Science-Based Medicine

The ancient Greeks posited a system of health and disease based on the four humors: blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile. According to this system, health is defined as a harmony of these four humors and disease is caused by an imbalance among them. Restore the balance, and health is restored. Bleeding is a familiar example of humoral medical treatment based on a diagnosis of an “excess” of blood. Fortunately, the humoral system of diagnosis and treatment died out with the advent of modern scientific medicine.

But as David Gorski asked (sarcastically, of course) in his presentation on quackademic medicine at CSICon in October, if supposedly ancient philosophies of diagnosis and treatment such as Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurveda are so beloved by CAM proponents, despite their implausibility and lack of evidence of effectiveness, why not the humoral model of health and disease? Why not include humorism in the CAM practitioner armamentarium?

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Over the past weekend, I had the opportunity to attend CSICon in Nashville, Tennessee. The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (“CSI”) combats all sorts of pseudoscience, including creationism/creation science/intelligent design and alternative/complementary/integrative medicine. Our own Team SBM was ably represented by Harriet Hall, David Gorski and Kimball Atwood, whose presentation highlighted the credulous acceptance of CAM in some medical schools, and by Steve Novella, who gave a talk on the placebo effect and its exploitation by CAM proponents. Among many other presentations were those on the Mayan calendar and the end of the world, unmasking of (supposedly) paranormal events, and the neurobiology of memory. Pseudoscience was given a well-deserved thrashing by rational minds.

On Saturday, I once again had the pleasure of hearing Eugenie Scott ,Ph.D., the virtually one-woman anti-creationism campaign who founded and heads the National Center for Science Education (NCSE). As I listened to her talk I couldn’t help but being struck by a number of similarities in the weaknesses apparent in arguments for creationism/ creation science/intelligent design (or “ID”)and those for alternative/complementary/integrative medicine (or “CAM”). I doubt the two groups like to think of themselves as ideological twins, but gosh, they sure do look alike.

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Last week, I discussed a rather execrable study. Actually, the study itself wasn’t so execrable, at least not in its design, which was a fairly straightforward three-arm randomized clinical trial. Rather it was the interpretation of the study’s results that was execrable. In brief, the authors tested an “energy healing” modality known as “energy chelation” versus a placebo (sham “energy chelation”) and found, as is so often the case in studies of “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) or “integrative medicine” (IM) that both modalities did better than no treatment on the primary outcomes but that the “real” treatment (if one can call energy chelation “real treatment”) produced outcomes that were statistically indistinguishable from the “sham” treatment. Not surprisingly, the next move on the part of the researchers was to do a bunch of comparisons, and, as is so often the case (particularly when one fails to correct statistically for multiple comparisons), they found a couple of secondary endpoints with barely statistically significant differences and trumpeted them as meaning that their “energy chelation therapy” has “significant promise for reducing fatigue.” They then argued that the study was also ” designed to examine nonspecific and placebo elements that may drive responses.”

Which brings us to the “power” of placebo.

As I was contemplating what I wanted to discuss this week, I thought about the study that Drs. Coyne, Johansen, and I objected to, but then I also thought about Dr. Crislip’s post last week and post I did about a month ago in which I noticed how lately CAM apologists seem to be—shall we say?—retooling their message in the wake of negative trial after negative trial of their implausible treatments. Gone (mostly) are claims of powerful specific effects and efficacy from treatments such as various “energy healing” modalities, acupuncture, homeopathy, and the like themselves, to be replaced by claims that physicians should embrace CAM because it’s “harnessing the power of placebo” to produce “powerful mind-body healing.” It’s a powerful message that has sucked in people who normally would be considered skeptics, such as Michael Specter, who, as I described, apparently bought into the message sufficiently that when Ted Kaptchuk was making the media round right before the holidays he happily published a fairly credulous interview with him entitled, The Power of Nothing: Could Studying the Placebo Effect Change the Way We Think About Medicine? (My answer: Very likely no.) Even Ira Flatow of Science Friday fell hard for Kaptchuk’s message, declaring at the beginning of the interview that Kaptchuk’s irritable bowel syndrome study is evidence that “placebos work even when patients are in on the secret.” (It’s not.)

