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

Popularity versus reliability in medical research

Two of the major themes on this blog since the very beginning has been the application of science- and evidence-based medicine to the care of patients and why so much of so-called “complementary and alternative” medicine, as well as fringe movements like the anti-vaccine movement, have little or–more commonly–virtually no science to support their claims […]

Categories
Bioethics Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics

They don’t call it “cheat-lation” for nothing (updated)

Last year, a seeming victory for the protection of human subjects from being subjected to pseudoscience. It began when Kimball C. Atwood IV, MD; Elizabeth Woeckner, AB, MA; Robert S. Baratz, MD, DDS, PhD; and Wallace I. Sampson, MD published a lengthy criticism of the NIH Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy (TACT) in Medscape, pointing […]

Categories
Biology Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Politics Science

Are we playing it too safe in cancer research? (Oops, Orac missed one)

This is just a brief followup to my post this morning about yesterday’s NYT article on cancer research. An excellent discussion of the NYT article can be found here (and is well worth reading in its entirety). In it, Jim Hu did something I should have done, namely check the CRISP database in addition to […]

Categories
Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine

Academia: Slowing down the search for cures? Other voices

On Friday, I expressed my irritation at the misunderstanding of science by NEWSWEEK’s science columnist Sharon Begley, in which she opines that it is those nasty basic scientists who insist on learning new science and new physiological mechanisms of disease that are devaluing translational and clinical research, in effect ghettoizing them in low impact journals, […]

Categories
Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Science

Academia: Slowing down the search for cures?

I was very happy with NEWSWEEK recently, specifically because of its lengthy expose of Oprah Winfrey and her promotion of pseudoscience, mysticism, and quackery on her talk show. However, I haven’t always been that thrilled with NEWSWEEK’s coverage of medicine and science. For example, NEWSWEEK’s science columnist Sharon Begley has gotten on my nerves on […]