Science-Based Medicine

The week is finally here! Believe it or not, I’m heading back to my old stomping grounds in the 1990s to appear as a guest of the Chicago Skeptics.

This Saturday, August 21, I’ll be giving a talk co-sponsored by Chicago Skeptics, Women Thinking Free Foundation, and the Center For Inquiry-Chicago at the Black Rock Pub & Kitchen. My talk will be on a topic near and dear to my heart (or a topic that fills me with alarm–the two are not mutually exclusive), mainly the infiltration of pseudoscience into medicine. I’ll be sure to touch on a number of issues, and you can be sure I’ll have something to say about the recent acupuncture review that appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine and perhaps a bit about the sort of pseudoscience that’s being practiced at some of our largest and most respected cancer centers. Afterwards, you–yes, you!–can ask me about anything you want if you show up. Anything, including vaccines, skepticism, and even Bill Maher!

If you live in Chicago and want to harass me (not the way Age of Autism harasses me), head on over to the Chicago Skeptics event page and click on the link to RSVP!

ADDENDUM: Holy crap! Someone just informed me that Chicago Comic Con will be in Chicago the same weekend as me. Even worse, William Shatner will be there on Saturday, which is when I’m giving my talk. How on earth can I possibly compete with the Shat?

For SBM readers in the Toronto area, I’ll be speaking on Friday, May 28, at the Centre for Inquiry on how science advocates can help support better health decisions:

Despite the dramatic improvements in the extent and quality of our lives, largely owing to modern medicine, our current health care system has fostered a backlash, manifested in part by the emergence of non-science-based “alternative” health care practices. This trend has driven a need for dialogue on how best we should balance evidence-based decisions against demands for consumer choice – regardless of the science. In this presentation, Scott Gavura will discuss how health care decision-making differs from other goods and services, and how this impacts on the choices we make, both as individuals, and in aggregate. Through an interactive discussion, he will facilitate a dialogue on the opportunities for science advocates to effect positive change in health at the patient- and population-level.

Science advocates have the evidence to support their positions. How do we translate this evidence to support effective decision making? On May 28, join the conversation.

Get the event details, and you can RSVP on Facebook. The talk is great value-for-money: $5, $4 for students, and free for CFI members.

It is my pleasure to announce the addition of a new SBM blogger. Impressed by his dedication to applying scientific principles to the profession of pharmacy, we have recruited Scott Gavura, who is currently best known for his work on Science-Based Pharmacy. You can find out a bit more about his background at his new page on SBM, and his first post is scheduled for Thursday, May 13. In the beginning he will be posting approximately once every four weeks.

Please join me in welcoming Scott to the SBM team.

One advantage of having a blog is that I can sometimes tap into the knowledge of my readers to help me out. As many readers know, a few of the SBM bloggers (myself included) will be appearing at the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism (NECSS) on Saturday, April 17. Since the topic of our panel discussion is going to be the infiltration of quackademic medicine into medical academia, I thought that now would be a very good time for me to update my list of medical schools and academic medical centers in the U.S. and Canada that have embraced (or at least decided to tolerate) quackademic medicine in their midst. After all, the list is over two years old and hasn’t been updated.

My list is long past due for an update, and I want to post that update right here, either right before or right after NECSS. But I need your help. Please peruse the previous roll of shame. Then either post here in the comments or e-mail to me any examples of quackademic medical programs in the U.S. and Canada (I’ll leave Europe to others better qualified to deal with it) that I may have missed. Equally important, if there are programs I listed before that no longer peddle woo, let me know that too, so that I can investigate and decide if I should remove the program from my list.

I’m particularly interested in the most egregious examples (although your submitting all examples is greatly appreciated). Yoga and meditation don’t bother me that much, for example. Neither do dietary studies, because diet and exercise are science-based medicine that have all too often been coopted by purveyors of woo. Homeopathy and reiki, on the other hand, do bother me. A lot. I’m also particularly interested in educational programs in CAM that are funded by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM).

Please help me construct the definitive list of academic programs in the U.S. and Canada that have adopted quackademic medicine.

A panels of bloggers from SBM will be taking part in the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism – NECSS 2010, April 17th beginning 10:00AM in New York.

There will be a 70 minute panel discussion moderated by John Snyder and featuring David Gorski, Kimball Atwood, Val Jones, and myself – Steven Novella. The topic of discussion will be the infiltration of pseudoscience into academic medicine.

This will be part of a full day of science featuring other excellent speakers, including James Randi, D. J. Grothe, Steve Mirsky, George Hrab, and Julia Galef. There will also be a live recording of the wildly popular science podcast, The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe.

Go to www.NECSScon.org to register.

Three and a half weeks ago, Amy Tuteur announced her departure from SBM. Three weeks ago, I announced that we were recruiting new bloggers to replace Amy, to bolster areas of weakness among our bloggers, and expand our repertoire. I thank those of you who have responded.

Given that none of you have heard anything from us other than perhaps an acknowledgment of receiving your application, I thought it reasonable to give a brief update. Due to a combination of the death crud (of which those of you who are my Facebook friends may be aware), a challenging couple of weeks at work, and various other concerns, I haven’t made as much progress in evaluating potential new bloggers as I had hoped. I had hoped that we would have at least been able to start sending out an offer or two by now. All I can ask is: Be patient. And, if you know of any quality bloggers who haven’t been proposed already, please let me know. We are evaluating candidates, and it shouldn’t be long before I start communicating with the top applicants.

I just thought I’d make a brief announcement that I’m currently in St. Louis attending the annual meeting of the Society of Surgical Oncology. If any of our St. Louis readers are attending the meeting, look me up. I’d be tickled to death to know whether any of my colleagues here are even aware of SBM, much less regular readers. (If no one is aware, though, I’ll be disappointed.) Heck, if you show me your mad skillz at writing and that you share our philosophy, maybe you can even join us as another blogger here!

