Medicine
palmd | March 12, 2009An interesting article was recently published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, the journal of the American College of Physicians (my professional organization). It has been noted in previous studies that there are differences in outcomes between African Americans and whites who are diagnosed with a heart attack. What hasn't been clear is the reason for these differences.
There are known disparities in access to health care, and there is sometimes a stated distrust in the medical system by minorities (not just due to such atrocities as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study). Many of us who…
purepedantry | March 12, 2009Most of the stuff you hear about hyperbaric oxygen being used to treat is total nonsense. It isn't effective at treating autism or cerebral palsy.
But an article in the Times makes the point that it is effective for treating some things:
The Undersea and Hyperbaric Medical Society, the professional organization in this field, recognizes 13 conditions for which it is legitimate to place patients in high-pressure chambers that force pure oxygen into their blood and tissues. Eleven of those conditions have been approved by Medicare for reimbursement, indicating that solid evidence supports…
jstemwedel | March 12, 2009The headlines bring news of another scientist (this time a physician-scientist) caught committing fraud, rather than science. This story is of interest in part because of the scale of the deception -- not a paper or two, but perhaps dozens -- and in part because the scientist's area of research, the treatment of pain, strikes a nerve with many non-scientists whose medical treatment may have been (mis-)informed by the fraudulent results.
From Anesthesiology News:
Scott S. Reuben, MD, of Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Mass., a pioneer in the area of multimodal analgesia, is said to…
tqa | March 12, 2009
Several news agencies are reporting that a massive academic fraud case has surfaced. A single researcher apparently fabricated data used in the publication of at least 21 journal articles published over a 12-year period.
After an internal reviewer raised concerns, Baystate Medical Center conducted an investigation into research conducted by Dr. Scott S. Reuben, who was - at that time - the chief of their acute pain service. As the phrase "at that time" suggests, the results of the investigation did not exonerate Dr. Reuben. Anything but, in fact. In late January, Baystate sent out a letter…
oracknows | March 12, 2009Science as it is practiced today relies on a fair measure of trust. Part of the reason is that the culture of science values openness, hypothesis testing, and vigorous debate. The general assumption is that most scientists are honest and, although we all generally try to present our data in the most favorable light possible, we do not blatantly lie about it or make it up. Of course, we are also all human, and none of us is immune to the temptation to leave out that inconvenient bit of data that doesn't fit with our hypothesis or to cherry pick the absolutely best-looking blot for use in our…
sciencepunk | March 11, 2009
Last week I wrote about how the BBC's Drive Time show on Radio 2 allowed a quack therapist to promote herself on air, making bizarre statements about the human body. This included the 'scientifically proven' existence of meridians which "carry the energy of our thoughts".
Needless to say, myself and others took umbrage to this miseducation, so I submitted the following to the BBC complaints panel:
As a science writer, I was disappointed to find out that your R2 Drive Time show on Wednesday gave a considerable amount of airtime to life coach Janet Thompson, allowing her to voice numerous…
oracknows | March 9, 2009
Regular readers of this blog know pretty much what I think of Jenny McCarthy. In brief, she's an opportunistic, scientifically ignorant but media-savvy twit whose hubris leads her to believe that her Google University education, coupled with her personal anecdotal experience, render her proclamations that vaccines cause autism and that "biomedical" quackery can cure it more convincing than all that boring science, epidemiology, and clinical trials. Indeed, her critical thinking skills are so poor that she was once a huge booster of the "Indigo Child" movement, but had to try to purge the…
denialism | March 9, 2009I have just finished taking my last major exam of medical school - Step 2 of the boards (including Step 2 Clinical Skills, or CS, which costs 1200 bucks, requires you to travel to one of a few cities in the country hosting it, and is sealed by a EULA that forbids me from talking about what the test was like), and am winding down my medschool career in the next few weeks. It's about 2 weeks from Match Day (the 19th), when I'll find out for sure where I will spend the next 5 or so years of my life. I'll be sure to have a post up a little after noon that day when I find out what the answer is…
grrlscientist | March 6, 2009tags: medical emergency, Finnish Emergency Medicine, Malmin sairaala, Malmi Hospital, Töölön sairaalan, Töölö Hospital, Klinikka 22, Helsinki Finland
Ambulanssi Töölön sairaalan tapaturma-aseman edessä, Helsingissä
[Ambulance in front of Töölö hospital, Helsinki, Finland]
Image: Hehkuviini, 29 January 2009 (Wikipedia commons) [larger view].
As you all might recall, I was going to visit Tallinn, Estonia yesterday. I spent a few hours looking at maps, photographs and reading about other people's visits, and generally getting very excited about this unexpected adventure.
Alas…
terrasig | March 5, 2009Chris Mooney just asked the question as to why sci/med bloggers are up in arms about Sen Tom Harkin's recent complaints about the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), the arm of NIH charged with funding studies to investigate the mechanisms and efficacy of modalities not currently considered mainstream medicine. I left a comment for Chris that ended up being a blog post so I'll share it with Terra Sig readers here and expound a bit for good measure.