That skeptics and scientists find the idea that the mind has the power to heal the body, often referred to as “self-healing” or “mind-body healing,” so seductive should probably not be surprising. After all, who wouldn’t want to be able to cure themselves simply by willing it to be so? It’s a concept that, like so many concepts in CAM, goes far back into ancient times and stretches forward to today in ideas like The Secret, which goes quite a bit beyond the whole idea of “mind-body healing” or healing yourself because you wish it to be so, and declares that you can have virtually anything you want simply by thinking the right thoughts. In fact, to me it appears that the “powerful placebo” is being drafted in the service of supporting what are, at their core, mystical beliefs far more than science. I’d like to elaborate on that idea a bit more than I did last time I discussed this isssue, where I concluded by writing:

In the end, all too much of the rebranding of CAM as placebo and the selling of placebos as some sort of powerful “mind-body healing” strikes me as being much like The Secret, in which wishing makes it so.

Let’s take a look at just how far this goes.
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Each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia require vaccination against certain diseases as a prerequisite to public and private school attendance, most commonly polio, mumps, measles, diphtheria, rubella, chicken pox, Heamophilus influenza type b, pertussis, tetanus, pneumococcal disease and hepatitis B. Unfortunately, mandatory vaccination for home-schooled children is rare. (1)

All states provide medical exemptions to vaccination mandates for those for whom vaccination poses a health threat. Indeed, it is doubtful that a state could constitutionally deny such medical exemptions.

Forty-eight states also allow exemptions based on religious beliefs. While it might be assumed that religious exemptions are required by the protection afforded religion under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that is not the case. The opposite is true. Religious exemptions themselves are constitutionally suspect. In fact, to pass First Amendment muster, a state’s religious exemption statute may have to be so broad as to become, in essence, a “philosophical” exemption.

Vaccination mandates survive early challenges

Compulsory vaccination laws have enjoyed strong support in the state and federal courts for over a century. Early in the 20th century, the U.S. Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of a statute authorizing a municipal board of health to require and enforce vaccination, in this case during a smallpox epidemic. The Court found the legislation represented a valid exercise of the state’s police power. In a statement that proved prescient about the failed constitutional challenges to vaccination mandates which followed, the Court said that “we do not perceive that this legislation has invaded any right secured by the Federal Constitution.” Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11, 38 (1905).

In 1922, the Court specifically addressed the subject of school vaccination, holding that it is a valid exercise of the state’s police power to make vaccination a condition of attending public or private school. Zucht v. King, 260 U.S. 174 (1922).
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I’ve really come to detest Dr. Mehmet Oz.

You remember Dr. Mehmet Oz, don’t you? How can you escape him? He is, after all, Oprah Winfrey’s protege, and of late he’s really been living up (or down) to the example set by his television mentor, who of late apparently thinks nothing of promoting faith healing quack John of God on her show. Following in the footsteps of his much more famous and well-known mentor, this season on his television show, The Dr. Oz Show, Dr. Oz has in some ways imitated Oprah and in some ways gone her one better (one worse, really) in promoting the Oprah-fication of medicine. And this season has been a particularly bad one for science-based medicine on The Dr. Oz Show. Apparently Dr. Oz felt that he had to surpass what he did last season, which included inviting a man whom I consider to be one of the foremost sellers of quackery on the Internet, Dr. Joseph Mercola. Prior to that, Dr. Oz had done an episode touting the glories of that form of faith healing known as reiki. In between, he made appearances at various panels of woo-friendly physicians trying to coopt President Obama’s health insurance reform initiative to cover more “holistic” care (i.e., “integrative medicine”).

