Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Systemic Exertion Intolerance Disease Speculcation
My wife and I are entering an age where our aches and pains are becoming a major ongoing topic of conversations. The pain of raising kids has transitioned into the pains of growing older. These aches and pains are, in the scheme of things, minor and intermittent. At work I get to see real suffering and it keeps my own in perspective....
Leech Therapy
Medicine can be aggravatingly slow to change and it can take years for new diagnostic or therapeutic interventions to percolate through the medical community. It can take equally long for old practices to fade. I have tried to follow the dictum of “be neither the first to try nor the last to abandon a therapy.” But nothing in the real world rivals...
Science-Based Politics: Lyme, Zika, and the Green Party.
I don’t have much to write about this week. Yeah, yeah, I know. How is that different than the last 50 blog entries? And I will have even less to say next time. But nothing of real interest has crossed my screen the past two weeks, not that I have really been looking. One of my favorite stories as a kid was...
Acupuncture and Endorphins: Not all that Impressive
I was reading, and deconstructing, a particularly awful bit of advice for acupuncture by Consumer Reports. It was the same old same old, but it was the source that made it particularly awful. I expect more from Consumer Reports than the uncritical regurgitation of the standard mythical acupuncture narrative. The report included the quote One possible reason for the benefits of acupuncture:...
About Herbs: an app to avoid
Medicine has an intellectual hierarchy. Supposedly the best and the brightest are in the academic medical centers and are the thought leaders in their field. Those of us lower in the hierarchy are well aware of some of the warts present on our betters, but I would expect those at the top would adhere to the highest intellectual and ethical standards. People...
Chiropractic Moves into Transportation
I debated which of two topics to blog about this week that appeared in my feeds. The first was “Graduate slams CQU for offering ‘pseudoscience degree’,” where an Australian is upset that her University is offering an undergraduate Bachelor of Science in Chiropractic and a postgraduate Master of Clinical Chiropractic degree because chiropractic is “complete pseudoscience”. And the second was: “Foundation for...
Dry Needling
War, huh, yeah What is it good for Absolutely nothing Uh-huh huh War, huh, yeah What is it good for Absolutely nothing Say it again, y’all War, huh, What is it good for Absolutely nothing Listen to me Ohhh, war, I despise Cause it means destruction Of innocent lives War means tears To thousands of mothers eyes When their sons go to...
Vaginal Seeding. Ew. That’s nuts. Hmmm, interesting.
Sometimes a headline will cause me to run through a series of reactions in rapid sequence. For example “Mothers facing C-sections look to vaginal ‘seeding’ to boost their babies’ health”: Early studies show that swabbing a mother’s vagina and transferring it to her baby’s mouth, eyes and skin may stimulate microbiome development similarly to babies born naturally – and protect it from...
Join Us at NECSS 2016. One Week To Go
A day of Science-Based Medicine, a weekend of science and skepticism NECSS, the NorthEast Conference on Science and Skepticism, is this spring. Included in the program will be a full day of Science-Based Medicine. The NECSS will be held May 12th–15th, 2015, in New York City at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Full Conference schedule here. Description: NECSS welcomes over 400 attendees to...
The New Chiropractic. And I thought SBM had an uphill battle.
Over at the Society for Science-Based Medicine we have Sisyphus as the logo on the website. Sisyphus, as you may know, is the Greek who had to push a boulder up a hill every day, the archetypal metaphor for futile labor. It was meant to be a bit tongue in cheek, but only a bit. As quackademia proudly expands I sometime feel...