Science-Based Medicine

Over the weekend, my wife and I happened to be in the pharmacy section of our local Target store. We happened to be looking for one of our favorite cold remedies, because both of us have been suffering from rather annoying colds, which have plagued both of us for the last week or two. As we perused the Cold and Flu section of the pharmacy, we were struck at how much shelf space was taken up by Airborne (which was “invented by a schoolteacher“). Nearly three years ago Airborne had to settle a case brought against it alleging false advertising to the tune of $23 million. Despite that, Airborne is still being sold, and there are even a whole bunch of knock-off products copying it. Then, as we continued to look for our favored cold remedy, we noted that, sitting right next to the extensive shelf space devoted to the various flavors and types of Airborne supplements, I saw Boiron’s homeopathic remedy for colds containing oscillococcinum, which is derived from duck liver and heart and diluted to 200C (a 10⁴⁰⁰-fold dilution).

Yes, I was a bit depressed after that. Now I know what my skeptical friends in the U.K. go through every time they walk into a Boots pharmacy.
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During the most recent kerfuffle about whether or not Evidence-Based Medicine can legitimately claim to be science-based medicine, it became clear to me that a whole, new round of discussion and documentation is necessary. This is frustrating because I’ve already done it several times, most recently less than a year ago. Moreover, I’ve provided a table of links to the whole series at the bottom of each post*…Never mind, here goes, and I hope this will be the last time it is necessary because I’ll try to make this the “go to” series of posts for any future such confusions.

The points made in this series, most of which link to posts in which I originally made them, are in response to arguments from statistician Steve Simon, whose essay, Is there something better than Evidence Based Medicine out there?, was the topic of Dr. Gorski’s rebuttal on Monday of this week, and also from several of the comments following that rebuttal. Mr. Simon has since revised his original essay to an extent, which I’ll take into account. I’ll frame this as a series of assertions by those who doubt that EBM is deficient in the ways that we at SBM have argued, followed in each case by my response.

First, a disclaimer: I don’t mean to gang up on Mr. Simon personally; others hold opinions similar to his, but his essay just happens to be a convenient starting point for this discussion. FWIW, prior to this week I perused a bit of his blog, after having read one of his comments here, and found it to be well written and informative.

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This post is intended to illustrate a bit about how medicine, including alternative medicine, is defined and limited legally by state licensure. This is, of course, an enormous topic, especially given the variety of laws and regulations among the 50 states and District of Columbia, and the many, often mutually inconsistent, court decisions interpreting them. A comprehensive survey would resemble Gibbon’s history of Rome and would likely be out-of-date the moment it was finished. My more modest goal here is to highlight a few of the ways in which licensure and scope of practice laws intersect the practice of CAM and give a few representative examples. 

The Rise of Medical Licensure

In the 19th century, a bewildering variety of different approaches to maintaining health and treating disease competed for the trust, and dollars, of prospective patients (or their owners, in the case of animal patients). Caveat emptor was the rule in an unregulated medical marketplace. Mainstream medicine was a competitor in this marketplace, though it was hardly science-based to any great extent compared to conventional medical practices today. Homeopathy was another pretty big player, along with osteopathy and numerous other more or less organized schools, as well as many individual snake oil salesmen, faith healers, local providers of folk remedies, and so on.^1,2

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One of the recurrent themes of science-based medicine is that any medical intervention that can plausibly cause physiological benefit can also plausibly cause physiological harm.  There is no such thing as “it can’t hurt.” Sometimes the risk may be minuscule – but we should never assume that it is zero. Being “natural” or “holistic” or being blessed with some other alleged marketable virtue does not affect the risk vs benefit calculation of an intervention.

Vitamins are an excellent example. There is widespread sentiment that vitamins are harmless, and that supplementing with vitamins is therefore a no risk-possible benefit scenario. It is certainly reasonable to conclude from the evidence that vitamins (at usual supplemental levels) are low risk, compared to many other types of medical interventions. High doses, or megadoses, of vitamins, however, risk toxicity and this risk increases with the dose.

But even at sub-toxic doses vitamins should not be assumed to be risk free. This is especially true when we take a public health perspective – what is the net effect of large scale supplementation on the population? A new meta-analysis looking at the net effects of Vitamin E supplementation on stroke risk reinforces this caution.

