Trick or Treatment?: Alternative Medicine on Trial
July 29th, 2010 | 
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Product Description
Welcome to the world of alternative medicine. Prince Charles is a staunch defender and millions of people swear by it; most UK doctors consider it to be little more than superstition and a waste of money. But how do you know which treatments really heal and which are potentially harmful?Now at last you can find out, thanks to the formidable partnership of Professor Edzard Ernst and Simon Singh. Edzard Ernst is the world’s first professor of complementary medicine, b… More >>
Posted in Alternative Medicine | 
Tags: alternative, Alternative Medicine, Complementary Medicine, Edzard Ernst, Medicine, Medicine Alternative, Medicine Description, Medicine On Trial, Partnership, Prince Charles, Product Description, Simon Singh, Superstition, Treatment, Trial, Trick, Uk Doctors, Waste Of Money, Welcome To The World
Singh and Ernst’s book is an introduction both to the principles of science-based medicine and various alternative remedies.
The authors explain by way of historical examples how the methodologies of evidence-based medicine evolved and the various pitfalls encountered along the way. To many attracted to alternative medicine ‘science’ is a dirty word, but explained in terms of how evidence is gathered and assessed the authors make a strong case for this approach being non-ideological, fair, and reasonable.
The authors begin in the first chapter entitled “How do you determine the truth?” by addressing this fundamental but surprisingly tricky question. Given all of the complications of the human body and influences impacting upon it, how can we be sure a remedy really works? Here the authors introduce the idea of using randomization and control groups to provide a means of fair comparison, using the historical examples such as scurvy and blood-letting as entertaining and sometimes gross illustrations.
In the remaining chapters the authors address popular practices such as acupuncture, homeopathy and chiropractic, expanding along the way on refinements such as blinding that were evolved by researchers in order to eliminate problems like unconscious bias and the placebo effect. It is also explained how systematic reviews work and the origins of the Cochrane Collaboration, an interesting story in itself.
This does not strike me as a book with an agenda: it is a clear and straightforward explanation of how science-based medicine is practiced and it provides what I think is a fair and balanced assessment of various alternative practices. If you are a big fan of alternative medicine I would strongly recommend you read this book. At the very least you will be entertained for a couple of hours with tales from the history of medicine, and you will certainly come away better informed. In all this was an entertaining, informative and thought-provoking book, and you come away with a wonderfully simple tool for making a complicated world simple: just do a randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blinded trial, stupid!
Rating: 5 / 5