned as still being within the realm of science. This approach allows the practitioner to ignore all of the complexity and difficulty of practicing real medicine, yet offer nostrums that, on first glance, can sound legitimate. Science-y,...

/ April 12, 2012

Herbal Medicine and Aristolochic Acid Nephropathy

Herbs are little more than dirty drugs, with uncertain dosing, potency, and often-unrecognized side effects. Aristolochic acid, which is present in the Aristolochia genus of plants often used in Traditional Chinese Medicine for many uses. Used in the West as a weight loss aid, Aristolochia is a case study in the unrecognized dangers of herbal medicine; it is a powerful nephrotoxin, and...

/ April 11, 2012

Update: Homeopathy in Brazilian Scientific American

Last week I wrote about a regrettable piece on homeopathy that was published in Scientific American Brasil.  There have been gratifying developments. Within hours, the editor in chief of Scientific American, Mariette DiChristina, appeared in the Comments. She said that Scientific American does not condone the pseudoscience of homeopathy, that the piece clearly should not have been published, that it would never have...

/ April 10, 2012

Why haven’t we cured cancer yet? (Revisited): Personalized medicine versus evolution

About a year ago, I addressed what might seem to the average reader to be a very simple question: Why haven’t we cured cancer yet? As I pointed out at the time, it’s a question that I sometimes even ask myself, particularly given that cancer has touched my life. Three years ago, my mother-in-law died of a particularly nasty form of breast...

/ April 9, 2012

Drinking from the Fire Hose: Odds and Ends on the Gasping Oppression aka influenza

I spend most of my time taking care of hospitalized patients with acute infections and issues of public health are, outside of infection control, not a high priority. Vaccinations in training were always like clean water and fresh food: their benefit was a given and I never needed to consider the benefits and subtleties of  vaccination. There is just so much time...

/ April 6, 2012

The “CAM” Consumer: Misled and Abused

There is a disturbing lack of protection for the consumer of “complementary and alternative” products and services. I can think of no other area of commerce where misleading, as well as out and out false, information is so regularly employed, without consequence, to entice the consumer into forking over his hard-earned cash. Nor do I know of any other manner of goods...

/ April 5, 2012

Whooping Cough Epidemic

The Washington State Department of Health has released a statement stating that they are in the midst of a whooping cough epidemic, which will likely reach its highest levels in decades. So far this year there have been 640 cases, compared to 94 cases over the same time period last year. This is a dramatic increase. Whooping cough is a vaccine preventable...

/ April 4, 2012

Scientific American Declares Homeopathy Indispensable to Planet and Human Health

I recently received an e-mail from one of SBM’s readers in Brazil, Felipe Nogueira Barbara de Oliveira, a PhD candidate in Medical Science who holds an MS in Computer Science and is who is trying to promote critical thinking and scientific medicine in his country. He sent me a jpeg copy of a short piece that was published (in Portuguese) in the...

/ April 3, 2012