April 17th, 2010 by David H. Gorski, M.D., Ph.D. in Announcements, Better Health Network, Health Policy, Medblogger Shout Outs, Opinion, Quackery Exposed, Research
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One advantage of having a blog is that I can sometimes tap into the knowledge of my readers to help me out.
As many readers know, a few of the SBM bloggers (myself included) will be appearing at the Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism (NECSS) today (Saturday, April 17). Since the topic of our panel discussion is going to be the infiltration of quackademic medicine into medical academia, I thought that now would be a very good time for me to update my list of medical schools and academic medical centers in the U.S. and Canada that have embraced (or at least decided to tolerate) quackademic medicine in their midst. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Science-Based Medicine*
April 8th, 2010 by David H. Gorski, M.D., Ph.D. in Better Health Network, Opinion, Research
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One of the things about science-based medicine that makes it so fascinating is that it encompasses such a wide variety of modalities that it takes a similarly wide variety of science and scientific techniques to investigate various diseases. Some medical disciplines consist of mainly of problems that are relatively straightforward to study. Don’t get me wrong, though. By “straightforward” I don’t mean that they’re easy, simply that the experimental design of a clinical trial to test a treatment is fairly easily encompassed by the paradigm of randomized clinical trials.
Medical oncology is just one example, where new drugs can be tested in randomized, double-blinded trials against or in addition to the standard of care without having to account for many difficulties that arise from difficulties blinding. We’ve discussed such difficulties before, for instance, in the context of constructing adequate placebos for acupuncture trials.
Indeed, this topic is critical to the application of science-based medicine to various “complementary and alternative medicine” modalities, which do not as easily lend themselves to randomized double-blind placebo-controlled trials, although I would hasten to point out that, just because it can be very difficult to do such trials is not an excuse for not doing them. The development of various “sham acupuncture” controls, one of which consisted even of just twirling a toothpick gently poked onto the skin, shows that.
One area of medicine where it is difficult to construct randomized controlled trials is surgery. The reasons are multiple. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Science-Based Medicine*
March 11th, 2010 by David H. Gorski, M.D., Ph.D. in Announcements, Better Health Network
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It’s been a rather eventful week here at Science-Based Medicine. I apologize that I don’t have one of my usual 4,000 word epics ready for this week. I was occupied all day Saturday at a conference at which I had to give a talk, and Dr. Tuteur’s departure produced another issue that I had to deal with. Fortunately, because Dr. Lipson is scheduled to do an extra post today, I feel less guilty about not producing my usual logorrhea. Who knows? Maybe it will be a relief to our readers too.
This confluence of events makes this a good time to take a break to take care of some blog business and make formal what I alluded to on Thursday in the comments after I announced Dr. Tuteur’s departure, namely that it’s time for us at SBM to start recruiting. Our purpose in recruiting will be to make this blog even better than it is already. We have an absolutely fantastic group of bloggers here, and it is due to their hard work and talent that SBM has become a force to be reckoned with in the medical blogosphere. Our traffic continues to grow, and reporters and even on occasion governmental officials have taken notice. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Science-Based Medicine*
December 5th, 2009 by David H. Gorski, M.D., Ph.D. in Announcements, Better Health Network
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I’ve been writing about the attempts of proponents of various pseudoscience, quackery, and faith-based religious “healing” modalities to slip provisions friendly to their interests into the health care reform bill that is being debated in the Senate. If you want to know what’s at stake, check out the first press release of a newly formed institute designed to promote science-based medicine in academia and public policy, the Institute for Science in Medicine.
It’s an embryonic institute, only recently formed by 42 physicians and scientists, several of whose names will be quite familiar to regular readers of SBM, but it’s jumping right into the fray. This is what the ISM is: Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Science-Based Medicine*
October 8th, 2009 by David H. Gorski, M.D., Ph.D. in Better Health Network, News, Quackery Exposed
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One of the major themes of the Science-Based Medicine blog has been to combat one flavor of anti-SBM movement that believes, despite all the evidence otherwise, that vaccines cause autism and that autism can be reversed with all sorts of “biomedical” quackery. Many (but by no means all) of these so-called “biomedical” treatments are based on the false view that vaccines somehow caused autism. I and my fellow SBM bloggers have expended huge quantities of verbiage refuting the pseudoscience, misinformation, and outright lies regularly spread by various anti-vaccine groups and two celebrities in particular, namely Jenny McCarthy and her boyfriend Jim Carrey. Most of the time, we discuss these issues in terms of the harm to public health that is done by falling vaccination rates due to the fear engendered by the message of the anti-vaccine movement and the threat of the return of vaccine-preventable diseases that once wreaked havoc among children.
There is another price, however. There is a price that is paid by autistic children themselves and their parents. It is a price paid in money and lost time. It is a price paid in being subjected to treatments that are highly implausible from a scientific standpoint and for which there is no good scientific evidence. It is a price that can result in bankruptcy, suffering, and, yes, even death. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Science-Based Medicine*
