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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

No, JAMA does not now recommend chiropractic care first for low back pain

Of all the alternative medical systems out there, chiropractic is one of the oddest. Unlike many of the others, it has a modicum of plausibility, at least for back problems due to musculoskeletal strains. After all, the science-based specialty of physical therapy uses spinal manipulation to treat back problems. Of course, the big difference between […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Quackery

Millennials and CAM use: Some depressing news

After having returned from TAM, I was pumped up by how much interest was shown in the case of Stanislaw Burzynski. More importantly, I was heartened to learn while I was there that the Texas Medical Board had submitted an amended complaint against him containing 202 pages worth of charges. Sure, the descriptions of the […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Science Skepticism/critical thinking

Medical marijuana and the new herbalism, part 1

Three months ago, I wrote about how the Cleveland Clinic had recently opened a clinic that dispensed herbal medicine according to traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) practice. As regular readers might expect, I was not particularly impressed or approving of this particular bit of infiltration of quackademic medicine into a major, generally well-respected academic medical center, […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Homeopathy Medicine Quackery

Homeopathy was quackery in 1796, it was quackery in 1988, and it will still be quackery in 2096

This is a post about homeopathic quackery. But I repeat myself. Those of you who’ve been readers here for a while have no doubt encountered Dana Ullman. He’s been popping up from time to time as a topic of this blog for many years now, almost to the very beginning, when he began spewing the […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Another one bites the dust to quackademic medicine

One of the most depressing things I regularly write about is, of course, the antivaccine movement. However, nearly as depressing to me is to watch the steady march of what I view as medical pseudoscience or even outright quackery into what should be bastions of science-based medicine, namely academic medical centers. As I’ve discussed many […]