March 22, 2012
Our initial optimism over Huffpo science being a haven for reason in a den of disease-promotion and quackery appears now to be misplaced. It appears the animal rights cranks have made inroads with Bruce Friedrich, a member of PETA and advocate of animal liberation, who has jumped from Huffpo "…
March 22, 2012
With the impending, and unprecedented, 3 days of arguments over the Affordable Care Act occurring early next week, it's interesting to see that the test case being used to challenge the law has now become a test case demonstrating the necessity of the law.
Mary Brown, the woman who asserts no one…
March 21, 2012
The news was just publicly announced that the University of Maryland is now the 2nd hospital to perform full face transplant in the US. Just a handful of these procedures have been performed around the world, and they are enormously complex ethically, surgically and medically.
To begin with, long…
March 21, 2012
In the continual spread of assaults on women's reproductive freedom in the wake of the 2010 tea party movement, another state, Idaho, is legislating women receive unnecessary and invasive medical procedures prior to obtaining abortion.
This is part of an unprecedented effort at the state level to…
March 15, 2012
At Alternet there is a great article by Kristin Rawls on homeschooling and educational neglect. I think it makes an excellent argument that homeschooling needs either tighter regulation and oversight, or needs to be outright outlawed:
In recent weeks, homeschooling has received nationwide…
March 13, 2012
In a debate on the floor of the Georgia State house over a bill to force women to bring all pregnancies after 20 weeks to term, even in cases of dead or non-viable fetus, this Georgia representative reaches a new low. State Rep Terry England seems to be suggesting pigs and cows do it, why can't…
March 9, 2012
The safety of soda has been in the news a lot lately. The news even seems bad for diet coke, which hits close to home for me given my diet coke addiction. The worst seems to be this correlative study proposing a link between diet sodas and stroke risk:
The study, which followed more than 2,500…
March 8, 2012
I think it's a nice, succinct description of the problem of climate change from one of the leaders of the field.
On a related note the nation of Kiribati is relocating to Fiji as their island nation is disappearing.
March 7, 2012
Ed Yong demands higher accountability in science journalism and has made me think of how in the last two days I've run across two examples of shoddy reporting. These two articles I think encompass a large part of the problem, the first from the NYT, represents the common failure of science…
March 4, 2012
We've discussed it before, why are costs so much higher in US healthcare compared to other countries? The Washington Post has a pointless article which seems to answer with the tautology costs are high because healthcare in America costs more. How much more? Well, we spend nearly twice as much…
March 1, 2012
About a month ago I asked if denialism is truly more frequent on the right or is it that the issues of the day are ones that are more likely to be targets of right wing denialism? After all, one can think of slightly more left wing sources of denialism like GMO paranoia, 9/11 conspiracies, altie-…
February 29, 2012
Via Ed I find out about a Psychic in Colorado sentenced to 5 years for fraud.
BOULDER, Colo. (CBS4)- A woman claiming to be a psychic has been sentenced to five years behind bars for stealing more than $300,000 from her clients.
Nancy Marks told her victims she needed their cash and credit card…
February 29, 2012
Mike Adams, HIV/AIDS denialist, anti-vaccine crusader, germ theory denialist, and most recently, promoter of a child-protective services vaccine/sex trade conspiracy, actually has a contributor-submitted article on how to spot a scam guru.
The advice in the article isn't terrible. Don't believe…
February 29, 2012
Turns out I gave Virginia governor McDonnell too much credit after he rejected the VA ultrasound bill on the grounds the state should insert itself into medical decisions. He's gone and flip-flopped as a slightly revised version of the bill passes through the VA Senate:
The 21 to 19 vote, mostly…
February 28, 2012
Pennsylvania is poised to enact a ultrasound bill even more stringent than Virginia's failed bill.
