Medicine
dblum | May 16, 2010 Once upon a time - by which I mean the 19th century - people spilled the poison arsenic into their lives with free and merry hands.
Arsenic was mixed into medicines, into cosmetics, into weed killers, insecticies, rat poisons, fly papers. It was the primary ingredient in a number of well-known dyes used to color fabric, wallpaper, the artificial leaves used to decorate hats and wreaths, cardboard boxes, greeting cards, labels, candles, India rubber balls, oil paint, tin plants, Venetian blinds, carpets, soap, and even green stones set into costume jewelry.
Naturally, poisoners…
palmd | May 13, 2010So-called "morgellons syndrome" is an interesting phenomenon. This syndrome is not at this point generally recognized by the medical community, but its sufferers describe many different systemic symptoms, such as "brain fog" and fatigue, and characteristic skin lesions which they describe as containing or extruding an unknown substance. The patients are most often diagnosed as having delusions of parasitosis, a diagnosis which understandably is not often acceptable to the patient.
One of the most consistent facts to date about the disorder is that there has been no significant scientific…
oracknows | May 12, 2010There are few things more dangerous than a reporter with no understanding of science who, though the arrogance of ignorance, somehow comes to think that he has found the "next big story." We've seen it before in various incarnations. One of the first such reporters to fall down the rabbithole of vaccine pseudoscience, thinking he found a huge story, was, of course, David Kirby, whose "investigations" produced resulted in his 2004 book Evidence of Harm: Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic, A Medical Controversy. Together with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his steamy, drippy turd of fear…
j7uy5 | May 11, 2010
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2008/05/repetitive_transcranial_magnet.php">Repetitive
transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) is a treatment for
major depression. It was approved (
href="http://www.accessdata.fda.gov/cdrh_docs/pdf8/K083538.pdf">PDF)
by the FDA in 2008. However, it has remained somewhat of a niche
treatment. Some providers remain
href="http://www.shockmd.com/2008/10/17/transcranial-magnetic-stimulation-gains-approval-of-the-fda-for-depression/">unimpressed
by studies of efficacy. One problem is that most of the studies
have been sponsored by the…
revere | May 8, 2010I don't write about mental health here, but not because I don't think it is of public health importance. It may be one of the most consequential and expensive maladies we have. It's not because I don't know anyone whose life it has touched. I know many. And it isn't because it is without intellectual interest. It may be one of the most difficult, entangled and ambiguous topics in public health. It is mainly because of lack of expertise on my part coupled with my attention being directed elsewhere. You can't write about everything and can't get up to speed on everything. Life is too short. But…
sa smith | May 7, 2010WARNING: Get a box of Kleenex before you read this post! I am NOT joking.
A few weeks ago I wrote a post on how scientists are using a genetically modified herpes simplex-1 virus to attack metastatic melanoma (an oncolytic, ie kills tumor cells, virus). The results of their clinical trials blew my mind.
Today I found out (thanks to an awesome reader!), that they are trying a similar protocol in a 13 year old kid with rhabdomyosarcoma. What this boy has been through:
Now 13-years-old, Evan was diagnosed with rhabdomyosarcoma in June 2008 at the age of 11...
... He's endured 28 rounds of…
oracknows | May 4, 2010As I pointed out yesterday before stirring things up a bit, I was up most of the night Sunday night working on a grant (two, actually), and I went full tilt all day yesterday to get it done. Consequently, last night I was in no shape to blog. I chilled. I copied. I picked a rerun. Interestingly, I remembered this post, which was something I did way back in early 2005. the last time I reran it was in 2006; so if you've been reading less than four years, it's new to you, and I'll be back for sure tumorrow. It's also interesting because this post is of a style and subject matter that I don't…
clock | May 3, 2010There are 32 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:
Novel Weapons Testing: Are Invasive Plants More Chemically Defended than Native Plants?:
Exotic species have been hypothesized to successfully invade new habitats by virtue of possessing novel biochemistry…
terrasig | May 1, 2010. . .because my voice has also been absent from the offline world.
Yes, the final gift to me from LungMutiny2010 is a case of inhaled corticosteroid dysphonia - and another opportunity to cultivate compassion for those with chronic illnesses and permanent loss of physiological functioning.
Here's a recap: After a three month battle with pneumonia, I returned to the university as much as I could about six weeks ago. I say "as much as I could" because, once again, I was amazed by how little my body would let me do after being confined to bed for ten weeks.
Some days I'd just be doing great and…
palmd | April 30, 2010Dana Ullman is an idiot. Or maybe insane. I'm not sure which, but his latest article at the Huffington Post reveals such a severe defect in rational thought that it must be one or the other (charitably speaking). He calls it "Lies, Damn Lies (sic), and Medical Research," and the point of it is quite clear: Ullman calls himself an "expert in homeopathic medicine" (which is akin to being a unicorn veterinarian) and since he has never been able to show that his particular health religion has any validity, he lashes out futilely at reality.
