Medicare is paying for nonsense. I recently wrote about the free preventive medicine appointments offered by Medicare. Those are worthwhile and are based on good science, but I was surprised to see that Medicare sometimes departs from rigorously science-based standards. They also cover alternative medicine treatments based on fantasy. Chiropractic According to Medicare.gov: Medicare Part B (Medical
Consumer Reports’ recent articles on low back pain address anecdotal customer satisfaction rather than scientific evidence of effectiveness. A correspondent e-mailed me, saying: “I received my latest issue of Consumer Reports with great interest because the cover story is about back pain. However after reading the article I walked away disappointed. How this well respected publication printed
ChiroNexus recently listed the top 10 chiropractic studies of 2013. In my experience, chiropractic studies tend to be of poor quality. A media report says “study shows chiropractic works for X,” and when I look for the study it turns out to be a single case report or an uncontrolled study. When Simon Singh was
I subscribe to American Family Physician, the peer-reviewed journal of the American Academy of Family Physicians. It emphasizes evidence-based medicine and most articles include a table showing strength of evidence ratings for key recommendations for practice. Lately, its scientific rigor has been slipping. I have complained to the editor about several articles whose recommendations were
