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Politics of alternative medicine

2009· letter· en· W2099611740 on OpenAlexaff
E Ernst

Bibliographic record

VenueInternational Journal of Clinical Practice · 2009
Typeletter
Languageen
FieldEconomics, Econometrics and Finance
TopicHealth Systems, Economic Evaluations, Quality of Life
Canadian institutionsVictoria Park
Fundersnot available
KeywordsMedicinePoliticsHarmAlternative medicinePublishingFoundation (evidence)LawFamily medicinePublic relationsPolitical sciencePathology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

To the Editor: ‘One wonders why it is still widely used, given the lack of benefit and the potential for harm’ asks G. Jackson in his brilliant editorial about the ‘alternative’ form of chelation therapy for arteriosclerotic diseases (1). One could ask the very same question about many other alternative or complementary therapies. My systematic reviews of chelation therapy concluded years ago that this approach should be considered obsolete (2, 3). Despite the fact that these were published in major journals, this conclusion was ignored by those US enthusiasts who initiated the Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy (TACT) trial. As a consequence, US$3 million have been wasted. Before we feel too smug about political pressure reigning over evidence in the USA, we should ask ourselves what is happening in Britain. Here, we have a lobby group for alternative medicine, ‘The Prince’s Foundation for Integrated Health’, that managed to obtain public funds for publishing a promotional and misleading brochure about several disproven treatments (4). And even the RCP has a committee, now called ‘Integrated Health Committee’ that, since its creation in 2001, seems to have all but abandoned any critical evaluation of this area.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.041
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.177
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch, Meta-epidemiology (narrow), Research integrity
Consensus categoriesMetaresearch
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Commentary · Consensus signal: Commentary
Teacher disagreement score0.136
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0410.177
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0030.001
Bibliometrics0.0010.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0020.000
Research integrity0.0010.003
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.629
GPT teacher head0.615
Teacher spread0.013 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.

Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreCommentary

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2009
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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