Category: Medical Ethics
Followup: Benedetti on Placebo Ethics
A few months ago I wrote about Fabrizio Benedetti’s research on the neurobiology of the placebo response, and a discussion about placebos and ethics ensued in the comments. Now Dr. Benedetti has written about that issue in a “Perspective” article in the journal World Psychiatry, “The placebo response: science versus ethics and the vulnerability of the patient.” We have learned that verbal...
Quackademic medicine trickles out to community hospitals
One of the major themes of this blog has been to combat what I, borrowing a term coined (as far as I can tell) by Dr. R. W. Donnell, like to refer to as “quackademic medicine.” Quackademic medicine is a lovely term designed to summarize everything that is wrong with the increasing embrace of so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) or, as...
Funding CAM Research
Paul Offit has published a thoughtful essay in the most recent Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) in which he argues against funding research into complementary and alternative therapies (CAM). Offit is a leading critic of the anti-vaccine movement and has written popular books discrediting many of their claims, such as disproved claim for a connection between some vaccines or ingredients...
A surprising article about “integrative” medicine in The New England Journal of Medicine vs. “patient-centered” care
The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) is published on Thursdays. I mention this because this is one of the rare times where my owning Mondays on this blog tends to be a rather large advantage. Fridays are rotated between two or three different bloggers, and, as awesome as they are as writers, bloggers, and friends, they don’t possess the rabbit-like speed...
The Marino Center for Integrative Health: Hooey Galore
Two weeks ago I promised that I would discuss the Marino Center for Integrative Health, identified in the recent Bravewell report as having a “hospital affiliation” with the Newton-Wellesley Hospital (NWH) in Newton, Massachusetts, which is where I work. I also promised in that post that I’d provide examples of ‘integrative medicine’ practitioners offering false information about the methods that they endorse. I’d...
Perpetual Motion: More on the Bravewell Report
I’m not here to convince people that we are right, although it would be nice if it turned out that way. I’m here to tell the truth and let readers decide for themselves.” — Kimball Atwood, Science Based Medicine, Bravewell Bimbo Eruptions I had been too inarticulate to formulate what is essentially my approach to this blog: to tell the truth. That...
Informed Consent and CAM: Truth Not Optional
In three recent posts, Drs. Novella, Gorski and Atwood took the Bravewell Collaborative to task over a report on its recent survey of U.S. “integrative medicine” centers. As Dr. Novella noted, So what is integrative medicine? When you strip away the rebranding and co-opting of features and treatments of mainstream medicine, you are left with the usual list of pseudoscientific practices that...
Bravewell Bimbo Eruptions
This is yet another response to the recent “Integrative Medicine in America” report published by the Bravewell Collaborative. Drs. Novella and Gorski have already given that report its due, so I won’t repeat the background information. Inevitably, I’ll cover some of the same points, but I’ll also try to emphasize a few that stand out to me. Most of these have been...
“Obama Promises $156 Million to Alzheimer’s…But where will the money come from?” That’s easy: the NCCAM!
The quoted language above is part of the headline of this story in today’s The Scientist: Citing the rising tide of Americans with Alzheimer’s—projections suggest 10 million people will be afflicted by 2050—the Obama administration and top National Institutes of Health officials are taking action. On February 7, they announced that they will add an additional $80 million to the 2013 NIH...
Placebo Again.
Medicine is simultaneously both easy and hard. As an Infectious Disease doctor, my day can be summed up with the phrase “me find bug, me kill bug, me go home.” Sometimes it is just that simple. A lot of the time it isn’t. I may not be certain what the infection is, or even if the patient has an infection, or allergies...