What’s the Truth behind The Truth About Pet Cancer?
The Truth About Pet Cancer (TAPC) is a slick bit of propaganda. Although it contains some interesting, even promising ideas, these are unfortunately served with a heavy seasoning of misinformation and fear-mongering. Hypotheses and opinions are presented as established facts, and anyone who disagrees is suggested to be ignorant at best, venal and corrupt at worst.
Veterinary Chiropractic
People are sometimes surprised to learn that all the heavy hitters of alternative medicine, such as acupuncture, chiropractic, homeopathy, etc., are inflicted on animals as well as humans. I’ve written about veterinary homeopathy, and the associated manufactroversy, in a previous post, and today I thought I’d take a look at veterinary chiropractic. The Players In most states, chiropractic is defined in terms of...
An Age of Endarkenment? The American Veterinary Medical Association and Homeopathy
It can be frustrating, and sometimes even a little depressing, to be a skeptic. Promoting reason and science-based medicine often feels like a Sisyphean effort that garners lots of hostility and ad hominem attacks from proponents of pseudoscience and few concrete victories. But once in a while, something happens to give a little hope and inspiration. In 2010, for example, the House...
Chinese Systematic Reviews of Acupuncture
I’ll begin with the possibly shocking admission that I’m a strong supporter of the collection of ideas and techniques known as evidence-based medicine (EBM). I’m even the current President of the Evidence-Based Veterinary Medicine Association (EBVMA). This may seem a bit heretical in this context, since EBM takes a lot of heat in this blog. But as Dr. Atwood has said, “we...
Testing the “individualization” of CAM treatments
One of the common claims of alternative medicine practitioners is that they individualize their treatment while conventional medicine treats all patients the same. This is nonsense on several levels, but it is also a common excuse for why randomized clinical trials cannot be performed, or cannot be viewed as reliable evidence, in evaluating some alternative therapies. However, some trials have been done...
Lessons from History of Medical Delusions
A brief reference on the web site The Quackometer recently drew my attention to a very short book (really more of a pamphlet, in the historical sense) by Dr. Worthington Hooker, Lessons from the History of Medical Delusions, which I thought might be of interest to readers of this blog. Though published in 1850, the book contains many eloquent observations that are...
Why Do We Really Need Clinical Trials?
A point I make over and over again when talking about new or alternative therapies that are not supported by good clinical trial evidence is that lower-level evidence, such as theoretical justifications, anecdotes, and pre-clinical research like in vitro studies and animal model testing, can only be suggestive, never reliable proof of safety or efficacy. It is necessary to begin evaluating a...
The Top Ten Pet Supplements: Do They Work?
An Embarrassment of Riches? Much has been written here about the dietary supplement business, a multibillion dollar industry with powerful political connections, and about the woeful inadequacy of regulation which allows widespread marketing of supplements without a solid basis in science or scientific evidence. The veterinary supplement market is a pittance compared to the human market, but still a billion-dollar pittance that...
How popular is acupuncture?
Everybody’s Doing It One argument that often comes up when skeptics and proponents of so-called complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) debate is the question of the popularity of various CAM practices. Advocates of CAM often claim these practices are widely used and growing rapidly in popularity. Obviously, CAM proponents have an interest in characterizing their practices as widely accepted and utilized. Even...
Complementary and alternative medicine in hospice care
A number of news outlets (e.g. Bloomberg Business Week, MSN.Com, US News, etc) have recently reported that use of complementary and alternative therapies (CAT) is widespread in hospice care facilities. This is based on a report from the Centers for Disease Control, Complementary and Alternative Therapies in Hospice: The National Home and Hospice Care Survey, Untied States, 2007. According to most news...