acupuncture
oracknows | February 16, 2015
If there's one thing that's become clear to me over the years about acupuncture, it's that it's nothing more than a theatrical placebo. Many are the times that I've asked: Can we finally just say that acupuncture is nothing more than an elaborate placebo? Most recently, I asked this question in 2012. What science-based medicine answers is yes. However, there's a large contingent of physicians under the sway of practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) who have fallen under the spell of that theatrical placebo, leading to a whole subdiscipline of quackademic medicine in which…
oracknows | January 25, 2015
It's no secret to my regular readers that it's highly unlikely that I'll ever be getting a job at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation (CCF) any time soon. After all, I've written posts about the CCF in which I've criticized its promotion of reiki, its establishment of a traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) herbal medicine clinic, complete with a naturopath running it, and its recent embrace of the founder of "functional medicine" (not to mention collaborator with antivaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.) Dr. Mark Hyman. A quick Google would reveal me as the author of such criticisms. Such is…
oracknows | January 5, 2015
NOTE: There is a follow up to this post.
The holidays are over. Time to start dishing out fresh Insolence, Respectful and, as appropriate, not-so-Respectful for 2015.
I do, however, feel obligated to deal with one painfully inappropriate action by a major science journal left over from 2014. It happened in an issue that came out just before Christmas, and, with all the festivities, being on call last week, and having houseguests; so, unfortunately, I just didn't get around to addressing it, either here or on my not-so-super-secret other blog (where I might crosspost this later in the week).…
oracknows | December 30, 2014
Ever since moving back to the Detroit area nearly seven years ago, one thing I've noticed is a propensity for our local news outlets to go full pseudoscience from time to time. I'm not sure why, other than perhaps that it attracts eyeballs to the screen, but, in reality, most of these plunges into pseudoscience and quackery are so poorly done that I find it hard to believe that even believers find them interesting. For example, back in 2008, I discussed a particularly dumb story aired by our local NBC affiliate WDIV entitled Orbs: Myth or Real?, which, not having started my new job yet, I…
oracknows | December 17, 2014
I've written quite a few times, both here and elsewhere, about the sham that is known as "traditional Chinese medicine" (TCM). Basically, there is no such thing as TCM per se. There were in the distant past many "traditional Chinese medicines," various folk medicine traditions that, contrary to what is taught now, did not form a cohesive system of medicine that worked. Then, in the 1940s and 1950s, Chairman Mao Zedong, unable to provide "Western" science-based medicine to all of his people, popularized Chinese folk medicine as "traditional Chinese medicine" and exported it to the world…
oracknows | December 1, 2014It should come as a surprise to no one that I'm not exactly a fan of "integrative oncology"—or integrative medicine, or "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), or whatever its proponents want to call it these days. After all, I've spent nearly ten years writing this blog and nearly seven years running another blog dedicated to promoting the scientific basis of medicine, and just this year managed to publish a lengthy commentary in a high impact journal criticizing the very concept of integrative oncology. Unfortunately, it seems to be the equivalent of the proverbial pissing in the…
oracknows | October 21, 2014
A mere couple of weeks ago, I was beginning to “celebrate” a week designated to celebrate the sheer quackiness of the quackery that is naturopathy. True, that’s not what the woo-friendly Senators and Representatives who imposed Naturopathic Medicine Week 2014 on a disinterested world that didn’t need, want, or understand it. They represented it as a great thing, the “integrating” of the “best of both worlds,” those worlds to them being conventional science-based medicine and alternative medicine. To those of us who support science-based medicine, it was integrating cow pie with apple pie,…
dr. dolittle | August 20, 2014 Image of electroacupuncture to the back from www.sandiegohealingarts.com
A new study published in AJP-Regulatory, Integrative and Comparative Physiology suggests that electroacupuncture to the abdominal region may prevent increases in blood sugar concentrations after a meal by affecting insulin sensitivity and circulating free fatty acid concentrations. Granted this is not comparative physiology research, I find it interesting that electrical stimulation can have such a large impact on metabolism, in mice at least.
