Sysiphus Speaks

I guess the BMJ is legit when it published Televised medical talk shows—what they recommend and the evidence to support their recommendations: a prospective observational study. In an act of admirable courage they

Prospectively recorded all episodes of The Doctors from 11 January to 1 May 2013 (79 episodes) and The Dr. Oz Show from 7 January to 1 May 2013 (78 episodes).

The NCCAM (National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine) has a new name and new initials: National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH).

The name was changed because people do not use alternative medicine alone, but they integrate useless pseudo-medicines to complement reality-based medicine.

Want to see a scamster squirm? Watch this Canadian Broadcasting reporter ask "Dr." Brian Clement some pointed questions about the Hippocrates Health Institute.

I think of learned helplessness every time I see someone abusing an animal by jabbing it with useless needles aka acupuncture. I know it is projection, but every time I see pictures of animals getting acupuncture, I see a depressed animal with learned helplessness.

He concluded with the usual chestnut about not throwing out the baby with the bath water.

Me? When it comes to pseudo-medicine I would throw out the baby, the bath water, the tub, the soap, the shampoo, the washcloth and the towel.

One thing we decided to do is to keep tabs on state bills which either give licenses to practitioners of pseudo-medicine or seek to alter their scope of practice, usually for the worse by expanding it. Even if SFSBM didn't have the resources to hire lobbyists to fight these bills, our readers can contact their legislators and give them a good dose of scientific reality.

But we wanted to do more. And now we have. Our first effort is a Report to the Naturopathic Advisory Committee of the Maryland Board of Physicians and you can read it here.

The OED is a stickler for examples of usage, so they pointed to Effect of Perineal Self-Acupressure on Constipation: A Randomized Controlled Trial in the Journal of General Internal Medicine. The study is out of UCLA, Yale and Southwestern Law School !?!

Usual care or perineal acupressure for constipation. Perineal acupressure. Where did perineal acupuncture come from? I don't know.

Osler described pneumonia as the Captain of the Men of Death. Back in days before antibiotics, vaccines, and a good understanding of the epidemiology, pneumonia was a routine killer. It could kill so quickly and painlessly Osler also called it the old man's friend, since it was a better death than many of the alternatives of the day. With friends like that...

After all, if the chiropractic subluxation is a product of the imagination, why not devise imaginary means to find it and do something about it?

In what looks like a manipulation of PLOS for a marketing program to increase the use of acupuncture in England, most of the same authors of the original paper hired an economist who found that, hey, acupuncture is cost effective.