“Empowerment.” What a grand word! After all, who doesn’t want to be “empowered”? Certainly not me. Perhaps that’s the reason why it’s become the new buzzword in a movement known as “patient-centered” care. Old fart that I am, I’m a bit puzzled by exactly what that term means. After all, I’ve always thought I have […]
Yesterday, I marveled at an article that appeared on the Associated Press new feed that basically said a lot of things about the infiltration of quackademic medicine into academic medical centers, how so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” 9CAM) is finding its way into the mainstream despite almost nonexistent evidence for the efficacy the vast majority […]
Vaccines have saved more lives and prevented more suffering than any medical invention ever conceived by humans. However, to be most effective, a large enough fraction of the population to produce herd immunity needs to be immunized. When the herd immunity threshold is reached, then the chances of anyone carrying a microorganism to cause disease […]
Here we go again. As regular readers know, I’ve lamented long and loud the infiltration of unscientific “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM, or what Dr. RW dubbed “quackademic medicine, a term I very much like) into medical school curricula, academic medical centers, and postgraduate medical education. A while back, in particular, I got rather worked […]
I’m busy working on a talk today, but there is a tidbit that lends itself to a brief (and hopefully amusing and educational) Sunday exercise. It comes, not surprisingly, from the anti-vaccine blog Age of Autism. It doesn’t actually have anything to do with vaccines per se, but it is a perfect encapsulation of the […]