Drs. Nicola Abate and Jiande Chen, lead investigators on this study, fed…
oracknows | June 20, 2014
It's been three days since America's quack, Dr. Mehmet Oz, had his posterior handed to him by a wily old prosecutor who is now a Senator, Claire McCaskill. The beauty of it is that, not only was Dr. Oz called, in essence, a liar to his face and not only was he called out for his irresponsible and hypercaffeinated promotion of various diet scams on his show, which is seen by millions every day, but he didn't see it coming, and his public spanking as he testified in front of Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Insurance, chaired by Sen. McCaskill, made instant news, with…
oracknows | May 8, 2014One of the themes of this blog since the very beginning of this blog is the threat to scientific medicine represented by a phenomenon that I like to call quackademic medicine. Although I did not coin the term, I frequently use the term and have done my best to popularize it among skeptics to describe the infiltration of pseudoscience into academic medicine, be it in the form of fellowships, research and clinical trials studying prescientific magic like homeopathy or "energy medicine," or even the offering of such services under the auspices of an academic medical center, thus putting the…
oracknows | April 23, 2014I don't recall if I've ever mentioned my connection with the Cleveland Clinic Foundation (CCF). I probably have, but just don't remember it. Longtime readers might recall that I did my general surgery training at Case Western Reserve University at University Hospitals of Cleveland. Indeed, I did my PhD there as well in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics. Up the road less than a mile from UH is the Cleveland Clinic. As it turns out, during my stint in Physiology and Biophysics at CWRU, I happened to do a research rotation in a lab at the CCF, which lasted a few months. OK, so it's not…
oracknows | February 13, 2014I must confess, I had a rather rough time yesterday. Actually, it's been a rough winter, at least as far as my car is concerned. Record amounts of snow and a January much colder than usual have wreaked havoc on the roads around where I live, producing craters that make our roads and freeways look more like the surface of the moon than anything you'd want to go speeding along on in an automobile. So it was that about a month ago on my way to work I couldn't avoid a particularly nasty crater, and immediately after I hit it I knew something was wrong. My tire pressure light went on, and the car…
oracknows | January 17, 2014Everyone hates health insurance companies. At least, so it seems. Personally, I've had my issues with such companies myself, particularly when having to deal with them when they refuse to cover certain medical tests for my patients. Fortunately for me, surgical oncology is a specialty that doesn't have a lot of tests or treatments that are frequently not covered, particularly for breast cancer surgery, which means that I don't have to deal with insurance companies that much. It's a wonderful thing for a doctor.
Still, for all the complaining about insurance companies, if there's one good…
oracknows | November 25, 2013Acupuncture is quackery. This cannot be repeated often enough, and, in fact, over the last several months I've developed a tendency to start all my posts on acupuncture by making sure to remind everyone that it is quackery. The reasons are many-fold. For one thing, the concepts behind acupuncture are based on the claim that somehow, placing little needles into the body along various lines known as meridians, somehow "redirects" the flow of vital life "energy" to healing effect. Never mind that this energy, called "qi," has never been detected, measured, or characterized, nor have have "…
oracknows | July 7, 2013Since I've been on a bit of a roll with respect to acupuncture over the last week or so, I thought I'd just round out the trilogy with one more post. One myth that acupuncture apologists like to promote relentlessly is that acupuncture is completely harmless, that it almost never causes complications or problems. While it's true that acupuncture is relatively safe, it still involves sticking needles into the skin, and, given that, it would be delusional to think that there couldn't be injury caused by that. Rarely, however, have I seen a story like this from Canada reported in the National…
oracknows | July 3, 2013Here we go again.
Oh, well. These things come in waves, and sometimes I have theme weeks. Right now, this week appears to be developing into a week of quackademic medicine involving dubious acupuncture studies. Yesterday, it was acupuncture for lymphedema after breast cancer surgery, a study coming right about what is rapidly becoming the Barad-dûr of cancer quackademia, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. How a hospital that is so awesome in every other way can have such a blind spot bigger than the Eye of Sauron, I don't know, but it does, and the result is a steady stream of…
oracknows | July 2, 2013Lymphedema is a complication of breast cancer surgery that all surgeons who do breast surgery detest. Patients, of course, detest it even more. The limb swelling that is the primary symptom of lymphedema comes about because surgery on the axillary lymph nodes (the lymph nodes under the arm) that is part and parcel of surgery for breast cancer can interrupt lymph vessels and cause backup of lymph fluid in the affected arm. This backup has consequences, including skin changes, a tendency towards infections, and, in extreme cases, elephantiasis (which is, fortunately, rarely seen these days as a…
oracknows | April 28, 2013Every 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 while since I've written about this particular subject; so it's a win-win for all sides! I get a topic. A certain CAM journal gets extra traffic. And you get the benefit of my usually brilliant deconstruction of dubious science. What could go wrong?
In any case…
oracknows | March 27, 2013It'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 par with Andrew Weil. True, he's not as famous to a lay audience as Weil is, but his influence on quackademic medicine over the last couple of decades has been enormous. It's not for nothing that David Freedman picked Berman as the main subject of his pro-"integrative medicine"…
oracknows | March 8, 2013So 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 I missed most of the first day, I did at least get to see a talk given by a friend of mine late in the day and I had a chance to hang out for a while with an old friend.
I also got the chance after I got back to my hotel room to be highly amused by a "response" to criticism from the author…