integrative medicine
oracknows | March 2, 2015It's been a rather...interesting...weekend.
Friday, I noted the death of Jess Ainscough, a.k.a. "The Wellness Warrior," a young Australian woman who was unfortunate enough to develop epithelioid sarcoma, a rare cancer, at the age of 22. I've been blogging about her because after her doctors tried isolated limb perfusion with chemotherapy in an attempt to avoid an amputation of her left arm at the shoulder, her tumor recurred, after which she chose not to undergo amputation and instead to embrace the quackery known as Gerson therapy, which she did for over two years. By the time she finished…
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 7, 2014
Last week, I discussed a monograph published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute Monographs entitled Clinical Practice Guidelines on the Use of Integrative Therapies as Supportive Care in Patients Treated for Breast Cancer. As you might remember, I was completely unimpressed. However, those guidelines were not the only thing in that particular JNCI monograph. There were lots of other articles, and, given that some of them show just how deeply quackery has insinuated itself into oncology in the form of "integrative oncology," I thought it was worth revisiting one more time.…
milhayser | December 2, 2014On Pharyngula, PZ Myers criticizes a stirring new short film imagining humanity's presence on the far-flung worlds of our solar system. PZ writes, "There’s nothing in those exotic landscapes as lovely and rich as mossy and majestic cedars of the Olympic Peninsula, or the rocky sea stacks of the nearby coast." So let's not get ahead of ourselves in turning Earth into a dust bowl. On Respectful Insolence, Orac considers the demerits of a new monograph on 'integrative oncology,' saying it's a false dichotomy polarizing aspects of actual science and pure wishful thinking. And on Uncertain…
oracknows | August 20, 2014
I’ll partially apologize here. The reason is that I said I’d be back to business dishing out the Insolence as usual, be it in the form of my usual 2,000 word gems, or slightly shorter, or a lot longer. However, fate intervened. First, there were new developments in the Frank Arguello threat machine. Go back to this post for updates. More importantly, a really cool thing finally happened. Steve Novella and a person regular readers of this blog know and love managed to do something that we need to do more of: Get the viewpoint of science-based medicine published in high impact biomedical…
oracknows | August 15, 2014
A lot of medical specialties have throwaway newspapers/magazines that are supported by advertising and somehow mysteriously managed to show up for free in the mailboxes of their practitioners. In my case, I’ve found myself on the subscription list for such papers about oncology, but, given that I trained as a general surgeon. I’m Board-certified as a general surgeon. When I have to recertify in about three years, it will be as a general surgeon, which was really fun to try to do last time after having specialized as a breast cancer surgeon and will likely be even more fun next time, when I…
oracknows | August 10, 2014
One of the most annoying phenomena when it comes to “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), which its advocates are more and more insistent on calling “integrative medicine” is how little the average doctor cares that pseudoscience is infiltrating medicine. The reason, of course, is that CAM advocates don’t like the “alternative” part of the term CAM. Come to think of it, they don’t like the “complementary” part, either, because it implies that conventional science-based medicine (what I like to refer to as “real” medicine) is the main treatment and what they do is just “…
oracknows | June 6, 2014I've discussed the evolution of "integrative" medicine on many occasions. To make the long story discussed over many posts short, medicine based on prescientific and/or unscientific ideas was once, appropriately, referred to as quackery, and those practicing it, appropriately, as quacks or charlatans—or other derogatory terms. Then, beginning sometime around the 1960s and 1970s, such quackery became known as "alternative" medicine. This was a less derogatory term than what used to be used, but still unsavory. As I put it, alternative medicine was (and is) medicine that does not fit into the…
oracknows | May 5, 2014Dr. David L. Katz is apparently unhappy with me. You remember Dr. Katz, don't you? If you don't, I'll remind you momentarily. If you do, you won't be surprised. Let me explain a bit first how Dr. Katz recently became aware of me again.
A couple of weeks ago, I posted a short (for me) piece about something that disturbed both Steve Novella and myself, namely An herbal medicine clinic at the Cleveland Clinic: Quackademia triumphant Steve had blogged about it as well a couple of days earlier. To my surprise, Maithri Vengala over at The Healthcare Blog noticed the blog post and asked me if I…
oracknows | March 10, 2014Every so often I wonder what the status is regarding the infiltration of pseudoscience into medicine. It's something I've been writing about on a regular basis for nine years now, a phenomenon known as "quackademic medicine." It's simultaneously a depressing and energizing topic, energizing because it's something I'm passionate about, but depressing because at times it seems like an unwinnable battle.
Times like now.
