Medicine
denialism | August 29, 2007In a scathing attack on what he calls "gunpoint medicine", Mike Adams attacks the medical establishment for their supposed ability to imprison patients, force treatments on people against their will and generally be very very evil.
Health officials in Lawrenceville, Georgia have arrested and jailed Francisco Santos, a teenager who tried to walk out of a hospital and go home after being diagnosed with TB (tuberculosis). Instead of allowing him to leave the hospital, health authorities arrested and jailed the teen, throwing him in into a 15 x 20 foot isolation chamber and not allowing him to…
revere | August 28, 2007A recent article in TimesOnline (hat tip RobT) raises an inevitable and interesting question about how we are going to ration scarce high tech medical resources in a pandemic. The article reports on a paper by Canadian scientists on SARS patients indicating that certain patterns of protein expression offer clues to clinical prognosis. In particular, the researchers found that protein expression patterns for interferons, known to participate in the innate immune system's reaction to viral infections, seem to indicate that one of two distinct patterns predict a relatively good prognosis, the…
scientificactivist | August 28, 2007Or, at least that's what I thought when I read this article from Saturday's Guardian:
Universities and medical schools have been criticised for increasing the number of animals used in research by more than 50% since 1996 while industry has reduced its procedures by 20% over the same period.
Campaigners say that a cultural inertia has meant that academics have been slow to adopt options such as tissue cultures or computer models. They argue there should be more funding to encourage researchers to find other options.
Gill Langley, director of the Dr Hadwen Trust for Humane Research, said: "…
sb admin | August 27, 2007By David Michaels
Tort "reformers" have long contended (with little evidence) that fear of litigation has scared off vaccine manufacturers from developing new vaccines.
It has been more than twenty years since Congress established the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. The program was designed to ensure that anyone injured by a vaccine would be fairly compensated, while protecting vaccine manufacturers from liability. Even with this program, the pace of new vaccine development slowed to a crawl in the 1990s. Opponents of law suits, including President George W. Bush, regularly use…
apalazzo | August 27, 2007This was to be expected. Remember how Elsevier and American Chemical Society hired Eric Dezenhall? (click here for more) Well apparently under Dezenhall's direction these guys have formed Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine or PRISM, a lobby group against open access.
As I've mentioned before, there is a concern about how open access (OA) is to be funded. It takes lots of money to hire editors and a production team to produce a top tiered journal such as Science, Nature, Cell and even PLoS Biology. And it is not only the peer review and production, but also the…
mementomori | August 26, 2007200 scientists attended an international conference in Chicago this last week in order to sniff out the latest research on a ubiquitous health disorder.
"We want to advance the science in this field," said Christine Wu, a researcher at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who helped organize the conference.
[The disorder] is neglected because it is not a disease that will kill people," she said in an interview. "But it's a huge problem. Everybody suffers from [the disorder] at one point in their lifetime."
The treatments for this malady range from over-the-counter medicines to an overhaul…
sciencetolife | August 25, 2007
Is depression overdiagnosed in today's society?
Yes, says Professor Gordon Parker in the August 18 2007 issue of the British Medical Journal.
Rates of diagnosis of depression have risen steeply in recent years. Parker, a scientia professor from the School of Psychiatry, University of New South Wales, believes this is because current criteria for diagnosis are medicalising emotions (like sadness) rather than true clinical depression.
Reasons for the overdiagnosis include lack of a reliable and valid diagnostic model and marketing of treatments beyond their true utility in a climate of…
revere | August 24, 2007I'm at the beach and as you might expect there are a lot of seafood restaurants. While I'm not a big fish eater, I do appreciate the really neat kinds of food poisoning you can get from fish. Like scombroid:
Scombroid fish poisoning is an acute illness that occurs after eating fish containing high levels of histamine or other biogenic amines. Symptoms typically include facial flushing, sweating, rash, a burning or peppery taste in the mouth, diarrhea, and abdominal cramps and usually resolve within several hours without medical intervention. More severe symptoms (e.g., respiratory distress,…
terrasig | August 22, 2007This is just heart-wrenchingly sad:
A [Pittsburgh area] doctor was charged with involuntary manslaughter Wednesday for administering a chemical treatment that state police say killed a 5-year-old autistic boy.
The child, Abubakar Tariq Nadama, went into cardiac arrest at Dr. Roy E. Kerry's office immediately after undergoing chelation therapy on Aug. 23, 2005.
Chelation removes heavy metals from the body and is approved by the Food and Drug Administration for treating acute heavy metal poisoning, but not for treating autism. Some people who believe autism is caused by a mercury-containing…
cortex | August 22, 2007Silas Weir Mitchell was a great American neurologist. Unfortunately, he's best known now for pioneering "the rest cure," which became a common treatment for hysteria and other afflictions of the "frail female nervous system". (See, for example, "The Yellow Wallpaper," by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.)
