Medicine
oracknows | July 12, 2009I'm currently in Las Vegas at The Amazing Meeting. Believe it or not, I was even on a panel! While I'm gone, I'll probably manage to do a new post or two, but, in the meantime, while I'm away communing with fellow skeptics at TAM7, I'll be reposting some Classic Insolence from the month of July in years past. (After all, if you haven't been following this blog at least a year, it'll be new to you. And if you have I hope you enjoy it again.) This particular post first appeared in July 2007.
Mike Adams is an idiot.
There, I said it.
Adams runs the NewsTarget website, a repository for all…
palmd | July 9, 2009On July 4th at 5 a.m., I'm loading the family into the car and driving very far away, where cellphones, pagers, and most critically the internet, do not work. Blogging has been very hard for me lately. I love writing, but due to work and family mishegos it's been hard to keep up with the posting. I'm hoping a stint up in the woods providing medical supervision to 400 souls will be rejuvenating. While I'm gone, I'll leave you with some of my favorite posts about the human side of medicine. I hope you enjoy reading them again, or for the first time. --PalMD
Urinary tract infections (UTIs…
oracknows | July 8, 2009Today, I'm leaving for The Amazing Meeting in Las Vegas. I can't wait to get there. Believe it or not, I'll even be on a panel! While I'm there I'll probably manage to do a new post or two, but, in the meantime, while I'm away communing with fellow skeptics at TAM7, I'll be reposting some Classic Insolence from the month of July in years past. (After all, if you haven't been following this blog at least a year, it'll be new to you. And if you have I hope you enjoy it again.) This particular post first appeared in July 2007.
This sort of thing makes one wonder if the personification of…
jstemwedel | July 7, 2009In the current issue of The Scientist, there's a pair of interesting pieces about how professional life goes on (or doesn't) for scientists found guilty of misconduct by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI).
Alison McCook's article, Life After Fraud, includes interviews with three scientists against whom the ORI has made formal rulings of misconduct. A big concern voiced by each of these scientists is that after the period of their debarment from eligibility to receive federal grants or to serve on a Public Health Service (PHS) committee has expired, the traces of their punishment…
dgmacarthur | July 7, 2009The UK House of Lords Science and Technology Committee has published the long-awaited report (PDF) from its inquiry into genomic medicine.
Mark Henderson at The Times has been busy today, putting out three excellent pieces on the report: a summary of the major implications, an opinion piece pushing the need for the health service to respond quickly to the arrival of genomic medicine, and a lengthy blog post praising the report and providing his views in more detail.
I find little to disagree with in Henderson's coverage, and certainly agree with his overall opinion of the report: this…
oracknows | July 6, 2009Two of the major themes on this blog since the very beginning has been the application of science- and evidence-based medicine to the care of patients and why so much of so-called "complementary and alternative" medicine, as well as fringe movements like the anti-vaccine movement, have little or--more commonly--virtually no science to support their claims and recommendations. One major shortcoming of the more commonly used evidence-based medicine paradigm (EBM) that has been in ascendance as the preferred method of evaluating clinical evidence. Specifically, as Dr. Kimball Atwood IV (1, 2, 3…
revere | July 6, 2009Flu virus is opportunistic. It takes advantage of any weakness. Seasonal flu picks on the very old and the very young, but pandemic flu has found us old folks tough and the younger amongst us quite tasty. No natural resistance seems to be a flavor enhancer. And pre-existing medical conditions? Quite delectable. So how full is the menu in the prime age range? CDC has just released one of their Quickstat summaries based on household interviews with a sample of the civilian, noninstitutionalized, adult U.S. population. The question the sample was asked was whether a doctor or other health…
palmd | July 4, 2009On July 4th at 5 a.m., I'm loading the family into the car and driving very far away, where cellphones, pagers, and most critically the internet, do not work. Blogging has been very hard for me lately. I love writing, but due to work and family mishegos it's been hard to keep up with the posting. I'm hoping a stint up in the woods providing medical supervision to 400 souls will be rejuvenating. While I'm gone, I'll leave you with some of my favorite posts about the human side of medicine. I hope you enjoy reading them again, or for the first time. --PalMD
I am often the bearer of bad…
oracknows | July 2, 2009Last year, a seeming victory for the protection of human subjects from being subjected to pseudoscience. It began when Kimball C. Atwood IV, MD; Elizabeth Woeckner, AB, MA; Robert S. Baratz, MD, DDS, PhD; and Wallace I. Sampson, MD published a lengthy criticism of the NIH Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy (TACT) in Medscape, pointing out that it was a boondoggle that was not only not based on sound science but was in fact risky to patients and riddled with conflicts of interest and administered by highly dubious practitioners. If you want to know just how bad the National Center for…
terrasig | July 1, 2009
Dear PharmGirl,
We wanted to make this note public today because a great many of our blog friends know of your dedication as a physician, wife, and a mother.
Yesterday you finished an association with an academic medical institution where you have been for half your life. From young women with breast cancer to old men in the V.A. Hospital, literally thousands have been touched by your gifts of intelligence, remarkable clinical judgment, and, perhaps most importantly, compassion. The recognition from your patients was abundant and we were privy to the personal notes of just how much you…
oracknows | July 1, 2009Remember Sharyl Attkisson?
