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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

How not to do a study on the efficacy of “alternative” medicine

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the last four years of examining the various forms of woo out there, it’s to be very, very skeptical whenever an advocate of a highly dubious-sounding “therapy” points to a study as “proof” that the therapy, whatever it is, works. Usually, what I find is a small pilot […]

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Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

“Integrative” medicine at Yale: A more “fluid” concept of evidence?

I realize that I’ve been very, very remiss in attending to a task that I’ve been meaning to get to since late January. There are several reasons, albeit not excuses, for why I have failed to do this task. Perhaps the most powerful impediment to my overcoming my inertia and just diving in and doing […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

A Friday rant about nonscience- and nonevidence-based medicine…

…courtesy of fellow ScienceBlogger Jake Young. Two money quotes: “First, what is CAM bringing to the table that science and medicine didn’t have? Good feelings. Acquaintance with the ways ignorance. Newer, better superstitions. Frankly, you can keep them.” “Science complemented by non-science ceases to be science, and there are no alternatives to the truth.” I […]

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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

Reclaiming the linguistic high ground: Renaming “complementary and alternative” medicine and the power of language

A few days ago, I was amused by a term coined by Dr. R.W. The term, “quackademic medicine,” was meant to describe the unholy fusion of non-science- and non-evidence-based woo that has infiltrated academic medicine to a disturbing extent over the last decade or two. There was a lot of reaction, mainly positive, to the […]

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Cancer Medicine Quackery

ASCO’s new guidelines promote quackery for cancer pain

Recently, the American Society of Clinical Oncology and the Society for Integrative Oncology published guidelines for treating cancer pain. These guidelines endorsed quackery like reflexology and acupuncture. The infiltration of quackademic medicine continues apace in oncology.