Quote:
Originally Posted by Wylie's Mom  Evidence Based Veterinary Medicine
Many of our posts, articles and authors seem to irritate vets and pet owners who are firmly entrenched in traditional medicine. By and large, the most common challenge they use against us is, “where are the scientific studies backing up your claims?”
It’s paradoxical that holistic medicine is unfairly held to a higher burden of proof than mainstream medicine. Do the vets and pet owners who accuse us of promoting medicine that lacks ‘scientific validity’ know that the majority of conventional drugs have an unknown mechanism of action?
One Golden Example
Some interesting examples from conventional human medicine include the 1950’s use of tetracycline (an antibiotic) in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis on the theory that it was caused by infectious agents. This was discontinued when rheumatoid arthritis came to be thought of as an autoimmune disease and the standard treatment changed to gold compounds despite their mechanism of action being largely unknown.
The mechanism of action for acetylsalicylic acid, a compound found naturally in white willow bark, and better known as Aspirin, was not discovered until 1971, although it had been available commercially and prescribed since about 1899.
The mechanism of action is in fact unknown for large numbers of commonly prescribed drugs including statins, most psychotropic /psychiatric drugs like Lithium, acetaminophen and Lysodren (a common chemotherapy drug) and general anaesthetics. Would it then make sense to stop using those on surgical patients?
And this is by no means a comprehensive list.
It’s very common in the pharmaceutical industry for drugs to be in vogue for a particular condition, for a certain period of time and to later be found as useless, ineffective, dangerous, or more useful for some other condition than for which they were created.
Ironically, we don’t have that problem with homeopathic remedies or medicinal herbs. The same ones that worked 200 years ago still work today. On the same conditions.
Sadly, “evidence based medicine”, although an excellent concept, has been corrupted into a buzzword used to discredit the results of raw feeding, homeopathy and other so-called alternative health care methods. “Evidence based” means that data from randomized controlled studies provides certainty about whether a treatment will work and is safe. The reality is 66% of the treatment procedures and drugs that are commonly used in conventional medicine have no or little evidence to recommend them (British Medical Journal, 2007). Many procedures have serious complications and many drugs cause difficult and unwanted effects. It is these issues that drive pet owners toward less harmful and health promoting approaches in the first place.
Below is the breakdown of clinical evidence for 2,500 common medical treatments from the study in the British Medical Journal.*
{{{ SEE CHART ATTACHED BELOW }}}
That’s a big grey area on the left, isn’t it? Add “unlikely,” “likely to be ineffective or harmful,” and “trade-off,” and that’s two-thirds of conventional medical treatments that are dubious.
The situation is likely worse in animal medicine. Often, human drugs and medications that have failed human trials are subsequently solicited to the pet market. In addition, there is no formal requirement for reporting adverse reactions to pharmaceuticals in veterinary medicine.
The next time somebody defends conventional medicine by asking us for “scientific validity”, we might ask them the same question. |
I was going to let this article pass without comment, but since it provides misinformation that could affect the health decisions that one makes for one's dog, it deserves a cursory examination.
First, this article creates a "straw man" type of argument. A straw man argument is defined as: "a common form of
argument and is an
informal fallacy based on false representation of an opponent's argument. To be successful, a straw man argument requires that the audience be ignorant or uninformed of the original argument." (From
Straw man - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
This article gives a false definition of "evidence based medicine." The actual definition of evidence based medicine is "the conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients. The practice of evidence based medicine means integrating individual clinical expertise with the best available external clinical evidence from systematic research." (From
Evidence based medicine: what it is and what it isn't | The BMJ)
In other words, it is medicine that works in a practical sense on real patients. If a treatment doesn't work, it isn't evidence based medicine. This makes the graph accompanying the article rather puzzling and unhelpful. It doesn't help that the most important links embedded in the article don't work, and it's not possible to track down where that graph actually came from, or what it was meant to demonstrate.
Clearly, based on what evidence based medicine actually is, statements like the following aren't relevant:
"The mechanism of action is in fact unknown for large numbers of commonly prescribed drugs including statins, most psychotropic /psychiatric drugs like Lithium, acetaminophen and Lysodren (a common chemotherapy drug) and general anaesthetics. Would it then make sense to stop using those on surgical patients?"
This isn't evidence based medicine either:
"Often, human drugs and medications that have failed human trials are subsequently solicited to the pet market. In addition, there is no formal requirement for reporting adverse reactions to pharmaceuticals in veterinary medicine."
The original article DOES link to the following website on homeopathic medicine, which I suppose is the point of this article:
- Home
Clearly, homeopathic medicine is subject to the same rules as evidence based medicine: Does it work?
I can't answer that question, but I will simply state that this article doesn't help explain what evidence based medicine is, and whether or not homeopathic medicine works.