Medicine
oracknows | October 24, 2007I've always wondered, as I'm sure many of my readers have, whether human beings have it in them to delay their own death, even briefly. Very early in the history of this blog, a mere 11 days after I started it, I discussed a study that strongly suggested that we cannot. In brief, it looked at the common belief that people dying from cancer can somehow, through sheer force of will, hold death at bay for brief periods of time, usually until some milestone that they wanted to see one more time is reached, be it a birthday, anniversary, holiday, or whatever. After they reach that milestone, the…
revere | October 23, 2007If you have or have had small children you may be all too familiar with earaches. When our kids were small we felt as if we were single-handedly supporting the amoxicillin makers. A major cause of middle ear infection is the organism Streptococcus pneumoniae (S. pneumoniae), which sometimes it invades other tissues and causes bacterial meningitis (not the kind that you read about killing healthy teenagers, but bad enough) and sometimes other body sites. It is also a cause of pneumonia in adults and was a common cause of secondary bacterial pneumonia in the 1918 flu. That was then. Now there…
oracknows | October 22, 2007I was thinking of calling this post Jenny McCarthy and Julie Deardorff: Two crappy tastes that taste crappy together, but I've already used that joke with Jenny McCarthy and Oprah Winfrey. Besides, Julie Deardorff isn't nearly as famous as Oprah, although, as I've discussed before, she's probably even more credulous than Oprah towards the lastest dubious feel-good story about autism. Of course, this means that Deardorff and McCarthy are custom-made for each other, and, unfortunately, the antivaccination columnist for the Chicago Tribune has finally hooked up with the former Playmate of the…
oracknows | October 17, 2007Via Health Care Renewal, I've learned of a study that, certain people may be surprised to learn, troubles me. Published yesterday in JAMA, it is, as far as I know, the most comprehensive quantification of one type of tie between industry and academia, specifically how many department chairs have ties to industry and what kind. Here's the abstract:
Institutional Academic-Industry Relationships
Eric G. Campbell, PhD; Joel S. Weissman, PhD; Susan Ehringhaus, JD; Sowmya R. Rao, PhD; Beverly Moy, MD; Sandra Feibelmann, MPH; Susan Dorr Goold, MD, MHSA, MA
JAMA. 2007;298:1779-1786.
Context…
oracknows | October 17, 2007I've written before about how one of the favorite tactics of those who do not like my insistence on applying skepticism, science, and critical thinking to the claims of alternative medicine or my refusal to accept a dichotomy between "alternative" and "conventional" medicine is to try so smear me as some sort of "pharma shill." It's happened so often ever since my Usenet days that I even sometimes joke about it preemptively sometimes when writing skeptical posts or make smart aleck comments asking where I can sign up to get those big checks from big pharma, given that they'd almost certainly…
terrasig | October 16, 2007As we discussed here yesterday, ixabepilone, a semi-synthetic anticancer drug derived from a soil bacterium was up for review by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Just over a half hour ago the manufacturer, Bristol-Myers Squibb, announced that the drug has indeed been approved for the treatment of advanced breast cancer. The drug will be sold under the trade name, Ixempra.
"Previously, patients with aggressive metastatic or locally advanced breast cancer no longer responding to currently available chemotherapies had limited treatment options," said Linda Vahdat, M.D., Associate…
j7uy5 | October 15, 2007Previously, I
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/01/transcranial_direct_current_st.php">wrote
about investigation of
href="http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2006/04/newsci_head_electric.html">tDCS
for treatment of
href="http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/fibromyalgia/DS00079"
rel="tag">fibromyalgia. Now there is
evidence that it may have a role in treatment of an entirely different
pain syndrome:
href="http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/migraine.html"
rel="tag">migraine.
href="http://spectrum.ieee.org/oct07/5599">Researchers
Testing New Electric…
oracknows | October 11, 2007One of the biggest complaints from alternative medicine practitioners is that some vast cabal, presumably made up big pharma, the CDC, the NIH, the AMA, and "conventional" doctors, is "suppressing" alternative medicine. Yes, true believers like, say, Mike Adams will claim that big pharma is going to suppress their free speech about "alternatives" and thus deny you your "heath freedom," which is in reality the freedom of quacks to push quackery without being hassled by pesky things like government agencies requiring that practitioners practice evidence-based medicine.
So what happens when…
denialism | October 11, 2007I will never forget the very first patient history I ever took. Part of medical school training is they send you onto the wards to gather patient histories and physicals so you learn to gather information effectively as a clinician. My first patient history was on a woman about 35 years old on the orthopedics ward, who was a triple-amputee. She had her legs removed below the thigh, and one arm amputated below the elbow. The cause was imminently preventable. She had type II diabetes that was poorly controlled. She was obese, weighing about 180 lbs despite the removal of large parts of…
oracknows | October 8, 2007Regular readers know that I've long been dismayed at the increasing infiltration of non-evidence-based "alternative" medical therapies into academic medical centers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7). It's gotten such a foothold that it's even showing up in the mandatory medical curriculum in at least one medical school. I've speculated before that academic medical centers probably see alternative medicine as both a marketing ploy to make themselves look more "humanistic" and a new revenue stream, given that most insurance companies won't pay for therapies without solid evidence of efficacy, meaning that…
terrasig | October 7, 2007Via Clinical Cases and Images, I just learned that Mark Rabnett at the University of Manitoba has just compiled a comprehensive list of medical student bloggers.
