Categories
Cancer Medicine Quackery

ASCO’s new guidelines promote quackery for cancer pain

Recently, the American Society of Clinical Oncology and the Society for Integrative Oncology published guidelines for treating cancer pain. These guidelines endorsed quackery like reflexology and acupuncture. The infiltration of quackademic medicine continues apace in oncology.

Categories
Clinical trials Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery

Aromatase inhibitors and acupuncture in breast cancer

Four years ago, I wrote about an essentially negative study looking at whether acupuncture could alleviate joint pain caused by aromatase inhibitors, a common treatment for estrogen-sensitive breast cancer. The study’s back, and it doesn’t look any more positive.

Categories
Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Integrative medicine Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery

Is it even possible to design high quality acupuncture trials?

Acupuncture advocates have published guidelines for “rigorous” acupuncture randomized controlled trials. While that sounds good on the surface, the devil is in the details, which reveal that acupuncturists’ dedication to scientific rigor is perhaps not so strong.

Categories
Bad science Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Popular culture

These days, ivermectin reminds me of acupuncture

As high-quality evidence increasingly and resoundingly shows that ivermectin does not work against COVID-19, advocates are doing what acupuncture advocates do: Turning to lower quality “positive” studies to claim incorrectly that their favorite ineffective treatment actually does “work.”

Categories
Bad science Medicine Pseudoscience Quackery

Even a pandemic doesn’t stop bad acupuncture studies

Earlier this month, a study claiming to have identified a neurologic mechanism by which acupuncture reduces inflammation was published in Nature. It does no such thing. it’s another bait-and-switch mouse study that likely would never have been published in such a high profile journal if it hadn’t rebranded electrical stimulation as “electroacupuncture”.