New blog intends to hold the medical profession to standards of science

Science Based Medicine, a blog devoted to upholding the principles of science in medicine, was launched yesterday. It’s a team effort by several leaders in the fight against pseudoscience. The inaugural post offers some perspectives on science:

Science is nothing more than a systematic and careful use of evidence and logic to evaluate factual claims. And good science possesses certain virtues that are not unique to science but generic to all intellectual endeavors: fairly accounting for all available evidence, using valid and internally consistent logic, using unambiguous concepts and language, proper use of statistics, being quantitatively precise and accurate, and above all being honest.

Yes, science is systematic and internally consistent. It is bound by certain rules. It is not, like integrative medicine, a smorgasbord of diverse ways of getting at the truth.