traditional Chinese medicine
oracknows | May 19, 2017Acupiuncture is a system of treatment rooted in the prescientific vitalism of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). It doesn't work. For anything. As Steve Novella and David Colquhoun put it, acupuncture is basically a theatrical placebo, which is why rigorous studies consistently fail to find a treatment effect due to acupuncture that is detectably greater than placebo. Not that that's stopped acupuncturists and acupuncture advocates from trying desperately to show that acupuncture "works," even if it means hooking up acupuncture needles to electrodes and turning it into transcutaneous nerve…
oracknows | May 1, 2017"Integrative medicine" is a term for a form of medicine in which pseudoscience and quackery are "integrated" with real medicine. Unfortunately, as Mark Crislip puts it, when you mix cow pie with apple pie, it doesn't make the cow pie better; it makes the apple pie worse. Unfortunately these days, there's a lot of cow pie being mixed with apple pie. Worse, it's gotten to the point where integrative medicine is subspecializing. For instance, there is now a specialty known as "integrative oncology," which particularly burns me. Indeed, supportive care oncology has been very susceptible to the…
oracknows | February 1, 2017I must admit that the last couple of weeks have been rather grim here on the old blog. Betweemn Donald Trump's White House spewing , an unfortunate patient embracing quackery, pseudoscience at the VA, and more. So it is that I feel as though it might not be a bad idea to step back for a day, to look into an acupuncture "study" that's been making the rounds in the media. Oddly enough, I remember it showing up a week ago and meant to discuss it then. So I'm glad that I saw a new news story on it in —where else?—The Daily Mail in the form of an article entitled Forget Viagra - acupuncture could…
oracknows | January 22, 2017Of all the forms of unproven and disproven alternative medicine being enthusiastically "integrated" into science-based medicine by proponents of "integrative medicine" (formerly—and sometimes still—known as "complementary and alternative medicine," or CAM), so-called "traditional Chinese medicine" (TCM) is clearly among the most popular and seemingly the most accepted. After all, acupuncture, the most famous modality in the TCM armamentarium, is offered in dozens of academic medical centers and hundreds of medical centers in the US, but it goes beyond that. It doesn't matter that the totality…
oracknows | November 17, 2016I’ve frequently written about what I like to refer to as “quackademic medicine,” defined as the infiltration of outright quackery into medical academia, particularly medical schools and academic medical centers. There’s no doubt that it’s a significant problem as hallowed institutions like Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center embrace nonsense, pseudoscience, and quackery in the name of “integrative medicine.” It goes far beyond MSKCC, however, with Dana-Farber and other elite institutions having apparently bought into the need to study prescientific vitalistic quackery.
One area that’s…
oracknows | November 14, 2016The Society for Integrative Oncology (SIO) doesn’t like me much. I understand. I haven’t exactly been supportive of the group’s mission or activities. So it wasn’t surprising that SIO wrote letters trying to rebut a Perspectives article on “integrative oncology” that I published in Nature Reviews Cancer two years ago. What depressed me about that encounter was that one of the complaints the SIO had about my article was that it spent too much verbiage discussing homeopathy as one pseudoscientific treatment that “integrative” oncology “integrates” with science-based medicine and no one uses…
oracknows | October 26, 2016Although I did not coin it, I frequently use the term “quackademic medicine” because, unfortunately, there’s a lot of quackademic medicine around. Although regular readers know what the term means, i always feel obligated to briefly explain what quackademic medicine is, for the benefit of any newbie who might happen upon this blog. Basically, it is a term used to describe an increasingly common and alarming phenomenon, the infiltration of rank quackery and pseudoscience into medical academia. You might think it impossible or unbelievable, but it’s anything but. Beginning around a quarter of a…
oracknows | September 19, 2016I never in a million years thought I’d be writing a blog post involving Selena Gomez.
Gomez, as many, if not most, of you are probably aware is currently a young pop star and actress who got her start as a child actress. Oddly enough, she was on Barney & Friends with Demi Lovato. These days, Gomez specializes in the variety of overproduced, lightweight pop that I don’t really listen to, although, ever since I subscribed to Apple Music, I’ve been known to listen to songs by performers like Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato just to see if I could figure out why they’re so popular. So far, I…
oracknows | August 9, 2016As I mentioned yesterday, there are news events involving medicine (more specifically pseudoscience in medicine) that are so ubiquitous and irritating that they’re enough to bring me briefly out of my vacation to bang out a quick post. So it was when I wrote my post yesterday about Michael Phelps’ enthusiasm for cupping, a practice attributed to traditional Chinese medicine that is actually an ancient practice that seems to have been independently thought up in multiple cultures, such as the ancient Egyptians. Basically, cupping therapy is a near-universal practice dating back at least 3,500…
oracknows | August 8, 2016So, in case you hadn’t noticed, I was taking a brief vacation, a long weekend if you will. As a result, I hadn’t planned on posting new completely original material until Wednesday or Thursday. (Monday’s post, some of you noticed, was a modified crosspost from my not-so-super-secret other blog.)
Then something happened.
