Medicine
oracknows | July 6, 2010Remember Dr. David Katz? Fellow skeptic and supporter of science-based medicine Dr. Steve Novella is unfortunate to be saddle with Dr. Katz on the same faculty as him at Yale. He achieved some notoriety a couple of years ago when at a Yale conference on complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), he laid down this gem:
I think we have to look beyond the results of RCTs in order to address patient needs today, and to do that I've arrived at the concept of a more fluid form of evidence than many of us have imbibed from our medical educations.
In one fell swoop, Dr. Katz rallied supporters of…
oracknows | July 5, 2010Today is the third day of the three day weekend cobbled together from happenstance that the Fourth of July fell on the weekend this year. In any case, I'm still in a bit of vacation mode; so this post won't be as voluminous as you are used to. (Some of you are probably rejoicing at the lack of logorrhea.) I'm also working on my talk for the Science-Based Medicine workshops at TAM8. In fact, while working on my talk, I came across a little tidbit that forms the basis of this post.
Blog bud PalMD once coined a truly apt term to describe a certain form of disclaimer that's found on quack…
pharyngula | July 4, 2010I don't envy Stephen Barrett at all, but this is going to be good. Barrett is the doctor behind QuackWatch a wonderful resource for exposing bogus medical claims. Among the many subjects of common charlatanry he's taken apart, one is the use of invalid tests to justify useless treatments, like chelation therapy, which is a goldmine for quacks. Do the doctory thing of drawing a little blood while wearing a white lab coat, send it off to a 'lab' that does a few tests and sends back a very official looking mass of data, and then the quack gazes into it and announces that you need powdered newts…
terrasig | July 3, 2010The 75th anniversary of Alcoholics Anonymous has brought out a spate of legacy media articles about the organization, most singing the praises of an unscientific movement begun during The Great Depression that still forms the basis of many clinical drug and alcohol addiction treatment programs.
My post Thursday on Brendan Koerner's Wired article brought out a very thoughtful commenter and sharp writer, friendthegirl. I learned that ftg writes the blog, Stinkin' Thinkin': Muckraking the 12-Step Industry.
Stinkin' Thinkin' was started with the intention highlighting the quackery and abuse that…
sb admin | July 2, 2010Steve Schoenbaum writes: In his blog this week, Mark Pendergrast challenges someone/anyone to take on explaining the differences between case-control studies vs. cohort studies. As an EIS officer, back in late May/early June 1968, I did a case-control study as part of the investigation of a common source outbreak of hepatitis in Ogemaw County, Michigan, so I will try to pick up the challenge. I believe it was only the second time case-control methods were used in a CDC epidemic investigation. In using this method I learned about the power of comparison, not just that numerators need…
sschoenbaum | July 2, 2010Steve Schoenbaum writes: In his blog this week, Mark Pendergrast challenges someone/anyone to take on explaining the differences between case-control studies vs. cohort studies. As an EIS officer, back in late May/early June 1968, I did a case-control study as part of the investigation of a common source outbreak of hepatitis in Ogemaw County, Michigan, so I will try to pick up the challenge. I believe it was only the second time case-control methods were used in a CDC epidemic investigation. In using this method I learned about the power of comparison, not just that numerators need…
terrasig | July 1, 2010The last two days (here and here), you lovely commenters and I have been bantering about legacy media's reluctance to use the original literature citation in print or online coverage of science, medicine, and health stories. The discussion has drawn input from working writers as well as scientists and bloggers and I also draw your attention to the comments at the impetus for these posts over at The White Coat Underground with PalMD.
But remember, my dear ink- and pixel-stained friends, I am also a graduate advisory board member and instructor in a science and medical journalism program at a…
lborkowski | June 30, 2010Mine explosions in China and Columbia in recent weeks have killed a total of 120 mineworkers.
An explosion in a coal mine in Antioquia, Colombia, killed 73 mineworkers; a total of 160 were in the mine at the time of the blast, and 90 escaped. Gas accumulations prevented rescue and recovery teams from entering the mine immediately. RCN Radio reports that in the previous five years, 71 miners were killed and another 4 left missing from 18 explosions in Colombian mines.