His entire argument boils down to a profound…
oracknows | April 29, 2010
In the wake of FRONTLINE's The Vaccine War, I was going to have a bit of fun with the reactions of the anti-vaccine fringe. After all, the spokescelebrity of the anti-vaccine movement, Jenny McCarthy, has posted yet another brain dead screed at--where else?--The Huffington Post. So has everybody's favorite pediatrician to the stars and apologist for the anti-vaccine movement, Dr. Jay Gordon. Both are incredibly target-rich environments, each worthy of its very own heapin', helpin' of not-so-Respectful Insolence. Truly, we have an embarrassment of riches here as far as blogging material…
oracknows | April 27, 2010I never would have thought it possible, but it's happened.
I'm sure most of you have heard of Dr. Andrew Weil, that champion of quackademic medicine who has made it his life's mission to bring the woo into academia in the form of training programs to "integrate" quackery with science-based medicine. From his home base at the University of Arizona, he spreads the woo hither and yon throughout academia, racking up big speaking fees wherever he goes and building a multimedia empire of books, DVDs, TV appearances, and Internet presence. Not satistfied, last year in the early stages of the debate…
j7uy5 | April 26, 2010National Geographic
href="http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/04/100421-new-fungus-cryptococcus-gattii-deadly-health-science/">reports:
A new strain of hypervirulent, deadly Cryptococcus gattii
fungus has been discovered in the United States, a new study says.
The outbreak has already killed six people in Oregon, and it will
likely creep into northern California and possibly farther, experts
say...
Cryptococcus infections in humans are hardly new. And so
far, the public health impact of the outbreak has been very low
(understanding, of course, that the personal impact has…
tsmith | April 26, 2010Student guest post by Anne Dressler
Ninety percent of menstruating women experience some kind of premenstrual symptoms during the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle, with 20-30% experiencing moderate to severe symptoms. With an even more severe collection of symptoms, is premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD). 3-8% of menstruating women report symptoms severe enough to be considered suffering from PMDD. Yet another designation, premenstrual magnification (PMM), is used to describe women who are symptomatic the entire cycle but have a premenstrual exacerbation of a diagnosed psychiatric,…
oracknows | April 23, 2010If there's one thing that has irritated me (one might even say, irritated me enough to start this blog), it's ideology or religion trumping science. Perhaps the most annoying form of this disease is the tendency of the right wing whackosphere to do everything and anything it can to distort and twist science to agree with its ideology, in particular its religion. One area that I used to write about a lot but don't so much anymore (we bloggers have to subspecialize, I guess, and these days my subspecialty is science-based medicine with only the occasional forays against forms of unreason other…
oracknows | April 21, 2010I tell ya, I go away for a few days, let the blogging slow down, decrease the usual logorrhea. Heck, I even go for the lazy blogger trick of an open thread. In the meantime, while I was busy learning about real science at the 2010 AACR Meeting, the forces of pseudoscience have not been quiet. No, they've been active; indeed, there is so much that requires Orac's not-so-Respectful Insolence and so little time for me to apply it. That means that, almost certainly, "deserving" candidates will be missed. That is a shame, but even Orac needs his rest from time to time.
None of this means that I…
dgmacarthur | April 19, 2010Mark Henderson breaks the news of the first sequencing of an entire nuclear family for non-medical (read: recreational) reasons. John West, his wife and two teenage children (aged 14 and 17) apparently paid the full retail price of almost US$200,000 (update: in the comments, Mark writes that West apparently got a "small" but not "hefty" discount off this retail price) to sequencing company Illumina to generate their complete DNA sequences.
The West family members are no strangers to sequencing - John West is the former CEO of Solexa, the sequencing technology company purchased by Illumina in…
oracknows | April 16, 2010I'm almost beginning to feel sorry for Andrew Wakefield.
Well, not really. He did bring all the misery that's poured down upon him like an unending waterfall of woe, such as the British General Medical Council (GMC) finding him guilty of research misconduct and soon very likely to recommend that he be "struck off," a delightful British term for removing someone's medical license and thus striking him off the list of licensed physicians. Soon after, the editors of The Lancet retracted his infamous 1998 paper that purported to suggest that there was a link between the measles virus in the MMR…
palmd | April 14, 2010A young relative of mine recently asked me my thoughts about medicine as a career. It's a relatively common question in my mail bag, and a tough one to answer, especially when asked by strangers. Career choices are very personal, so I don't like to give advice as much as let people know what they can expect from a career in medicine. Here's one of the latest letters to show up in my inbox (edited by me for anonymity, etc.).
Dear Pal,
I'm a third year medical student at the end of my clerkships now, and I've found that I pretty well like everything. I did my pediatrics rotation early and…
revere | April 14, 2010I am pro-abortion. Not in the sense that I think abortions are good. I don't. In the sense that I am pro-surgery for medical conditions that can be surgically treated, or pro-pharmaceuticals for medical conditions that can be treated with drugs. I consider an unwanted fertilization to be a medical condition with significant consequences that can be treated. Now that I have gotten that out of the way I hope I can be free to state some ambivalence later about some other matters related to the anti-abortion movement.
But no ambivalence about a woman's ability to get an abortion. Roe v. Wade was…