WHO Statement on Reporting Clinical Trials
The World Health Organization (WHO) has recently released a new position statement on mandatory reporting of all interventional clinical trials. This is a positive step in the trend towards higher quality and greater transparency in clinical trials. The underlying ethical concept here is that the public has a right to data that results from experimentation on humans. The researchers do not ethically...
Cancer Centers and Advertising Practices
You have probably seen the TV commercials or other ads for Cancer Treatment Centers of America. They make it sound like “the place to go” if you have cancer. They claim to be “different,” to combine the best cancer technologies with natural therapies in a humane, patient-centered approach that helps you fight the disease and maintain your quality of life. They offer...
The Wild West: Tales of a Naturopathic Ethical Review Board
In Arizona, a naturopathic institutional review board has been set up to examine the ethics of naturopathic research projects. It's going about as well as naturopathic training and practice.
March Madness: Basketball, Brackets and Psi! Oh my!
In 2011, psychologist Daryl Bem published a highly controversial series of nine experiments designed to tease out the potential existence of precognition, the ability to experience future events. In order to isolate the potential influence of future events on the present, Bem’s experimental design reversed the standard order of psychological investigations. In one experiment, for example, subjects were allowed to practice with...
Wikipedia vs Quackery – Standards vs Chaos
Wikipedia, an online open-source encyclopedia, can boast 470 million visitors each month, making it one of the most popular websites on the internet. It is an incredibly useful resource – I think it’s fair to say it is the online reference of record. For that reason people care how topics important to them are represented in Wikipedia. Wikipedia, in fact, has become...
Healthy Habits Global: Spreading False Information about an MLM Coffee with Herbal Additives
When my husband was helping a friend with a project at the house of someone he didn’t know, the lady of the house gave him an earful about the health benefits of the coffee sold by Healthy Habits Global (HHG), a multilevel marketing (MLM) enterprise for which she is a distributor. She sent him home with samples and a brochure with a...
Integrative medicine, naturopathy, and David Katz’s “more fluid concept of evidence”
Dr. David Katz is undoubtedly a heavy hitter in the brave new world of “integrative medicine,” a specialty that seeks to “integrate” pseudoscience with science, nonsense, with sense, and quackery with real medicine. In fairness, that’s not the way physicians like Dr. Katz see it. Rather, they see it as “integrating” the “best of both worlds” to the benefit of patients. However,...
FDA and Homeopathy: Part Two.
Friends, FDA, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Homeopathy, not to praise it. The evil that homeopaths do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones; So let it be with Homeopathy. The noble Ullman Hath told you homeopathy was effective: If it were so, it was a grievous fault, And grievously hath Homeopathy answer’d it....
How should the FDA regulate homeopathic remedies?
The FDA announced recently that it is holding a public hearing on April 21 and 22, to obtain information and comments from stakeholders about the current use of human drug and biological products labeled as homeopathic, as well as the Agency’s regulatory framework for such products. These products include prescription drugs and biological products labeled as homeopathic and over-the-counter (OTC) drugs labeled...
Don’t Blame the Patient