acupuncture
Respectful Insolence
Tag archives for acupuncture
An amusing “very special issue” of Medical Acupuncture
Posted by Orac on April 29, 2013 Every so often, our “friends” on the other side of the science aisle (i.e., the supporters of “complementary and alternative medicine”—otherwise known as CAM or “integrative medicine”) give me a present when I’m looking for a topic for my weekly bit of brain droppings about medicine, science, and/or why CAM is neither. It’s also been…
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…
The Cleveland Clinic Foundation: Mixing cow pie with apple pie in pediatrics
Posted by Orac on February 27, 2013 Thanks to a winter storm that dumped a heapin’ helpin’ of heavy wet snow on us last night, we lost power before this post even got going. However, I did have a bit of time this morning to finish it up as a quickie (by my standards) before my laptop battery indicator started expressing its…
Quackademic medicine invades the military again
Posted by Orac on October 18, 2012 As much as I write about the infiltration of quackademic medicine into medical academia, there is one particular area that is being increasingly invaded by such quackery. It’s an area that you wouldn’t necessarily expect, although anyone who’s read The Men Who Stare at Goats might not be so shocked. Yes, I’m referring to the…
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…
PAPupuncture? On the rebranding of regional anesthesia as acupuncture
Posted by Orac on May 21, 2012 Acupuncture has been a frequent topic on this blog because, of all the “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) modalities out there, it’s arguably the one that most people accept as potentially having some validity. The rationale behind acupuncture is, as we have explained many times before, little different than the rationale behind any “energy healing”…
More acupuncture quackademic medicine infiltrates PLoS ONE
Posted by Orac on September 10, 2010 I hate to do this to Bora again. I really do. I’m also getting tired of blogging all these crappy acupuncture studies. I really am. However, sometimes a skeptic’s gotta do what a skeptic’s gotta do, and this is one of those times. As you may recall, a mere week ago I was disturbed to…
When what an acupuncture study shows is much more interesting than what acupuncture believers think it shows
Posted by Orac on June 1, 2010 Of all the “alternative” therapies out there, arguably the most studied is the modality known as acupuncture. Perhaps the reason is that, unlike homeopathy, which based on physics, chemistry, and biology alone is so implausible that, for it to “work,” huge swaths of well-established physics and chemistry would have to be shown to be not…
Your Friday Dose of Woo: Homeopathy gets needled
Posted by Orac on February 26, 2010 I realize that there are two huge target-rich articles out there that my readers have been clamoring for me to comment on. First, there’s a particularly silly and simplistic article by Nicholas Kristof about how it’s supposedly the “toxins” causing autism (an article in which he apparently doesn’t realize that Current Opinions in Pediatrics is…
Bringing woo to disaster areas
Posted by Orac on January 26, 2010 Almost two years ago, I discovered something that disturbed me greatly. Basically, I learned the story of an Air Force officer named Col. Richard Niemtzow, MD, PhD. Col. Niemtzow is a radiation oncologist who has over the last decade fallen deeply into woo. Specifically, he has become known for a technique that he has dubbed…
Subjecting prisoners to quackery
Posted by Orac on March 25, 2009 I’ve at times been asked where I come up with my blogging material. Since I’ve become fairly popular, one major source has been readers sending me stories. I often don’t have time to respond, and most of them don’t interest me enough to be motivated to write, but there are enough that do that I…
Taking woo in the military to a whole new level: Deploying acupuncturists to Iraq
Posted by Orac on December 15, 2008 Several months ago, I wrote a post about the experimentation with acupuncture by an Air Force physician, Col. Robert Niemtzow. In the post, I started with an admittedly exaggerated vignette–a story, if you will–of a soldier whose leg was shredded by a mortar in battle. When the medic came to treat his wounds and get…