1. Money. Advertising, conflicts of interest, funding of studies.

2. The religious right (stem cell research, abortion misinformation, end of life issues).

3. Public/science education.

4. Money again. The lack of universal health care and the profit motive in medicine.

5. Tradition. The refusal or slowness/ resistance to change of doctors based on previous/anecdotal experience rather than research.

6. Lack of focus on preventative care, lack of primary family doctors. This seems to be changing though. Can’t say I like the HMO alternative much more though.

7. Health insurance companies, med mal.

And no, I don’t like CAM, but I don’t see it as the primary threat.

As for NCCAM, I kind of see it as a necessary evil. It shouldn’t be necessary, but since so many people use these therapies, it is. Maybe less people will fall for the hype when they see it doesn’t work. (Wishful thinking?)

Especially since you did not like my answer on the Measles posting. Really all of the people who died before the vaccine was available were not vaccinated! How is that a hard concept to grasp?

Why do you care?

For more information you should try http://www.flutrackers.com/forum/ .

Why do you care? You seem to post your questions on postings here that are not really associated with the H1N1 flu. First it was on the Measles posting, and now this one… Do you see anything on H1N1 above? Um, nope!

Have you tried actually reading the posts that come up when you search for “h1n1″ on this blog? If you had, you would have found Joe Albietz contribution from Dec. 11, 2009 more relevant to your question than this blog posting.

I was wondering where I could find the following information.

Out of all the deaths from H1N1 in the US, how many were unvaccinated and how many vaccinated.

This should be very easy to find because there is a record of all those vaccinated, but oddly, this information doesn’t seem available.

Any ideas.

Thanks.

” — seemed to believe”?

I am sure he merely had in mind how to establish the validity of certain types of medical claim.

Double-blind trials are never performed without there first being some OTHER reason (path to knowledge?), for thinking that a treatment might work better than placebo.

I met a neurologist at a dinner recently, former teacher at both Temple and Emory, who seemed to believe that double blind trials are the only form of experiment and, indeed, the only path to knowledge. Of course, this necessarily implies that, say, Astronomy contains no knowledge.

I called this path learning, much like Lorenz observed in water shrews, and it made him cry.

More seriously, medicine tends to be really insular. Ideas go round and round the same horn, with the same people talking to one another about only the things they are interested in.

In the mildest cases, this leads to people unable to argue their case because they’ve only ever talked to the previously convinced. In more serious cases, as with the neurologist, it leads to a blinkered imagination, unable to conceive of anything beyond the groove.

Groopman’s book How Doctors Think points to this tendency as a major issue in malpractice as well as skepticism of medical knowledge. It’s worth reading.

Written by a physicist who’s never done a double blind trial in his life, and likely never will.

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2009/01/your_friday_dose_of_woo_the_revenge_of_s.php

The number of quack studies is not limited to NCCAM, it is living strong and well in the regular medicine world. Fear based medicine seems to be the mode of the decade.

Evolution is a fact, with mountains of evidence to demonstrate that, from fossil record to phylogeny of species to genetic drift in DNA records to real time experiments in single celled organisms. It is proven as well as anything can be proven.

Intelligent design is an idea borne on the concept that its all just too complicated to be true. In other words, because tons of people who have not spent years studying evolutionary biology cannot understands the intricacies of evolution, evolution is therefore bogus and untrue, and instead it is the product of supernatural intervention.

Evolution is science. Intelligent design is creationism, and is therefore religion.

Intelligent design can be taught in schools, but only as part of comparative religion courses. It has no place in science class.