Category: Medical Academia
An Original: Richard de Mille, Carlos Castaneda, Literary Quackery
An Original: Richard De Mille, Carlos Castaneda, and Literary Quackery I was away in Nature – with a real capital N, and decided to insert an allegory this week instead of a medical subject. The genesis here was a sweeping of the mind and brushing away of cobwebs and detritus called worries and other preoccupations. The application to this here blog is...
Cranks, quacks, and peer review
Last week, I wrote one of my characteristically logorrheic meandering posts about what turns a scientist into a crank or a doctor into a quack. In a sort of continuation of this line of thinking, this week I’ll turn my attention to one of the other most common characteristics of a crank, be he scientific crank (i.e., a creationist), a quack, or...
“Acupuncture Anesthesia”: a Proclamation from Chairman Mao (Part III)
A Digression: The Politics of Chinese Medicine in the People’s Republic of China (The Early Years) *** A Partial Book Review: Chinese Medicine in Early Communist China, 1945-63: a Medicine of Revolution, by Kim Taylor Mao’s was a complex personality. He was by nature a control freak, highly secretive, quickly suspicious, ruthless in revenge. These were all personal characteristics that were to...
“Acupuncture Anesthesia”: A Proclamation from Chairman Mao (Part II)
An Anesthesiologist’s Perspective The late John Bonica (1917-1994), one of the great anesthesiologists of the 20th century, has been called “The Founding Father of the Pain Field.” He developed this interest while treating wounded soldiers at Fort Lewis, Washington, during WW II. Shortly thereafter he became a pioneer of epidural analgesia and other forms of safe pain relief for labor and delivery....
“Acupuncture Anesthesia”: A Proclamation from Chairman Mao (Part I)
James Reston’s Appendectomy For many Americans, the current wave of public fascination with “complementary and alternative medicine (CAM)” can be traced to a single event: New York Times columnist James Reston’s appendectomy in China during the summer of 1971, which Reston reported in an interesting and amusing article on July 26 of that year. Many of those who noticed the publicity following this event...
Homeocracy 3
The previous post of this series analyzed the results of the 1994 Pediatrics paper purporting to show a statistically significant effect of homeopathic preparations on acute childhood diarrhea in a population in Nicaragua. That clinical trial followed a pilot study that also had shown a small but statistically significant effect of homeopathic remedies. A moment here for explanation as to why I am...
Harvard Medical School: Veritas for Sale (Part VI)
Loose Ends: Dr. Koh and More After Dr. Federman’s letter and my reply, posted in Part V of this series,† there seemed little point in pursuing the matter further. Although Dr. Federman never answered my reply, he did send, at my request, a copy of Commissioner of Public Health Howard Koh‘s written “construction of the events in the Massachusetts Special Commission.” As you may recall, those events...
Harvard Medical School: Veritas for Sale (Part V)
September 26, 2002 Kimball Atwood, M.D. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Dear Kim, I have now had time to look into the allegations in your letter of June 14th which, incidentally, I shared with Dr. David Eisenberg and he with several others. I have sought consultation about our exchanges and the gist of my response follows. Some of your concerns and allegations are very helpful and...
The Dull-Man Law
Kimball Atwood is obviously trying to throw mud at Harvard and at homeopathy, but when you throw mud, you get dirty… (Sigh) So little time, so much misinformation. Hence the Dull-Man Law: In any discussion involving science or medicine, being Dana Ullman loses you the argument immediately…and gets you laughed out of the room. This will be the last time that I...
Harvard Medical School: Veritas for Sale (Part IV)
HMS Puts the Messenger in its Crosshairs When, during the fall and winter of 2001-02 I first approached Dean Daniel Federman of the Harvard Medical School (HMS) with evidence that the HMS “CAM” program was promoting pseudomedicine, I gave him some materials that I thought would be adequate to make the case: ‘CAM’ Director David Eisenberg’s dubious funding sources and his failure to...