You know you’re a committed blogger when your vacation can be interrupted by an overpowering urge to write about something in the news. Longtime regular readers (or even not-so-longtime regular readers) can probably guess right away what I’m talking about. Of course, I gave it…
oracknows | July 24, 2016I was originally going to write this post for the 4th of July, given the subject matter. However, as regular readers know, I am not unlike Dug the Dog in the movie Up, with new topics that float past me in my social media and blog reading rounds serving as the squirrel. But never let it be said, though, that I don't circle back to topics that interest med. (Wait, strike that. Sometimes, that actually does happen. After all, I have been at this nearly 12 years now. It just didn't happen this time.) This time around, I will be using documents forwarded to me by a reader as a means of revisiting…
oracknows | July 12, 2016Given the study that I’m going to discuss, I can’t help but start out with a brief (for me) reminiscence. Longtime readers know that I graduated from the University of Michigan Medical School in the late 1980s. Back when I attended U. of M., its medical school was considered stodgy and hard core even by 1980s standards. No organ systems approach to education for U. of M.! Oh, no. It didn’t matter that the organ systems approach, in which all classes are organized by organ systems and teach the same organ systems at roughly the same time (e.g., biochemistry teaching the biochemistry of the…
oracknows | July 1, 2016There are so many ridiculous alternative medicine treatments being “integrated” via “integrative” medicine into medicine, no matter how ridiculous they are, that it’s not only hard to believe, but it’s hard to keep track. Homeopathy is, of course, the most ridiculous, although “energy medicine” definitely gives homeopathy a run for its money in the Department of Stupid. The depressing thing is that most physicians, even “integrative medicine” physicians, know that homeopathy is bunk (at least when they even know what homeopathy is—most think it’s just herbal medicine). However, those same…
oracknows | March 4, 2016Acupuncture is quackery.
As with naturopathy (a medical pseudo-"specialty" that embraces acupuncture and other so-called traditional Chinese medicine), when I write about acupuncture I like to start out with a provocative statement, a statement of—dare I say it?—judgment in order to shock new readers and let them know exactly where I'm coming from. Why I consider acupuncture to be quackery now, after years of not being sure, is simple and well documented in many posts on this blog. (Just type "acupuncture" into the search box if you don't believe me; here's an example.) Basically, I started…
oracknows | October 30, 2015When I wrote about YouYou Tu, the Chinese scientist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her successful identification, isolation, purification, and validation of Artemisinin, an antimalarial medication that was quite effective. It was also derived from an herbal remedy used in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), which has led a fair number of TCM advocates to portray this Nobel Prize as a "validation" or "vindication" of TCM. It wasn't. Nor was it a validation of naturopathy or herbalism, as has been claimed. It was a validation of the good, old-fashioned science-based…
oracknows | October 11, 2015Last week, in response to the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Chinese scientist Youyou Tu, who isolated Artemisinin and validated it as a useful treatment for malaria back in the 1970s, I pointed out that the discovery was a triumph of natural products pharmacology, not of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). So did Scott Gavura, a pharmacist who blogs at my favorite other blog, Science-Based Medicine, who also emphasized that the path from TCM remedy for fever to pill used to treat malaria was the very model of how pharmacologists isolate medicines from plants.…
oracknows | October 8, 2015Yesterday, I wrote about the winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Youyou Tu, who, after screening 2,000 herbal treatments from traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) for anti-malaria activity, finally discovered Artemisinin. She isolated it from the plant in which it is found, using modern chemistry to isolate it, purify it, and later chemically modify it to make it more active against malaria. Tu deserved the Nobel Prize for her years of screening. As I pointed out, contrary to how the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Tu is being spun, it is not a validation of TCM, but rather of…
oracknows | October 7, 2015Earlier this week, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Youyou Tu for her discovery of the anti-malaria compound Artemisinin, as well as to William C. Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura for their discovery of a novel therapy for roundworm. Artemisinin, as some of you might know, is a compound derived from traditional Chinese medicine, which is why, to my irritation, it didn't take long for headlines like How traditional Chinese medicine finally won its Nobel Prize, What the 2015 Nobel Prizes mean for traditional Chinese medicine, and A Medical Breakthrough Made Possible By Ancient…
oracknows | September 29, 2015I've spent a lot of time in Cleveland. Indeed, I lived there for eight years in the late 1980s and early 1990s, during which time I completed my surgery residency training, completed my PhD, and, even more importantly, met and married my wife. Even though I haven't lived there for nearly 20 years—I can't believe it's been that long—I still have an affinity for the city, which is perhaps why I've had a tendency to come down hard on venerable Cleveland medical institutions that turn to quackademic medicine, one where I trained (I'm talking to you, University Hospitals of Cleveland) and one…
oracknows | July 13, 2015I sometimes catch flak for repeating this, but there was a time when I thought there might be something to acupuncture. I don't care, because, as a blogger, when I write a post I assume that a significant fraction of people reading it have never seen this blog before and therefore aren't even the least bit familiar with what I've written before on the subject. That makes them a blank slate, as far as this blog is concerned, and obliges me to explain everything. That time was about nine or ten years ago, and my rationale was, not surprisingly, that, unlike many other alternative medicine…