If you’ve spent any time at all reading science and medicine blogs, you know that many of us are quite critical of the way the traditional media covers science. The economics of the business allows for fewer and fewer dedicated science and medical journalists. In the blogosphere, writers have a certain freedom—-the freedom not to be paid, which means that the financial fortunes of our medium (the web) are not directly tied to how many readers I bring in with a headline. But all this is just a lot of words introducing my critique of a recent New York Times article.

The article is titled “Using Science to Sort Claims of Alternative Medicine”. It’s well-written and interesting, but suffers from a fatal flaw (or perhaps just recapitulates it)—like most of us, it fails to take into account how likely (or unlikely) a bizarre medical claim is when evaluating evidence for it.

The author doesn’t realize it, but he points out the fatal flaw in the modus operandi of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). Lately, the alternative medicine community has seen some of its bigger trials fall apart.

The alternative medicine community has a few different sects. The largest is the group of various snake-oil salesmen out to make a buck on others’ suffering. Then there is the “supplement industry”. Finally there is the saddest sect—that of real scientists trying to use evidence-based medicine to evaluate improbable claims. These folks mean well, but they’ve picked the wrong tool for the job.

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