medicine
clock | June 1, 2008More from SCONC:
Tuesday June 17 at 6:30-8:30 pm
Science Café - A 'One Medicine' Approach to a Changing World
NC State's Barrett D. Slenning MS, DVM, MPVM will share with us the view that knowing about diagnoses and treatments of animals can benefit humans. The opposite is also true, given the fact that about 60 percent of all human pathogens are zoonotic diseases, transmissible between animals and people. Join us to learn how human and veterinary medicine can join forces to protect us with rapid responses to the outbreak of disease.
Location: The Irregardless Cafe, 901 W. Morgan Street,…
oracknows | June 1, 2008In the nearly two years of its existence, I have strived to feature only the finest and most outrageous woo that I can find. It's mostly been medical quackery but sometimes it's other topics as well. Oddly enough, the vast majority of the woo featured nearly every week never attracts the attention of any regulatory bodies. Given the hilariously, extravagantly pseudscientific or spiritual claims made to support some of these devices, it's hard to image how so many of them never attract the loving attention of the Food and Drug Administration or the counterpart of the FDA in other countries in…
oracknows | May 30, 2008In a couple of hours, I'll be en route to my favorite city in the world, a place where, although I lived there for but a brief three years, I felt completely at home.
Chicago, baby!
Yes, I'm on the way to the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting in Chicago. While there, I'll be checking out the latest and greatest findings from the world of cancer therapy. As any blogger would, I'm hoping not just to learn something but to find interesting blog material.
In the meantime, don't forget that the 88th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle is fast approaching on Thursday, June 5 at…
clock | May 30, 2008Today in PLoS Genetics: a nice review of some interest to my readers: When Clocks Go Bad: Neurobehavioural Consequences of Disrupted Circadian Timing by Alun R. Barnard and Patrick M. Nolan:
Progress in unravelling the cellular and molecular basis of mammalian circadian regulation over the past decade has provided us with new avenues through which we can explore central nervous system disease. Deteriorations in measurable circadian output parameters, such as sleep/wake deficits and dysregulation of circulating hormone levels, are common features of most central nervous system disorders. At…
oracknows | May 30, 2008If there's one thing I've learned over the last couple of years of doing this little feature, it's that there are a couple of kinds of woo. Actually, there are certainly more than a couple, but pretty much all woo can be divided into a couple of types. The first time is where the woo is based on no science at all, but rather mysticism or some other religious or "spiritual" force. This may or may not be combined with the physical or with some sort of scientific or pseudoscientific explanations to justify it, but at its very heart the woo far more religion than science. Then, there's another…
sb admin | May 29, 2008The fight against HIV occurs on several different levels: prevention of transmission and acquisition, treatment of the infection, and prevention and treatment of opportunistic illnesses.
Prevention has been addressed extensively (and perhaps will be again later), and opportunistic illnesses is a huge topic, so first I'll delve a bit into the origins and biology of the treatment of HIV infection (and of course the usual caveat; this is grossly oversimplified, and Abbie has a whole lot of good, ungrammatical science over at her place).
For better or worse, this requires another short biology…
oracknows | May 29, 2008As many who take an interest in this subject know, one of the most common arguments that advocates of various medical woo often make is the appeal to ancient wisdom. They seem to think that if a treatment is old (homeopathy, acupuncture, various "energy healing" methods), there must be something to it because otherwise it wouldn't have persisted. (Never mind that belief in ghosts and evil spirits, for example, has persisted for many thousands of years.)
Here is an explicit description of just what some of this "ancient medical wisdom" is, straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak, namely…
oracknows | May 29, 2008Sometimes I wonder if subjecting myself to all this woo is going to my head. Why do I worry that this might be the case? Recently, I made the mistake of getting involved in an e-mail exchange with a prominent antivaccinationist. Perhaps it was my eternal optimism that led me to do this, my inability to believe that any person in the thrall of pseudoscience, no matter how far gone and how active in harassing anyone who counters him, can't be somehow saved and brought around to understand the value of science and why their previous course was wrong. Such efforts on my part almost inevitably end…
oracknows | May 28, 2008I sometimes wonder if the world is laughing at me.
Let me explain. A while ago I compiled a list of academic medical institutions that--shall we say?--are far more receptive to pseudoscientific and downright unscientific medicine in the form of so-called complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), otherwise known as "integrative medicine." I dubbed this list my Academic Woo Aggregator, and lamented how big it was with much wailing and gnashing of skeptical teeth. Indeed, more than once I have reluctantly concluded that woo is fast becoming the future of American medicine. High up on the…
ddobbs | May 28, 2008
For Claudius Conrad, a 30-year-old surgeon who has played the piano seriously since he was 5, music and medicine are entwined — from the academic realm down to the level of the fine-fingered dexterity required at the piano bench and the operating table.
C.J. Gunther for The New York Times
IN TUNE Dr. Conrad, a pianist and surgeon, says that he works better when he listens to music and that music is helpful to patients.
