Year: 2010

Your disease, your fault

Earlier this week, my colleague Dr. Gorski explored a common theme in alternative medicine: the idea that all disease is preventable.  This implies that all disease has a discrete cause and that individual behavior can mitigate this cause. If biology worked this way, my job as an internist would be very different.   Many people would love to believe that life is this...

/ September 9, 2010

Ghostwriting As Marketing Tool

An article in the latest issue of PLOS Medicine, The Haunting of Medical Journals: How Ghostwriting Sold “HRT”, details the use of ghostwriting as a marketing tool for pharmaceutical companies. It is a chilling discussion of how at least one pharmaceutical company, Wyeth, used the peer-reviewed literature as a method of distributing marketing messages to physicians. The author, Adriane J. Fugh-Berman, details...

/ September 8, 2010

Write for Oprah? Wrong for Me

From January through June of 2010 I wrote a column entitled “The Health Inspector” in O, The Oprah Magazine. Now, apparently, I have been fired; although they have not had the common courtesy to tell me so. The whole thing has been a bizarre, frustrating experience.  It started last fall, when I got an e-mail from Tyler Graham. He introduced himself as...

/ September 7, 2010

“Complex, multi-component therapy” can be studied well

This August was a tough month for SBM bloggers reading The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). Just one week after a review of acupuncture for back pain—in which the authors recommended referring patients to traditionally trained acupuncturists despite data showing that traditional needling does not outperform a blinded sham control (click here here here for the trifecta takedown)— NEJM featured an...

/ September 6, 2010

Mike Adams on Dr. Mehmet Oz’s colon polyps: “Spontaneous” disease?

Given that it’s a holiday and I debated whether or not I even wanted to post anything today, I think I’ll keep things light and uncharacteristically brief today. After all, not every post can be like last week’s epic on Avastin or the week before’s epic on peer review. That’s a lot of work, and it is a holiday, after all. Besides,...

/ September 6, 2010

Yes, drug companies do pay attention to herbal medicine

I’m only a monthly contributor here but between being a SBM reader and having my own blogs, I often grow weary of the blind criticism that researchers and drug companies couldn’t care less about traditional folk medicines as drug products. My laboratory spends every single day working on natural product extracts in the search for compounds that may have selective effectiveness against...

/ September 3, 2010

Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Testing: Road Map or Tarot Cards?

A topic of growing interest (and concern) at SBM is laboratory and diagnostic test pseudoscience. Bogus tests are everywhere, and Kimball Atwood recently discussed several of them. But over the past several years, diagnostic tests have emerged that appear to be science-based and offer gene-level insights into your health. And these tests don’t even require a physician’s visit – just a swab...

/ September 2, 2010

WHO Partnering with Traditional Healers in Africa

The World Health Organization is recommending the use of traditional healers in Africa to help in the treatment of HIV. Is this a good idea, or a devil's bargain?

/ September 1, 2010

Kaiser Rejects Neck Manipulation

Despite quackademia, anti-vaccine propaganda, and other discouraging trends, the news is not all bad. A major HMO has taken a decisive action in support of science-based medicine.  Kaiser Permanente Mid Atlantic States and Mid-Atlantic Permanente Group recently announced the elimination of neck manipulation from their chiropractic coverage. The revised policy states, Given the paucity of data related to beneficial effects of chiropractic...

/ August 31, 2010

Avastin and metastatic breast cancer: When science-based medicine collides with FDA regulation

Not all drugs that prevent progression of cancer prolong the patient's survival. The case of Avastin and metastatic breast cancer reminds us of that simple, unfortunate fact once again.

/ August 30, 2010