Snake Oil Science - R. Barker Bausell

An analysis of the science behind complementary and alternative medicine written by the former director of research at the Univesity of Maryland's NIH-funded Complementary Medicine Program. This is a fascinating book to read if you have a chronic medical condition and try, from time to time, to find something to treat it. It explains how the placebo effect and its cousins - reversion to the mean, natural history, and so on - trick us into believing that ineffective treatments are effective. This book is also a great reference for scientists, especially social scientists, trying to design good studies and evaluate the quality of published works. It will make me a much more skeptical, and reasoned, consumer of the science press and medical treatments.

Snake Oil Science: The Truth About Complementary and Alternative Medicine
R. Barker Bausell
2007
Available from Amazon