Sysiphus Speaks

What a lot the pseudo-medicine offer patients, besides time, is touch. Lots of touch, and touch is nice. Even something as totally wackaloon as craniosacral therapy looks quite pleasant if the underlying goofiness is removed. Lying on your back, half asleep, as your head is gently massaged.

Washington just became the third state (along with Vermont and Oregon) to cover naturopathic services as Medicaid providers. Medicaid is the state-run, but federally financed, health care program for low-income residents, and it is up to the individual states to decide what services the state will pay for.

Age cannot wither acupuncture, nor custom stale its infinite variety. Shakespeare. Antony and Cleopatra There are so many kinds of acupuncture: Chinese, Japanese, tongue, hand, ear, German and electro. Which is the real one? Trick question. None are.

I recently mentioned the issues of bias in the medical literature and suggested that belief in a pseudo-medical intervention may be every bit as distorting as a financial interest in an outcome. A positive study of acupuncture by acupuncturists should be as suspect as a pharmaceutical sponsored drug study.

When pseudo-medical providers take money from the sick and desperate for therapies that have no basis in reality is fraud I cannot say. But it is wrong.

The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) wants to change its name to the National Center for Research on Complementary and Integrative Health.

The more troublesome problem is hidden data. All the studies that are not published and could help inform clinicians as to efficacy and side effects of medications. You can compensate for errors and bias if the data is available but not if it is unpublished. This problem is well described in the most excellent Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients.

I was sent a copy of the abstract Vaccination Attitudes and Education in Naturopathic Medicine Students from The International Research Congress on Integrative Medicine and Health (IRCIMH). Sobering results:

Fortunately, it has been quite a while since they achieved that goal in any particular state. NDs are licensed or registered in 18 states now, but recent legislative successes fall far short of full PCP scope of practice. And there has been pushback against their prescribing privileges in one state.

The May 2nd Science had an article called Male Scent May Compromise Biomedical Studies and reviews how mice respond to pain.

The odd thing is that Care Oregon does pay for acupuncture for headache. So they may pay for a pseudo-medicine with no efficacy and only complications, but they will not pay for a real medicine with good efficacy and fewer complications.

People like to have a diagnosis and a reason for their medical problems. If one is not offered, they will find one no matter what the evidence demonstrates. Autism is a good example.

Because newborns are not eating broccoli in utero and have not yet developed a colon bacteria flora, they can be born with a vitamin K deficiency. That can lead to Hemorrhagic Disease of the Newborn and they can bleed into the brain and other organs. Because of this risk, every newborn gets a shot of vitamin K a delivery. If you google vitamin K shot, in the first dozen hits is Skip that Newborn Vitamin K Shot,

To me, the most intriguing feature of homeopathy is not that people use it but rather that it can be sold at all. By all rights, a company shouldn't be able to sell a small bottle of overpriced water or sugar tablets as a remedy for what ails you. And no health care pracitioner should be allowed to prescribe it. But they do

Effectiveness of homeopathic medicine associated with allopathic medicine in the outpatient management of influenza-like illnesses or ear, nose, and throat disorders by pharmacists looked at who received homeopathic or real medications and their outcomes. There are numerous issues with the study, but the results are interesting for reasons probably not intended by the authors.