Results for: abstract
Placebos as Medicine: The Ethics of Homeopathy
Is it ever ethical to provide a placebo treatment? What about when that placebo is homeopathy? Last month I blogged about the frequency of placebo prescribing by physicians. I admitted my personal discomfort, stating I’d refuse to dispense any prescription that would require me to deceive the patient. The discussion continued in the comments, where opinions seemed to range from (I’m paraphrasing) ...
Black Cohosh and Hot Flashes
Black Cohosh, an herbal “supplement” (i.e. unregulated drug) remains popular for the treatment of hot flashes and other autonomic symptoms resulting from menopause. This product is yet another good example of the double standard that the supplement industry and ideological promoters are allowed to employ. The NCCAM website gives this summary: Black cohosh, a member of the buttercup family, is a plant...
Ambiguity
Some people have made the mistake of seeing Shunt’s work as a load of rubbish about railway timetables, but clever people like me, who talk loudly in restaurants, see this as a deliberate ambiguity, a plea for understanding in a mechanized world. The points are frozen, the beast is dead. What is the difference? What indeed is the point? The point is...
Smallpox and Pseudomedicine
A good case of smallpox may rid the system of more scrofulous, tubercular, syphilitic and other poisons than could otherwise be eliminated in a lifetime. Therefore, smallpox is certainly to be preferred to vaccination. The one means elimination of chronic disease, the other the making of it. Naturopaths do not believe in artificial immunization . . . —Harry Riley Spitler, Basic Naturopathy:...
Oil of Oregano
Paradoxically, the less evidence that exists to support the use of of a treatment, the more passionate its supporters seem to be. I learned this early in my career as a pharmacist. One pharmacy I worked at did a steady business in essential oils. And king of the oils was oil of oregano. Not only were there several different brands of the...
The Top Ten Pet Supplements: Do They Work?
An Embarrassment of Riches? Much has been written here about the dietary supplement business, a multibillion dollar industry with powerful political connections, and about the woeful inadequacy of regulation which allows widespread marketing of supplements without a solid basis in science or scientific evidence. The veterinary supplement market is a pittance compared to the human market, but still a billion-dollar pittance that...
Delusional Parasitosis
A new study looks into the disorder known as delusional parasitosis, which many dermatologists believe is the true diagnosis behind the controversial disorder called Morgellon’s disease. Morgellons is a controversial disorder because many patients with symptoms believe they are being infected by an unusual organism, causing excessive itching, but no offending organism has been found. Some patients claim they have strange fibers...
Fungus yields new prescription drug for multiple sclerosis
The following post appeared earlier this week at my Chemical & Engineering News CENtral Science blog, Terra Sigillata. For some odd reason – perhaps this week’s frantic academic schedule of commencement activities – it was not highly read there. I thought that our Science-Based Medicine readers would appreciate it because this new prescription drug is derived from a family of fungi that...
Autism Prevalence Higher than Thought
Crossposted from NeuroLogica Blog Over the last 20 years the prevalence of autism (now part of autism spectrum disorder, ASD) has been increasing. The medical community is largely agreed that this increase is mostly due to expanding the diagnostic category and greater efforts at surveillance. There remains some controversy over whether or not these factors explain all of the measured increase, or...
Vaccines and infant mortality rates: A false relationship promoted by the anti-vaccine movement
The anti-vaccine movement is a frequent topic on the Science-Based Medicine blog. There are a number of reasons for this, not the least of which being that the anti-vaccine movement is one of the most dangerous forms of pseudoscience, a form of quackery that, unlike most forms of quackery, endangers those who do not partake of it by breaking down herd immunity...