But Weir Mitchell's most important contribution to neurology came from his diagnosis of phantom limbs, which he called "sensory ghosts". His discovery came during the middle of the Civil War, when he was working as a doctor at Turner's Lane hospital in Philadelphia. The battle of Gettysburg had…
oracknows | August 22, 2007Thanks to Blake, I now have The Enemies of Reason, Part 2:
My review of this episode is below the fold. I managed to BitTorrent the episode and watch it on my laptop on my flight back from Chicago last night. If you don't want to be influenced by my opinion before watching, watch the episode first and then see if you agree with my assessment.
Part 2 of Richard Dawkins' The Enemies of Reason, The Irrational Health Service, is, as you might imagine, right up my alley. Moreover, it's the stronger of the two parts of this documentary in many ways, although I think it continues the theme of…
oracknows | August 17, 2007So, after nearly two weeks of torturing myself trying to put together an R01-level grant on short notice and make it actually competitive, I'm finally free. The grant has been submitted (amazingly, the online submission process went through without a hitch), and, sleep-deprived but still hopped up on the Sudafed that kept the mucus membranes in my nasal passages from exploding outward at a high velocity, scattering watery goo everywhere.
Not a pretty sight when it happens, hence the Sudafed.
Fortunately, the pollen has subsided to the level where I am only mildly miserable, allowing my…
denialism | August 17, 2007One of the problems with denialists is that they simply can't accept that science doesn't conform to their ideology. For instance, it's not enough to just be morally opposed to abortion, the anti-choice organizations have to misrepresent risks of the procedure, including promoting the false link (NCI) between abortion and breast cancer.
Recently, Talk to Action exposed the lies of Crisis Pregnancy centers, and the dishonest tactics they use to misrepresent the services they offer and lie about the risks of abortion. These centers which use federal money to misrepresent the science, are…
revere | August 16, 2007A new paper in the Annals of Internal Medicine underlines a point we have tried to make multiple times (e.g., see here, here and here). Naive and unthought out therapeutic responses to the idea that bird flu kills via a "cytokine storm" is a bad idea. Cytokine storm is also a common feature of sepsis, which accompanies some pneumonia and other infections and has a high case fatality ratio. I haven't read the original paper because I am at the beach where the Annals of Internal Medicine isn't carried at the local convenience store and my internet connection is barely adequate for email, but I…
omnibrain | August 16, 2007According to an article in Salon, via Mind Hacks:
The American Psychological Association, the world's largest professional organization of psychologists, is poised to issue a formal condemnation of a raft of notorious interrogation tactics employed by U.S. authorities against detainees during the so-called war on terror, from simulated drowning to sensory deprivation. The move is expected during the APA's annual convention in San Francisco this weekend.
The APA's anti-torture resolution follows a string of revelations in recent months of the key role played by psychologists in the development…
denialism | August 15, 2007No. But the WSJ would like you to believe so.
One libertarian talking point I hear a lot (Cato of course loves this story), and is repeatedly pushed by the WSJ, is that the market and consumers should decide the safety and efficacy of drugs - not dirty gov'mint bureaucrats who want nothing but death and suffering for cancer patients. The latest is this commentary from Ronald Trowbridge and Steven Walker which has some fun with math to suggest the delay in approval of cancer drugs has led not to dozens, or hundreds, or thousands, but hundreds of thousands of premature deaths.
Is there…
oracknows | August 14, 2007It's that time of year again! Time for the one Center of the NIH dedicated to studying "remedies," regardless of how scientifically implausible or lacking in evidence to support them, the National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) to put forth its budget request for FY 2008. What's the bill for government-funded studies of woo?
$121,699,000.
Depressing. Let's see what the possible justification is for sending $121 million on studying things such as homeopathy:
Large numbers of American health care consumers are using CAM modalities in an effort to preempt disease and…
purepedantry | August 14, 2007This has got to be the dumbest article I have ever read.
The headline reads: Brain blood flow helps treat depression.
Well, yeah. Try having a brain without blood flow, and you will be pretty depressed too.
It gets better. Here is what the article says:
Israeli scientists have confirmed the usefulness of established molecular imaging approaches in the treatment of depression.
"Individuals in a depressed emotional state have impaired cerebral blood flow," said Associate Professor Omer Bonne at Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center in Jerusalem. "Clinical improvement in depression is…
angrytoxicologist | August 13, 2007To get right to the heart of the matter, Salon did an article about the risks of bisphenol A (BPA) in plastics. From the land where nothing is harmful, a reply came from Trevor Butterworth (real name) who is an editor at STATS. If you don't know what STATS is, they are a non-profit attached (in what way, I don't know) to George Mason Univ, who I believe are industry funded, who 'dubunk' bad science news/media (they don't list their funding but have an office in downtown DC in the midst of lobbyists offices). Unfortunately, they are as about as unscientific as the rest of the media. They twist…
signout | August 8, 2007Running a resident team on the general medicine wards is not a simple thing, especially at this time of year. The medical students are new to clinical work, and are painfully self-conscious. The interns are new to the hospital, and are scared of their own shadows. The upper-level residents are new to running teams, and are not completely sure what it means to be in charge.
That's not to say we don't understand our responsibilities. As one of those upper-levels, it is my job to set the team's priorities, which means I determine the order of rounding and delegate work to different members of…