Explosives stored in a mine shaft went off and killed 47 miners in the Xingdong No. 2 coal mine in China's Henan province on…
sb admin | June 30, 2010Karen Starko writes: When the "financial crisis" started and the news media started throwing around numbers in the trillions and projected fixes in the billions, I realized I just didn't get it. So I got a little yellow post-it, labeled it "understanding trillions," and started a list of examples. And when I learned that the US GDP in 2006 was 13T and the derivative market, estimated in June 2007, was valued at 500T, I quickly got a sense of the potential drain of the derivative market (in which money is spent on items without real value...my definition, please correct me if I am wrong). I…
kstarko | June 30, 2010Karen Starko writes: When the "financial crisis" started and the news media started throwing around numbers in the trillions and projected fixes in the billions, I realized I just didn't get it. So I got a little yellow post-it, labeled it "understanding trillions," and started a list of examples. And when I learned that the US GDP in 2006 was 13T and the derivative market, estimated in June 2007, was valued at 500T, I quickly got a sense of the potential drain of the derivative market (in which money is spent on items without real value...my definition, please correct me if I am wrong). I…
clock | June 29, 2010Lots of new articles in four of seven PLoS journals. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Impact of Ocean Warming and Ocean Acidification on Larval Development and Calcification in the Sea Urchin Tripneustes gratilla:
As the oceans simultaneously warm, acidify and increase in PCO2,…
palmd | June 28, 2010Over a quarter century ago, a young woman was admitted to a New York hospital with fever and agitation. She never walked out. Libby Zion died while under the care of he primary care doctor and two medical residents. The exact cause of death was never identified, but the case led to a forced examination of medical residents' work hours. This was driven largely by Zion's father who felt that his daughter had been killed by inexperienced, poorly supervised, and overworked resident physicians.
"You don't need kindergarten," he wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece, "to know that a resident…
clock | June 28, 2010There are 26 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
The Usefulness of Peer Review for Selecting Manuscripts for Publication: A Utility Analysis Taking as an Example a High-Impact Journal:
High predictive validity - that is, a strong association between the…
mmckenna | June 28, 2010In the winter of 1999, I stood in an outpatient clinic in a pediatric hospital in New Delhi and listened to a father sobbing over the paralysis of his only son. He was a farmer and lived in Uttar Pradesh; counting walks, minibuses and trains, it had taken him 24 hours to get to the hospital. He had carried the toddler the entire way.
His son had gotten the drops, he insisted: Every time the teams came to his neighborhood -- which they did three, four times each year -- he or his wife had lined up all their children, the boy and his older sisters. His son had had 11, 12 doses, the man said.…
sschoenbaum | June 24, 2010Steve Schoenbaum writes: "Inside the Outbreaks", Mark Pendergrast's wonderful history of the Centers for Disease Control's Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS), can be read on many levels. I confess that as a former EIS officer (1967-1969), personally familiar with most of the "elite medical detectives" of the first few decades, I tended to read it "between the lines". I found myself recalling many personal incidents, interactions with others, and themes mentioned but not necessarily fully developed in the book. I'd like to consider a couple of those here:
Early on in "Inside the Outbreaks…
ejohnson | June 24, 2010In addition to author Mark Pendergrast, we have four more outstanding contributors here to discuss Inside the Outbreaks over the next few weeks. Though they all come from public health backgrounds, their experiences in and with the Epidemic Intelligence Service are all different. Check out their bios below and tune in to see what they have to say about the book!
Liz Borkowski
Liz, who is one of our own bloggers here on ScienceBloggers over at The Pump Handle, is a Research Associate at the George Washington University School of Public Health's Department of Environmental and Occupational…
mmckenna | June 24, 2010There's a troubling item in this afternoon's issue of the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report or MMWR: The first report in the United States of a novel resistance mechanism that renders gram-negative bacteria extremely drug-resistant and that has been linked to medical care carried out in India or Pakistan.
The short item describes three isolates (E. coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae and Enterobacter cloacae) found in three patients in three states between January and June of this year. All three isolates produced New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase (NDM-1), which has never been recorded in…
palmd | June 23, 2010When it comes to medical blogging, no one has been as consistently good, fresh, and snarky as Orac. Respectful Insolence sets the standard for all other medical blogs, and though Orac may not be a media star like some other med bloggers, his writing has had a significant impact on some important medical issues such as vaccination. The fact that he is often the target of vicious attacks by anti-vaccination activists and other quacks and wackos shows just how good a job he is doing.
Though he has been criticized for being a bit loquacious, his thoroughness is one of the traits that makes…
oracknows | June 23, 2010June is almost over. If you work in an academic medical center, as I do, that can mean only one thing.
The new interns are coming, and existing residents will soon be advancing to the next level. The joy! The excitement! The trepidation! And it's not all just the senior residents and the faculty feeling these emotions. It's the patients too. At least, it's the patients feeling the trepidation. The reason is the longstanding belief in academic medical centers, a belief that has diffused out of them and into "common wisdom," that you really, really don't want to get sick in July.
But is there…
oracknows | June 22, 2010(NOTE ADDED 12/7/2010: Kim Tinkham has died of what was almost certainly metastatic breast cancer. Also note that, when it was publicized on the Internet and on the blogosphere that Tinkham's cancer gave every indication of having recurred and she was dying, her "practitioner" Robert O. Young removed the videos embedded below from YouTube.)
Remember Kim Tinkham?
She's the woman who was diagnosed with Stage III breast cancer about three years ago. At the time, she became infamous because she showed up on Oprah Winfrey's show, back when Oprah was in her "Secret" phase and proceeded to alarm…