Science-Based Medicine

A reader sent me an interesting post from her own blog. It’s well-written, compelling, and betrays an exceptional intelligence. It’s also completely wrong.

The piece is called, “Bias, Racism, and Alternative Medicine”, an intriguing title. The first part tries to establish that “Western medicine” in one of many ways of understanding health and disease. She starts with some personal anecdotes—always interesting, rarely generalizable:

While receiving Western biomedical treatment for ADD, the side effects of my therapy convinced me that western medication alone would not provide a solution to my problems.

One of the author’s fundamental misunderstandings is that the failure of a particular treatment to make her feel better does not invalidate all of medical science, and more important, it does not validate “other ways of thinking”. Still, I can understand how this happens. Personal experience is powerful; unfortunately, it is also misleading. I like this writer. She seems very kind. She goes on to describe her enlightenment further, but this is where a pleasant anecdote goes terribly wrong: Continue Reading »

We would all like to live longer. The most promising longevity research indicates that severe calorie restriction might extend life span, but such a diet is difficult to follow. Resveratrol, a phytochemical found in red wine, has been evaluated as a possible way out of the dilemma. When given to obese mice on a high calorie diet, it produced a number of changes associated with improved health, such as increased insulin sensitivity, and it increased survival. Perhaps by taking resveratrol you could eat as much as you want and get fat without suffering the usual consequences. Perhaps you could get the longevity benefits of severe calorie restriction without restricting calories.

In addition to fat mice, resveratrol also extends the life of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Caenorhabditis elegans and Drosophila melanogaster (yeast, nematodes, and fruit flies). But a study in non-obese mice found no increase in survival (although it did find several signs of improved health). Besides the anti-aging claims, there is also some evidence from in vitro and animal studies that it might have cardiovascular effects and anti-cancer effects. Continue Reading »