This week, JAMA Internal Medicine published a clinical trial purporting to find that acupuncture helps stable angina. Here's a hint: It doesn't. It's a bait-and-switch study that used "electroacupuncture" instead of acupuncture with poor blinding and lack of consideration of prior plausibility.
Category: Complementary and alternative medicine
Facebook joins Google in deprioritizing medical misinformation: Are social media companies finally “getting it”?
Yesterday, social media giant Facebook announced that it was acting against medical misinformation by using keyphrases to deprioritize results promoting misinformation and scams? Is it enough, and is it too late?
Chiropractor Anthony Pellagrino touts a dubious study of chiropractic for stroke
"Dr." Anthony Pellagrino is a chiropractor who fancies himself a scientist. Unfortunately, his touting a dubious study of chiropractic for stroke shows that he doesn't know a crappy study when he sees it.
A horrifyingly unethical study of chiropractic treatment of infants with torticollis
Orac encounters a study of chiropractice manipulation under anesthesia for infant torticollis. Iit takes a lot to horrify Orac any more, but subjecting infants to unnecessary anesthesia and radiation to crack their necks did it.
Thomas Jefferson University goes full quack with a department of “integrative medicine”
Quackademic medicine takes a big leap forward at Thomas Jefferson University with its new Department of Integrative Medicine and Nutritional Sciences.
Trojan horse: Selling “integrative oncology” as science-based
Integrative oncology "integrates" quackery with oncology. Its practitioners, however, frequently delude themselves that their specialty is science-based. A recent review article by two integrative oncologists from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center expresses that delusion perfectly.
Traditional Chinese medicine is science, ma-an! National Geographic promotes quackery
There's a whole genre of quack apologia for traditional Chinese medicine that I like to call "traditional Chinese medicine is science, ma-an!" Basically, it tries to convince you that the prescientific, mystical, vitalistic mass of nonsense that is traditional Chinese medicine is "ancient knowledge" that was far ahead of its time and that its wisdom will be rediscovered to become the future of medicine. It's utter nonsense, of course. Unfortunately, in its January issue, National Geographic fell for this myth—hard.
Quoth chiropractor William Cole: “Have your doctor run a bunch of useless functional medicine tests”
“Functional medicine” preaches the “biochemical individuality” of each patient, which is why one of its key features is that its practitioners order reams of useless lab tests and then try to correct every abnormal level without considering (or even knowing) what these abnormalities mean, if anything. So they make up fake diagnoses and profit.
Naturopath Paul Theriault challenges Orac. It does not go well..for Not-a-Doctor Theriault
In the days before Orac left the blog in order to rest and recharge his Tarial cell, he got into a little..."discussion"... on Twitter with a naturopath named Paul Theriault. It did not go well...for Not-a-Doctor Theriault. Be careful what you wish for, naturopaths, when you encounter Orac. You might get it.
Is there such a thing as the “placebome”?
As results from randomized clinical trials show that alternative medicine is nothing more than placeboe, quacks like to argue that they are "harnessing the power of placebo" with their methods and that placebos have real healing effect. They've even gone so far as to make up a genomics-based concept: The placebome. But is there such a thing as the placebome?