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Medicine

“Integrative medicine”: The lure of the shaman healer

Quite to my surprise, apparently I’ve become fairly well known as a critic of so-called “integrative medicine,” that which used to be called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) but whose name was changed because its practitioners didn’t want to be “complementary” to anything. Rather they wanted their woo to be co-equal with science-based medicine (SBM). […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Naturopathy Politics Quackery

Can Alternative and Conventional Medicine Get Along? No.

If 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 […]

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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 […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Quackery

The fallacy of moderation at BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine

One of the fun things about blogging is that I can often follow how various issues develop and, more importantly, insert my opinion into the issue. As bizarre as it seems to me even almost nine years after starting this blog that anyone keeps reading what I have to lay down (and it still does […]

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Cancer Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

One more example of the price of refusing science-based cancer therapy

Another year, another Breast Cancer Awareness Month. While most people who have either been touched by breast cancer or who have a professional interest in it, the significance of Breast Cancer Awareness Month is that it is a time, well, to increase awareness and to promote breast cancer research. There is another side to Breast […]