Chaperones Needed. On acupuncture.
I receive a monthly newsletter from my medical board. Among other issues discussed are the results of disciplinary actions for physicians. Occasionally a physician who has boundary issues is required to have a chaperone present when doing exams. I was thinking that the concept of a chaperone could be more widely applicable. Consider “You Docs: Amazing acupuncture,” the latest from Drs Oz...
Yahoo News spews NaturalNews anti-vaccine (and other) propaganda
Yahoo News appears to have confused NaturalNews with actual news. It’s not. NaturalNews is the in-house propaganda organ for Mike Adams, whom I’ll introduce in a minute (although he needs no introduction for most readers here). A couple of recent examples: A recycled story, over a year old, from NaturalNews, appearing on Yahoo News last week. It starts out as...
Brain Research in the 21st Century
In April 2013 President Obama announced the BRAIN initiative – Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies – committing 100 million dollars to brain research. The goal of this initiative is to accomplish with the brain what the Human Genome Project accomplished with the human genome. The BRAIN project came after a similar, and larger, initiative in Europe – the European Union’s Human...
K2: The Vitamin, Not the Mountain
Science is complicated. Simple concepts that appear at first to be obviously true or untrue usually turn out to be more nuanced than we thought. Newtonian physics was taken as “the truth” until we learned in the 20th century that it didn’t apply on cosmological or subatomic scales. Medicine and human physiology are more complicated than most people realize or want to...
Quackademia update: The Cleveland Clinic, George Washington University, and the continued infiltration of quackery into medical academia
Quackery has been steadily infiltrating academic medicine for at least two decades now in the form of what was once called “complementary and alternative medicine” but is now more commonly referred to as “integrative medicine.” Of course, as I’ve written many times before, what “integrative medicine” really means is the “integration” of quackery with science- and evidence-based medicine, to the detriment of...
Hiccups: From Acupuncture to Quantum Touch
nOne of the most common questions I get in the newborn nursery, especially from first time parents, involves hiccups. Babies hiccup in the womb and most, if not all of them, will have periodic bouts of hiccups in the neonatal period. But many new parents are surprised by their baby’s first spasmodic contractions of the diaphragm. When brought up, it is often...
If you don’t buy this supplement for your child, you’re a terrible parent
The supplement industry wants you to buy their products, and they’re not above using a little parental guilt to make you into a customer. In the photo above, the promoter is my local pharmacy, where the large window display caught my eye: Give your Child The Tools to SUCCEED in School! Who doesn’t want their child to succeed? And if you knew...
“Mystery” Illness in Colombia
It looks like we can file this one under “here we go again.” A small town in Colombia, El Carmen de Bolivar, has seen more than 200 girls hospitalized with a mysterious illness since May of this year. The symptoms include dizziness, headaches, and fainting. So far, all of the girls hospitalized have been found to be healthy and were quickly released...
Bad News and Good News from Down Under: Science-Based Medicine in Australia
The bad news: in a disturbing attempt to woo customers, some Australian pharmacists are offering in-store consultations with naturopaths. The good news: Australian skeptics and supporters of science have had a lot of recent successes in combatting quackery. Non-Doc in a Box In an article in the Australian magazine The Skeptic, Loretta Marron reports on naturopaths in pharmacies. You can read it...
Do doctors pay attention to negative randomized clinical trials?
We at the Science-Based Medicine blog believe that all medicine, regardless of where it comes from, should be held to a single science-based standard with regards to efficacy, effectiveness, and safety. We tend to focus primarily on “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), now more commonly known as “integrative medicine,” because (1) we believe it to be undermining the scientific basis of medicine...