In the next season, in particular over the last couple of months, Dr. Oz showed me just how wrong I had been when I had previously been saying that Dr. Oz seemed to be mostly science-based but with a soft spot for certain kinds of pseudoscience. This season, Dr. Oz has thrown down the gauntlet to science-based medicine (SBM) and, as I like to put it, crossed the Woo-bicon. First, he not only invited Joe Mercola back on his show, but he did it defiantly, defending Mercola against what I consider to be much-deserved charges of being a seller of quackery and lauding him as a “pioneer of holistic treatments.” A couple of weeks later, Dr. Oz pulled the classic “bait and switch” of alternative medicine, featuring a yoga instructor on his show who also advocated all sorts of Ayruvedic quackery. Then, a mere few days later Dr. Oz, apparently not satisfied at his transformation from nominally science-based to being based solely on whatever would bring him higher ratings, completed his journey to the Dark Side of quackery by credulously featuring a faith healer on his show and hosting what has to be the lamest faith healing that I’ve ever seen in my entire life. After that, I didn’t think Dr. Oz could go much lower, although he tried, two examples of which were his anti-vaccine-sympathetic episode on autism in which he featured Dr. Robert Sears and his utterly reversing a previous scientifically correct stance of his and promoting a dubious and potentially dangerous diet.
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I graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School in the late 1980s. If there’s one thing I remember about the four years I was there, it’s that U. of M. was really hardcore about science back then. In fact, one of the things I remember is that U. of M. was viewed as being rather old-fashioned. No new (at the time) organ system approach for us! Every four weeks, like clockwork, we’d have what was called a concurrent examination, which basically meant that we were tested (with multiple choice tests, of course) on every subject on the same morning. The medical curriculum for the first two years had been fairly constant for quite some time, with a heaping helpin’ of anatomy, histology, biochemistry, and physiology in the first year and the second year packed full of pharmacology, pathology, and neurosciences. Nowhere to be found was anything resembling “energy medicine” or anything that wasn’t science-based!

Of course, back in the 1980s, the infiltration of quackademic medicine into medical schools and academic medical centers hadn’t really begun in earnest yet, although the rumblings of what is now called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) and, more frequently these days, “integrative medicine” (IM) were starting to be heard in East Coast and West Coast schools. Even there, though, the incipient CAM movement was viewed as fringe, not worthy of the attention of serious academic physicians. Indeed, in the late 1980s, even at what are now havens of quackademic medicine if someone had suggested that diluting substances until there is nothing left, as in homeopathy, or waving your hands over a patient in order to channel the “universal source” of energy into a patient in order to heal a patient, as in reiki, had any place in scientific medicine, he’d have been laughed out of medical school–and rightly so.

Not so today, unfortunately. Although the problem of infiltration of quackademic medicine into academic medical centers goes way beyond this example, I can point out that faith healing based on Eastern mystical beliefs instead of Christianity is alive and well and ensconced in academic medical centers such as the University of Maryland School of Medicine Center for Integrative Medicine, where reiki masters are roaming the halls of the University of Maryland R. Adam Cowley Shock Trauma Center and Bonnie Tarantino, a Melchizedek practitioner, holographic sound healer, and an Usui and Karuna Reiki Master holds sway. Meanwhile, all manner of woo, such as acupuncture, homeopathy, craniosacral therapy, reiki, and reflexology are offered. Truly, you know that when an academic medical center has gone so far as to offer homeopathy, reflexology, and reiki, it’s all over as far as academic credibility is concerned, and it has become a center of quackademic medicine. Sadly, even a hospital where I trained, MetroHealth Medical Center, has succumbed to the temptation to add the quackery that is reiki to its armamentarium. That aside, I had never expected that my old, hardcore University of Michigan would go woo in such a big way.

I was wrong.
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A couple of weeks ago, both Steve Novella and I criticized Dr. Mehmet Oz (a.k.a. “America’s doctor”) for not only hosting a man I consider to be a major supporter of quackery, but going far beyond that to defend and promote him. After that, I considered Dr. Oz to be a lost cause, with nothing to excuse him for his having embraced a man whose website is a wretched hive of scum and quackery almost as wretched as NaturalNews.com (in my opinion, of course). Unfortunately, apparently Dr. Oz’s defense of Dr. Mercola was only the beginning of the end of whatever minimal credibility Dr. Oz had left as a practitioner of evidence-based medicine.

This week, Dr. Oz put the final nails in the coffin of his credibility as a practitioner of science-based medicine. I realize that some would argue that he did that long ago. Fair enough. However, I always held out some hope that he might stop mixing pseudoscience like reiki with science. Then he embraced Dr. Joseph Mercola. Strike one! Unfortunately, strikes two and three followed over the last week or so.
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Several of the bloggers on Science-Based Medicine have been — shall we say? — rather critical of Oprah Winfrey. The reason, of course, is quite obvious. Oprah is so famous that if you mention her first name nearly everyone will know exactly of whom you speak. For the last quarter century, her daytime TV talk show has been a ratings juggernaut, leading to the building of a media behemoth and making Oprah one of the richest and most famous women in the world. Unfortunately, part of Oprah’s equation for success has involved the promotion of quackery and New Age woo, so much so that last year I lamented about the Oprah-fication of medicine, which scored me a writing gig in the Toronto Star. Whether it be promoting bio-identical hormones, The Secret (complete with a testimonial from someone who used The Secret to persuade herself not to pursue conventional therapy for breast cancer), Suzanne Somers, the highly dubious medicine promoted by Dr. Christiane Northrup, or foisting reiki aficionado Dr. Mehmet Oz or anti-vaccine “mother warrior” Jenny McCarthy onto a breathless public, arguably no one is a more powerful force for the promotion of pseudoscience in America, if not the world. Truly, the ending of Oprah’s TV show in the spring is a very good thing indeed for science and rationality. Or it would be, were it not for the fact that the reason Oprah is wrapping up her show after a quarter of a century is to start up her own cable channel, so that we can have Oprah-branded and -inspired programming 24/7.

