Feb 06 2009
…of why we keep harping on this. A couple of days ago The Scientist reported that the “economic stimulus package” may include a windfall for the NIH:
Senate OKs big NIH bump
Posted by Bob Grant
[Entry posted at 4th February 2009 04:12 PM GMT]
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You can bet that if this happens, the NCCAM will be licking its chops for some of that lettuce. Let’s continue to explore why it shouldn’t get any…
Jun 30 2011
Dr. Gorski is in the throes of grant-writing, so I’m filling in for him today by following up on a topic introduced a few months ago. It involves a key medical player in the U.S. government: Dr. Josephine Briggs, Director of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM).
Steve Novella and I first encountered Dr. Briggs at the 2nd Yale Research Symposium on Complementary and Integrative Medicine in March, 2010. I reported here that she seemed well-meaning and pro-science but that she also seemed naive to the political realities of her office and to much of the content of “CAM” (as illustrated by her recommending the NCCAM website, which is full of misinformation; previously I’d noticed her unfortunate innocence of “acupuncture anesthesia,” which is to be expected of most academics but not of the CAM Explicator-in-Chief).
Jan 17 2009
As you may or may not know, Change.gov is being used by Obama’s team to solicit policy ideas. Americans submit ideas, along with supporting rationale, and people “vote up” or vote down” the proposals. “Up” votes increase the score of the proposals, and “down” votes decrease the score. It is described thusly on the Change.gov website:
Share your ideas on any issue facing the new administration, then rate or comment on other ideas. The best rated ideas will rise to the top — and be gathered into a Citizen’s Briefing Book to be delivered to President Obama after he is sworn in.
A couple of days ago, P.Z. Myers let me know about an excellent proposal over at the Citizen’s Briefing Book: Defund the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine:
Here’s a way to increase the available funding to NIH without increasing the NIH budget: halt funding to NCCAM, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. This Center was created not by scientists, who never thought it was a good idea, but by Congress, and specifically by just two Congressmen in the 1990′s who believed in particular “alternative” (but scientifically dubious) treatments. Defunding NCCAM would save at least $225 million, possibly more.
Defunding NCCAM would also provide a direct societal benefit. Practitioners of so-called “alternative” medicines constantly refer to NIH’s support as a way of validating their practices and beliefs, most of which are not supported by evidence. The fact is that after >10 years, NCCAM has not yet found a single piece of positive evidence for any of these methods, which include acupuncture, “qi”, homoepathy, magnet therapy, and other treatments.
Any legitimate, promising medical treatment can be funded by one of the existing NIH Institutes. There’s no need for a separate center for “alternative” therapies – but what has happened is that NCCAM has become a last refuge for poorly designed, unscientific studies that couldn’t get funded through the normal peer-reviewed process.
He even cited our co-blogger’s (in)famous article Why the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) Should Be Defunded. Maybe he should take a gander at my post The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM): Your tax dollars hard at work, as well.
Continue Reading »
Jan 21 2009
As part of President Obama’s new approach to politics, with the promise of making it more transparent, his transition team solicited ideas from the public at change.gov. On this site anyone could post an idea and everyone could vote proposals up or down. Apparently the most popular ideas will be given some consideration. It’s an interesting blend of democracy and representative government. Whether is has any utility remains to be seen – but it’s just electrons and therefore it’s easy to experiment.
There are numerous suggestions under the health care category, but one in particular that might be of interest to readers of this blog. The author, Professor S, sent me the link to his suggestion that the new Administration defund the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM).
What a great idea.
Apr 02 2010
For a number of reasons, well-argued many times here on SBM, it would be beneficial to American citizens if the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) were abolished. This does not seem to be in the cards anytime soon. Here, then, are my suggestions for making the Center less dangerous and less of a marketing tool for pseudomedicine than it has been since its inception. Some suggestions might even make the Center somewhat useful. They are listed in order of priority. The Center should:
1. Abandon all unethical trials, beginning with the Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy (TACT, which is under the joint auspices of the NHLBI). This should be done in a very public manner. The reasons for abandoning the TACT, in summary, are as follows.
Jan 16 2012
As the sole cancer surgeon among our stable of Science-Based Medicine (SBM) bloggers, I’m probably the most irritated at the infiltration of pseudoscience into academia (or, as we sometimes like to call it, quackademic medicine) in the realm of cancer. Part of the reason, of course, is that cancer is so common and that the consequences of adding pseudoscience to cancer therapy are among the most devastating. Witness, for instance, the use of Gonzalez therapy to treat pancreatic cancer, a form of quackery that harms patients and resulted in incredibly unethical and disastrous clinical trial of Gonzalez quackery versus chemotherapy whose results were entirely predictable, given the lack of prior plausibility of the treatment: Gonzalez protocol patients did worse, with no evidence that the therapy impacted the natural history of the disease and the Gonzalez patients scoring lower on quality of life measures. Or look at what happens when patients with breast cancer choose quackery over science-based therapy.
