Science-Based Medicine

This is almost the final entry (for now) in a series of posts about the pitfalls of regulating physicians who peddle quackery.† In previous entries we’ve seen how quacks have portrayed an illegal and pseudoscientific treatment, intravenous hydrogen peroxide, as legitimate; how a physician who practiced that and other dubious methods eluded definitive regulatory sanctions for years; examples of quacks banding together to form pseudomedical pseudoprofessional organizations (PPOs) and bogus board-certification schemes to establish the appearance of professional legitimacy, for protection from regulatory scrutiny, to garner political clout, to attract funds from interested businesses, to dupe the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education into granting continuing medical education credits (CMEs) for pseudoscientific conferences, and more.

Now we’ll look at several examples of how state medical boards in the U.S. have abdicated their responsibility to protect the public from such practitioners. A few caveats: first, in most cases I can only guess why that has happened. Some of it has probably been due to naiveté, or to political or legal pressures. To some extent it has probably been due to faddism and its close relative, misleading language. Next, the examples given here are by no means exhaustive. Next, a state medical board can only be as effective as the language in the state’s medical practice act allows it to be, and that is determined by legislators (politics), not board members. Finally, state medical boards have not uniformly made the wrong choices regarding quack practices and practitioners.

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Attention science fiction buffs: it’s time to put pen to paper (er… keys to keyboard) and create a fictional account of some aspect of the future of medicine. This is Medgadget’s third annual science fiction writing contest.

You could win a Palm Tungsten E2 handheld with Epocrates loaded on it – and the glory that only this honor can bestow. Please go to the Medgadget blog for contest rules.

You have only 2 weeks to submit your entries. Good luck…

I’m one of the judges this year!

New Kid on the Block

Well, I’m not sure how new, but it was to me 6 months ago when I heard about Functional Medicine (FM) on a doc call-in program originating in Santa Cruz, Calif. The doc often presents a plurality of approaches to the callers’ problems, most of whom call because they seek self-help methods, supplements, or other short-cuts to help, or who share the utopian dream/meme of sectarian health claims through rearranging implausible ideas on the deck of the good ship Nature. (There could be a mixed metaphor in there somewhere but I go on…)

The radio call-in host, a middle-age sounding woman with a holistically oriented practice in a nearby town seems quite intelligent, grounded in real physiology, biochemistry, and mechanics of the body. I sometimes can catch her in errors but not as often as one could a more typical quacky doc, such as a chelationist. What I can hear is an intermittent string of recommendations I had never heard of, or sometimes had heard of and known to be false.  The program beams to a wide area – from Santa Cruz/San Jose area to the central coast in San Luis Obispo. It broadcasts on KUSP FM Saturday mornings at 9 AM Pacific time for those who want to listen on the net (Ask Dr. Dawn.)

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“The internet, in democratizing knowledge, has led a lot of people to believe that it is also possible to democratize expertise.”

- SBM Commenter, yeahsurewhatever

I’ve spent the last few years of my life in Internet “Consumer Land,” doing what I can to bring accurate health information directly to patients. Of course, I have been surprised by the push-back, and the demand for misinformation. When I first left full time clinical work, it never occurred to me that people would prefer to read falsehoods when provided a clear choice between truth and error. I guess I was pretty naïve.

Journalist Lesley Stahl provided me with some helpful insights during a recent conference. She explained that the Internet has catalyzed a new method of information transfer – speed trumps accuracy, the line between pundits and journalists is blurred, and anyone who can get to a microphone can become an “expert.” Gone are the days of careful sourcing and fact-checking. And gone is the public trust in “mainstream media.”

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I wrote previously on NeuroLogica blog about Morgellons disease. Both Peter Lipson and Wallace Sampson have also covered this interesting syndrome here on SBM. Briefly, sufferers of this dubious syndrome believe they have foreign material exuding from their skin, causing chronic itching and sores. The evidence suggests that in truth they suffer from something akin to delusional parasitosis – the false belief of foreign parasites in their skin, leading to chronic itching which causes the sores and also works clothing fibers into the skin, which are later exuded.

Morgellons, in short, is a fake disease, a false and somewhat far-fetched explanation for symptoms that have a much more prosaic, if undesired, explanation.

Those who believe they have Morgellons, however, are legitimately ill and are an extremely vulnerable population. They feel they have a serious and mysterious illness, and worse the medical profession does not understand their illness and so denies that it exists. This is a perfect setup for snake oil-peddling con-artists.

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Sometimes I read an article in a medical journal that makes me say, “Well, duh! I could have told you that without a study.” Sometimes I read collected data that make me ask, “So what?” Sometimes I read an article that makes me wonder what kind of pogo stick they used to jump from their data to their conclusions. Sometimes I read a study that is so poorly conceived that you couldn’t hope to get any useful information from it. Sometimes I read a study that reminds me of class projects or term papers where you just thought of something easy to do to fill the squares to get credit. Sometimes I read a study funded by the NCCAM that makes me very angry that they wasted my tax dollars. Sometimes all these things coincide in one article.

“Ophthalmology Patients’ Religious and Spiritual Beliefs: An Opportunity to Build Trust in the Patient-Physician Relationship” is such an article. A questionnaire was anonymously filled out by 124 consecutive return patients in one ophthalmologist’s practice. It asked about their religious and spiritual beliefs and their understanding and level of concern about their eye condition. Continue Reading »

In a previous post, I argued that placebo is an artifact of certain clinical interactions, rather than a treatment that we can exploit. Apparently, there are a whole lot of doctors out there who don’t agree with me. Or are there?

