June 24th, 2010 by Harriet Hall, M.D. in Better Health Network, Health Policy, Opinion, Quackery Exposed, Research
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It’s boring to try to ferret out reliable health information from dry medical journals. It’s easier and more fun to watch a movie. A new movie promises to change the way you think about your health. To bring you breakthroughs that will transform your understanding of how to get well and stay well. To share the discoveries of leading researchers and health practitioners about miracle cures that traditional medicine can’t explain.
If this makes your baloney detector light up, good for you!
The Living Matrix: A Film on the New Science of Healing is an atrociously bad movie that falls squarely in the tradition of What the Bleep Do We Know? In his book Nonsense on Stilts, Massimo Pigliucci characterized the “Bleep” movie as “one of the most spectacular examples of a horribly tangled mess of science and nonsense,” and this new movie is more of the same. Bleep was just silly, but The Living Matrix is potentially dangerous because it might persuade patients to make poor decisions about their medical care. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Science-Based Medicine*
March 24th, 2010 by DrRob in Better Health Network, Health Tips, Opinion, Research
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Here’s some advice I have given teenage boys who are going toe-to-toe with their mothers about a health issue:
Don’t go toe-to-toe with your mother; it’s a no-win situation. Either you are right, and you are looked at as a “smarty-pants” or you are wrong, and have given her a huge “I told you so.” If, on the other hand, you keep quiet and listen to what she’s saying, it’s a win-win: either she’s right and you learn something, or she’s wrong, and you have been vindicated.
Fathers often pipe in that this applies to wives as well. Mom’s don’t seem to disagree (for some mysterious reason).
While this may be sound relational advice, it also needs to be heeded by the medical community in its relationship to “complimentary and alternative medicine” or CAM. I am not saying we shouldn’t be angry and frustrated with the CAM purveyors who are harming and even killing people (such as the anti-vaccine movement). I am not saying that we should embrace CAM and put it at anywhere near equal footing with our profession. What I am saying is that in our enthusiasm to win the argument, we can undermine our own credibility. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Musings of a Distractible Mind*
