Respectful Insolence
Search Results for nccam
NCCAM and “pragmatic trials.” Again.
Posted by Orac on May 14, 2013 I’m not alone in pointing this out, but if there’s one thing about research and clinical trials into “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) that has become very apparent to me over the years, it’s that the more rigorous the study the less likely it is to show an effect. In normal research, the usual progression…
Politics versus scientific peer review
Posted by Orac on May 3, 2013 In the United States, the federal government has long had a prominent role in funding science research. Be it the $30 billion a year or so that funds the National Institutes of Health or the $5 or $6 billion a year allotted to the National Science Foundation, the government funds a lot of basic and…
In which Orac gets even more “shrill and brutish” about chelation therapy and TACT
Posted by Orac on April 10, 2013 If there’s one thing that a certain subset of people who view themselves as reasonable and science-based don’t like, it’s harshness: Harshness in criticism, harshness in discussion, or—horror of horrors!—anything they view as “incivility.” That’s all well and good as far as it goes, but the problem is that sometimes there are things that demand…
Criticizing the Trial to Asess Chelation Therapy (TACT) is defending science-based medicine
Posted by Orac on March 28, 2013 When I wrote about the Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy (TACT) trial last week, little did I suspect that I would be revisiting the topic again so soon. For those of you not familiar with TACT, it was a trial designed to test a favorite quack treatment for cardiovascular disease, chelation therapy. It is, as…
A founding father of quackademic medicine speaks
Posted by Orac on March 27, 2013 It’s been a while since I’ve written about Brian Berman. We first met him when he somehow managed to insinuate a “case report” of chronic low back pain into The New England Journal of Medicine in which he recommended acupuncture for this patient. Dr. Berman also happens to be a founder of quackademic medicine on…
The author of the acupuncture meta-analysis lambastes the “sceptics’ movement” in a “peer-reviewed” paper
Posted by Orac on March 8, 2013 So I finally made it to the Society of Surgical Oncology Annual Symposium. Thanks to the snowstorm that apparently wasn’t (at least, I don’t see any snow around), my arrival was delayed by a day, as all flights to the Washington, DC area were canceled on Wednesday. But I did finally get here, and, although…
Dr. Oz’s journey to the Dark Side is now more than complete: It’s Oz and homeopathy versus science-based medicine
Posted by Orac on January 30, 2013 On Monday of this week, Michael Specter published an article in The New Yorker entitled THE OPERATOR: Is the most trusted doctor in America doing more harm than good? In the article, Specter expended considerable verbiage that, as I explained yesterday, was beautiful in how it let Oz reveal through his own words that (1)…
Homeopaths swing and miss yet again…
Posted by Orac on December 31, 2012 Homeopathy amuses me. Homeopaths amuse me as well, which is why I’m resurrecting this post. It was originally published elsewhere a few years ago and somehow never crossposted here. So if it seems a bit dated, fear not; Orac hasn’t fired up his Tarial cells and managed to go back in time. Now, I realize…
Just how stupid do homeopaths think we are?
Posted by Orac on December 17, 2012 I realize that I’ve said it many times before, but it bears repeating. Homeopathy is the perfect quackery. The reason that homeopathy is so perfect as a form of quackery is because it is quite literally nothing. On second thought, I suppose that it’s not exactly nothing. It is, after all, water or whatever other…
Quackademic medicine involving reflexology
Posted by Orac on November 27, 2012 Reflexology is quackery. It’s based on magical thinking that views every major organ in the body as somehow mappable to specific points on the soles of the feet or the palms of the hands and posits that somehow massaging these areas can have therapeutic effects on the organs in question. Claims regularly made for reflexology…
Representative Dan Burton’s last antivaccine hurrah is scheduled for November 29
Posted by Orac on November 23, 2012 Whenever I blog about atrocities against science like the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), I’m frequently asked how just such an edifice designed to promote pseudoscience could have come to be as a full-fledged center in the National Institutes of Health. The answer is simple and boils down to woo-loving legislators. In…
The “success” of NCCAM grants on homeopathy
Posted by Orac on November 19, 2012 One of the great benefits of having been a blogger for nearly eight years now is that I now have a rich history of thousands of posts. True, there are the occasional posts that I wish I hadn’t written and even the occasional post that I consider to be not particularly good, but for the…
The results of the unethical and misbegotten Trial to Asess Chelation Therapy (TACT) are finally revealed
Posted by Orac on November 5, 2012 Chelation therapy, in my somewhat Insolent opinion, is pure quackery. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the most common quackeries out there, used by a wide variety of practitioners for a wide variety of ailments blamed on “heavy metal toxicity.” Chelation therapy involves using chemicals that can bind to the metal ions and allow them to…
What is the role of NCCAM at the NIH? Dr. Killen tries to explain.
