Absurd medical claims
palmd | April 19, 2009My regular readers know that I hold the Huffington Post in the lowest possible regard when it comes to its medical writing. HuffPo offers a daily platform for the worst pseudo-science and infectious disease promotion. Apparently that was getting to hard, because now I think their down to phoning it in. Last week's post by a "body cleanse expert" reads like a late-night infomercial, and is about as accurate.
The article, with the fanciful title of, "Antibiotics Cause Cancer?" is written by Kim Evans whose medical qualifications are apparently limited to selling books on how to cleanse your…
palmd | April 18, 2009I've never done this before, but the previous threads are getting rather messy and I'm closing them down. Feel free to use this thread for your ongoing discussion. A few thoughts first.
Obviously some of the rhetoric is heated, which is fine. But if you're going to throw around invective, don't complain if it's thrown back. Also, please remember that an ad hominem argument is invalid if it substitutes for substantive argument, but that insults that simply color, rather that replace and argument are not invalid, just, well, colorful.
Also remember that when trying to understand how to take…
palmd | April 15, 2009First, I'd like to thank everyone who participated in the naturopaty primary care challenge. It was far more successful than I could have hoped. A number of naturopaths and their supporters responded, most of them quite rationally. It takes guts to walk into the fire.
It also takes fanaticism.
I have always rather assumed that most naturopaths and other "alternative" healers are, on the whole, motivated by good. After reading all the comments, I still hold that assumption---most "alternative" healers probably mean well. That does not, however, divorce them from an ethical…
palmd | April 14, 2009So naturopaths want to be licensed to practice "primary care". I've come down pretty hard on this idea, but one of my colleagues is asking me to reconsider for some pretty good reasons.
If we license them as PCPs, then they must be held to the same standards as MDs, meaning they must provide insurers including medicare with PQRI data on quality measures and outcomes, and they must buy malpractice insurance (and lots of it). I have a feeling that as when they have bad outcomes and are found to not be following the standard of care, the trial lawyers can make a few more boat payments.
palmd | April 13, 2009Yesterday I issued a challenge to naturopathic physicians to justify why they should be considered competent primary care physicians. The best and most comprehensive answer received so far is the one from "Mona". Here is my analysis.
Her response, while not entirely "wrong", shows a frightening level of chaotic thinking and unsophistication.
As a naturopathic physician graduated from National College of Naturopathic Medicine in 1988, and having done a year's residency there in Family Practice I am happy to answer your relatively easy question. I see many diabetic patients who come with…
palmd | April 13, 2009One of the common themes in biology and medicine is the feeling that somehow there must be more. Creationist cults simply know that life must be more than matter, and mind-body dualists (which includes most alternative medicine advocates) are certain that humans are more than an "ugly bag of mostly water" (sorry for the geek reference). If you can stick with me here, I'll explain to you a bit of the history surrounding this fallacy.
Most of us intuitively feel that we are both a body and a person. In every day life, it makes a certain operational sense to think of our "mind" as being…
palmd | April 11, 2009Yesterday's piece about naturopathy lead to a nice conversation, but I realized we're missing something. We don't actually have a naturopath to defend the profession.
You see, if, for example, you are curious what your primary care physician might recommend to you, you can go to the American College of Physicians website, or the US Preventative Services Task Force to get an idea of what the standard of care and evidence is for screening, prevention, and treatment. What isn't clear to me is what a naturopathic primary care provider has to offer.
Here's my question, and I encourage any and…
palmd | April 10, 2009I'm a primary care physician. What I, other internists, pediatricians, and family medicine docs do is prevent and treat common diseases. When we get to diseases that require more specialized care, we refer to our specialist colleagues. There is a movement afoot to broaden the role of naturopaths to make them primary care doctors. The big difference between naturopaths and real primary care physicians (PCPs) is that naturopaths haven't gone to medical school, completed a post-graduate residency program, and taken their specialty boards. Why is this important? If a naturopath wants to be…
palmd | April 7, 2009Remember last week when I told you about this guy over at HuffPo who was all excited about an experiment on spooky distance healing? Remember how the "study" used glorified Scientology E-meters and ginned up the negative data to make it look good? Remember how this guy abused the word quantum until it begged for mercy?
Well, they let him write again. Very sad. But at least this time his article has an appropriate title: Why Rational Thinking Is Not All It's Cracked Up To Be.
It's like this: if you have a car, but you've never learned to drive, and aren't even sure what a car is for, you…
palmd | April 6, 2009I don't know what it's like to be autistic. I don't know what it's like to raise an autistic child. For this knowledge, I have to rely on others, and there are plenty of talented bloggers out there who write about these experiences all the time. What I do know is that there is a cadre of autism "activists" out there who do a great disservice to people who do know something about these experiences.
One such example is Dr. Jerry Kartzinel, who co-wrote Jenny McCarthy's latest monument to her own idiocy. "Dr. Jerry" is infamous among many parents of autistic children for this quote:
Autism,…
palmd | April 3, 2009Well, HuffPo does it again. No other mainstream news outlet brings the stupid on health news like Arianna. Take today's vapid article on vitamin supplementation.
