Novella SBM

The Science based medicine effort & blog by Yale School of Medicine neurologist (and anti homeopathy activist) Steven Novella celebrated its 10 year online anniversary recently. Rather than rejoice about the 10 year effort to stop the use and growing interest in homeopathy, Novella is unable to celebrate and proceeds to tell his devotees why not.

1.   The organization has no major sponsors. "After several tries, no ad services were compatible with our editorial policy." Support now needs to come from donations, so there is now a "support" button.

Translation: No reputable company wants to be associated with radical anti homeopathy activists. Without enough funds, SBM can't "further" their "mission."

2.   The "forces" against SBM are "highly profitable". The supplement industry has "billions" of dollar. Information about homeopathy and integrative medicine are "infiltrating" medical schools. State & local governmental legislators are being lobbied to promote "quack-friendly" laws! ineicalare follarfollarsuIt is an unfortunate reality that the forces we are up against are extremely well-funded. Quackery, fraud, and snake-oil are highly profitable. The billions of dollars generated by the supplement industry, homeopathy, and countless worthless health services and products have been funding several decades’ worth of concerted efforts to infiltrate pseudoscience into medical schools. These funds have been used to lobby state and federal governments for quack-friendly laws. They have been used to market a narrative of medical pseudoscience to the public, fostering a distrust of genuine expertise, and promoting conspiracy theories and blatant misinformation. They have literally millions of times more funding than we do. There is no profit in defending science and critical thinking, in medicine or elsewhere. All of the SBM editors and contributors are volunteers. We actually sacrifice time we could be expending more profitably elsewhere to promote SBM. But we have learned how to accomplish a lot with a little.