Categories
Medicine Popular culture Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Functional medicine (FM) quackery dissected in the mainstream media

Functional medicine (FM) is “make it up as you go along” quackery that combines the “worst of both worlds,” namely the overtesting and overtreatment that can plague conventional medicine plus the quackery “integrated” into “integrative medicine.” It’s rare to see a mainstream outlet get it right about FM, but an Irish journalist pulls it off.

Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine Integrative medicine Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

“Practice drift”: A feature, not a bug, in “integrative medicine”

Two prominent advocates of “integrative medicine” bemoan the “practice drift” they see in their specialty, in which doctors drift farther and farther away from their training. What this means is (although it would never be admitted) is that these “integrative medicine” doctors are drifting further and further into quackery. Too bad this is a feature, not a bug.

Categories
Bad science Complementary and alternative medicine Integrative medicine Medicine Politics Pseudoscience Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Helene Langevin is named NCCIH director. Let the quackery flow again!

Helene Langevin has been named the new director of the National Center for Complemenary and Integrative Health. Given her history of dodgy acupuncture research, my prediction is that the quackery will flow again at NCCIH, the way it did in the 1990s when Tom Harkin zealously protected it from any attempt to impose scientific rigor on it.

Categories
Bad science Medicine Politics Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Medicaid and the Oregon Health Authority: The scam of replacing opioids with “nonpharmacologic treatments for pain” like acupuncture

The Oregon Health Authority is on the verge of passing a radical policy that would require chronic pain patients receiving Medicaid to have their opioids tapered to zero while covering “nonpharmacologic treatments for pain” that include primarily acupuncture, chiropractic, massage therapy, and other “alternative” treatments. Not surprisingly, the Oregon Chronic Pain Task Force, which is responsible for this proposed infliction of quackery on the most vulnerable, has three acupuncturists and a chiropractor sitting on it.

Categories
Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Pseudoscience Quackery

The case of Tan Qindong shows that in China traditional Chinese medicine is big pharma

Proponents of integrating quackery like most traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) into real medicine portray themselves as underdogs being persecuted by big pharma and the FDA. In China, however, the case of Tan Qindong shows that in China TCM is big pharma.