Snake Oil Science: The Truth about Complementary and Alternative Medicine

Front Cover
Oxford University Press, 2007 - Family & Relationships - 315 pages
Hailed in the New York Times as "entertaining and immensely educational," Snake Oil Science is not only a brilliant critique of alternative medicine, but also a first-rate introduction to interpreting scientific research of any sort. The book's ultimate goal is to illustrate how the placebo effect conspires to make medical therapies appear to be effective--not just to consumers, but to therapists and poorly trained scientists as well. Bausell explores this remarkable phenomenon and explains why research on any therapy that does not factor in the placebo effect (and other placebo-like effects) will inevitably produce false results. Moreover, as the author shows in an impressive survey of research from high-quality scientific journals, studies employing credible placebo controls do not indicate positive effects for alternative therapies beyond those attributable to random chance. Readers will come away from this book with a healthy skepticism of claims about the latest "miracle cure," be it St. John's Wort for depression or acupuncture for chronic pain.
 

Contents

The Rise of Complementary and Alternative Therapies
1
A Brief History of Placebos
23
Natural Impediments to Making Valid Inferences
37
Impediments That Prevent Physicians and Therapists from Making Valid Inferences
59
Impediments That Prevent Poorly Trained Scientists from Making Valid Inferences
69
Why Randomized Placebo Control Groups Are Necessary in CAM Research
83
Judging the Credibility and Plausibility of Scientific Evidence
101
Some Personal Research Involving Acupuncture
113
A Biochemical Explanation for the Placebo Effect
143
What HighQuality Trials Reveal About CAM
167
What HighQuality Systematic Reviews Reveal About CAM
199
How CAM Therapies Are Hypothesized to Work
255
Tying Up a Few Loose Ends
277
NOTES
295
INDEX
317
Copyright

How We Know That the Placebo Effect Exists
127

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2007)

R. Barker Bausell, Ph.D., a professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore, was Research Director of a National Institutes of Health-funded Complementary and Alternative Medicine Specialized Research Center.

Bibliographic information