This brings up a big issue with this type of gamification. If someone prescribes a solution which has a superficial short term effect (think painkillers, etc), they may be rewarded in 'points' (e.g. money) because the patient is able to see a direct effect. This would reward treating symptoms rather than the underlying problem and could result in sub-optimal treatment. Unless this website is planning on adjusting rewards based on long term effects on the order of years, I'm not sure how this would be avoided.

EDIT: etc, as in et cetera

Perhaps this is a side note to your point, but if when you say "ect" you mean electroconvulsive therapy, then I'll note that ECT has excellent efficacy for major depressive disorder among others and is well-studied: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroconvulsive_therapy#Effic...

It is hard to believe that anyone would want an electroconvulsive therapy based on an Internet advice. Even if, no doctor in his right mind will perform it just because the patient demands it.

This brings a whole new twist to your username.

How is this different than evidence based medicine?

Correlation is not a causation.

If you eat a sugar pill with an "imprint of camomile" and it makes you feel different, it's neither the sugar nor the imprint, but your own belief that does that. However the "evidence based medicine" may conclude it was the spirit of camomile or the lovely sperical shape that made all the difference. Evidence must be supplanted by the reliable reproduction of the results with all variable factors accounted for. Otherwise it's just guessing.

evidence: cutting off his leg is bad, but we had to do it first to have the evidence. => data

science: from all we know, we assume that cutting off his leg is bad, so we don't do it. => data and models

A lot of "alternative medicine" is just not science, and simply does not work. Unless you consider being temporarily "cured" by your own endorphins as an instance of evidence based medicine.

How much did you have to dig to find a detective with homeopathy in their bio? ;)

One quack in the crowd doesn't mean that they are all quacks.

PS If you actually believe you practice science-based medicine, you may be part of the problem. Medicine is mostly a guessing game, and will stay that way until we have genome-specific-personalized-medicine with real-time biofeedback mechanisms from sensors in the body.

I know it's unpopular to stick up for physicians but...

> Medicine is mostly a guessing game

Can you be more specific with that sweeping generalization?

> and will stay that way until we have genome-specific-personalized-medicine with real-time biofeedback mechanisms from sensors in the body.

And why do you think that? Again, by what study, authority, knowledge or reasoning?

> you may be part of the problem.

Actually no, it's the other way around. You are part of the problem. I'm so tired of people who have zero training or background in medicine or science half-haphazardly proselytizing without any data or evidence to them up.

Please stop pretending like you know the answer to something this important if you aren't in the position to do so.

He's one of three doctors listed on the homepage, which was the submitted link here.

There's a difference between "we don't know everything" and "we have good reason to believe homeopathy is useful". Sure, maybe eating raw duck poop will cure asthma, but I'm not going to try it just in case it works.

Um, Daniel Auer is one of the 3 listed in the front page, so I guess he didn't have to dig much.

"Medicine is mostly a guessing game".

Seeing a comment like this, on HN, in 2015, just boggles my mind.

I'm glad that very good "guesses" from people that have been studying medicine all their life, benefits from centuries of accumulated scientific knowledge on the subject, and used cutting edge diagnosing equipment were able to completely heal my crucial ligament when it broke, or were able to save my mother's life when diagnosed with breast cancer.

How exactly do you practice SBM? I find this difficult to believe, since as far as I'm aware there are no science based medical schools, no science based clinical guidelines, no research into the efficacy of science based treatments, etc. As far as I can tell it's just a poorly defined idea that isn't even logically coherent enough to have any real world practitioners.

For whatever flaws may exist with naturopathy, at least it's a real thing with legitimate practitioners.

edit: Also, your assertion that Dr. Auer advertises himself as a homeopathic practitioner isn't even accurate. His actual bio states, "Dr. Auer is continuously furthering his education and understanding of the body through post-doctorate courses and various seminars ranging from functional medicine, functional endocrinology, natural hormone balancing, holistic nutrition, homeopathy, herbology, chiropractic neurology, and various chiropractic and soft tissue techniques."

In other words, he is saying that he has studied homeopathy to some extent. Which if you haven't done, you're probably not a very good doctor.

> I'm aware there are no science based medical schools,, no science based clinical guidelines, no research into the efficacy of science based treatments, etc

Since you don't actually support your argument with any data, citations, or rational points, what would you say all these things are based on?

> For whatever flaws may exist with naturopathy, at least it's a real thing with legitimate practitioners.

Can you please define "it's a real thing" and "legitimate" and "practitioners" in that statement?

>Studied homeopathy to some extent. Which if you haven't done, you're probably not a very good doctor.

Tell me again how you are able to judge what makes a good doctor? By what authority, knowledge or reasoning?

> "no research into the efficacy of science based treatments"

Wouldn't that make SBM not scientific by definition?

SBM believes that rather than treating patients using evidence based medicine, you should look at the all of the scientific evidence about the efficacy of a treatment, but then weight that evidence using preexisting scientific beliefs about the world in general.

The problem is that it's not clear whose gets the decide what the existing scientific beliefs are, how the evidence should be weighted, whether this results in better patient outcomes than treating patients using evidence based medicine, etc.

+1 for pointing out the problems with SBM. While I truly believe in it, it's always good to counter some people thinking it's the ultimate solution which will somehow solve all problems in medicine.

Oh, ok. Thanks for clarifying! For some reason, I assumed SBM == EBM, and Wikipedia didn't help.

As far as I know, the only serious proponents of SBM are the authors of the sciencebasedmedicine.org blog. There don't seem to be any scholarly articles on the subject, and the only books that exist are just compilations of the blog posts.