February 27, 2010
Science-Based Medicine
Harriet Hall
Harriet Hall, MD, The SkepDoc, discusses her column in O, The Oprah Magazine that focuses on debunking medical myths. She contrasts science-based medicine and “complementary and alternative medicine,” and tells why she objects to the latter term. She details why homeopathy elicits more moral outrage from her than other kinds of CAM remedies. Other topics she addresses include acupuncture, chiropractic, radical life extension, pharmaceutical cognitive enhancers, the difference between fringe-science and pseudoscience, and also the risks of science-based medicine.
Also in this episode, The Honest Liar, Jamy Ian Swiss, talks about his hobby: collecting pseudosciences.
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Listener Reactions
Thank you for clearing up that musculoskeletal manipulation is the only chiropractic practice that may be useful.
I love Harriet Hall and all of her columns! A great skeptic! Thanks for the interview DJ!
My wife and I are friends of Harriet, the Skepdoc, and her husband Kirk.
We consider her the smartest woman we ever have ever met and probably ever will meet. I have absolutely no problem calling her the female Einstein of our times.
Today’s world that seems to partially thrive on medical quackery, nonsensical superstitions, and outright idiotic concepts could use many more of her calibre.
Keep up the good work, Harriet: remember, even if you were all alone, one candle is better than total darkness.
In “Does Eating Late at Night Make You Gain Weight?” (from her Oprah blog) Harriet Hall identifies as a myth, the commonly believed connection between eating close to bedtime and weight gain. I think her reasoning is flawed.
here’s an excerpt from Harriet Hall’s article:
“Researchers at the University of Texas at El Paso had 867 people keep diet diaries that divided the day into four-hour periods. It turned out that people who ate more in the morning ate fewer calories overall, and people who ate late at night ate more calories overall. This is the key. Typically, Americans who eat late at night are not simply postponing dinner from 6 to 10 P.M. They are actually eating more [...]. Hall then concludes: “So it’s not when you eat, it’s how much you eat.”
Well, of course. But why should a behavior that results in a lower caloric intake be dismissed as not a real effect? If eating late at night results in a tendency for people to eat more calories, then it is not a health myth to say eating late at night makes you gain weight” !
There still seems like there is more possibilities left here to explore that do not defy physics (e.g. calories in, calories out), for instance:
- Is it possible that, when compared to morning and daytime meals, a greater percentage of the food and sugar eaten just before going to sleep gets converted to fat during sleep? And once stored as fat, that weight is harder to “burn-off” (because of hunger pangs)?
rewrite:
why should a behavior that results in a higher caloric intake be dismissed as not a real effect? If eating late at night results in a tendency for people to eat more calories, then it is not a health myth to say there is a connection between eating late at night and gaining weight !
also, to clarify, it’s the connection between weight gain and eating “soon before going to sleep for the night”, not simply eating “late at night”, that should be addressed when attempting to debunk this myth, if in fact it is a myth.
One could call the quackery “pseudomedicine”
(Skeptic magazine Vol3. No.1)
Good info on homeopathy and chiropractors—I did not know any of this detail about chiropractors.