Month: October 2014

Infinite Variety? So many styles of acupuncture.

Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale. Her infinite variety. – William Shakespeare This is not a typical post for me, but something I have been meaning to do to satisfy my own curiosity. I have wondered, how many variations of acupuncture are there? I suspected a lot, but I thought I would go looking and make a list. Since acupuncture is...

/ October 31, 2014

“Quackery: A $10 Billion Scandal”

Who would you guess authored a 250-page report which begins with this Preface? This report marks the culmination of an intensive four-year review of quackery and its impact on the elderly. . . As this report details, quackery has traveled far from the day of the pitchman and covered wagon to emerge as big business. Those who orchestrate and profit from the...

/ October 30, 2014

SBM on Wikipedia in Every Language

One of the most interesting aspects of living through the second half of the 20th century and into the first half of the 21st century is the profound change in access to information. I remember in the 1980s there was a buzz (at least among technophiles and science fiction nerds) about how computers were going to be connected in a worldwide network...

/ October 29, 2014

Salk’s swansong: renaissance of the injected polio vaccine

Picture a lab scientist. White coat, pensive expression, microscope in hand. Glasses, perhaps. The person you have in mind (providing you are willing to humour a stereotype or two) may have a striking resemblance to Jonas Salk, the archetypal laboratory researcher, born in New York City on Wednesday 28th October 1914 — one hundred years ago today. The name will be familiar...

/ October 28, 2014

Mirror Neurons and the Pitfalls of Brain Research

[Ed. Note: I realize that I normally post on Monday, but thanks to an R21 grant deadline tomorrow, I will not be able to post new material today (although you might have noticed some “familiar” material posted yesterday.) Harriet has graciously agreed to cover for me today, and we have a special guest post for you tomorrow. Fear not. I’ll soon be...

/ October 27, 2014

A little shameless self-promotion and a plea

Here’s a little shameless self-promotion, which we editors at Science-Based Medicine indulge in from time to time. This time around, I’d just like to mention that I’m the guest on the latest episode of the Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe, where I was permitted to pontificate about children with cancer whose parents deny them chemotherapy. Check it out. Second, in less than...

/ October 27, 2014

Brian Hooker and Andrew Wakefield accuse the CDC of scientific fraud. Irony meters everywhere explode.

The antivaccine movement and conspiracy theories go together like beer and Buffalo wings, except that neither are as good as, yes, beer and Buffalo wings. (Maybe it’s more like manure and compost.) In any case, the antivaccine movement is rife with conspiracy theories. I’ve heard and written about more than I can remember right now, and I’m under no illusion that I’ve...

/ October 26, 2014

The “It’s All Good!” Fallacy of Complementary and Alternative Medicine…..

As a young mother comforts her feverish and uncomfortable infant, a doctor enters the dimly-lit exam room. The child’s mother and the bedside nurse look at him expectantly. “I’ve got the results. There is an infection in your son’s spinal fluid, which was one of the things we discussed as a possible cause of his high fever and irritability,” the physician explains...

/ October 24, 2014

Lessons from the dubious rise and inevitable fall of green coffee beans

News this week that a randomized controlled trial of green coffee bean (GCB) has been officially retracted from the medical literature signals what is hopefully the end to one of the most questionable diet products to appear on the market in years. Plucked from obscurity and then subjected to bogus research, it’s now clear that the only people that actually benefited from...

/ October 23, 2014

A TCM Challenge

In the tradition of James Randi, a Chinese doctor who is an outspoken critic of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) has issued a challenge to its proponents. He has put up 50,000 yuan (about $8,000), which has been matched by donors for a total of over 100,000 yuan, to any TCM practitioner who can use pulse diagnosis to determine with accuracy whether females...

/ October 22, 2014