Posted by Orac on November 1, 2012 I’d like to publicly thank Dr. John Killen, Jr. I was looking for something to write about yesterday evening, and, just when I was beginning to despair that I might have to do another post on the lunacy that is antivaccine nonsense (even I get tired of taking on antivaccine idiocy, as regular readers know),…
American Academy of Family Physicians embraces quackademic medicine
Posted by Orac on October 15, 2012 In a week and a half, Harriet Hall, Kimball Atwood, and I will be joining Eugenie C. Scott at CSICon to do a session entitled Teaching Pseudoscience in Medical (and Other) Schools. As you might imagine, we will be discussing the infiltration of pseudoscience into medical academia and medical training, a phenomenon I frequently refer…
Our pharma overlords will be displeased…
Posted by Orac on September 27, 2012 There’s an oft-quoted saying that’s become a bit of a cliché among skeptics that goes something like this: There are two kinds of medicine: medicine that’s been proven scientifically to work, and medicine that hasn’t. This is then often followed up with a rhetorical question and its answer: What do call “alternative medicine” that’s been…
Overselling preclinical results
Posted by Orac on September 17, 2012 As part of my ongoing effort to make sure that I never run out of blogging material, I subscribe to a number of quack e-mail newsletters. In fact, sometimes I think I’ve probably overdone it. Every day, I get several notices and pleas from various wretched hives of scum and quackery, such as NaturalNews.com, Mercola.com,…
Can we finally just say that acupuncture is nothing more than an elaborate placebo? Can we? (2012 edition)
Posted by Orac on September 12, 2012 I sense a disturbance in the skeptical blogosphere. It is something that I half-expected, but, even so, it nonetheless somewhat surprised me when it arrived in the form of comments on my blog and e-mails from readers, fellow supporters of science-based medicine, and others asking me what I thought. In a way, it makes me…
The director and deputy director of NCCAM pontificate about “scientific plausibility”
Posted by Orac on September 11, 2012 One of the overarching issues, if not the overarching issue that makes so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM)—or, as it’s now more commonly called, “integrative medicine”—so problematic is prior plausibility. It’s also one of the most difficult to explain to the lay public, because to someone not trained in science it can sound like not…
Oh, goody. NCCAM has a blog.
Posted by Orac on June 20, 2012 Oh, goody. I don’t know how I’ve missed this, given that it’s been in existence now for over a month now, but I have. Regular readers (and even fairly recent readers, given that I write about this topic relatively frequently) know that I’m not a big fan of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative…
A quackfest at the University of Toronto
Posted by Orac on May 29, 2012 I always thought that the University of Toronto was a great school, but lately I’ve been starting to have my doubts. My doubts began three years ago, when I noticed that Autism One Canada, which is basically the Canadian version of the yearly antivaccine biomedical quackfest held every Memorial Day week in the Chicago area,…
Supplements: Not mystical anticancer magic
Posted by Orac on May 8, 2012 It’s no secret that over the years I’ve been very critical of a law passed nearly 20 years ago, commonly referred to as the DSHEA of 1994. The abbreviation DSHEA stands for about as Orwellian a name for a law as I can imagine: the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act. Of course, as we’ve…
NCCAM: I say we take off and nuke the entire center from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
Posted by Orac on May 3, 2012 Over the years that this blog has been in existence, beginning very early on, there has been one overarching theme. That theme is that the best medicine is science-based medicine. Sure, we could quibble about how that was originally defined, and I used to be more of a booster of evidence-based medicine until its blind…
Dan Burton’s last antivaccine hurrah?
Posted by Orac on April 26, 2012 A couple of months ago, I couldn’t help but rejoice when I learned that Indiana Representative Dan Burton had finally, after twenty years in the U.S. House of Representatives, decided to retire after the end of this term. I thought that anyone in the U.S. who supports science-based medicine should rejoice, too, because I’m hard-pressed…
Dr. Oz promotes quackery…again
Posted by Orac on April 4, 2012 Note: Today’s a travel day. I’m driving home from the AACR. As a result, I decided to post something that appeared elsewhere, doing a quick edit to make it a bit more “insolent.” I realize that since the show I discuss aired an episode during which he featured a psychic medium in a segment called…