Let me remind all of you amateur biologists that vitamins, discovered over a hundred years ago, were found to be "vital" to health. What made them different from macronutrients such as fats, proteins, sugars, etc., is that they were only required in very small quantities. There has always been a fascination with vitamins, and even during this time of nutritional excess, people like their supplements.
Thankfully there are…
palmd | April 2, 2009"You know the moon landings were ginned up on a Hollywood sound stage, right?"
"Hey, how come it's so hard to get the Truth out there about the 9/11 attacks being staged by the CIA/Mossad?"
"I don't know why they think I'm crazy; the aliens really did probe my anus."
We hear crap like this all the time, but these wackos never get ink in major media outlets because, well, they are so clearly paranoid and deranged. So why do we see a similarly paranoid, deranged person like Jenny McCarthy on the pages of Time magazine? Is it because she's more photogenic than most alien abductees? Is it…
palmd | March 30, 2009This war taking place in our nation's medical schools and academic medical centers. Orac at Respectful Insolence has been tracking this trend, as have those of us writing at Science-Based Medicine. It is a war between those who feel that medicine should continue to be based on science and those who want to integrate faith-based practices. The model for this war is not that of pedagogical disputes or funding scuffles. More than anything else, it resembles a religious war.
The basic story goes like this: medical schools are in charge of educating future doctors. Individual hospitals are…
palmd | March 25, 2009Whatever you think of its political reporting, no other mainstream media outlet can bring the stupid like the Huffington Post, especially with regards to medical reporting. Its most famous contributors include antivaccinationists like David Kirby and Robert Kennedy, Jr., and kumbaya therapy wackaloon Deepak Chopra.
Now they bring us an article by some dude I've never heard of with a title that should have him laughed out of any legitimate scientific institution: "The Science of Distant Healing". This is one stupid article.
First of all, who the hell is this guy? According to his bio:
Dr.…
palmd | March 18, 2009A frequent commenter on the conscience issue has raised a lot of questions on an recent post. He seems somewhat frustrated that I don't understand his point. What I think he doesn't realize is that I do understand his point all too well---he is just wrong. Here is an example:
You also still haven't cleared up that little inconsistency regarding the matter of whether or not there is a professional obligation to provide elective services. Or is it just physicians, but not pharmacists or other healthcare professionals, who have rights of conscience?
OK, I'll clarify it for you. It's not that…
palmd | March 16, 2009Over at Neurotopia, Scicurious has been doing some terrific writing about depression. Mental illness is a topic I've written about many times, so I was inspired to look into the vault and see what kind of goodies I had back there. Well, since I truly loathe people who dole out dangerous medical lies, I figured it was time to dust off this little bit on Scientology and mental illness, rework them a bit, and share them with you again.
The problem
Depression, in the medical sense, is not a mood...it is a severe
disorder originating in the brain, and affecting the entire body. Major…
palmd | March 16, 2009Thankfully, I don't receive all that much blog-related mail. But this weekend I received several communications about a piece in popular liberal blog. The piece is (ostensibly) about Lyme disease, which coincidentally happens to be one of the topics of my first post here at SBM. In fact, I've written about Lyme disease a number of times, and Dr. Novella has a very good summary of the controversy at one of his other blogs. Since we've discussed this so many times, I won't be reviewing the entire controversy, but looking at this particular blog post to examine how our personal experiences…
palmd | March 13, 2009I hate this topic. I really do. But Abel started it this time. Over at Terra Sig, the good pharmacologist brought up the issue of pharmacists behaving badly. I've dealt with the ethical implications of conscience clauses ad nauseum but Abel's discussion raised some important points.
A brief recap: a patient with a valid prescription for morphine was denied her medication by a pharmacist. The reason given was "that [the patient] should find some alternative pain relief", presumably one that does not involve opioid analgesics. I won't bother with my usual rant about the responsibility…
palmd | March 11, 2009It's not like we haven't had this discussion before. I have, on previous blogs, written about the fantasy that is reiki, as have my colleagues. In fact, the very same colleague turned me on to a recent news piece out of Cleveland. Here's my problem with reiki---it's bullshit, pure and simple.
"But how can you be so dismissive?," a credulous reader might ask. My answer comes in two parts.
Absurdist ridiculousity
OK, so I made up that phrase---which is exactly what I have in common with the founder of reiki. In 1922 Mikao Usui (JSG) fasted on a mountaintop in Japan and "received" the…
palmd | March 10, 2009So, I was exploring the twittersphere and noticed that one of my followers was an advocate of "EFT". This sounded familiar, so I dug through the old blog archive and found this piece from early last year.
Once again, by way of Mercola.com, I've learned of a whole new woo. He touts this one for the treatment of fibromyalgia. According to Joe:
EFT is a procedure that borrows from the much-heralded discoveries of Albert Einstein (everything, including your body, is composed of energy) AND from the ancient wisdom of Chinese acupuncture.
Of course I had to follow that link. Anyone who can…