Clinical trials of integrative medicine: testing whether magic works?
PainSci summary of Gorski 2014?This page is one of thousands in the PainScience.com bibliography. It is not a general article: it is focused on a single scientific paper, and it may provide only just enough context for the summary to make sense. Links to other papers and more general information are provided at the bottom of the page, as often as possible. ★★★☆☆?3-star ratings are for typical studies with no more (or less) than the usual common problems. Ratings are a highly subjective opinion, and subject to revision at any time. If you think this paper has been incorrectly rated, please let me know.
A lot of dead horses are getting beaten in alternative medicine: pointlessly studying silly treatments like homeopathy and reiki over and over again, as if it’s going to tell us something we don’t already know. This point has been made ad infinitum on ScienceBasedMedicine.org since its founding in 2009, but here Drs. Novella and Gorski make the case against testing “whether magic works” in a high-impact journal, Trends in Molecular Medicine.
original abstract†Abstracts here may not perfectly match originals, for a variety of technical and practical reasons. Some abstacts are truncated for my purposes here, if they are particularly long-winded and unhelpful. I occasionally add clarifying notes. And I make some minor corrections.
Over the past two decades complementary and alternative medicine treatments relying on dubious science have been embraced by medical academia. Despite low to nonexistent prior probability that testing these treatments in randomized clinical trials (RCTs) will be successful, RCTs of these modalities have proliferated, consistent with the principles of evidence-based medicine, which underemphasize prior plausibility rooted in science. We examine this phenomenon and argue that what is needed is science-based medicine rather than evidence-based medicine.
related content
- “The faulty statistics of complementary alternative medicine (CAM),” Maurizio Pandolfi and Giulia Carreras, Eur J Intern Med, 2014.
- “Clinical trials of integrative medicine: testing whether magic works?,” David H. Gorski and Steven P. Novella, Trends in Molecular Medicine, 2014.
- “Recommendations are made in the absence of any good treatments,” David Colquhoun, British Medical Journal, 2017.
These two articles on PainScience.com cite Gorski 2014 as a source:
- PS Why “Science”-Based Instead of “Evidence”-Based? — The rationale for making medicine more science-based
- PS The “Impress Me” Test — Most controversial therapies are fighting over scraps of “positive” evidence that damn them with faint praise
This page is part of the PainScience BIBLIOGRAPHY, which contains plain language summaries of thousands of scientific papers & others sources. It’s like a highly specialized blog. A few highlights:
- A Bayesian model-averaged meta-analysis of the power pose effect with informed and default priors: the case of felt power. Gronau 2017 Comprehensive Results in Social Psychology.
- The neck and headaches. Bogduk 2014 Neurol Clin.
- Agreement of self-reported items and clinically assessed nerve root involvement (or sciatica) in a primary care setting. Konstantinou 2012 Eur Spine J.
- Effect of NSAIDs on Recovery From Acute Skeletal Muscle Injury: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. Morelli 2017 Am J Sports Med.
- Association of Spinal Manipulative Therapy With Clinical Benefit and Harm for Acute Low Back Pain: Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. Paige 2017 JAMA.