The problem is that Harkin has stated that the establishment is discriminating against alternative medicine and…
palmd | March 5, 2009This is a cross-post from Science-Based Medicine. Go there! --PalMD
There are many ways in which cult medicine believers try to insinuate themselves into the health care system. As Dr. Gorski has pointed out, "prevention" is one of their metaphorical feet in the door. The cult medicine literature often says things like, "mainstream medicine is fine for treating acute illness, but what we do is prevention." What they often leave out is the question of what "prevention" means, what the data on prevention is, and how to properly approach prevention. It's likely that one of my co-editors…
dgmacarthur | March 5, 2009Last month I mentioned a US fertility clinic that was offering couples undergoing IVF the opportunity to screen their embryos for sex, and for genes associated with "cosmetic" traits such as eye and hair colour. I used this as an opportunity to note that the genetic complexity of many traits (e.g. height, also discussed yesterday) would make it highly unlikely that embryo screening would be effective for these, although for hair and eye colour such screening is certainly feasible.
The media coverage of this fertility clinic - run by reproductive endocrinologist Jeff Steinberg (pictured) -…
ddobbs | March 5, 2009Philip Dawdy takes a interesting look at a new study of the safety of placebo arms in clinical trials of antidepressants in teens. My own quick scan of the study [which Dawdy makes available as pdf download] suggests it's full of great nuggets.
Its take-home: Placebo treatments produced remission rates of 48%, while the rate for active treatment was 59%. And, quite interestingly, the study concludes:
Patients who responded to placebo generally retained their response. Those who did not respond to placebo subsequently responded to active treatment at the same rates as those initiallyl…
ddobbs | March 4, 2009I'm having difficulty even reading, much less posting about, the river of stories about pharma and device industries, FDA regs, conflicts of interest, and so on. But I'll take a stab here at spotlighting the main events and making some sense of where this is headed. For I don't think it's just coincidence that brings in a few days an archetypal pharma scandal, an unexpected and emphatic Supreme court reversal, an underwear check administered to the entire faculty of the Harvard Medical School, and the decision to "make an example" of surgeons who took kickbacks for using medical devices.
The…
terrasig | March 4, 2009I just wanted to send out congratulations to my friends and colleagues in Charleston at the Medical College of South Carolina (MUSC) on the 2 March announcement of their receipt of NCI Cancer Center designation:
The Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) Hollings Cancer Center has attained National Cancer Institute (NCI) designation, a distinction held by only 63 other cancer centers in the U.S. The Hollings Cancer Center (HCC) is the only institution in South Carolina with this prestigious status.
Andrew S. Kraft, MD, Director of the Hollings Cancer Center (HCC), said being named one of…
oracknows | March 4, 2009If there's' one theme, one cause, that this blog has emphasized throughout the four years of its existence and the three years of its having resided on ScienceBlogs, it's been to champion science- and evidence-based medicine over pseudoscience and quackery. Whether it's refuting the lies of antivaccine zealots, having a little fun with some of the more outrageously bizarre forms of pseudoscience, railing against cancer quackery, lamenting how easily pseudoscientific quackery has infiltrated medical academia, complaining about drug companies rigging clinical studies, or trying to educate my…
mikethemadbiologist | March 2, 2009A recent article that examined the relationship between antibiotic use and antibiotic resistance in Finland made me realize one very sad fact: what is easy to do in Finland is nearly impossible in the U.S. because we lack a national healthcare system (note: I'm not talking about how healthcare is paid for which is an argument about reimbursement, but a uniform system of record keeping and informatics protocols).
Consider this from the introduction (italics mine; citations removed for clarity):
According to current Finnish care recommendations, the first-line antimicrobial agents for the…
oracknows | March 1, 2009Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) owes me a new irony meter.
I'll explain in a minute, but first you have to know why I even give a rodent's posterior about Harkin. As you may recall, no single legislator in the U.S. has done more to damage the cause of science- and evidence-based medicine than Tom Harkin. It was through his efforts that the National Institutes of Health, despite the fact that its scientists were not agitating for it, had the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) rammed down its throat, first as the Office of Alternative Medicine (OAM) and then, when…
jstemwedel | February 26, 2009
This morning, I was made aware (by my better half) of the existence of Google Flu Trends. This is a project by Google to use search terms to create a model of flu activity across the United States. Indeed, the results have been good enough that they were reported in a Letter in Nature [1] back in November 2008 (but with a correction published online 19 February 2009). From that letter:
Seasonal influenza epidemics are a major public health concern, causing tens of millions of respiratory illnesses and 250,000 to 500,000 deaths worldwide each year. In addition to seasonal influenza, a new…
oracknows | February 25, 2009Over the last few days, it seems to me, I've been blogging so much about antivaccine lunacy that I was beginning to wonder whether I should rename the blog "Respectfully Insolent Antivaccine Slapdowns." As good as it's been to dwell on seeing the antivaccine movement suffer two major setbacks in 2009 even before we've reached the end of February, it's time to move on for a while; that is, unless the antivaccine movement does or writes something stupid enough to tempt my attention back. In the meantime, as I get back into the swing of blogging again, I haven't yet gone through my pile of…