Category Archives: General

It can be very instructive when proponents of alternative medicine respond to comments or criticism from skeptics. Sometimes, they respond with reasoned, even evidence-based defense of a specific practice. This is a good sign and can lead to productive discussion. … Continue reading →

Early on in my effort to understand and evaluate alternative veterinary therapies, I had the naïve notion that learning about their mechanisms of action and the research evidence behind them would enable me to tell which were safe and effective … Continue reading →

Stumbled across this blog post from VancouverFeline recently. Warms my skeptical heart!! In medicine, we have many habits and quirks handed down through the generations. Often, we think nothing of these, and even believe that these well-accepted practices are grounded … Continue reading →

I have been participating in a discussion on the Veterinary Information Network (VIN) about the AVMA’s failure to take a scientific and principled position on homeopathy, and it prompted me to outline a few thoughts on the subject of whether … Continue reading →

The American Holistic Veterinary Medical Association (AHVMA), and the associated foundation (AHVMF) appear frequently in articles on this blog. These organizations represent a large portion of alternative veterinary practitioners, and the AHVMF is involved in significant efforts to spread the … Continue reading →

The Journal of the American Medical Association and British Medical Journal have produced a video of a discussion with some of the founding figures of the Evidence-Based Medicine movement. This offers some great insights into the improtant and fundamental shift in … Continue reading →

A key focus of this blog is to promote a science-based perspective for veterinary medicine. I believe that relying more on science and less on habit, tradition, intuition, and personal experience will lead to better care for our patients. While … Continue reading →

Here’s a paper that’s been getting a lot of press lately and which illustrates some common problems with scientific studies which turn up often in the domain of alternative medicine, although that is not the subject of this study. Hart … Continue reading →

The nature of science is fundamentally critical. Science works best when it shows us what is not true. This is largely a function of the fact that most of the biases and cognitive quirks that lead us astray when trying … Continue reading →

One of the most attractive features of alternative therapies is that they offer hope. CAM treatments, by definition, are almost never validated by the usual scientific research evidence used to test mainstream medical therapies. If they were, they would no … Continue reading →