Month: December 2008

A Year of Science-Based Medicine

On January 1, 2008 I wrote the first blog entry on Science-Based Medicine introducing the new blog. Now, by coincidence, I have the privilege of writing the last entry of 2008. It seems like a good time to look back over the last year and reflect on our little project. I am happy to write that by all measures SBM has been...

/ December 31, 2008

The $150,000 Vaccine Challenge

A man named Jock Doubleday has offered $150,000 to any physician who gives vaccines to drink the chemicals in a vaccine. It's a profoundly dishonest challenge, so full of conditions that it's clear it was meant never to be honored, much less paid.

/ December 30, 2008

The fallacy of “balance” and “fairness” about unscientific health claims in the media: A case study

For those of us who have dedicated ourselves to promoting science-based medicine, one of the most frustrating impediments to our message is the media. Time and time again, I’ve complained about how the media takes unscientific health claims, particularly when it comes to vaccines, and gives a credulous hearing to them. Sometimes, it’s a filmmaker with a distinct ideological axe to grind...

/ December 29, 2008

Egnorance is Bliss

A few years ago, at a skeptics conference in Los Angeles, Stephen Barrett of Quackwatch had just finished giving a talk and was fielding questions from the audience. Someone asked, “why don’t you ever talk about how dangerous regular medicine is?” Dr. Barrett, with a look of bewilderment in his face and a tone of exasperation in his voice, replied: “This is what I...

/ December 26, 2008

Defending Science-Based Medicine

Science-based medicine is more than a website. It is a philosophy of medicine that is actively vying with other philosophies for dominance in the world of medicine. We believe that medicine should be based upon the best science available, according to a single universal standard of rigorous methodology and valid logic and reason. Others desire a double-standard, so that they can be...

/ December 24, 2008

Santa Visits the Hospital

Since Val has broken the ice, I thought I would offer some more Christmas humor. The following is a Narrative Summary (a report of a hospitalization) that was circulated at the Plattsburgh Air Force hospital where I worked in 1986. I published it in my memoirs, Women Aren’t Supposed to Fly. Unfortunately I don’t know who wrote it, so I can’t give...

/ December 23, 2008

Put your fears in perspective

I’m having a helluva Sunday.  My father-in-law’s in the hospital,  it’s 2 degrees out with a wind chill of 40 below, my clothes all smell like latkes, my daughter is having a melt-down, and I screwed up the .xml file for my podcast. The last part reminds me of something—science is hard, and when we step out of our areas of expertise,...

/ December 22, 2008

Battlefield acupuncture revisited: That’s it? That‘s all Col. Niemtzow’s got?

It’s like the zombie that wouldn’t die, isn’t it? I’m referring to so-called “battlefield acupuncture,” a topic that I wrote about last week for this very blog. With a week separating my usual posts, I normally don’t write about the same topic two times right in a row, but I’m making an exception for this topic. There are three reasons. First, I...

/ December 22, 2008

Influenza Deaths

“There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.”- Donald Rumsfeld How do we know what we know? It is said by some anti-vaccine proponents that vaccines...

/ December 19, 2008

Quackery tolerance – a learned response

Academic politeness turns to the vicious  This is more on the theme of academic and postmodern roots of sectarianism-quackery’s advance on medicine. I illustrate through the personal experience of a noted combatant – Mary Lefkowitz – in the front lines of the war with intellectual and academic buffoonery passing as scholarship. The joke is not in the buffoonery, though. The joke is turning...

/ December 18, 2008