Results for: Bravewell
How SHOULD We Discuss Quackery with Innocents and the Not-so-Innocent?
Recents posts by Drs. Albietz and Gorski have highlighted questions that are recurrent on SBM. We are convinced that medicine should be based on real knowledge, to the extent that it exists, and that physicians should be honest; these are matters of science and ethics. How do we reconcile that with heartfelt, if misguided beliefs of patients, their families, and others? When Dr. Albietz...
“Urban Zen” and homeopathy at Beth Israel Medical Center, or: Dr. Gorski destroys his chances of ever being invited to join the faculty at BIMC or the Albert Einstein College of Medicine
I guess I never really wanted to work in Manhattan anyway. At least, that’s what I keep telling myself. I mean, why on earth would I want to? What’s the attraction? Living in the heart of it all, all those shows and all those amazing cultural activities, all those world-class restaurants? Being close to Boston, Philadelphia, and other cool East Coast cities,...
Resistance is futile? Hell, no! (A call to arms)
Well, I won’t back down No, I won’t back down You can stand me up at the gates of hell But I won’t back down Gonna stand my ground Won’t be turned around And I’ll keep this world from draggin’ me down Gonna stand my ground And I won’t back down From “I Won’t Back Down” by Tom Petty, 1989 This week,...
Science, Reason, Ethics, and Modern Medicine, Part 2: the Tortured Logic of David Katz
In Part 1 of this series* I asserted that a physician’s primary ethical responsibility is to honesty and integrity, which in turn must be largely based on science and reason (I apologize if that sounded preachy; if there had been more time I might have couched it in more congenial terms). I mentioned the fallacious reasoning whereby proponents of implausible medical claims (IMC) point to real and...
Resistance is futile
Dr. Sampson’s droll post on Thursday written from the point of view of an advocate of unscientific “alternative” medicine modalites (these days known as “complementary and alternative medicine”–abbreviated “CAM”–or “integrative” medicine), coupled with Dr. Atwood’s most recent contribution to his ongoing series on how the mish-mash of a little valid herbal medicine mixed with a whole lot of woo otherwise known as...
The Trojan Horses of Education
Last time I described what I could find about the “Quiet Revolution” plan for medicine through the eyes and minds of the Bravewell Collaborative and Christy Mack, wife of the multi-millionaire or billionaire CEO John Mack. The idea seemed two-pronged; “humanize” physicians and medicine generally, and integrate folkway, sectarian and “alternative” methods into the system. What bothered me more, having become inured...
Integrative Medicine – Sectarians’ Trojan Horse
Integrative Medicine – Sectarians’ Trojan Horse leapfrogs science (Or, I can misuse language with the best of them…) I stumbled across an article from Archives of Internal Medicine, 2002 (Integrative Medicine: Bringing medicine back to its roots. Arch Intern Med. 2002 Feb 25;162(4):395-7). It is one of the first authored by Andrew Weil on “Integrative Medicine “ – another is BMJ in...
The Weekly Waluation of the Weasel Words of Woo #4
That’s What I’m Talkin’ ’bout! The new single-paragraph paradigm for the W^5/2 seems to have worked: there were 13 Waluations for the paragraph submitted in W^5/2 #3, every one of ’em good. Several themes emerged; I’ll discuss them in no particular order. When did you stop beating your wife? The passage charges that the “biomedical model,” by which is apparently meant modern medicine, does...
Charlie Woo TV
Some of us received the announcement a week ago of the Bravewell Collaborative’s planned conference on “Integrative Medicine” co-sponsored with the National Academies’ Institute of Medicine, to take place in February, 2009. (Note: I like to cap slogans and commercial trademarks and such and enclose them in quotation marks. Especially when the terms have no consensus meaning or are intended to obscure...
How Can Smart People Be So Stupid?
This is a quick posting that begins to respond to the question posted today by Joe: What I don’t understand is why the majority of doctors at Columbia did not say “This is obvious abuse of patients, and it will not be tolerated here.” Given his richly-deserved malpractice record, why was [Gonzalez] even associated with Columbia? David Gorski answered it in part:...