Friday, July 10, 2009

Science based Medicin e conferance at TAM-7

Great Lectures today on Science based medicine. Case studies in Cancer Quackery, Scientific Critique of Chiropractic, Lyme Disease. I will be blogging on each of these after I inteview the presentors friday and saturday. I will give one highlight from each talk.
1) while we need to individualize each patients treatment we often ( and I can see myself doing it) we let errors like false pattern recognition, influenced by quirky personal experience , over reliance on non-specific signs and symptonsand conformational bias.
2)Suzzanne Summers only had Stage one Cancer and had 94-96% chance of 10 year survival with or without additional treatment and chemo would only have added 1-4 % improvement in survival so her claims of alternative medicine cured her is blatantly wrong.
3) 20% of all Basilar strokes are caused by chiropractic manipulation, 1/2 of all chiropractic manipulation has negative side effects, Children should never be manipulated by chiropractor.
4) Chronic Lyme disease:
most likely no such thing as chronic Lyme disease ;
definitely no such thing as chronic Lyme disease that responds to antibiotic
Check back over next couple days for full story.