Clinical trials
Respectful Insolence
Category archives for Clinical trials
“Natural” versus CAM “natural”
Posted by Orac on August 15, 2011 NOTE: I was on a lovely vacation for three days in Chicago over the weekend, where I visited old haunts. (Bathroom attendants? At one of my favorite pub hangouts when I lived in Lincoln Park, John Barleycorn? Handing out crappy brown paper towels? Plastering the walls there with endless rows of flat screen TVs turned…
Scientific fraud and journal article retractions
Posted by Orac on August 12, 2011 A week ago, I took someone who has normally been a hero of mine, Brian Deer, to task for what I considered to be a seriously cheap shot at scientists based on no hard data, at least no hard data that he bothered to present. To make a long, Orac-ian magnum opus short, Deer advocated…
More evidence for the effectiveness of vaccines
Posted by Orac on July 26, 2011 Yesterday, I wrote about how two anti-vaccine activists, Barbara Loe Fisher and Joe Mercola, were unhappy that bloggers targeted their advertisement that they put on the CBS Times Square JumboTron for a letter-writing campaign to try to persuade CBS Outdoors to do the right thing and stop selling ad time to groups who promote a…
Dangerous placebo medicine for asthma
Posted by Orac on July 18, 2011 Note: I just got back from TAM; so if you happened to see a different version of this post somewhere else, now you know why. Last week while I was at TAM, a study appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). It is another beautiful example of how proponents of complementary and alternative…
Dr. Egnor has his own blog now. Hilarity ensues about evolution and medicine.
Posted by Orac on June 24, 2011 Remember Michael Egnor? I bet many of you do. If you were reading this blog three or four years ago, Dr. Egnor was a fairly regular target topic of my excretions of not-so-Respectful Insolence. The reason for that was, at the time, I was quite annoyed that a fellow surgeon could so regularly lay down…
Stepping back: Lies, damned lies, and…science-based medicine?
Posted by Orac on June 20, 2011 Note: Grant writing ruled again this weekend; so I took this post, which first appeared elsewhere, and decided to revise and repost it. It seems appropriate, given what I’ve been discussing lately. Enjoy, and hopefully there’ll be something new tomorrow.. I’ve been complaining a lot about a certain journalist lately, specifically one named David Freedman.…
Damn those microfascists demanding evidence-based medicine!
Posted by Orac on June 13, 2011 Orac note: Grant season is in full swing, and that’s what I spent my weekend doing: writing grants. Consequently, here’s a rerun from, hard as it is to believe, four and a half years ago. It’s the first appearance of one of the most hilarious “alt-med” attacks on science-based medicine I’ve ever seen, calling us…
Dr. Andrew Weil versus evidence-based medicine
Posted by Orac on May 23, 2011 Let’s face it, Dr. Andrew Weil is a rock star in the “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) and “integrative medicine” (IM) movement. He is one of its founders, at least a founder of the its most modern iteration, and I am hard-pressed to think of anyone who did more in the early days of the…
Still more evidence that Morgellons disease is most likely delusional parasitosis
Posted by Orac on May 18, 2011 One of the stranger Internet-based quackery phenomena of the last decade is Morgellon’s disease. This is a topic I haven’t visited that much on this blog, its having last come up in a big way a little more than a year ago, when I discussed it in the context of Dr. Rolando Arafiles and the…
The DCA zombie arises again
Posted by Orac on May 16, 2011 Remember dichloroacetate, also known as DCA? This is a relatively simple compound that showed promise in rodent models of cancer four years ago, leading to an Internet meme that “scientists cure cancer, but no one notices.” It also lead to scammers trying to take advantage of desperately ill cancer patients. The whole sordid story is…
More dubious moral reasoning from animal rights activists
Posted by Orac on March 15, 2011 Yesterday, I did a post about ethics in human experimentation. The reason I mention that is because in the comments, a commenter named Paul pointed out an editorial of the sort of variety that we frequently see whenever there is a revelation of misdeeds in human research and a response to that article that is…
Revisiting the issue of ethics in human experimentation
Posted by Orac on March 14, 2011 Progress in science-based medicine depends upon human experimentation. Scientists can do the most fantastic translational research in the world, starting with elegant hypotheses, tested through in vitro and biochemical experiments, after which they are tested in animals. They can understand disease mechanisms to the individual amino acid level in a protein or nucleotide in a…
If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we cure cancer?
