Month: October 2010

Corporate pharma ethics and you

Although I’m one of the few non-clinicians writing here at SBM, I think about clinical trials a great deal – especially this week. First, our colleague, Dr. David Gorski, had a superb analysis and highly-commented post on The Atlantic story by David H. Freedman about the work of John Ioannadis – more accurately, on Freedman’s misinterpretation of Ioannadis’s work and Dr. Gorski’s...

/ October 29, 2010

Fatigued by a Fake Disease

Are you tired? Is it because your adrenal glands are too? No, probably not.

/ October 28, 2010

Blog Discussion with an SBM Critic

Over the last couple of days I have been engaged at NeuroLogica in a discussion with a fellow blogger, Marya Zilberberg who blogs at Healthcare, etc. Since the topic of discussion is science-based medicine I thought it appropriate to reproduce my two posts here, which contain links to her posts. A Post-Modernist Response to Science-Based Medicine I receive frequent commentary on my...

/ October 27, 2010

Energy Bracelets: Embedding Frequencies in Holograms for Fun and Profit

A salesman is demonstrating a new product at a sports store in the local mall. He has a customer stand with his arms extended horizontally to the sides; he presses down on an arm and the customer starts to fall over. Then he puts a bracelet on the customer and repeats the test; this time he is apparently unable to make the...

/ October 26, 2010

Lies, damned lies, and…science-based medicine?

I realize that in the question-and-answer session after my talk at the Lorne Trottier Public Science Symposium a week ago I suggested in response to a man named Leon Maliniak, who monopolized the first part of what was already a too-brief Q&A session by expounding on the supposed genius of Royal Rife, that I would be doing a post about the Rife...

/ October 25, 2010

SBM Host Change

Tonight (Friday Night) we will be moving SBM to a new faster host. This will improve the performance of SBM, which has been sluggish recently, and give us the ability to increase our resources as needed as SBM continues to grow. Comments posted between Friday night and approximately Sunday morning may be lost in the gap as the location of the new...

/ October 22, 2010

Influenza Vaccine Mandates

I have been involved in infection control and in what is now called quality for my career. Since infection control issues can occur in any department, my job involves being on numerous quality related committees (Medical Executive, Pharmacy and Therapeutics, etc) where I have witnessed or participated in what seems to be innumerable quality initiatives. It always gripes my cookies when someone...

/ October 22, 2010

Heart disease: one of science-based medicine’s great successes

Sixty years ago, the world was full of miracles. Western Europe was recovering from the devastation of World War II, an agricultural revolution promised to banish the fear of starvation in large parts of the world, and the mythical Mad Men era gave Americans a taste of technology-dependent peace and prosperity unlike any in the past. Despite the technological progress that would...

/ October 21, 2010

The 2010 Lorne Trottier Public Science Symposium

I really have to give those guys at McGill University’s Office for Science and Society credit. They’re fast. Remember how I pointed out that I’ve been away at the Lorne Trottier Public Science Symposium? This year, the theme was Confronting Pseudoscience: A Call to Action, and I got to share the stage with Michael Shermer, Ben Goldacre, and, of course, our host,...

/ October 20, 2010

Pharmaceutical Company Contact and Prescribing

In my group practice, the Yale Medical Group, drug-company sponsored lunches and similar events have been banned. This is part of a trend, at least within academic medicine, to create some distance between physicians and pharmaceutical companies, or at least their marketing divisions. The justifications for this are several, and are all reasonable. One reason is the appearance of being too cozy,...

/ October 20, 2010