Even as the transvaginal ultrasound bill in Virginia was causing national outrage, Pennsylvania conservatives were quietly pushing a even more restrictive abortion bill. The legislation is designed…
February 27, 2012
There is a joke expression about surgeons, "sometimes wrong, never in doubt." Depending on how you feel about surgeons I've heard it begin "sometimes right" and "even when wrong." Applied to Rick Santorum, I think it has to be "usually wrong" if not "always wrong" given the serious of ridiculous…
February 27, 2012
In a victory for science, and those who favor open access for the easy dissemination of scientific results to the public and scientists around the world, Elsevier has withdrawn support for the Research Works Act.
I think credit has to go to Tim Gowers calling for and Michael Eisen spreading the…
February 23, 2012
And good riddance. It sounds like the Governor saw this bill would be more trouble than it's worth.
Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) revoked his support for the original bill just minutes before the House began debate on it, saying that the government did not have the power to require the…
February 19, 2012
Hot Air and the daily caller are excited to pronounce socialized medicine dead as the British NHS plans to contract with private hospitals and providers on top of socialized care. From The Caller:
Joseph A. Morris, a former Reagan White House lawyer who now serves on the board of the American…
February 19, 2012
Many bloggers and commentators have expressed outrage over the decision by Virginia to require ultrasound examination, possibly transvaginal ultrasound, prior to women obtaining an abortion. From Bill Maher to Dahlia Lithwick people are outraged and have even suggested that it should be considered…
February 16, 2012
**Update, the NYT has an editorial in their Sunday edition recommending the passage of two bills in congress requiring advanced notice from drug manufacturers in event of likely shortage.
Health affairs discusses the increasingly frequent shortages of critical, life-saving, generic drugs. This…
February 16, 2012
Everyone is writing about desmogblog's leak of internal documents from the Heartland Institute. But to me I think leaked documents are nothing compared to their fully public, out-in-the-open history of being openly contemptuous of science, funding cranks with advanced degrees (though not in…
February 15, 2012
WSJ has an article about the increasing number of pediatricians who fire their patients who refuse to vaccinate:
Pediatricians fed up with parents who refuse to vaccinate their children out of concern it can cause autism or other problems increasingly are "firing" such families from their practices…
February 13, 2012
We've written quite a bit about single payer health care systems as well as other models that are a mixture of public and private spending.
We've also analyzed some of the sources of excess cost of US healthcare to other countries. What is uniformly true about universal health care systems is…
February 13, 2012
Somebody please tell me why the national library of medicine gave up their pubmed.com and pubmed.org domains? It used to be you could just type "pubmed.org" and get pubmed. Now, some cyber squatter has put some worthless spam search on the site. Before I realized it wasn't a site redesign my…
February 13, 2012
Sometimes I'm reading essays in major newspapers and have to wonder if they've been reading denialism blog. Today, Krugman on Santorum:
Nor is this only about sex and religion: he has also declared that climate change is a hoax, part of a "beautifully concocted scheme" on the part of "the left" to…
February 12, 2012
Many are linking to this story around the blogosphere and I encourage everyone to read it. In it, a Ob/Gyn describes her emergency care of a woman who arrived in her ED in hemorrhagic shock from a botched illegal abortion. Though clearly it was touch and go and there was some panicky action, our…
February 12, 2012
Lot's of blogging hay was made over the conservatives = stupid and racist article two weeks ago, but it seems like since that was published they're going out of their way to provide supporting evidence. Between reincarnating a 40 year old dead argument about whether or not women should be able to…
February 12, 2012
One of the characteristics of defective thinking, particularly of cranks (see theHOWTO) that we've discussed on scienceblogs is their poor ability to process information that is contradictory. Last week there were some interesting reports on a study which suggested those who believe in conspiracy…
February 9, 2012
The states in Green have gone for Rick Santorum, who besides having a a Google problem also believes in one of the wackiest conspiracy theories there is - the climate change hoax. That is, the belief that there is a shady group of Illuminati that have power over thousands of climate scientists…
