Dean Ornish
oracknows | January 16, 2014Practitioners of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) have a love-hate relationship with randomized clinical trials (RCTs). Actually, it's mostly hate, but they do crave the validation that only randomized clinical trials can provide within the paradigm of evidence-based medicine (EBM). Yes, I intentionally said EBM, rather than science-based medicine (SBM), because, as I've described so many times before, the two are not the same thing. EBM fetishizes clinical trials, a fixation that I sometimes call "methodolatry," defined by a blog bud of mine from long ago as the "profane…
oracknows | March 5, 2009I realize I've said it before, but I still can't believe as many people read what I like to lay down on a daily basis right here on this blog. Believe me, it has nothing to do with an sort of false sense of modesty. After four years at this, I know I'm good at blogging. Real good. But good isn't always enough to make much of a difference or even to garner an audience. Whether I've done the first, I don't know. I like to think that I have. As for the second, I've done pretty well for myself. Indeed, after a year of stagnant traffic, January and February were the best months, traffic-wise, in…
palmd | March 3, 2009The blogosphere is doing a reasonably good job of covering this, but I'm still fuming over Senator Tom Harkin's (D-IA) health care policy hearings. Each morsel of the hearing contains more idiocy than the last. In my attempt to shed some light into Harkin's guano-filled cave, I'm going to examine some of the specific testimony, starting with that of Dr. Dean Ornish.
Medicine today focuses primarily on drugs and surgery, genes and germs, microbes and molecules, but we are so much more than that.
When I hear statements like this, my bullshit detector asplodes. Sure, it's only one sentence…
oracknows | March 3, 2009Yesterday, I wrote about Senator Tom Harkin's (D-IA) little woo-fest in the Senate's Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, which he called Integrative Care: A Pathway to a Healthier Nation. I and a lot of the rest of the medical blogosphere (such as PalMD, Val Jones, and Tufted Titmouse) shook our heads in disbelief and disgust at Harkin's statement (video here) about the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM):
One of the purposes of this center was to investigate and validate alternative approaches. Quite frankly, I must say publicly that it has…