Also, if anyone’s interested in attempting a meetup, let me know. I’ll be in St. Louis until Sunday morning. It may or may not be possible, given that the SSO meeting fills each day quite nicely and most evenings have something booked, including meeting up with a former postdoc of mine who happens to be at Washington University now, but you never know until you ask. Unfortunately, Saturday night probably out, unless it’s before 7 PM or after 10 PM. My mentor, Dr. Mitch Posner, is the incoming president of the SSO; so I want to go to the Presidential Banquet that evening.

It’s been a rather eventful week here at Science-Based Medicine. I apologize that I don’t have one of my usual 4,000 word epics ready for this week. I was occupied all day Saturday at a conference at which I had to give a talk, and Dr. Tuteur’s departure produced another issue that I had to deal with. Fortunately, because Dr. Lipson is scheduled to do an extra post today, I feel less guilty about not producing my usual logorrhea. Who knows? Maybe it will be a relief to our readers too.

This confluence of events makes this a good time to take a break to take care of some blog business and make formal what I alluded to on Thursday in the comments after I announced Dr. Tuteur’s departure, namely that it’s time for us at SBM to start recruiting. Our purpose in recruiting will be to make this blog even better than it is already. We have an absolutely fantastic group of bloggers here, and it is due to their hard work and talent that SBM has become a force to be reckoned with in the medical blogosphere. Our traffic continues to grow, and reporters and even on occasion governmental officials have taken notice. That’s why Dr. Tuteur’s departure makes this a perfect opportunity to build on that record and make SBM even better and a more essential as a source of medical commentary than it is already. To accomplish this goal, it’s clear that any recruitment cannot be simply to fill in a gap in our posting schedule. I would much rather have a weekday go without a post every now and then than to recruit the wrong person to take over Dr. Tuteur’s spot. As a result, I hope to make this recruitment more strategic and to do it in a more formal manner than we have perhaps done in the past. We also plan on taking our time and therefore ask your patience.

To this end, I’m going to ask for nominations, either self-nominations or nominations of others, as suggested bloggers for SBM. Please also include a link to the nominee’s blog or, if the nominee is not a blogger or otherwise known for skeptical writings regarding medicine elsewhere (such as R. Barker Bausell), samples of his or her writing about topics relevant to SBM. I will compile the list over the next couple of weeks; our bloggers will discuss and vet the candidates; and we will decide whom we want to try to persuade to join us, either as a regular weekly blogger (currently Harriet Hall, Steve Novella, and me), an every-other-week blogger (currently Peter Lipson, Mark Crislip, Val Jones, and Joe Albietz), a monthly blogger (currently Kim Atwood), or an occasional contributor (currently Wally Sampson, David Ramey, John Snyder, Tim Kreider, and David Kroll). Finally, if you’re nominating yourself, please specify how often you are interested in contributing and tell us a bit about yourself and your background. Also realize that we do require our bloggers to write under their own names. No pseudonyms will be permitted, at least not on this blog.

So where do we need the most help? A number of you, as well as a number of SBM bloggers, came up with excellent suggestions for priority areas where our readers what to see more material or where we are weak here at SBM. These areas include, in no particular order:
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The editors and crew at SBM have an announcement that needs to be made. This morning, Dr. Amy Tuteur tendered her resignation and will therefore no longer be a blogger at SBM. Some of you might already be aware of this development because Dr. Tuteur has already announced her decision on her own blog. That is why we considered it important to post an announcement here on SBM as soon as possible.

While we are sorry to see Dr. Tuteur go and wish her well in whatever future endeavors she decides to pursue, over the last several weeks it had become clear to both the editors of SBM and Dr. Tuteur herself that, although Dr. Tuteur had routinely been able to stimulate an unprecedented level of discussion regarding the issues we at SBM consider important, SBM has not been a good fit for her and she has not been a good fit for SBM. Over the last few days mutual efforts between the editors and Dr. Tuteur to resolve our differences came to an impasse. Unfortunately for all parties, that impasse appeared to be unresolvable and resulted in Dr. Tuteur’s decision to leave SBM.

As a result of Dr. Tuteur’s departure, we will be adjusting the posting schedule in order to cover her normal Thursday slot. Final decisions have not been made yet, but we expect that every weekday will continue to be covered, with at least one post per weekday. 

I’ve been writing about the attempts of proponents of various pseudoscience, quackery, and faith-based religious “healing” modalities to slip provisions friendly to their interests into the health care reform bill that will be debated in the Senate beginning today. If you want to know what’s at stake, check out the first press release of a newly formed institute designed to promote science-based medicine in academia and public policy, the Institute for Science in Medicine.

It’s an embryonic institute, only recently formed by 42 physicians and scientists, several of whose names will be quite familiar to regular readers of SBM, but it’s jumping right into the fray. This is what the ISM is:

The ISM is a non-profit educational organization dedicated to promoting high standards of science in all areas of medicine and public health. We are a watchdog group of medical professionals who believe the best science available should be used to determine health policy and establish a standard of care that protects and promotes the public health. We oppose legislation that seeks to erode the science-based standard of care and expose the public to potentially fraudulent, worthless, or harmful medical practices or products.

Given how when faced with science going against them purveyors of unscientific medicine and medical beliefs try to win in politics where they can’t win in science (as my earlier post today describes for naturopaths in Ontario and the anti-vaccine movement in Oregon), just as we do on SBM, those of us who have helped to form the ISM have our work cut out for us.

Steve Novella has more.