Josephine Briggs
oracknows | April 10, 2016It's no secret that I'm not particularly fond of the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH). Formerly known as the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) and before that the Office of Alternative Medicine, NCCIH has been the foremost government agency funding research into quackery and the "integration" of quackery into medicine for the last 24 years, which is, of course, the reason I've been been harshly critical of NCCIH since very early in the history of Respectful Insolence. Basically, NCCIH not only funds studies of dubious "…
oracknows | January 7, 2016It's an understatement to say that I'm not exactly a fan of the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH), the institute formerly known as the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) and, even a year after its name change, probably still better known by its old moniker. Just type "NCCAM" or "NCCIH" into the search box of this blog if you don't believe me. Basically, it's an institution forced upon the National Institutes of Health in the 1990s by Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA), a woo-friendly senator who believed that bee pollen cured his allergies…
oracknows | September 18, 2015Homeopathy is a frequent topic on this blog, for reasons that regular readers no doubt understand all too well by now. Homeopathy is, as I like to call it, again borrowing from Tolkien, The One Quackery To Rule Them All. When it comes to quackery, few can even come close to homeopathy for the sheer ridiculousness of its precepts. Whether it is the Law of Similars, which claims that to cure a disease you need to use a substance that cause's that diseases symptoms in healthy people, a "law" that has no basis in science, or the Law of Infinitesimals, which postulates that serially diluting a…
oracknows | May 22, 2014
Pretty much everyone who's gotten through junior high recognizes the line from the William Shakespeare play Romeo and Juliet, when Juliet says, "What's in a name? that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call'd, retain that dear perfection which he owes without that title." It's a succinct contemplation of how much a name means, which, according to Juliet, isn't that much. She (and Shakespeare) were right then, and the same thing is still true. In particular, it's true when referring to things perhaps less appealing than young love…
oracknows | May 15, 2014Over the years, the criticism of "evidence-based medicine" (EBM) that I have repeated here and that I and others have repeated at my not-so-super-secret other blog is that its levels of evidence relegate basic science considerations to the lowest level evidence and elevate randomized clinical trial evidence to the highest rung, in essence fetishizing it above all, a form of thinking that I like to call methodolatry. Now, when EBM works correctly, this is not an entirely unreasonable way to look at things. After all, we just want to know what works in patients. Basically, when EBM is working…
oracknows | February 7, 2014If there's one thing that I write that I don't feel I repeat too much (although some might disagree), it's that, unlike other centers and institutes at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), there is not, and never was, a compelling scientific justification for the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) to exist as a separate entity. There is nothing that NCCAM does that couldn't be done just as well in other parts of the NIH, with the exception of research into modalities with such low prior plausibility and such fantastical proposed mechanisms of working that…
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 | August 20, 2013To say that I haven't been much of a fan of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) throughout the years is a gross understatement. If you want to see the depths of my—shall we say?—lack of enthusiasm for NCCAM, feel free to type "NCCAM" in the search box of this blog and in particular look for posts that have "NCCAM" somewhere in their titles. It won't take you long to find posts by yours truly with titles as awesome as NCCAM: I say we take off and nuke the entire center from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure and NCCAM in the news: Why does it still exist?…
oracknows | September 10, 2012One of the overarching issues, if not the overarching issue that makes so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM)—or, as it's now more commonly called, "integrative medicine"—so problematic is prior plausibility. It's also one of the most difficult to explain to the lay public, because to someone not trained in science it can sound like not being open-minded. I like to joke about this whole concept by saying that it's good to be open-minded but not so open-minded that your brains fall out. In other words, the main difference between science-based medicine (SBM) and evidence-…
oracknows | June 20, 2012Oh, goody.
I don't know how I've missed this, given that it's been in existence now for over a month now, but I have. Regular readers (and even fairly recent readers, given that I write about this topic relatively frequently) know that I'm not a big fan of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). Just search this blog for "NCCAM" if you don't believe me. I've explained the reasons many times, but the CliffsNotes version is that NCCAM is an enormous waste of taxpayer money, dedicated as it is to the study of modalities that are at best highly implausible and at…