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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

The director of NCCAM discovers Bayesian probability. Hilarity ensues.

Over the years, the criticism of “evidence-based medicine” (EBM) that I have repeated here and that I and others have repeated at my not-so-super-secret other blog is that its levels of evidence relegate basic science considerations to the lowest level evidence and elevate randomized clinical trial evidence to the highest rung, in essence fetishizing it […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Naturopathy Quackery

A finger in the dike isn’t enough

Every so often I wonder what the status is regarding the infiltration of pseudoscience into medicine. It’s something I’ve been writing about on a regular basis for nine years now, a phenomenon known as “quackademic medicine.” It’s simultaneously a depressing and energizing topic, energizing because it’s something I’m passionate about, but depressing because at times […]

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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 Medicine Politics

Surgeon General nominee Dr. Vivek Murthy and “integrative medicine”: A cause for concern?

While I’ve been all tied up paying attention to the developments in the Stanislaw Burzynski case, it figures that President Obama would go and do something like nominating the next Surgeon General. Normally, this is not such a big deal, because there really hasn’t been a Surgeon General who has really been particularly well-known or […]