By oracknows on August 2, 2013. Alternative medicine, so-called complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), or, as it s become fashionable to call it, integrative medicine is a set of medical practices that are far more based on belief than science. As my good bud and collaborator Mark Crislip so pointedly reminded us last week, CAM is far more akin to religion than science-based medicine (SBM). However, as I ve discussed more times than I can remember over the years, both here and at my not-so-super-secret-other blog, CAM practitioners and advocates, despite practicing what is in reality mostly pseudoscience-based medicine, crave the imprimatur that science can provide, the respect that science has. That is why, no matter how scientifically implausible the treatment, CAM practitioners try to tart it up with science. I say tart it up because they aren t really providing a scientific basis for their favored quackery. In reality, what they are doing is choo
As the first crop of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are being rolled out, we can start to see the light at the end of this pandemic tunnel. Still, in the US alone there will probably be another 200,000 deaths before we reach herd immunity. Further, as fast as this vaccine development and deployment was, it’s not clear how much faster it will bring an end to the pandemic. We will likely be 18 months into the pandemic before we have significant vaccine uptake, and that may not be far off from how long the pandemic was going to last in the first place. There is no doubt is will save lives and hasten the end, but still – only after we lost about half a million people to the virus.