Results for: Bravewell
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...
Stop Making Sense
I usually rely on the Secret. Every two weeks or so the Universe offers up some bit of wacky whimsey and I have a topic for an SBM blog entry. This week the Universe has failed me. Nothing has crossed my LCD so I have no studies to evaluate and I have been unusually busy at work preventing my browsing the Interwebs...
Keeping the customer satisfied
These days patient satisfaction is becoming more and more important in judging how well hospitals and physicians are doing. Indeed, Medicare reimbursements are linked in part to a patient satisfaction survey administered by the government. The underlying assumption is that patient satisfaction correlates with high quality care, But is that true? I have my doubts. Indeed, there is evidence that, at best,...
A surprising article about “integrative” medicine in The New England Journal of Medicine vs. “patient-centered” care
The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) is published on Thursdays. I mention this because this is one of the rare times where my owning Mondays on this blog tends to be a rather large advantage. Fridays are rotated between two or three different bloggers, and, as awesome as they are as writers, bloggers, and friends, they don’t possess the rabbit-like speed...
The Marino Center for Integrative Health: Hooey Galore
Two weeks ago I promised that I would discuss the Marino Center for Integrative Health, identified in the recent Bravewell report as having a “hospital affiliation” with the Newton-Wellesley Hospital (NWH) in Newton, Massachusetts, which is where I work. I also promised in that post that I’d provide examples of ‘integrative medicine’ practitioners offering false information about the methods that they endorse. I’d...
Dr. Oz revisited
We here at SBM have been very critical of Dr. Mehmet Oz, who through his relentless self-promotion (and with more than a little help from his patron Oprah Winfrey) has somehow become known as “America’s doctor.” Back in the early days, when he was the regular medical expert on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Dr. Oz was at least tolerable. Much of what...
Informed Consent and CAM: Truth Not Optional
In three recent posts, Drs. Novella, Gorski and Atwood took the Bravewell Collaborative to task over a report on its recent survey of U.S. “integrative medicine” centers. As Dr. Novella noted, So what is integrative medicine? When you strip away the rebranding and co-opting of features and treatments of mainstream medicine, you are left with the usual list of pseudoscientific practices that...
Adventures in defending science-based medicine in cancer journals: Energy chelation
My co-bloggers and I have spent considerable time and effort over the last four years writing posts for this blog (and I for my not-so-super-secret other blog) bemoaning the infiltration of quackademic medicine into what once were bastions of evidence- and science-based medicine. We’ve discussed at considerable length reasons for why this steady infiltration of pseudoscience into medical academia has been occurring....
Integrative Medicine: “Patient-Centered Care” is the new Medical Paternalism
Integrative Pitchmen Several of us have written about how contemporary quacks have artfully pitched their wares to a higherbrow market than their predecessors were accustomed to, back in the day. Through clever packaging,* quacks today can reasonably hope to become professors at prestigious medical schools, to control and receive substantial grant money from the NIH, to preside over reviews for the Cochrane...
Survey says, “Hop on the bandwagon of ‘integrative medicine’!”
A Brief Clinical Vignette In researching this post, I found an article published nearly two years ago in The Hospitalist entitled Growth Spurt: Complementary and alternative medicine use doubles, which began with this anecdote: Despite intravenous medication, a young boy in status epilepticus had the pediatric ICU team at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison stumped....