Dr. Steve Novella on Dr. Oz
Saturday, April 30th, 2011Dr. Steve Novella is a great skeptic and promoter of science based medicine. He writes for the appropriately named blog Science Based Medicine. Dr. Novella and other pro-science doctors have been very critical of Dr. Oz, the cardiologist turned media personality who is a big promoter of alternative medicine.
Surprisingly he was invited to be on Dr. Oz’s show. I had hoped that this would be a great opportunity to bring some skeptical and science to a show that badly needs it. Unfortunately, it turned out to be almost painful to watch.
Well, it seems that the good doctor tried pretty hard to make a point and, in the process hopefully he did get through to a few. However, it’s pretty hard to win a debate when the other side of it is also the moderator and when you have a hostile audience. Dr. Novella pretty much is standing along against at least three other “experts” who are looking to promote alternative medicine.
Dr. Oz manages to make a number of statements that really get under my skin. For one thing there’s the whole claim that acupuncture is rejected because it does not fit into our “western” mindset. NO! It doesn’t work. There’s no “Western” science, but only science. The scientific method is culturally independent and used everywhere. In China, they use science and have been doing pretty damn well with it. Best of all, Eastern, Western Northern and Southern doctors can all agree on what works and does not because the laws of logic and science are universal.
Then the “arrow” versus “ballistic missile” approach. God this guy really annoys me! Science based medicine is not nearly as brute-force based as it is made out to be and there’s not only one type of therapy for each given condition. The only thing that separates medicine from alternative medicine is that medicine works.
Finally “just let the patient decide what works for them.” People are VERY BAD at judging the effectiveness of medicine on an individual basis. That’s why we have placebo-controlled, large-scale clinical studies. Anecdotes are worthless and the fact that a particular therapy seems like it worked for you is not an objective fact that can be relied on. Most people don’t understand this and if they did they might be less apt to believe their own intuition when there’s good established data to look at.

So why on earth would anyone make a fuss about a worker being exposed to 17.55 mSv? That level may be bellow the (extremely conservative) standards for exposure under normal operations, but it’s not high at all. It’s not high enough to cause any detectable health problems. It’s about the same exposure someone might get from a few CT scan examinations.
Even in the worst case, where all material is discharged, there is zero danger of any dangerous radiation levels to areas beyond Northern Japan. The United States, Europe, Australia and elsewhere simply cannot be effected to any substantial level by any breach at any Japanese reactor, or even if every singe Japanese reactor simultaneously experienced a complete meltdown and core breach. It’s impossible.










