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Oncologist Considers Heat-Based Cancer Treatment

There’s so much weird and exciting cancer news this week, it’s hard to keep up!

Double-kudos to Andrew Pollack on his front-page and careful coverage in the New York Times of the hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemotherapy (Hipec) technique that’s being used at some name-brand health care facilities to treat colon cancer.

First, he spares no detail in the Times describing the seemingly primitive, crude method:

….For hours on a recent morning at the University of California, San Diego, Dr. Andrew Lowy painstakingly performed the therapy on a patient.

After slicing the man’s belly wide open, Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Medical Lessons*

Consumer Reports Promotes Alternative Medicine With Questionable Research

Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve intermittently read Consumer Reports, relying on it for guidance in all manner of purchase decisions. CR has been known for rigorous testing of all manner of consumer products and the rating of various services, arriving at its rankings through a systematic testing method that, while not necessarily bulletproof, has been far more organized and consistent than most other ranking systems. True, I haven’t always agreed with CR’s rankings of products and services about which I know a lot, but at the very least CR has often made me think about how much of my assessments are based on objective measures and how much on subjective measures.

Until now.

I just saw something yesterday on the CR website that has made me wonder just how scientific CR’s testing methods are, as CR has apparently decided to promote alternative medicine modalities by “assessing” them in an utterly scientifically ignorant manner. Maybe I just haven’t been following CR regularly for a while, but if there’s an article that demonstrates exactly why consumer product testing organizations should not be testing medical treatments; they are ill-equipped to do so and lack the expertise and knowledge. The first red flag was the title, namely Hands-on, mind-body therapies beat supplements. The second red flag was the introduction to the article: Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Science-Based Medicine*

FDA-Approved Drugs Are Not Always Effective: The Benefits Of Alternative Medicine

St-Johns-wort

On Saturday, while thousands of Boston Bruins fans gathered at Government Center to celebrate the team’s recent Stanley Cup victory, a hundred or so true die-hards met a few blocks away at a Massachusetts General Hospital conference to talk about complementary and alternative medicine for psychiatric disorders. While I hated to miss the Bruins parade, I’m glad I attended the MGH conference.

I’ve always been a bit of a skeptic about so-called natural therapies for one simple reason: they don’t have to go through the same rigorous testing in clinical trials that medications do. At the same time, I realize that FDA-approved drugs don’t work for everyone. One in three adults with major depression, for example, can’t completely improve their mood and other symptoms even after trying multiple antidepressants.

Clearly, we need better options for treating mental health disorders. The MGH conference convinced me that some types of complementary and alternative medicine—or CAM, for short—might be worth trying. The presenters, all psychiatrists who treat patients at MGH, backed up their recommendations with scientific evidence. Several of them also contributed to the American Psychiatric Association’s recent report on CAM therapies.

We’ll be doing a story on CAM therapies for psychiatric disorders in an upcoming issue of the Harvard Mental Health Letter. For now, here are some things I learned on Saturday: Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Harvard Health Blog*

Very Few Herbal Remedies Work: Here Are 5 That May Be Useful

Montage of St. John's Wort, African Plum, Horse Chestnut, Red Yeast Rice, and Feverfew

Here at Skeptic North, we’ve often been a sharp critic of those herbal remedies that are unable to withstand the scrutiny of science. Yet nature does indeed house many pharmacologically active compounds, and it stands to reason that some of them will have medicinal value. So today, we’re going to turn the tables and look at 5 herbal remedies that have held up well in repeated studies and are generally regarded as effective.

1)  St. John’s Wort for Depression

If there’s one herbal medicine that consistently gets high marks for effectiveness, it’s St. John’s Wort as a treatment for mild depression. A 2008 Cochrane Review looked at 29 trials totaling over 5000 patients, including 18 comparisons with placebo and 17 comparisons with synthetic standard antidepressants, and found significant effects in both cases. The Natural Medicines Comprehensive Database indicates that St. John’s Wort is likely as effective as both first generation antidepressants (low-dose tricyclics) and the current generation of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors like Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Skeptic North » Erik Davis*

Press Release Contains Ridiculous Health Claim Of The Week

Every once in a while, a press release comes along that’s worth mocking publically. Here’s one of them.

In honor of National Mental Health Month, one PR flack pitched Philip Stein watches. In the flack’s words: “The highlighted element of the watch is the brand’s exclusive wellness technology that helps wearers improve sleep and reduce stress. The watch is embedded with a metal disk that emits natural frequencies into the body wearer and in turn, affects the wearer’s energy field. It’s called ‘Natural Frequency Technology’ and is a new patented technology studies suggest help to improve sleep quality and reduces stress.”

Really. That’s what the flack said. Right off the bat, he’s gone from mental health issues to sleepless nights from stress. Not content with confounding the two issues, he continues: “Dr. Jeff Gardere, America’s well-known psychologist, is Chief Medical Executive for Philip Stein Watches and had been running a practice for over 20 years. He recognized during that time that there was a huge need to educate the public on the possible severities of stress and everyday lifestyle changes that everyday people can make without a prescription. Dr. Gardere found a natural way to reduce stress and prescribed his patients with a high-end accessory Philip Stein Watch.”

The psychologist “prescribed” a watch. I wonder if my insurance company would pay for that scrip? Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

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How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

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Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

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The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

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Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

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