Posted by Orac on February 21, 2011 Why haven’t we cured cancer yet? If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we cure cancer? If we can harness the atom, why can’t we cure cancer? How many times have you heard these questions, or variants thereof? How many times have you asked this question yourself? Sometimes, I even ask…
The NIH threatened
Posted by Orac on February 16, 2011 As most of you know, most of the basic and translational biomedical research in the U.S. is funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Unfortunately, the NIH budget has been stagnant for the last five or six years. That’s been bad enough, leading to a decline in funding success rates for applicants for research…
Let’s do some real science for a change! The NCCAM Strategic Plan 2011-2015
Posted by Orac on February 14, 2011 I’ve made no secret about the fact that I am not a fan of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). I consider it a useless, redundant center within the National Institutes of Health because it does nothing that could’t be done as well or better in the institutes and centers of the…
Is the “decline effect” really so mysterious? (revisited)
Posted by Orac on January 5, 2011 Back in December, I took issue with a highly irritating article by someone who normally should know better, Jonah Lehrer, entitled The Truth Wears Off: Is There Something Wrong With the Scientific Method?, so much so that I wrote one of my typical long-winded deconstructions of the article. One thing that irritated me was contained…
More dubious statements about placebo effects
Posted by Orac on December 23, 2010 In discussing “alternative” medicine it’s impossible not to discuss, at least briefly, placebo effects. Indeed, one of the most common complaints I (and others) voice about clinical trials of alternative medicine is lack of adequate placebo controls. Just type “acupuncture” in the search box in the upper left hand corner of the blog, and you’ll…
The Chicago Tribune, “chronic Lyme disease,” and demands for false balance
Posted by Orac on December 20, 2010 During the six years of its existence, one frequent complaint I’ve had on this blog, it’s been about how the press covers various health issues. In particular, it’s depressing to see how often dubious and even outright false health claims, such as the claim that vaccines cause autism, that cell phones or powerlines cause cancer,…
Is the “decline effect” really so mysterious?
Posted by Orac on December 17, 2010 NOTE: Orac was actually out rather late last night. It turns out that the more administrative responsibility he somehow seems to find the more he has to go out to dinner as a part of various cancer center-related functions. As a result, he is recycling a bit of recent material from elsewhere that he in…
Sadly, this is not too far from the truth for my basic science colleagues…
Posted by Orac on December 15, 2010 It’s times like these that I’m glad I’m a clinician-scientist: Or maybe not. The reason is that the same conversation in a clinician-scientist’s review would be asking why he’s only produced X number of RVUs last year and suggesting pointedly that he needs to double his RVU output. Oh, and, by the way, he needs…
The toll due to secondhand smoke
Posted by Orac on November 29, 2010 Given that I’ve dedicated my life to treating cancer and researching the biology of cancer, the ultimate goal being to use that knowledge of cancer biology to develop ever more effective treatments directed at the specific molecular derangements that lead to cancer, it’s not surprising that I’m very much anti-tobacco. After all, arguably there is…
Integrating patient experience into research and clinical medicine: Will this lead to true “personalized medicine”?
Posted by Orac on November 8, 2010 I advocate science-based medicine (SBM) on this blog. However, from time to time, consider it necessary to point out that SBM is not the same thing as turning medicine into a science. Rather, I argue that what we do as clinicians should be based in science. Contrary to what some might claim, this is not…
What’s in a placebo? Mike Adams certainly doesn’t know.
Posted by Orac on October 29, 2010 If there’s one thing that confounds advocates of so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), it’s the placebo effect. That’s because, whenever most such remedies are studied using rigorous clinical trial design using properly constituted placebo controls, they almost always end up showing effects no greater than placebo effects. That’s the main reason why they frequently…
Better late than never: The Swedish mammography study and screening for women under 50
Posted by Orac on October 7, 2010 Last week blew by me in a blur. Because I was in full grant writing frenzy to get an R01 in the can by Friday, pretty much anything that wasn’t totally urgent got shoved aside, at least after Wednesday. Of course, it was last Wednesday that yet another mammography study was being touted as a…
Mark Hyman deceives about “science research deception”
Posted by Orac on October 5, 2010 One of the favorite fallacious arguments favored by pseudoscientists and denialists of science is the ever infamous “science was wrong before” gambit, wherein it is argued that, because science is not perfect or because scientists are not perfect, then science is not to be trusted. We’ve seen it many times before. Indeed, we saw it…