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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 14583

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: Journal Article

Singh S, Ernst E.
Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine
The New England Journal of Medicine 2008 Nov 6; 359:(19):2076-2077
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/short/359/19/2076?query=TOC


Full text:

The authors of this book state in their introduction: “Our mission is to reveal the truth about the potions, lotions, pills, needles, pummeling and energizing that lie beyond the realms of conventional medicine.” Their goal is to answer the question of whether alternative therapies provide any benefits – or only a placebo effect.

Simon Singh is a physicist and science journalist, and his coauthor, Edzard Ernst, is a physician and professor of complementary medicine. Ernst is one of the best qualified people to summarize the evidence on this topic. After graduating from medical school, he practiced at a homeopathic hospital . . .

 

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909