“If I don’t play for a couple of days,” said Dr. Conrad, a third-year surgical resident at Harvard Medical School who also holds doctorates in stem cell biology and…
oracknows | May 27, 2008If there's one thing that quacks and cranks share in common, it's that they do not like scrutiny, particularly by people with some scientific knowledge. Indeed, when confronted with scientists or educated lay people who can challenge their crankery, it's amazing how they react the same way almost every time; they try to silence or--if you will--expel the person who challenges their world view. That's because they want to control their message and operate within the confines of their cozy world, where never is heard a discouraging--and especially never critical--word. Most of all, they never,…
oracknows | May 27, 2008As a physician and scientists who's dedicated his life to the application of science to the development of better medical treatments, I've often wondered how formerly admired scientists and physicians degenerate into out-and-out cranks. I'm talking about people like Peter Duesberg, who was once an admired scientist thought to be on track for a Nobel Prize; that is, until he became fixated on the idea that HIV does not cause AIDS. True, lately he's been trying to resurrect his scientific reputation with his chromosomal aneuploidy hypothesis of cancer, but, alas, true to form he's been doing it…
ddobbs | May 26, 2008
A Chopin Nocturne...
from Derek Bownds' MindBlog by noreply@blogger.com (Deric)Bownds blogs on neuro matters -- and, each week, posts a video of him playing a bit of classical music on his piano. Gotta like it.
FDA To Mine Big Databases For Safety Problems
from Pharmalot
The effort, called Sentinel Initiative,will be the first time the FDA will have an opportunity to monitoralmost immediately how drugs are affecting the public. To do so, theagency will mine databases of more than 20 million patients who receivetheir drugs through Medicare. The idea, of course, is to catch sideeffects…
ddobbs | May 26, 2008A couple weeks ago Slate ran a piece asking "Are doctors shilling for drug companies on public radio?", which I took brief note of in a previous post. Now I've written up a longer reaction (actually a reaction to the reaction to the Slate story) for Columbia Journalism Review's "Observatory" blog, which covers science journalism. The gist:
If journalists ... want the information they present to the public to be taken as credible, they need to err on the side of transparency, presenting not only the voices but also the relevant financial interests of the experts they feature. Failing to do so…
oracknows | May 25, 2008I figured it was coming, although I didn't think it would come this far before David Kirby's impending visit to the U.K., but I guess that's the fruit of his being invited by a woo-loving Lord to give a briefing at Parliament. This time it comes in the form of an article in the Daily Telegraph entitled MMR: The Debate That Won't Go Away.
David Kirby's there in full force, making up numbers about mitochondrial disorders as he's been doing all along. There are also credulous references to Jenny McCarthy and the "Green Our Vaccines"/"too many too soon" toxin gambit, to the horrible monkey study…
oracknows | May 25, 2008You know, I keep trying to get away from this topic for a while. But, as Michael Corleone said in The Godfather, Part III, "Just when I thought I was out... they pull me back in." I suppose it is unfortunately a measure of the success that antivaccinationists have been having with their public relations effort this year that this stuff keeps popping up everywhere like some mercury- and "toxin"-crazed Whac-A-Mole⢠that I can never seem to stay quiet more than a couple of days on the topic lately. Sometimes I ignore it, even when it's David Kirby. Sometimes I can't.
This time I can't, because…
oracknows | May 25, 2008Epi Wonk has completed part II of her deconstruction of the latest abuse of epidemiology and statistics by those pseudoscientists for the mercury militia, Mark and David Geier. (I commented on part I here):
Pretty steep slopes and, therefore, apparently strong associations. But there's no attempt to control for, or adjust for, the confounding effect of birth cohort. Just one look at Figure 1 (or a basic knowledge about trends in autism) tells you the regression coefficients (slopes) are being driven by increases in autism risk over time. Given the increase in frequency of autism (and other…
oracknows | May 24, 2008Damn Steve Novella.
Well, not really, but I always get annoyed when someone comes up with an analogy or description of a phenomenon that I should have thought of first. I don't really get annoyed at the person who came up with such ideas, but rather at myself for not thinking of something so obvious or precious first. Whether this self-criticism is a symptom of the megalomania or massive ego that I have been accused of having by some of my less--shall we say?--enamored readers or simply a personality quirk, I'll leave to the reader to decide.
Whatever the case, writing for Science-Based…
j7uy5 | May 24, 2008Sleepdoctor (Michael Rack) alerts us to a new pharmaceutical product in
development: BGC20-0166. He doesn't say a lot, except to
dismiss it out of hand. That is appropriate, but I thought
I'd add a bit of explanation.
His post:
Saturday, May 03, 2008
href="http://sleepdoctor.blogspot.com/2008/05/pills-dont-cure-obstructive-sleep-apnea.html">Pills
don't cure Obstructive Sleep Apnea
The life sciences company BTG is developing a pill that will supposedly
treat obstuctive sleep apnea:
BGC20-0166 is a novel combination of two marketed serotonin modulating
drugs being developed…