I realize that “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) or, what quackademics like to call it now, “integrative medicine” (IM) is meant to refer to “integrating” alternative therapies into SBM or “complementing” SBM with a touch of the ol’ woo, but I could never manage to understand how “integrating” quackery with SBM would do anything but weaken the scientific foundation of medicine. Moreover, weakening those foundations would have more consequences than just “humanizing” medicine; weaker scientific standards would allow not just ancient quackery like traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) into academia, but it would also provide an opening for drug and device companies to promote their wares under less rigorous requirements for evidence. There’s also perhaps a touch of personal embarrassment involved. After all, oncology and cancer surgery tend to be specialties that are the most steeped in science. If I had to rank specialties for how science-based they are, I’d certainly put oncology near the top, which is why I tend to come down so hard on “integrative oncology” and, even worse, “naturopathic oncology.”
Consequently, I was doubly disturbed several months ago when I learned that the director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, had agreed to be the keynote speaker at the Eight International Society for Integrative Oncology Conference in Cleveland, OH. I say “doubly” disturbed because it disturbed me that Francis Collins would agree to speak at such a function and, perhaps even more, because the host institution was Case Western Reserve University, the institution where I both completed my surgery residency and my PhD in Physiology and Biophysics. Sadly, it now appears that my old stomping grounds at University Hospitals has been thoroughly infiltrated with quackademic medicine, as evidenced by this clinical trial of reiki for psoriasis that’s making the rounds of news services and the offering of acupuncture, reiki, and even reflexology at various UH facilities through the University Hospitals Connor Integrative Medicine Network. Let me tell you, there was none of this pseudoscience going on when I finished my residency there in 1996. Seeing it there now provokes a reaction in me not unlike Sylvester Junior’s reaction when his father Sylvester embarrasses him, particularly when I noted that the director of the CWRU Comprehensive Cancer Center, Dr. Stanton L. Gerson, was to give one of the keynote talks, entitled, “The Future of Integrative Oncology.” (Hint for those of you not familiar with classic Looney Tunes cartoons: A paper bag is involved.) I guess that by expressing my extreme disappointment and embarrassment that the institution where I learned to become a surgeon has during the last 15 years gone woo, I’ve probably just killed any opportunity I might have to work at the Case Comprehensive Cancer Center ever again. Oh, well, add it to the list, along with Beth Israel and my alma mater the University of Michigan.)
Back when I first learned about it, I thought about blogging the meeting, but without much concrete to go on, given the copious other SBM-related topics to blog about, all I could do was to write a critical open letter to Dr. Collins about his decision to accept the offer to be the keynote speaker at the Society for Integrative Oncology (SIO). Then yesterday I saw popping up in my e-mail a notice from the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), along with a link to a story in its publication The ASCO Post entitled NIH Director Calls for Rigorous Evaluation of Integrative Medicine to Provide Evidence of Efficacy.
Et tu, Dr. Collins?
Continue Reading »
Jul 24 2009
Near the end of my series* on ‘Acupuncture Anesthesia’, I wrote this:
Most Westerners—Michael DeBakey and John Bonica being exceptions—who observed ‘acupuncture anesthesia’ in China during the Cultural Revolution seem to have failed to recognize what was going on right under their noses.
I should have added—and I now have—Arthur Taub’s name to that tiny, exceptional group. Taub, a neurologist and neurophysiologist at Yale, was a member of a delegation of Americans sent to China to observe ‘acupuncture anesthesia’ in May of 1974, about a year after Dr. Bonica‘s visit. The delegation included several prominent anesthesiologists. Their report, Acupuncture Anesthesia in the People’s Republic of China: A Trip Report of the American Acupuncture Anesthesia Study Group, was published in 1976 and is available in its entirety here. Excerpts follow (emphasis added):
Pain is a subjective experience. Judging whether an individual is in a state of pain depends on observations of the subject’s behavior, including verbal reports to the observer…When there is no evidence of pain, the observer can adopt one of three positions: Continue Reading »
Oct 28 2008
Sometimes I read an article in a medical journal that makes me say, “Well, duh! I could have told you that without a study.” Sometimes I read collected data that make me ask, “So what?” Sometimes I read an article that makes me wonder what kind of pogo stick they used to jump from their data to their conclusions. Sometimes I read a study that is so poorly conceived that you couldn’t hope to get any useful information from it. Sometimes I read a study that reminds me of class projects or term papers where you just thought of something easy to do to fill the squares to get credit. Sometimes I read a study funded by the NCCAM that makes me very angry that they wasted my tax dollars. Sometimes all these things coincide in one article.
“Ophthalmology Patients’ Religious and Spiritual Beliefs: An Opportunity to Build Trust in the Patient-Physician Relationship” is such an article. A questionnaire was anonymously filled out by 124 consecutive return patients in one ophthalmologist’s practice. It asked about their religious and spiritual beliefs and their understanding and level of concern about their eye condition. Continue Reading »
Sep 14 2009
PRELUDE: SOME BAD NEWS FOR ADVOCATES OF SCIENCE-BASED MEDICINE
It was a bad week for science-based medicine. It was a good week (sort of) for science-based medcine.