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Melanie Thernstrom has written a superb book based on a historical, philosophical, and scientific review of pain: The Pain Chronicles: Cures, Myths, Mysteries, Prayers, Diaries, Brain Scans, Healing, and the Science of Suffering. Herself a victim of chronic pain, she brings a personal perspective to the subject and also includes informative vignettes of doctors and patients she encountered at the many pain clinics she visited in her investigations. She shows that medical treatment of pain is suboptimal because most doctors have not yet incorporated recent scientific discoveries into their thinking, discoveries indicating that chronic pain is a disease in its own right, a state of pathological pain sensitivity.

Chronic pain often outlives its original causes, worsens over time, and takes on a puzzling life of its own… there is increasing evidence that over time, untreated pain eventually rewrites the central nervous system, causing pathological changes to the brain and spinal cord, and that these in turn cause greater pain. Even more disturbingly, recent evidence suggests that prolonged pain actually damages parts of the brain, including those involved in cognition. Continue Reading »

When I write or talk about the scientific evidence against particular alternative medical approaches, I am frequently asked the question, “So, if it doesn’t work, why is it legal?” Believers in CAM ask this to show that there must be something to what they are promoting or, presumably, the government wouldn’t let them sell it. And skeptics raise the question often out of sheer incredulity that anyone would be allowed to make money selling a medical therapy that doesn’t work. It turns out that the answer to this question is a complex, multilayered story involving science, history, politics, religion, and culture. 

While we science types tend to be primarily interested in what is true and what isn’t, that is a sometimes surprisingly minor factor in the process of constructing laws and regulations concerning medicine. What I hope to do in this series of essays is look at some of the major themes involved in the regulation of medical practice, particularly as they relate to alternative medicine. I will begin by touching on some of the general philosophical and legal issues that have defined the debate among the politicians and lawyers responsible for shaping the legal environment in which medicine is practiced. The I will review some of the specific domains within this environment, including: medical licensure and scope-of-practice laws; malpractice law; FDA regulation of drugs, homeopathic remedies, and dietary supplements; truth-in-advertising law; and anti-trust law.

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We advocate science-based medicine (SBM) on this blog. However, from time to time, I feel it necessary to point out that science-based medicine is not the same thing as turning medicine into a science. Rather, we argue that what we do as clinicians should be based in science. This is not a distinction without a difference. If we were practicing pure science, we would be theoretically able to create algorithms and flowcharts telling us how to care for patients with any given condition, and we would never deviate from them. It is true that we do have algorithms and flowcharts suggesting guidelines for care for a wide variety of conditions, but there is wide latitude in them, and often a physician’s “judgment” still ends up trumping the guidelines. While it is also true that sometimes physicians have an overinflated view of the quality of their own “clinical judgment,” sometimes to the point of leading them to reject well-established science, as Dr. Jay Gordon frequently does, what I consider to be physician’s judgment is knowing how to apply existing medical science to individual patients based on their circumstances and, yes, even desires and values.

Indeed, if there’s one area where SBM has all too often fallen short in the past, it’s in taking into account the patient’s experience with various treatments. What got me thinking (again) about this issue was an article by Dr. Pauline Chen in the New York Times last Thursday entitled Listening to Patients Living With Illness. She begins her article with an anecdote:
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Attacks on science-based medicine (SBM) come in many forms. There are the loony forms that we see daily from the anti-vaccine movement, quackery promoters like Mike Adams and Joe Mercola, those who engage in “quackademic medicine,” and postmodernists who view science as “just another narrative,” as valid as any other or even view science- and evidence-based medicine as “microfascism.” Sometimes, these complaints come from self-proclaimed champions of evidence-based medicine (EBM) who, their self-characterization otherwise, show signs of having a bit of a soft spot for the ol’ woo. Then sometimes there are thoughtful, serious criticisms of some of the assumptions that underlie SBM.

The criticism I am about to address tries to be one of these but ultimately fails because it attacks a straw man version of SBM.

