Category: Science and the Media

The compassion gambit

I’ve spent the last three weeks writing about a “brave maverick doctor” by the name of Stanislaw Burzynski who claims that he can cure cancers that regular oncologists cannot. He uses a combination of what he calls “antineoplastons” (which, it turns out, are more or less than the active metabolites of an orphan drug known as sodium phenylbutyrate) plus a very expensive...

/ December 19, 2011

A Seal of Approval

I have never belonged to the American Medical Association.  As a student I didn’t want to pay the dues. As a practicing physician I am of the opinion that the AMA has two often mutually exclusive goals (promoting physician income and patient care)  and they are doing both badly. In the 1990’s the AMA entered into a contract with Sunbeam to get...

/ December 2, 2011

Stanislaw Burzynski: Bad medicine, a bad movie, and bad P.R.

And the Lord spake, saying, “First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin. Then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out. Once the...

/ November 28, 2011

Dummy Medicine, Dummy Doctors, and a Dummy Degree, Part 2.3: Harvard Medical School and the Curious Case of Ted Kaptchuk, OMD (concluded)

A Loose End In the last post I wondered if Ted Kaptchuk, when he wrote the article titled “Effect of interpretive bias on clinical research,” had understood this implication of Bayes’s Theorem: that interpretations of most scientific investigations are exercises in inverse probability, and thus cannot logically be done without consideration of knowledge external to the investigation in question. I argued that...

/ November 11, 2011

The Greater Good: Pure, unadulterated anti-vaccine propaganda masquerading as a “balanced” documentary

The Greater Good purports to be a film that provides a balanced look at the benefits and risks of vaccines. It is nothing of the sort. It is pure, unadulterated antivaccine propaganda that uses emotionally manipulative anecdotes to promote pseudoscience.

/ November 7, 2011
Steve Jobs

“And one more thing” about Steve Jobs’ battle with cancer

Did Steve Jobs' delay in undergoing surgery for his cancer cost him his life? The new Walter Isaacson biography provides more information, but does not resolve the question.

/ October 31, 2011

Steve Jobs’ medical reality distortion field

As I pointed out in my previous post about Steve Jobs, I’m a bit of an Apple fan boy. A housemate of mine got the very first Mac way back in 1984, and ever since I bought my first computer that was mine and mine alone back in 1991 (a Mac LC), I’ve used nothing but Macintosh computers, except when compelled to...

/ October 21, 2011

Steve Jobs’ cancer and pushing the limits of science-based medicine

Editor’s note: There is an update to this post. An Apple fanboy contemplates computers and mortality I’m a bit of an Apple fanboy and admit it freely. My history with Apple products goes way back to the early 1980s, when one of my housemates at college had an Apple IIe, which I would sometimes use for writing, gaming, and various other applications....

/ October 10, 2011

Scientific American Mind Is Not So Scientific

When Scientific American first announced that they would publish Scientific American Mind, I hurried to subscribe, thinking it would keep me informed about new developments in a field I am passionately interested in. I have enjoyed the magazine, particularly the regular columns, the news items about research findings, the reviews that alert me to books I will want to read, the “Ask...

/ September 20, 2011

Survey says, “Hop on the bandwagon of ‘integrative medicine’!”

A Brief Clinical Vignette In researching this post, I found an article published nearly two years ago in The Hospitalist entitled Growth Spurt: Complementary and alternative medicine use doubles, which began with this anecdote: Despite intravenous medication, a young boy in status epilepticus had the pediatric ICU team at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison stumped....

/ September 19, 2011