She's the CBS reporter who can really bring home the crazy when it comes to vaccines and autism, laying down some serious crankery (complete with many logical fallacies) and hit pieces on Dr. Paul Offit. Indeed, at times she gives Mike Adams a run for his money when it comes to laying down the pseudoscience and crankery. Worse, she appears to be in bed with at least one of the bloggers at the antivaccine propaganda blog Age of Autism for the purpose of bringing antivaccination lunacy to the masses by assisting them in smearing Voices for Vaccines. Indeed, aside from…
ddobbs | June 30, 2009I have suspected for some time now that the band oddly close process designed to produce the DSM-V --- the diagnostic statistical manual that is psychiatry's diagnostic guide and Bible --- would create an explosion of some sort. But I didn't think it would explode quite so soon.
As Daniel Carlat outlines in a wonderful post â a must read, very high infotainment value â this is a pretty entertaining missing match. We have Allen Frances, a prominent psychiatrist who helped produce the previous edition of the DSM, leveling some very harsh criticisms of the process designed to produce a new…
palmd | June 30, 2009Major depressive disorder (hereafter referred to as "depression") is a prevalent and disabling illness. According to the National Institute of Mental Health:
Major Depressive Disorder is the leading cause of disability in the U.S. for ages 15-44...[and]...affects approximately 14.8 million American adults, or about 6.7 percent of the U.S. population age 18 and older in a given year.
There's been some terrific writing on depression around ScienceBlogs this year. I've written a few pieces touching on mental illness in the past, but never anything explicitly about depression. Given the…
terrasig | June 30, 2009
I love it when new readers stumble upon old posts.
Such was the case when I received the following delightful comment from Seattle-based psychologist, Dr Gary Grenell, on my April 2008 post about the passing of Dr Charlotte Tan, a pediatric cancer chemotherapy pioneer:
I was probably in one of her earliest actionmycin-D trial groups for Wilms tumor in 1957. Now at age 55, 52 years later, still going strong!
Most of you scientific youngsters today probably only know of actinomycin D as a laboratory tool for inhibiting RNA synthesis. But here in the following repost, learn about the…
oracknows | June 30, 2009I waited.
I knew it was coming. It had to. History was on my side. My quarry was nutty, but in a way exceedingly predictable. it wasn't so much that I knew exactly what he would do. He wasn't predictable in that way. It was that I knew he would do something crazy. Actually, on second thought, I did know what he was going to do. I had only to consider how ghoulishly he treated Tony Snow and Bernie Mac, and Tim Russert and how he leapt at the opportunity to abuse Christina Applegate. To him, when a dying celebrity like Patrick Swayze rejected quackery, it was more than he could stand. Whenever…
pharyngula | June 29, 2009The first few talks this morning focused primarily on policy as illuminated by science; only the third talk was pure science.
Chiechanover's talk was on both the history and future of drug research, which he characterized in terms of three major revolutions in the last century.
The first revolution was a period of accidental discoveries in 1930s-1960s, where the discovery of a useful drug comes first, by observation of therapeutic effects, followed by chemical isolation, and only at the end (if at all), is the mechanism of action worked out. He gave the example of aspirin. Willow tree bark…
palmd | June 29, 2009A long while back, at the original wordpress incarnation of this blog, I wrote a piece on the reasons that chiropractic is unscientific nonsense. Because it was popular, I moved it over here. Well, a chiropractor has come to bravely defend his field and left us a comment.
A study in the May 2007 issue of the Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics reports health plans that use Chiropractors as Primary Care Providers (PCPs) reduce their health care utilization costs significantly.
The study covers the seven-year period from 1999 to 2005. Researchers compared costs and…
mikethemadbiologist | June 29, 2009Yesterday's article by Gina Kolata about cancer research mistakes a symptom--caution due to a perceived lack of funding--for the disease, which is the symbiosis between academia and the NIH. Don't get me wrong, a lot of research should involve academics. But the priorities of NIH have become overwhelmed by the priorities of academia. I think Kolata's dead on target with this part of her article (italics mine):
One major impediment, scientists agree, is the grant system itself. It has become a sort of jobs program, a way to keep research laboratories going year after year with the…
clock | June 28, 2009This is a repost of an November 6, 2007 post (as always, click on the icon to see the original and its comments):
Cannot. Resist. Funny. Titles. Sorry.
But seriously now, the question of authorship on scientific papers is an important question. For centuries, every paper was a single-author paper. Moreover, each was thousands of pages long and leather-bound. But now, when science has become such a collaborative enterprise and single-author papers are becoming a rarity, when a 12-author paper turns no heads and 100-author papers are showing up more and more, it has become necessary to put…
oracknows | June 26, 2009If there's one thing that I've found that's simultaneously gratifying and somewhat infuriating over the last year or so, it's that the skeptical movement has finally really noticed that anti-vaccination movement in a big way. Those of us who've been on the blogospheric front lines for the last few years have sometimes been frustrated that this issue, at least until recently, got so little attention outside of our dedicated little circle and the much larger circle of anti-vaccine zealots and the quacks who enable and encourage them.
That's not to say that there weren't some prominent skeptics…