True, the criticism of SBM I’m about to address does come from someone named Steve Simon, who vocally supports EBM but doesn’t like the the criticism of EBM implicit in the very creation of the concept of SBM. Simon has even written a very good deconstruction of postmodern attacks on evidence-based medicine (EBM) himself, as well as quite a few other good discussions of medicine and statistics. Unfortunately, in his criticism, Simon appears to have completely missed the point about the difference between SBM and EBM. As a result, his criticisms of SBM wind up being mostly the application of a flamethrower to a Burning Man-sized straw man representing what he thinks SBM to be. It makes for a fun fireworks show but is ultimately misdirected, a lot of heat but little light. For a bit of background, Simon’s post first piqued my curiosity because of its title, Is there something better than Evidence Based Medicine out there? The other reason that it caught my attention was the extreme naiveté revealed in the arguments used. In fact, Simon’s naiveté reminds me very much of my very own naiveté about three years ago.

Here’s the point where I tell you a secret about the very creation of this blog. Shortly after Steve Novella invited me to join, the founding members of SBM engaged in several e-mail frank and free-wheeling exchanges about what the blog should be like, what topics we wanted to cover, and what our philosophy should be. One of these exchanges was about the very nature of SBM and how it is distinguished from EBM, the latter of which I viewed as the best way to practice medicine. During that exchange, I made arguments that, in retrospect, were eerily similar to the ones by Simon that I’m about to address right now. Oh, how epic these arguments were! In retrospect, I can but shake my head at my own extreme naiveté, which I now see mirrored in Simon’s criticism of SBM. Yes, I was converted, so to speak (if you’ll forgive the religious terminology), which is why I see in Simon’s article a lot of my former self, at least in terms of how I used to view evidence in medicine.

The main gist of Simon’s complaint comes right at the beginning of his article:
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As Vaccine Awareness Week draws to a close, I thought it might be instructive to step back and look at the tactics, impact, and successes of the anti-vaccine movement. Yesterday, Orac questioned the best approach to counter the anti-vaccine movement. With today’s post, I’ll summarize two pertinent papers on the effectiveness of their tactics, and suggest some possible approaches.

There’s overwhelming evidence that vaccines have provided us with tremendous health benefits. Smallpox has been eliminated (except, apparently, for homeopathic nosodes), polio is almost gone, and occurrences of diseases like measles or rubella are now rare. In use for over a century, they are a public health triumph: diseases that terrified us a generation ago are now never seen.  Epidemiologic evidence demonstrates that vaccines have a remarkable safety record, and are exceptionally cost-effective interventions. Yet in spite of this, concerns about vaccine safety seemingly continue to mount.  And as we see time and time again, when vaccination levels drop, diseases reappear. So what’s driving anti-vaccine sentiment, and why is it successful?

The H1N1 pandemic of 2009/10 is now about a year past its peak, and is instructive as a case study on communication on  vaccine safety and efficacy. Remember the H1N1 vaccine? Judging by the anti-vaccine rhetoric of just last year, by now we should all have been rounded up by the army, given forced injections, and if the vaccine didn’t kill us right away, or make us walk backwards, we’d be immunosupressed (from the aluminum adjuvant), or have Gulf War Syndrome (from the squalene). And not only did it not work, it doubled our odds of getting H1N1.  All we needed was vitamin D and a proprietary supplement formula to avoid the flu, they said.

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It is probably of no surprise to anyone who has read my blog entries, I am a proponent of vaccines.  They give the most bang for the infection prevention buck, and many of the childhood illnesses covered by the vaccine are now so rare that many physicians, even in Infectious Diseases, have never taken care of cases of measles or mumps or German measles, etc.  It is  a remarkable triumph of modern medicine.  Of course, the decline of infectious diseases is always multifactorial: good nutrition, understanding of diseases epidemiology, and good hygiene all have contributed to the decline of many diseases, vaccine preventable or not,  The application of science has resulted in an almost inconceivable decline in contagions that have killed and injured millions.

It is always better to prevent an illness than to have to treat it.  An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.  Even those who erroneously believe that standard vaccines are not effective and/or dangerous understand that it is better to prevent illness with some sort vaccine.  But rather than use an effective vaccine, they choose, instead, other options.  Like homeopathic vaccines. Continue Reading »