No one source is complete, so I hope this list will be of help to the fevered mind that cannot rest until every blogging student in the health sciences has been tracked down. I see a permanent job for a few people who are willing to work for no salary while exposing themselves to resident evil, anger, fear, and cadaver fumes. As for me, if I don't wake up screaming I just may have to go back to renegotiating Nietzsche in the…
mementomori | October 7, 2007The story of thalidomide, the notorious teratogenic drug developed in Germany and sold around the world from 1957 to 1961 as a treatment for morning sickness, continues to unfold. By now most are familiar with thalidomide's history, how it caused phocomelia and other severe birth defects in over 10,000 babies, how it was never approved in the United States thanks to the insight and viligance of an FDA employee named Frances Kelsey, M.D., Ph.D., and how it has been approved now to treat certain types of cancer. Will its legacy be one of more than just shame?
Elderly patients with an…
thusspakezuska | October 5, 2007What does it take to be included in The Best Science Writing 2007?
Well, it helps if you write for the New Yorker or the New York Times. Eleven of 20 contributions selected for this volume originally appeared in the New Yorker or the New York Times or New York Times Magazine. It also helps if you are writing about something to do with human beings (twelve articles), and especially if you can contrive to write about the human brain (seven of those twelve articles). We humans do like to read about our brains.
You will have just a slight edge if you are a man (thirteen contributions…
oracknows | October 5, 2007Some readers have been sending me links to this article on CNN.com entitled 5 Alternative Medicine Treatments That Work. Unfortunately, Your Friday Dose of Woo took up the time that normally would have gone into given this article the lovingly Respectfully Insolent⢠treatment that this utterly credulous article so richly deserves and that you, my faithful readers, demand. Fortunately Mark over at denialism.com has taken the time to fisk this one in detail. Does that mean Orac has nothing more to say on this article?
You know the answer to that one. Mark just made it so that I can restrain my…
denialism | October 5, 2007CNN suggests there are 5 (count them 5) alternative medicine treatments that actually work! How pathetic is it for altie-meds that the article is presented this way. You know, 5 altie-med therapies that work versus, well, all real pharmaceuticals that actually have proven medical effects. As many have pointed out, if it works, it ceases to be "alternative" and then becomes evidence-based medicine. But let's not take this for granted, let's go over this list presented by altie-quack Andrew Weil.
1. Acupuncture for pain
Hands, down, this was the No. 1 recommendation from our panel of…
denialism | October 4, 2007
The New England Journal has an article on the phenomenon known as chronic Lyme disease. Lyme disease, is a tick-borne infectious disease caused by an bacterium known as Borrelia burgdorferi carried by ticks in certain regions of the United States and Europe in which it is endemic. Here is the US map of cases below.
It can result in a fever-like illness with a characteristic rash (although not in all cases) called erythema migrans, and if left untreated, can cause more serious problems like arthritis, and cardiovascular and neurological complications.
A small number of people and doctors…
j7uy5 | October 3, 2007This device, a
href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071003/sc_nm/germany_pillow_life_dc">computerized
pillow, may have a medical justification. But I
would recommend caution.
Daryoush Bazargani, a computer science professor in Germany, has
invented a device that he
believes can be used to help stop a person from
href="http://www.entnet.org/healthinfo/snoring/snoring.cfm">snoring.
The
device uses a microphone to detect and analyze the noise of snoring.
It then adjusted air-filled bladders in the pillow to
reposition the person's head.
Snoring is one of the cardinal symptoms of…
grrlscientist | October 3, 2007tags: researchblogging.org, treatment-emergent suicidal ideation, suicide, citalopram, celexa, SSRI, black box warning
Despite what the news might have you believe, it is quite rare for a depressed person to exhibit increased suicidal thinking after they have begun treatment with an SSRI, such as citalopram (celexa). According to the statistics, so-called "treatment-emergent suicidal ideation" occurs only in approximately 4% of all people taking citalopram, whereas this same phenomenon also occurs in 2% of all placebo-treated cases. However, in those unusual cases where suicidal ideation…
sb admin | October 3, 2007By James CelenzaÂ
Last year, a jury found that three paint companies created a public nuisance when they made and sold the lead paints that continue to poison children in Rhode Island. Now, Rhode Island Attorney General Patrick Lynch is proposing that the companies spend $2.4 billion removing lead paint from more than half the houses and apartments in Rhode Island. Some criticize the effort and expense that will be required, but lead poisoning is a serious issue that deserves our attention - and this settlement provides an opportunity to address lead poisoning and connected health issues in…
mementomori | October 3, 2007Ridentem dicere verum quid vetat?
-Horace
Here's some hilarious "news" from the FDA, just hot off the press:
Taxotere Gets FDA Approval For Advanced Head And Neck Cancer Before Chemoradiotherapy And Surgery
Heh heh...
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved Taxotere Injection Concentrate combined with cisplatin and 5-fluorouracil for induction therapy of locally advanced squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck before chemoradiotherapy and surgery.
Ha ha ha ha ha!
Clinical investigator, Marshall Posner, MD, Medical Director of the Head and Neck Oncology Program at Dana-…