Category: Science and Medicine

SCAMlandia. CAM in Oregon.

I quite like Portlandia. I find it funny and it captures a part of Portland. I recognize large swaths of the city’s culture in the show. Other representations of the city I recognize less. Sunset publishes beautiful photographs of the NW, but when I look at the photos I think, that section of the city never looks that good. It is quite...

/ January 11, 2013

The Shred Diet: A Minimally Kooky Way To Lose Weight

With New Years’ weight loss resolutions freshly made, let’s take a science-based look at another of the latest diet books being promoted by various public relations agencies. In my last post we explored the claims made by the hysterical Eat To Save Your Life authors in their book featuring a demonic cheeseburger on its cover jacket. Today I will review, Shred: The...

/ January 11, 2013

What’s past is prologue

Today marks the five year anniversary of the blog. I was not part of the initial stable of writers, my first entry published Jan 31. As I remember it shortly thereafter they browbeat me into writing twice a month. I had a lot of hesitancy participating as I was uncertain I could keep up with the twice monthly writing requirements. I am...

/ January 1, 2013

780.6. What is a fever?

You can tell what a doctor does for a living by the ICD-9 codes they have memorized. There is an ICD-9 code for nearly every medical condition. Weightlessness is 994.9. Must be there for NASA, I have yet to see a weightless patient. Decapitation by guillotine is E978. There, I suppose, in case Marat returns from the dead. There is an ICD-9...

/ December 28, 2012

Why Do People turn to Alternative Medicine

Any sociological question is likely going to have a complex answer with many variables that are not easy to tease apart. We should therefore resist the temptation to make simplistic statements about X being the cause of Y. We can still, however, identify correlations that will at least inform our thinking. Sometimes correlations can be triangulated to fairly reliable conclusions. When the...

/ December 26, 2012

Fever Phobia

Should you be afraid of your child having a fever? It depends, but probably not.

/ December 21, 2012

Disingenuous: Deconstruction of a naturopathic white paper

Science is the Concept by which we measure our reality I don’t believe in magic I don’t believe in I-ching… I just believe in science…and that reality. John Lennon. Sort of. As regular readers of the blog are aware, I am science/reality based. I think the physical and basic sciences provide an excellent understanding of reality at the level of human experience....

/ December 14, 2012

Energy Medicine – Noise-Based Pseudoscience

So-called complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is largely philosophy-based medicine rather than science based. There are a few core concepts that are endlessly recycled in various forms, but it is mythology and culture, not grounded in the rigorous methods of science that allow us to tell the difference between our satisfying fantasies and hard reality. Sometimes proponents of such philosophies try to...

/ December 12, 2012

Support Science-Based Medicine

Next month is the 5 year anniversary of  Science-Based Medicine. We have published 1575 articles so far, with 72,400 comments. We are getting about 475,000 views per month, and SBM has attracted the attention of the mainstream media, government agencies, peer-reviewed journals, and even television and movie producers. Over the last five years we have endeavored to be a valuable resource for...

/ December 5, 2012

Fun With Statistics

Statistics is the essential foundation for science-based medicine.  Unfortunately, it’s a confusing subject that invites errors and misunderstandings.  We non-statisticians could all benefit from learning more about statistics as well as trying to get a better understanding of just how much we don’t know. Most of us are not going to read a statistics textbook, but the book Dicing with Death: Chance,...

/ December 4, 2012