Booktopia - Snake Oil Science: The Truth about Complementary and Alternative Medicine, R. Barker Bausell Ph. D., 9780195383423

Snake Oil Science: The Truth about Complementary and Alternative Medicine

By: R. Barker Bausell Ph. D.

Retail Price:	$27.32
Booktopia Price	$23.90

ISBN: 9780195383423

Format: Paperback
Published: July 2009

All prices in Australian Dollars

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Hailed in the New York Times as "entertaining and immensely educational," Snake Oil Science is not only a brilliant critique of alternative medicine, but also a first-rate introduction to interpreting scientific research of any sort. The book's ultimate goal is to illustrate how the placebo effect conspires to make medical therapies appear to be effective--not just to consumers, but to therapists and poorly trained scientists as well. Bausell explores this remarkable phenomenon and explains why research on any therapy that does not factor in the placebo effect (and other placebo-like effects) will inevitably produce false results. Moreover, as the author shows in an impressive survey of research from high-quality scientific journals, studies employing credible placebo controls do not indicate positive effects for alternative therapies beyond those attributable to random chance. Readers will come away from this book with a healthy scepticism of claims about the latest "miracle cure," be it St. John's Wort for depression or acupuncture for chronic pain.