Month: August 2015

“Precision medicine”: Hope, hype, or both?

I am fortunate to have become a physician in a time of great scientific progress. Back when I was in college and medical school, the thought that we would one day be able to sequence the human genome (and now sequence hundreds of cancer genomes), to measure the expression of every gene in the genome simultaneously on a single “gene chip,” and...

/ August 31, 2015

ND Confession, Part II: The Accreditation of Naturopathic “Medical” Education

Accreditation of a school does not mean what most people think it means. In particular, it does not mean anything about the quality of education received there, or the validity of the topics studied.

/ August 29, 2015

(Dys-)Functional Medicine Comes to Dentistry

The great philosopher Deepak Chopra wrote: “I do not believe in meaningless coincidences. I believe every coincidence is a message, a clue about a particular facet of our lives that requires our attention.” So when SBM author extraordinaire Jann Bellamy emailed me last week with an article about so-called “Functional Dentistry” with the comment “Blog fodder?”, I looked it over with interest...

/ August 28, 2015

Is there a natural treatment for tinnitus?

“Why do you bother blogging?” asked a colleague. “You take hours of your personal time to write, and you do it for free. You’re not even getting any citations for all that work.” I admit I found the questions a bit surprising. True, you won’t find SBM posts abstracted in PubMed. But I’m writing for an entirely different audience. I blog for...

/ August 27, 2015

An Industry of Worthless Acupuncture Studies

Even more interesting to me than the question of whether or not acupuncture is effective for any particular symptom is the meta-question of how acupuncture proponents have managed to promote a treatment with systematically terrible scientific data. A new study provides a fresh example of this, which I will discuss below. I think the behavior of acupuncturists reflects the fact that there...

/ August 26, 2015

Taxpayers Fund Scientology Research on Gulf War Veterans

The “Hubbard protocol” is Scientology’s religion-based, pseudoscientific “detoxification” treatment used in its Narconon program to treat drug addiction. It was dreamed up by a science fiction writer with no medical training. Now it is being studied as a treatment for veterans suffering from Gulf War illness. Our limited public money for research is being wasted on a study with no scientific merit....

/ August 25, 2015

Vaccine Whistleblower: BS Hooker and William Thompson try to talk about epidemiology

Here we go again with the whole “CDC Whistleblower” thing, this time with a book about the recorded conversations between Brian J. Hooker and William Thompson. Well, not the whole conversations, of course. If they were to release the whole conversations, we might get the truth, and the truth always gets in the way of the antivax crowd. Instead, we get an...

/ August 24, 2015

Vaccine Whistleblower: An antivaccine “exposé” full of sound and fury, signifying nothing

Antivaccine lawyer Kevin Barry has published a book containing what are allegedly the transcripts of telephone conversations between "CDC whistleblower" William Thompson and biochemical engineer turned incompetent antivaccine epidemiologist Brian Hooker. Suffice to say, the transcripts do not show evidence of a massive coverup at the CDC of evidence that vaccines cause autism.

/ August 24, 2015

Review of Vaccine Whistleblower: A Legal Perspective 

This post addresses some legal issues raised in the Vaccine Whistleblower book. The first part explains whistleblower protections and how Dr. Thompson’s allegations fit into them. The second part addresses Dr. Thompson’s suggestion of an independent research agency. The third part explains why the book’s claim that school mandates violate international human rights is incorrect. A note on the book: Chapters 1...

/ August 24, 2015

How should we treat DCIS?

I’ve written more times than I can remember about the phenomenon of overdiagnosis and the phenomenon that is linked at the hip with it, overtreatment. Overdiagnosis is a problem that arises when large populations of asymptomatic, apparently healthy people are screened for a disease or a condition, the idea being that catching the disease at an earlier stage in its progression will...

/ August 23, 2015