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Wednesday, 08 October 2008

Woo: The opposite of medical evidence?

I recommend Respectful Insolence, a blog written anonymously by a surgeon who uses a light-hearted, velvet-revolver approach when critiquing questionable research studies and exposing faulty analysis. (It's part of ScienceBlogs.com.)

The author calls it "woo" when medical schools and other institutions defend feel-good techniques that are poorly grounded in empirical evidence -- either because studies have been poorly designed, or because there's just no there there, whether or not the studies are done properly. He's gone so far as to develop an Academic Woo Aggregator: "Last week, almost on a whim, I decided to try to figure out just how much woo has infiltrated academic medicine by trying to come up with an estimate of just how many academic medical centers offer woo of some form or another in the form of centers of 'integrative medicine' or 'complementary and alternative medicine' (CAM)." Whether or not you agree with his conclusions, I think we all could learn something from his commitment to rigor and his witty way of dissecting research.

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Comments

Interesting post... thanks!!!
I really like it

very nice reading... great work at this post!!!

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