Medicine
oracknows | August 11, 2011The infiltration of quackademic medicine continues apace, except that it's not just quackademic medicine. Now, it goes way, way beyond that to encompass not just academic medical centers but community hospitals, hospitals of all sizes, large private hospitals, and health care institutions of all shapes and sizes. Frequently, proponents of quackademic medicine try to portray those of us who oppose the infiltration of pseudoscience into medicine as being behind the times, as futilely resisting the wave of the future. They portray so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) as the…
oracknows | August 10, 2011Here we go again.
Starting sometime in 2007, back when the idea that mercury in vaccines was the cause of the "autism epidemic" of the late 1990s and into the new century, I started referring to the "mercury/autism" hypothesis as being dead, dead, dead, as in pining for the fjords dead. Then, depending on what kind of mood I was in, I'd start liberally quoting more from Monty Python's famous Dead Parrot Sketch, including pointing out that the mercury/autism hypothesis passed on! This hypothesis is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet its maker! It's a stiff! Bereft of…
oracknows | August 9, 2011It came as a shock to me to find out yesterday that former director of the American Red Cross and former director of the NIH Bernadine Healy died. Chalk it up to my simply being ignorant of the fact, but I didn't know, or had forgotten, that she had brain cancer. Interestingly, she had had this glioma and survived 13 years. Compare that to David Servan-Schreiber, who survived his brain tumor for 20 years and attributed much of it not just to medical science, but to all the woo he came to believe in and practice.
For purposes of this blog, the reason her death is even worth noting briefly is…
egrossman | August 8, 2011By Elizabeth Grossman
While the rest of the country has been experiencing an epic heat wave, in the Pacific Northwest where I live, thus far the summer has been unusually cool. One consequence of the cool weather is a slow-to-appear local tomato crop, made evident to consumers by some remarkably high prices. A pint of organic cherry tomatoes at my neighborhood market recently jumped more than a dollar within a week to $4.99, prompting me to wonder precisely what goes into the price of tomatoes.
Regional growers, distributors, and retailers all told me that prices are typically determined by…
oracknows | August 8, 2011Over the years that I've been following the anti-vaccine movement, I've become familiar with typical narratives that reporters use when reporting on the vaccine fears stirred up by anti-vaccine activists. One narrative is the "brave maverick doctor" narrative, in which an iconoclastic quack (such as Mark Geier or Andrew Wakefield, for example) is portrayed fighting a lonely battle against the scientific orthodoxy. This particular narrative is extremely popular because it feeds into the story of the "underdog," coupled with a healthy disrespect of the powers that be, particularly the…
oracknows | August 5, 2011I admire Brian Deer. I really do. He's put up with incredible amounts of abuse and gone to amazing lengths to unmask the vaccine quack Andrew Wakefield, the man whose fraudulent case series published in The Lancet thirteen years ago launched a thousand quack autism remedies and, worst of all, contributed to a scare over the MMR vaccine that is only now beginning to abate. Yes, Andrew Wakefield produced a paper that implied (although Wakefield was very careful not to say explicitly) that the MMR vaccine caused an entity that later became known as "autistic enterocolitis" and later implied that…
oracknows | August 2, 2011One of the very first themes I started hammering on in this blog, dating back to its very inception, is the analysis of alternative medicine cancer testimonials. One reason was (and is) that I take care of cancer patients and do research into developing new treatments for a living. Another reason is that, to the average lay person, most of whom don't have much of an understanding of cancer, alternative medicine cancer testimonials can sound extremely convincing.
For example, if you didn't know that breast cancer can have a highly variable course spreading out over years, Kim Tinkham's claim…
oracknows | July 31, 2011As hard as it is to believe, I've been blogging about anti-vaccine nonsense and autism quackery since early 2005. Before that, I had been a regular on the misc.health.alternative newsgroup, where I had also encountered anti-vaccine pseudoscience, but the topic had not been a top priority for me. In fact, when I started this blog back in late 2004, I did not imagine at that time that I would somehow end up becoming one of the "go-to" bloggers for taking on anti-vaccine nonsense. Yet somehow I did, and dealing with the misinformation, lies, and pseudoscience of the anti-vaccine movement has…
kbonham | July 27, 2011For about two years in high school, I would occasionally break out into pretty severe hives. I would first notice a mild itch on my wrists or ankles, and I would know that the hives were coming if I gently scratched my forearm and raised red streaks were left behind (I have a picture somewhere of a large inflamed smiley face I drew on my chest during one of these episodes). A dose or two fo Benedryl would completely knock the hives down, but left untreated, they would spread over my entire body. It was almost certainly an allergic reaction, but despite a battery of tests at an allergist's…
kbonham | July 25, 2011Antibodies are often thought of as magic bullets, and as far as bullets go, they are about as magic as you can get. Antibodies are proteins that are manufactured by specialized "B-cells," and their main feature is that they stick to things. At first glance, biochemical stickiness does not seem all that magical; there are innumerable examples of proteins that have evolved to interact with one another or with other types of molecules. But while natural selection can take millions of years to refine an interaction, your body can mount an immune response and generate antibodies against almost any…
mikethemadbiologist | July 13, 2011There's been a spate of abortion restrictions passed by state legislatures around the country. And they'll have tragic consequences for women's health (italics mine):
Indiana recently defunded Planned Parenthood clinics throughout the state. The new law makes any organization that performs abortion ineligible for state funds. Lack of clarity in the state's antiabortion law is affecting hospitals, too. Since its enactment, doctors in hospitals have stopped terminating pregnancies that pose a high risk to the health and life of a woman for fear of losing Medicaid patients.
