alternative medicine
terrasig | November 17, 2006"It's shameless," says David Colquhoun, professor of pharmacology at University College London. "Medicines work or don't work, and they should be labelled accordingly," he says.
Professor Colquhoun is quoted in today's New Scientist in response to the first registration of an herbal product (arnica gel) in the UK's Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA).
Mind you, this effort aims only to provide a registry of a product's name and purity, not efficacy:
For a herbal medicine to be allowed on the register, its maker must show that it is safe and manufactured to a…
terrasig | November 16, 2006Over the last several days, Dr. RW, Orac, and Joseph (Corpus Callosum) have been discussing the virtues, or lack thereof, of a national medical student association espousing the coverage of integrative, complementary and alternative medicine (ICAM) modalities in the medical curriculum.
Our SciBling, Joseph, raised the interesting point that CAM education might improve the one aspect of medicine that administrators and health insurance companies are trying to drive from medicine: the doctor-patient relationship. I would say that none of the MD bloggers disagree that time constraints in the…
revere | November 15, 2006My Scibling, Orac, over at Respectful Insolence has a special thing about those he calls "alties." They make him crazy. For Orac alties represent a broad category of alternative medicine approaches. I more or less agree with him but I don't have the same passion about it he does. I'm also willing to believe some things now considered alternative approaches will become mainstream at some point and I know that many things we now consider conventional will be abandoned as without any scientific foundation. That's pretty much the way things work and I don't draw any larger lessons from it, except…
terrasig | November 7, 2006This press release just in from NIH is entitled, "Stephen E. Straus, M.D. becomes senior advisor to NIH director," but what it really means is that a change in leadership is occurring at NIH's alternative medicine arm, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM).
Straus has been ill and is stepping down for health reasons being replaced by acting director, Ruth L. Kirschstein, M.D. (you postdocs should recognize the name since the NIH postdoctoral grants are named after Dr Kirschstein in recognition of her decades of NIH service, in part as director of NIGMS).
The…
What is the responsibility of the health care team with patients who refuse evidence-based medicine?
terrasig | October 10, 2006I'm a day late in recommending this, but I encourage all who are interested in alternative medicine for cancer to spend the time it takes to get through Orac's heartwrenching documentation of the case of a young breast cancer patient who is likely to die in the very near future, through no fault of medicine.
The bottom line: likely curative therapy (i.e., "upwards of 93% long term survival with proper surgery and adjuvant chemotherapy and/or hormonal therapy") was refused by a young woman with a small, treatable, breast mass, only to have her lack of success with alternative therapies bring…
terrasig | October 9, 2006I sometimes get grief from my colleagues about subscribing to the Wall Street Journal, but it is worth every penny. Some of the best stories on health and drug development appear in the WSJ. Beyond its outstanding health reporting, even basic news articles will appear in the WSJ and get picked up, literally, three or four days later by CNN as though they were news. Contrary to other opinions, the WSJ is not a shill for the neoconservative movement - only its editorial page wields a heavy conservative hand which, I find, is fun to read just the same.
I pay the extra $39 a year and have my…
revere | August 30, 2006I have a lot of tolerance for eccentricity as long as it doesn't hurt anyone. I'm a western physician who believes strongly in modern medical science, but I'm not as rabid and offended by alternative medicine as many of my colleagues. As long as it doesn't hurt anyone. Which unfortunately it frequently does. Take homeopathy.
The guiding principles of homeopathy are (1) "like cures like"; (2) remedies are taken in very low doses (one might say vanishingly low doses, like one part of remedy to a trillion parts of water); (3) there is a single remedy for every illness, although finding it might…
terrasig | August 18, 2006I've stayed out of the Starchild Abraham Cherrix case, where a 16-year-old boy and his parents are trying to refuse known, effective, and life-saving chemotherapy for a curable cancer in lieu of a scientifically unproven alternative regimen that includes coffee enemas.
Orac of Respectful Insolence has been most prolific in commenting on the issues at hand and yesterday, The Cheerful Oncologist, weighed in. I'm happy about this because both fellas are MDs with highly-specialized oncology training in surgical and medical oncology, respectively. Hence, I defer to them on issues of life and…
terrasig | July 17, 2006Get ready to be barraged by news of a proprietary pine bark extract exhibiting efficacy against attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. Today's report by the French company that manufactures a maritime pine bark extract seems to be associated (see press release below fold) with Dr Steven Lamm, a clinical assistant professor at NYU Medical School, and based on results published in the journal, European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.
I don't believe this is actually "news" as stories such as this one appeared about a month ago. Hence, I fear that today's press release and satellite hook…
terrasig | July 7, 2006This link provides a truly lengthy diatribe on "11 Effective, Natural Strategies To Kill Your Cancer" that I found the other day while reading on ABCNews about Sheryl Crow's battle with breast cancer. It literally takes about 15 min to read and then ends with a list of links to purchase products mentioned in the "report," with nearly all being mail order supplements from one Robert Harrison of Homer, Alaska.
Before even getting into the inaccuracies and misrepresentations in the diatribe, I started to tally the cost of all the immune boosting supplements I should purchase, but grew weary…