Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine Popular culture Quackery Science

The CEO of Aetna embraces quackery

Everyone 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 […]

Categories
Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Science

Quoth Dean Ornish and NCCAM: Your randomized clinical trials can’t study my CAM!

Practitioners 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 […]

Categories
Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Still more oversold placebo research from our old friend Ted Kaptchuk

Here we go again. In the wake of study after study that fails to find activity of various “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) beyond that of placebo, the campaign to a “rebrand” CAM as “working” through the “power of placebo” continues apace, in the wake of the successful campaign to “rebrand” various needle-based medical modalities […]

Categories
Medicine Politics Science

On advanced practice nurses and scope of practice

One aspect of science-based medicine (SBM) that I perhaps don’t spend enough time and effort on is the intersection of law and medicine for areas in medicine other than the infiltration of pseudomedicine like “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) into academia and the never-ending quest of quacks like naturopaths to gain state licensure in states […]

Categories
Autism Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Television

A counterpoint to Jenny McCarthy’s autism narrative

There was a time when I used to blog about Jenny McCarthy a lot. The reason, of course, is that a few years ago, beginning in around 2007, she seized the title of face of the antivaccine movement in America through her “advocacy” for her son Evan, whom she described as having been made autistic […]