What depressed me this time was article that popped up in my feed on Medscape entitled, Do Clinicians Base CAM Recommendations to Patients on Evidence of Efficacy? Since "…
oracknows | February 18, 2014The vast majority of what is known as "alternative medicine" is quackery. Let's just get that right out front right from the very beginning of this post. That's where I'm coming from, and where I'm coming from is a science- and evidence-based viewpoint. To quote a cliche that is true and modified to my own view of medicine, there is no such thing as "alternative medicine." There is medicine that has been scientifically demonstrated to work. There is medicine that has been scientifically demonstrated not to work. And there is medicine that has not been shown to work. What makes up "alternative…
oracknows | November 19, 2013While I've been all tied up paying attention to the developments in the Stanislaw Burzynski case, it figures that President Obama would go and do something like nominating the next Surgeon General. Normally, this is not such a big deal, because there really hasn't been a Surgeon General who has really been particularly well-known or had much of an impact since Dr. C. Everett Koop, although back when President Obama first took office Dr. Sanjay Gupta's name was floated as a possibility for the position. Obviously, he didn't get it. (I'm guessing that being a neurosurgeon and CNN's chief…
oracknows | October 25, 2013Most, if not virtually all, of what is now referred to as "traditional Chinese medicine" is quackery. I realize that it's considered "intolerant" and not politically correct to say that in these days of "integrative medicine" departments infiltrating academic medical centers like so much kudzu enveloping a telephone pole, but I don't care. I'm supposed to be impressed that the M.D. Anderson and Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Centers, among others, have lost their collective mind and now "integrate" prescientific nonsense along with their state-of-the-art cancer therapy? I don't think so. I…
oracknows | October 21, 2013I was doing my usual browsing of the web yesterday in search of topics for today's post when I came across an excellent article by a colleague and friend of mine, Dr. Rachael Dunlop, who nailed it in a post entitled Anti-vaccination activists should not be given a say in the media. In the article, Dr. Rachie nailed a point that I and other skeptics have been trying to make time and time again, namely how the press all too frequently inserts false balance in stories about medicine, particularly vaccines. As Dr. Rachie put it, we don't give equal time to flat earth believers. My favorite…
oracknows | October 9, 2013Here we go with another one.
Three weeks ago, I mentioned in a post that the week of October 7 to 14 was declared by our very own United States Senate to be Naturopathic Medicine Week, which I declared unilaterally through my power as managing editor of Science-Based Medicine (for what that's worth) to be Quackery Week. One wonders where the Senate found the time to consider and vote for S.Res.221, which reads:
S.Res.221 – A resolution designating the week of October 7 through October 13, 2013, as “Naturopathic Medicine Week” to recognize the value of naturopathic medicine in providing safe…
oracknows | August 30, 2013I was depressed yesterday. I've been on vacation this week (staycation, actually, as I stayed at home and didn't go on any trips); so you would think it would take a lot to depress me. It did. Scott Gavura over at Science-Based Medicine wrote about how another once-proud academic medical center, the University of Toronto, is letting the Trojan horse that is "integrative medicine" into the halls of its medical school and school of pharmacy. As I frequently say, much to the annoyance of advocates of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) and "integrative medicine," what "integrative…
oracknows | July 24, 2013It's hard to believe that it's been nearly two years since I first noticed that a board certification in quackery was in the works and appeared to be nearly ready to go. I'm referring, of course, to Andrew Weil's effort to create a board certification in so-called "integrative medicine," better known to those of us on the science-based side of medicine as integrating quackery and pseudoscience with real medicine. Since it's been so long since I last addressed this issue, it's probably worth a brief recap. Basically, back in 2011, Andrew Weil and his Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine (…
oracknows | June 13, 2013For a long time, going back almost to the beginning of this blog eight and a half years ago, I've referred to the "bait and switch" of alternative medicine. What I mean by that is the manner in which advocates of alternative medicine—or, as they like to call it these days, "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or, more recently still, "integrative medicine"—co-opt perfectly science-based modalities like diet, nutrition, and exercise as being somehow "alternative." Alternatively, they woo-ify such science-based modalities and then claim them as CAM. Either way, they deceptively give…
oracknows | February 27, 2013Thanks 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 displeasure. Since it's a topic that doesn't really necessitate a long post anyway, it's a perfect fit for today, and I'll just put off what I was going to write about today until tomorrow. Or the day after if nothing else comes up between now and then that interests me more. You see, the power company is…
oracknows | November 12, 2012"Holistic."
How often do we hear that word bandied about by practitioners of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or, as it's increasingly called, "integrative medicine" (IM)? Lots. The reason is that CAM/IM practitioners seem to think they own the word. They've so utterly co-opted it that it has become meaningless, in the process perverting it. No longer does it mean "taking care of the whole person." Not really, at least not anymore. Thanks to quacks having taken possession of it as their own, "holistic" now has a connotation of woo, in which it is said to be impossible to be a…