Category: Medical Academia

Time for a little blatant self-promotion

I thought I’d take advantage of my prerogative as managing editor of this blog to do a quick bit of blatant self-promotion. I will be in the Washington, DC area later this week, and while I’m there to attend the Society of Surgical Oncology Annual Cancer Symposium, I’ll also be taking advantage to do a little side trip to give a talk...

/ March 6, 2013

Storytelling in Medicine

We can’t stress often enough that anecdotes are not reliable evidence; but on the other hand, patient stories can serve a valuable purpose in medical education. Hearing how a disease affected an individual patient is more powerful than reading a list of symptoms in a textbook and is far more likely to fix the disease in the student’s memory. When I think...

/ December 18, 2012

The American Medical Student Association: On “integrating” quackery with science-based medicine

There’s a saying in medicine that we frequently hear when a newer, more effective therapy supplants an older therapy or an existing therapy is shown not to be as efficacious as was once thought, and it has to do about how long it takes for the use of that therapy to decline. The saying basically says that the therapy won’t die out...

/ October 22, 2012

Related by coincidence only? University and medical journal press releases versus journal articles

There are certain topics in Science-Based Medicine (or, in this case, considering the difference between SBM and quackery) that keep recurring over and over. One of these, which is of particular interest to me because I am a cancer surgeon specializing in breast cancer, is the issue of alternative medicine use for cancer therapy. Yesterday, I posted a link to an interview...

/ August 20, 2012

NCCAM on “integrative medicine”: What’s in a word?

I don’t know how I’ve missed this, given that it’s been in existence now for a month and a half, but I have. Regular readers (and even fairly recent readers, given that I write about this topic relatively frequently) know that I’m not a big fan of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). (Come to think of it, neither...

/ July 2, 2012

Science, Evidence and Guidelines

Disclaimer:  I am a paid Medscape  blogger and writer, and since they are in part supported by advertisements from the Pharmaceutical companies,  indirectly I am in the thrall of Big Pharma. I found Harriet’s post on the Medscape Connect topic of How do you feel about Evidence-Based Medicine? interesting. I wondered about the breakdown of the comments by both specialty and opinions...

/ June 15, 2012

Quackademic medicine trickles out to community hospitals

One of the major themes of this blog has been to combat what I, borrowing a term coined (as far as I can tell) by Dr. R. W. Donnell, like to refer to as “quackademic medicine.” Quackademic medicine is a lovely term designed to summarize everything that is wrong with the increasing embrace of so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) or, as...

/ June 11, 2012

Dental X-rays and Brain Tumors — Oh My!

Fear sells, and the media loves it. If it’s scary, no matter how tenuous the link or inconclusive the study, you are going to see it on the news. How many times over the years have you heard that your cell phone might give you brain cancer, even though it never turns out to be true? Once such a claim is made,...

/ May 11, 2012

Feet of Clay

It has been tough in Portland this year. The Trailblazers, our NBA, and only professional team, started out on a tear, then went right down the toilet. It is painful to see such promise dribbled away. Sigh. Why is elation always followed by disappointment? Everyone and everything has feet of clay. Except Cassius Marcellus. At the beginning of March the NEJM had...

/ March 31, 2012

Help a reader out: Abstracts that misrepresent the content of the paper

Earlier this week, a reader of ours wrote to Steve and me with a request: First off, I just want to say thank you for everything you gentlemen do. I find that your sites are extremely helpful when trying to figure out what level of information is BS, and what is real. In short, I was wondering if either of you two...

/ March 9, 2012