Results for: placebo
Cochrane Reviews: The Food Babe of Medicine?
There are two topics about which I know a fair amount. The first is Infectious Disease. I am expert in ID, Board Certified and certified bored, by the ABIM. The other, although to a lesser extent, is SCAMs. When I read the literature on these topics, I do so with extensive knowledge and, in the case of ID, 30 years of clinical...
How “they” view “us”
We skeptics like to view ourselves as the heroes, as the ones beating back the tide of pseudoscience and protecting the gullible from quacks. Unfortunately, the very victims whom we seek to save don't see it that way. To them, we are the villains, and they hate us. To all too many of them, almost any means are justifiable to combat us....
Naturopathy vs. Science: Vaccination Edition
We saw it coming. The re-emergence of vaccine-preventable disease should surprise no-one that’s been following the anti-vaccine movement. Rebutting anti-vaccine rhetoric feels like a Sisyphean struggle. Steven Novella likened it to a game of whack-a-mole, where the moles are the same old tropes that keep popping up, no matter how often they are refuted with facts. Vaccines are a remarkable success of...
Curing Hepatitis C: A Success Story and a Price Tag
Previously incurable, hepatitis C now has a treatment. A very, very expensive treatment. But there is hope for acutely and chronically infected people.
Gluten-free skin and beauty products: Extracting cash from the gullible
Gluten-free doesn't make sense for a lot of diets. Except for lip balm and toothpaste, it makes an order of magnitude less sense for beauty products.
Moxibustion
Moxibustion is the burning of mugwort close to, or sometimes into, the skin. Does it work? No. Why do people use it? Because it's old.
Another Damning Homeopathy Report
What will it take? That is the lingering question, one that has significant implications for the legitimacy and effectiveness of our professional and regulatory institutions. Homeopathy is 100% pure nonsense. It is one of the so-called “alternative” medical systems that has absolutely no basis in reality. It is magic-based medicine. It is based on two-centuries-old pre-scientific ideas, bad guesses that turned out...
Hickey: On Cupping.
Always start with an excuse. I have been ill for the last 10 days. I suspect I picked up an infection from the woman I slept with in Vegas.* I normally go through the day at warp 5 (I do not want to destroy space-time), but this illness has reduced my mental functioning in the evening to one-half impulse at best, with...
Chiropractic: A Summary of Concerns
Although obscured by controversy, there is evidence to indicate that spinal manipulation can be as effective as conventional treatment methods in relieving low-back pain.1,2,3,4 This grain of truth mixed with chiropractic vertebral subluxation theory that encompasses a broad scope of ailments makes it difficult for the average person to distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate use of manipulation by chiropractors. A person who...
An Update on Water Immersion During Labor and Delivery
Science Based Medicine last covered the increasingly common practice of laboring while immersed in water, in many cases followed by delivering the baby while still submerged, a little over four years ago. In that post, Dr. Amy Tuteur focused primarily on the contamination of the water with a variety of potentially pathogenic bacteria and the associated risk of infection. She also touched...