According to…
tfk | July 12, 2011Long-time readers know that, last April and May, I invested a decent amount of time in tearing apart a book by conservative punditress S. E. Cupp. Cupp, a self-proclaimed atheist, had written a book defending the religious right, and she titled it Losing Our Religion: The Media's Attack on Christianity.
Why, you may be asking, would an avowed atheist describe fundamentalism as "our religion"? I don't know. But she does, consistently adopting the fringiest, least atheist-friendly forms of Christianity as if they were the only form Christianity could take. Thus, she mocked Chris Matthews's…
sa smith | July 12, 2011Despite his apparent random and brief moments of lucidity, I cant say Im a 'big fan' of Oklahoma senator and physician Tom Coburn (click here to read his completely insane 'analysis' of HIV/AIDS). He says hes 'PRO-LIFE' yet he held up funds for HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention in Africa because some of the organizations that would receive this funding offer family planning services which include abortion services.
Killing 'babies' while they are unfeeling, unthinking barely multicellular organisms: BAD!
Killing very real, very thinking, very feeling babies via long, painful deaths via AIDS…
jtoney | July 6, 2011Stop smoking? Absolutely. Easy as swallowing a pill? Think again.
A study just published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal by my colleague Dr. Sonal Singh indicates that Chantix can lead to "increased risk of a major harmful cardiovascular event" by 72% compared to placebo.
"People want to quit smoking to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease but in this case they're taking a drug that increases the risk for the very problems they're trying to avoid," says Sonal Singh, M.D., M.P.H., an assistant professor of general internal medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of…
tsmith | July 6, 2011While "flesh-eating infections" caused by the group A streptococcus (Streptococcus pyogenes) may grab more headlines today, one hundred and fifty years ago, the best known and most dreaded form of streptococcal infection was scarlet fever. Simply hearing the name of this disease, and knowing that it was present in the community, was enough to strike fear into the hearts of those living in Victorian-era United States and Europe. This disease, even when not deadly, caused large amounts of suffering to those infected. In the worst cases, all of a family's children were killed in a matter of a…
oracknows | July 6, 2011What did the poor Haitians ever do to deserve this?
Think about it. A year and a half ago, they suffered through an enormous earthquake that will take them decades, maybe even a lifetime, to recover from fully; that is, if they ever do recover from it fully. Since then, they've received massive amounts of international aid, which is good. What's not so good is that, along with that aid have come a bunch of quacks. I first noticed the incursion of the quackiest of quacks, namely homeopaths, into Haiti only a couple of weeks after the quake. This group of homeopaths was patterned after the…
lborkowski | July 5, 2011One of the disturbing aspects of the recent E. coli outbreak in Germany was the apparent lack of sufficient hospital surge capacity to handle a sudden influx of seriously ill patients. Der Spiegel reported:
On Monday, hospitals all over northern Germany struggled to treat thousands of patients suffering from the effects of the bacteria. More than one-third of the people infected with E. coli have also come down with a life-threatening complication known as hemolytic-uremic syndrome (HUS) which attacks the blood, kidneys and brain, and has left doctors racing to save lives. Ambulances have…
lborkowski | June 30, 2011NPR's Melissa Block traveled to Mozambique, where poverty and a shortage of both healthcare providers and facilities contribute to a high maternal mortality rate, for the first segment of the "Beginnings" series that will air throughout the summer on All Things Considered. She starts off with some grim statistics:
In Mozambique in southeastern Africa, the rates of maternal and infant mortality are among the highest in the world.
In her lifetime, a Mozambican woman has a 1 in 37 chance of dying during pregnancy or within a short time after a pregnancy has ended. One in 10 children won't live…
oracknows | June 29, 2011Well, I'm back.
Grant frenzy is over (for now), and I have a couple of weeks before the next cycle begins again. Well, actually, it's more than that. The next big NIH grant deadlines are in October and November, but the Susan G. Komen Foundation grant notices just showed up in my e-mail the other day, and the deadlines for its preapplications are in early to mid-August. The fun never ends, and if the Army approves my preapplication for its Idea Award grant application I'll have a full application to write in August too. It's times like these when I ask myself why it is exactly that I do this…
oracknows | June 27, 2011It's grant crunch time, as the submission deadline for revised R01s is July 5. However, in a classic example of how electronic filing has actually made things more difficult, the grant has to be done and at the university grant office a week before the deadline if it is to be uploaded in time. So, my beloved Orac-philes, I'm afraid it's reruns again today, but, benevolent blogger that I am, I'll again post two about the same topic. Since I recently reran a really old post that started it all, I thought I'd follow up with the two additional posts about the same topic. This one is from 2006,…