First the bad.
There has been a development that anyone who supports science in medicine and opposes quackery will likely find disturbing. Do you remember Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA)? We’ve written about him extensively over the last several months on this blog. First of all, he is the man most responsible for the creation of that government-sanctioned, government-funded bastion of pseudoscience, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. He’s also one of the men most responsible for the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA) of 1994, which has done more to protect the supplement industry from making dubious health claims than any other piece of federal legislation. More recently, Harkin has made a name for himself in the health care reform debate currently ongoing by inviting advocates of “integrative” medicine (IM), which in essence integrates quackery and the pseudoscientific with scientific medicine, to Capitol Hill as a means of trying to persuade his fellow legislators to include a CAM/IM version of “wellness” care as part of any bill that might pass this fall. In essence, he is trying to hijack any health care reform bill to include government sanction of unscientific medicine. Meanwhile, he has been chastising NCCAM because it hasn’t “validated” enough “alternative medicine” for his taste. (Actually, it’s validated none, because virtually none of it is likely to be valid.)
This is the man who, according to reports, will almost certainly be taking over the chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) after the death of its former chair, Senator Edward Kennedy. This committee is among the most important for government health policy and will be in the thick of the final negotiations and battles over any health care reform that may arise from Congress this fall.
The existence of powerful supporters of pseudoscience in the highest eschelons of government has real consequences. As I’ve described before, NCCAM, being based entirely on studying highly–even ridiculously implausible–notions about disease and how to treat it, has resulted in the infiltration of quackery into academia, where ideas once rightly dismissed as quackery are respectfully given deference and studied as though they were anything other than Tooth Fairy science, a process that Dr. R. W. Donnell has amusingly termed “quackademic medicine.” One result was the expenditure of $30 million on an unethical, poorly designed, and corrupt trial of chelation therapy for cardiovascular disease. Another result was an even more unethical trial of an even more scientifically implausible remedy for a deadly cancer. Although the fact that the trial was even done is a horror, at least last week we finally found out the results, which had been suppressed for nearly four years, namely that this protocol is not just useless, but worse than useless. It’s a Pyrrhic victory for science-based medicine and cold comfort to patients with pancreatic cancer who may have continued to use this protocol during those four years, but at least we finally know.
Let’s take a look at the study. But first, a little background.
Continue Reading »
Dec 10 2010
This is the second post in a series* prompted by an essay by statistician Stephen Simon, who argued that Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) is not lacking in the ways that we at Science-Based Medicine have argued. David Gorski responded here, and Prof. Simon responded to Dr. Gorski here. Between that response and the comments following Dr. Gorski’s post it became clear to me that a new round of discussion would be worth the effort.
Part I of this series provided ample evidence for EBM’s “scientific blind spot”: the EBM Levels of Evidence scheme and EBM’s most conspicuous exponents consistently fail to consider all of the evidence relevant to efficacy claims, choosing instead to rely almost exclusively on randomized, controlled trials (RCTs). The several quoted Cochrane abstracts, regarding homeopathy and Laetrile, suggest that in the EBM lexicon, “evidence” and “RCTs” are almost synonymous. Yet basic science or preliminary clinical studies provide evidence sufficient to refute some health claims (e.g., homeopathy and Laetrile), particularly those emanating from the social movement known by the euphemism “CAM.”
It’s remarkable to consider just how unremarkable that last sentence ought to be. EBM’s founders understood the proper role of the rigorous clinical trial: to be the final arbiter of any claim that had already demonstrated promise by all other criteria—basic science, animal studies, legitimate case series, small controlled trials, “expert opinion,” whatever (but not inexpert opinion). EBM’s founders knew that such pieces of evidence, promising though they may be, are insufficient because they “routinely lead to false positive conclusions about efficacy.” They must have assumed, even if they felt no need to articulate it, that claims lacking such promise were not part of the discussion. Nevertheless, the obvious point was somehow lost in the subsequent formalization of EBM methods, and seems to have been entirely forgotten just when it ought to have resurfaced: during the conception of the Center for Evidence-Based Medicine’s Introduction to Evidence-Based Complementary Medicine.
Thus, in 2000, the American Heart Journal (AHJ) could publish an unchallenged editorial arguing that Na2EDTA chelation “therapy” could not be ruled out as efficacious for atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease because it hadn’t yet been subjected to any large RCTs—never mind that there had been several small ones, and abundant additional evidence from basic science, case studies, and legal documents, all demonstrating that the treatment is both useless and dangerous. The well-powered RCT had somehow been transformed, for practical purposes, from the final arbiter of efficacy to the only arbiter. If preliminary evidence was no longer to have practical consequences, why bother with it at all? This was surely an example of what Prof. Simon calls “Poorly Implemented Evidence Based Medicine,” but one that was also implemented by the very EBM experts who ought to have recognized the fallacy.
There will be more evidence for these assertions as we proceed, but the main thrust of Part II is to begin to respond to this statement from Prof. Simon: “There is some societal value in testing therapies that are in wide use, even though there is no scientifically valid reason to believe that those therapies work.”
