New blog just being added to the blogroll is Natural Remedies That Work, by Dr Shaun Holt, a blog that promises to examine which natural therapies actually work and are backed by solid research – and which don’t, and are not.
Good reading, especially when in today's Herald Shaun is talking about how bureaucracy is killing medical research (and patients).
Shaun is one of the good guys. If you want rational reading on an often-conflicted topic, then he’s your man.
5 comments:
Interesting. I read an article-which-I-now-can't-find yesterday on how ‘the market’ is cited as a reason British universities have started offering BSc’s in Homeopathy and the like - which is of course a travesty - but the demand is there! Thankfully a few Professors and the like have managed to stop it being taught as science at a few of the universities.Interesting how market forces influenced the courses on offer, just would’ve thought a frickin’ university would’ve figured out that it shouldn’t be taught as science.
Now I have to admit that generally I'm not the greatest fan of most alternative and complementary therapies. For example, sticking burning candles in people's ears seems quite strange to me, if only because ear drums are reasonably fragile, candles are associated with house fires, and no ear wax is likely to be sucked out. Likewise, homeopathy cannot work, except by simple placebo effect, and the idea that cracking people's backs and necks can cure problems such as infertility, asthma and colic simply makes no sense (the guy who came up with this idea was a janitor, by the way - no disrespect to janitors - he was later run-over by his son who wanted to carry on the family business of back-cracking).
Not suprisingly, I am a very big fan of evidence based medicine. But I'm also aware that just because many CAM therapies are not supported by evidence or sensible scientific rationale, does not mean that all do not work. So in correctly dismissing the ones which are not supported by proper evidence, it is imperative that we do not 'throw the baby out with the bath water' and lose that do.
So this new blog that Dr Holt proposes makes a lot of sense to me. Let's hear which of the wierd and wonderful CAM therapies work - because surely some must. And if we can hear this from a person trained in science and medicine, so much the better.
With regard to the idea of private ethics boards and attracting research funding to NZ, it's a pity this wasn't discussed at the recent government summit.
AG - good points. I asked to go to the jobs summit to talk about this idea - was told it was a great idea, but was not invited in the end. Cheers.
StephenR - it was in the Sunday Pravda Times yesterday, taken from The Grauniad - here's the original
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/
2009/feb/24/homeopathy-science
Cheers
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