Sysiphus Speaks

Our new Ms. America, D.C., has parlayed her "INSTANT CELEBRITY STATUS!" into a gig as spokesperson for the Brain Injury Association of America. According to the BIAA,

How do you credential someone in a field that is based in pseudo-medicine, divorced from reality, with a panoply of imagery diseases treated with equally imaginary therapies? Like natruopathy?

It is also ironic that while the ABIM is striving to improve care with the initiative, many organizations are institutionalizing pseudo-medical therapies in Integrative Medicine Departments that meet none of the Choosing Wisely criteria.

What SBM givith, pseudo-medicine taketh away.

Like TCPM, India wasting huge sums of money, $16 million, trying to find scientific legitimacy with their own version of tooth fairy science, “ayurgenomics”

honey is still touted as a treatment for cough and you do not want to give honey to children because of the risk of botulism. So hows about agave nectar ? So in an interesting study, Placebo Effect in the Treatment of Acute Cough in Infants and Toddlers they compared agave nectar, placebo and no intervention in children with cough.

A few nights ago I ran across "Love Crunch Premium Organic Granola" at (surprise!) Whole Foods. Those of you who read my post, "What Whole Foods Doesn't Tell You," over on the SBM blog, will have caught me in a broken promise here. In the post, I deplored a magazine, "What Doctors Don't Tell You," found in the check-out aisle. The magazine was chock-full of "alternative" health garbage, including downright dangerous advice on cancer treatment. I swore, right there in front of everybody, that I would not darken the door of Whole Foods again as long as they continued to promote such nonsense.

Pseudo-medical providers ignore complications and, as the chiropractic response to the risk of stroke after neck manipulation demonstrates, work hard at denying that complications can occur. In real medicine we always try and side with patient safety. Not chiropractors.

It turns out that the phrase 'serious methodological problems' is a remarkable understatement as the paper on green coffee beans and weight loss was retracted this week. Why?

Not everyone thinks that pseudo-medicines would be at best in the way and at worst dangerous to the function of reality based medicine. For example take The Roles of Acupuncture and Other Components of Integrative Medicine in Cataclysmic Natural Disasters and Military Conflicts.

In China a real doctor has bet a practitioner of TCPM that he (the TCPM) cannot determine if a woman is pregnant 80% of the time by the TCPM diagnostic practice of feeling the pulse. The women will evidently be behind a curtain so the TCPM will have no other clues as to the state of the female. A simple binary result, pregnant or not, by feeling the pulse and only feeling the pulse. Like the Rosa test, it will be simple and elegant. At stake is RMB 100,000.