The mind boggles.

Still, my dislike for how Oprah promotes New Age mysticism and pseudoscience on a distressingly regular basis aside, I actually did think there were limits to how low she would go. I actually thought there were limits to how egregiously vile a quackery Oprah would endorse. The operative word, of course, is “did,” which now needs to be struck off after last Wednesday, which is when Oprah did an entire show entitled Do You Believe in Miracles? (Guess what answer was implicitly, if not explicitly, endorsed.) Featured prominently in that episode were several segments on the faith healer John of God.
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Science-based medicine is, among other things, a tool.  Science helps us sequester our biases so that we may better understand reality.  Of course, there is no way to avoid being human; our biases and our intuition still betray us, and when they do, we use other tools.  Ethics help us think through situations using an explicitly-stated set of values that most of us agree upon (and in order to get wide agreement, these precepts must be pretty general).

Ethical problems are a normal part of medical practice. In medical school I received a bit of formal didactic education on ethics, and on the floors we often have formal ethical discussions to help understand and resolve conflicts.   But ethics are not a weapon used to obtain a result we want; they are a tool to give a framework for understanding and resolving dilemmas.  Ethical dilemmas can arise out of may types of conflicts, for example when our personal beliefs clash with those of our patients, or when patients’ and families’ desires conflict.  They can also arise when we as physicians are constrained in our actions by outside forces.
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Editor’s note: Given the controversial nature of the topic, I think it’s a good time to point out my disclaimer before this post. Not that it’ll prevent any heated arguments or anything…

The Science-Based Medicine blog was started slightly over two years ago, and this is a post I’ve wanted to do since the very beginning. However, since January 2008, each and every time I approached this topic I chickened out. After all, the topic of abortion is such a hot button issue that I seriously questioned whether the grief it would be likely to cause is worth it. (Take the heat generated any time circumcision is discussed here and ramp it up by a factor of 10.) On the other hand, there is so much misinformation out there claiming a link between abortion and the subsequent development of breast cancer when the data simply don’t support such a link, and the name of this blog is Science-Based Medicine. Why should I continue to shy away from a topic just because it’s so religiously charged? More importantly, in my discussion how can I focus attention on the science rather than letting the discussion degenerate into the typical flamefest that any discussion of abortion on the Internet (or anywhere else, for that matter) will almost inevitably degenerate into. Indeed, such discussions have a depressing near-inevitability of validating Godwin’s law not once but many times — usually within mere hours, if not minutes.

My strategy to try to keep the discussion focused on the science will be to stay silent about my own personal opinions regarding abortion and, other than using it to introduce my trepidation about discussing the topic, the religious and moral arguments that fuel the controversy. That’s because the question of whether abortion is the murder of a human being, merely the removal of a lump of tissue, or somewhere in between is a moral issue that, at least as far as I’m concerned, can’t ever be definitively answered by science. That is why it is not my purpose to sway readers towards any specific opinion regarding the morality of abortion. Indeed, I highly doubt that any of our readers care much about my opinions on the matter. On the other hand, I would hope that I’ve built up enough trust over the last two years that our readers will be interested in my analysis of the existing data regarding something another related issue. It is my purpose to try to dispel a myth that is not supported by science, specifically the claim that elective abortion is causes breast cancer or is a very strong risk factor for its subsequent development. That is a claim that can be answered by science and, for the most part, has been answered by science with a fairly high degree of certainty. Despite the science against it, the medical myth that abortion causes breast cancer or vastly increases the risk of it is, like the myth that vaccines cause autism, a manufactroversy that won’t die, mainly because it is largely fueled by religious beliefs that are every bit as immune to science as the ideological beliefs that drive the antivaccine movement.
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