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Curate's egg at Science-based Medicine

By tlambert on February 26, 2008.

Mark Hoofnagle reviews a new group blog, Science-Based Medicine.

I must say I've loved much of the writing at the new blog Science-Based Medicine. These guys are fighting the good fight and presenting very sophisticated aspects of evaluating the medical literature in a very accessible way. In particular I'd like to point out David Gorski's critique of NCCAM and the directly-relevant articles from Kimball Atwood on the importance of prior probability in evaluating medical research.

The writng that Hoofnagle doesn't like are two poorly researched posts from Wallace Sampson, who uncritically accepted everything Neil Munro wrote and declared the Lancet studies to be a 'scandal'. Sampson was comprehensively refuted in the comments, but rather than own up to his mistakes, he wrote another post repeating falsehoods from the first one.

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You're right, those two posts are terrible, but I've glanced over a few of the other posts and comments made by the blog authors and found the quality of the argument to be uneven. Perhaps these are growing pains (I think the blog has only been around for a couple of months) and over time they will find their voices.