A recent study published in the British Medical Journal is getting
a lot of enk (e-ink) in the blogosphere. As a practicing internist, I have some pretty strong opinions (based in fact, of course) about both this study and placebos in general.

The Study

The current BMJ study defines placebo as “positive clinical outcomes caused by a treatment that is not attributable to its known physical properties or mechanism of action.”  I’ve got a lot of problems with this definition, but we’ll get to that later.  It also allowed physiologically active medications to “count” as placebos.  Oops.

The study surveyed internists and rheumatologists practicing in the U.S. They tried to control negative responses to the term “placebo” thusly (from the Methods section):

Because the term “placebo” and behaviours surrounding its use can be contentious, we devised a series of non-judgmental questions beginning with broad questions that avoided the term “placebo” and then gradually gained more specificity, culminating in items whose responses used a clear definition of a “placebo treatment.” By constructing a series of items in this manner we allowed respondents to describe their attitudes and experiences as accurately as possible.

The first set of three items began with a hypothetical scenario in which a dextrose tablet was shown in clinical trials to be superior to a no treatment control group (thus establishing its efficacy as a placebo treatment). To avoid biasing responses these three questions did not use the term “placebo,” “placebo treatment,” or “placebo effect.”

I know a lot of doctors.  They tend to be fairly bright.  I don’t think any of them would be deceived by this scenario.  When you read “dextrose pill”, you think “placebo”.  It might as well be the same word.

Respondents were then asked to indicate which of several treatments they had used within the past year primarily as a placebo treatment, defined as a treatment whose benefits derive from positive patient expectations and not from the physiological mechanism of the treatment itself; and how they typically described placebo treatments to patients. By asking these five questions both without the term “placebo” and then using the term, we aimed to assess physicians’ practices as accurately as possible.

All docs would recognize this as a placebo scenario.  However, the definition above is rather problematic.   Is a placebo “a treatment whose benefits derive from positive patient expectations and not from the physiologic mechanism of the treatment itself”?

The validity of this study hinges on the answer to this question.

Placebo—I do not think it means what you think it means

The concept of placebo, and the way it is used in this study are both problematic.  First, we have an elephant in the exam room.  When we observe a so-called placebo effect, we are very susceptible to the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.  Just because the patient’s condition changes doesn’t mean we have done anything to cause that change.  In fact, due to the remarkably inexact human pattern-recognition software, we are likely to attribute a change in a patient’s condition to something, and if we don’t know what that something is, we may label it “placebo”.  So the very concept of placebo may be an artifact of our way of thinking, a label to place on a co-incidence, rather than a “thing”.  We may have wrongly reified a rather fuzzy concept.

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Towards the end of last week, I was contemplating what I would be writing about for Monday. No topic had quite floated my boat, but I hated to dip into the archive of topics I’ve written about before to update a post. After all, I like to be topical whenever possible. Then what to my wondering eyes should appear (yes, I know Christmas is still two months away) but a study in the British Medical Journal by a group lead by Jon C. Tiburt at the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health in collaboration with investigators at the Osler Institute at Harvard University and the McClean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago entitled Prescribing “placebo treatments”: results of national survey of US internists and rheumatologists.

Serendipity? Who cares? The study addresses a very important aspect of science-based medicine.
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One of the occasional arguments used in support of “alternative” approaches to human medicine is the observation that since “alternative” medicine is used (with anecdotal success) in animals, and animals don’t know anything about the treatment that they’re getting, then they must work a priori.  Of course, the fallacy of such an observation is pretty obvious to anyone with a logical/skeptical frame of mind, because it assumes that the therapies do work (even though there’s little evidence of that).

Clearly, however, some people perceive that the therapies work, including veterinarians – there are veterinary acupuncturists, chiropractors, homeopaths, etc., etc.  Since there’s very little scientific support for the idea that the therapies actually have any clinically significant effect on biological processes, including the processes that result in disease, questions arise as to whether there are other effects of “alternative” treatments on animals. Specifically, people may wonder whether or not animals can benefit from placebo effects.
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We at Science-Based Medicine are pleased to announce the recruitment of yet another blogger to add to the discussion of the scientific basis of medicine. We’re especially pleased because he will help us address questions that we were not particularly well-equipped to address before his joining us. So, please welcome to the SBM fold David Ramey, DVM, who will be discussing science- and evidence-based veterinary medicine.

David Ramey, DVM, is a 1983 graduate of Colorado State University. After completing an internship in equine medicine and surgery at Iowa State University, he entered private equine practice in southern California. Dr. Ramey is an author of numerous books on equine health care, and a prominent voice for the application of evidence-based standards to veterinary medicine. He was a member of the task for on “Therapeutic Options” of the American Association of Equine Practitioners, as well as a member of the task force that wrote the current guidelines for the use of “Complementary and Alternative” veterinary medicine for the American Veterinary Association. He has published numerous articles and books pertaining to “alternative” approaches to veterinary medicine, including the 2004 Complementary and Alternative Veterinary Medicine Considered, co-authored with world renowned veterinary ethicist Dr. Bernard Rollin.

We get a fair number of questions about the use of “alternative” medical practices such as homeopathy and acupuncture on animals, particularly from people who ask us how they can appear to work on animals when animals supposedly don’t exhibit placebo effects. Dr. Ramey will be of great value in discussing such issues. Unfortunately, he will only be able to contribute posts around once a month or so. Fortunately, his first post will appear tomorrow. Don’t miss it.