Month: August 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.
(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...
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...
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...
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...
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...