medicine
oracknows | May 6, 2008Since I'm almost never home in time to see the 6:30 PM news, it's unlikely I'll be seeing this series on NBC news about the "mind-body" connection when it airs, although I'll search for video later when I get a chance. Apparently I missed this last night:
When we were planning this week's series "the Mind Body Connection," Alex Wallace the executive producer of Nightly News asked me what was new with the alternative medicine movement, which has been in full swing for more than a decade.
The answer is that a handful of billionaires have brought alternative medicine into many the nation's major…
sb admin | May 6, 2008GINA, the Genetic Information Non-discrimination Act, has been passed by the House and the Senate, and will be signed by the president. Others have explained some of the implications of the bill, but the need for the bill is a grave sign.
GINA is a symptom...a symptom of a diseased health care system. Health insurance works by pooling risk. Ideally, an insurer will take as many people as possible, regardless of their health histories, and the premiums of the healthy will support the care of the unhealthy few. Of course, insurance companies aren't stupid. They would rather have the…
"Why aren't there more clinical trials studying the effect of CAM on cancer?" cries the CAM advocate
oracknows | May 6, 2008I've lamented time and time again just how much money the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) wastes on basic research and clinical trials of modalities that are, from a scientific viewpoint, so highly implausible that the chances of finding a clinically useful or relevant--or even a consistent statistically significant--effect (for example, homeopathy or reiki) or on therapies for which there is already abundant negative evidence (chelation therapy, for example) are vanishingly small. In this fifth year of a flat or declining NIH budget and of scientists facing…
oracknows | May 5, 2008OK, I know it's like the post calling the kettle black, but what the heck is PalMD doing blogging on vacation? And are his two most recent posts so good? This is what I mean:
Why hospice matters
Never say "hopeless"
I recently had the unfortunate opportunity to visit a relative in hospice. I was incredibly impressed. Nice, well-appointed rooms, with a caring, attentive staff that did everything in its power to keep the dying as comfortable and free of distress, both physical and emotional, as humans can do. As a cancer surgeon, I've been involved with a number of patients who went to…
oracknows | May 5, 2008That's the message that Ben Stein has been pushing lately, namely not just the hated "Darwinism" but science itself inevitably leads to political philosophies such as Nazi-ism and Stalinism (but especially Nazi-ism, given its emphasis on racial hygiene and eugenics), including the mass murder that resulted from them. As a result, Stein has been correctly and deservedly excoriated not just by science bloggers, but even by fellow conservatives such as Instapundit, who characterized Stein as "totally having lost it," and John Derbyshire, who correctly characterized Stein's lies as a blood libel…
sb admin | May 4, 2008I'm not going to lie to you. This post contains some actual science. WAIT! Don't click away! I'll make it palatable, I promise!
It's just that this is such an interesting story, and I can't help sharing it. It is a shining example of one of the great successes of modern medical science, and stands in such stark contrast to the unfulfilled promises of the cult medicine crowd, with their colon cleanses and magic pills. This is the story of a real magic pill.
It starts back in 1960. A couple of researches at the University of Pennsylvania were looking at chromosomes in the blood cells of…
sb admin | May 4, 2008In this space, we have explored some real conspiracies, using as an example the tobacco companies' war on truth. Smoking, and smoking-related disease, continues to be a significant burden on the health of Americans. For example, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) affects between 10-25 million Americans. This disabling illness, which includes emphysema and chronic bronchitis, is horrifying to watch, and worse to experience. Smoking is also one of the strongest risks for heart disease which kills over half-a-million Americans yearly.
But it seems that smoking is on the decline…
oracknows | May 3, 2008Does anyone remember a few months ago, when I wrote about Ben Stein? No? Here, then, I'll jog your memory. Ben Stein and his involvment in that piece of cinematic excrement Expelled! "inspired" me to--if you'll excuse the term--resurrect a certain recurring character from the very early days of this blog. Yes, I'm talking about the ever-dreaded Hitler Zombie, who returned after more than a year's absence to take a huge chomp out of Ben Stein's brain.
Now we're seeing the results of that chomp, and I'm not just talking about the ridiculous claims in Expelled! that "Darwinism" leads inevitably…
oracknows | May 2, 2008Good news!
In the wake of having his fishing expedition of a subpoena against autism blogger Kathleen Seidel quashed, it would appear that lawyer to the mercury militia Clifford Shoemaker and his clients Seth and Lisa Sykes have decided to voluntarily dismiss their lawsuit against Bayer and no longer pursue it.
Of course, that brings up the question of just what the heck Shoemaker's attempts to dragoon unrelated parties such as Kathleen Seidel and Dr. Marie McCormick into the proceedings with dubious subpoenas was supposed to accomplish. Were such actions a sign of increasing desperation, a…
grrlscientist | May 2, 2008tags: Elizabeth Blackburn, Joan Steitz, Albany Medical Center Prize
I learned this afternoon that America's highest prize in medicine, the Albany Medical Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research, was awarded to two women for the first time in its history. The recipients, Elizabeth Blackburn of the University of California, San Francisco, and Joan Steitz of Yale University will share the $500,000 prize, which is second only to the $1.4 million Nobel Prize. The two medical scientists, who work independently of each other, study proteins associated with DNA and RNA, and their work will likely…
oracknows | May 2, 2008Over the last few years, depressingly, we've witnessed a rise in antivaccinationist activism. Beginning with the highly unethical activities of Andrew Wakefield and his bogus study in 1998 that set off a scare over the MMR vaccine supposedly causing autism that led to declining vaccination rates and skyrocketing measles and mumps rates in the U.K., it metastasized to the U.S. with hyped up concerns that the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal used in most vaccines until 2001 was a cause of autism. Over the last year or so, it's been helped along by useful celebrity idiots like Jenny…
oracknows | May 2, 2008
As I approach the second anniversary of Your Friday Dose of Woo (now only a mere two months away), it occurs to me: What sort(s) of woo, if any, have I neglected? Is there a kind of woo that is commonplace but has somehow slipped under Orac's radar? Hard as it may be to believe, there have now been over 100 installments of my weekly bit of vanity. Looking back over it, I see all manner of woo. Quantum homeopathy? Check? Sound healing? Of course! DNA Activation? That was definitely a fun one! Detoxification footpads? Not once, but twice! 9/11 Truther conspiracy theories? Yes, I've even…
oracknows | May 1, 2008It's late, and I'm working on tomorrow's installment of Your Friday Dose of Woo; so I don't have the time to give this particularly dumb guest editorial Think twice before you vaccinate your child in the Winona Daily News, which is packed full of antivaccinationist lies and pseudoscience, a proper dose of the not-so-Respectful Insolence that it deserves. Suffice it to say that, while denying that they are antivaccination (as all antivaccinationists do), writers Jim and Laurie Jenkinson then go on to prove exactly the opposite by spewing an amazing collection of idiocy, including citing Robert…
oracknows | May 1, 2008Yet another dubious study has been making the rounds of mercury militia websites and discussion forums. The study is being played up and touted by certain very excitable and scientifically not-too-bright militia members and woo-meisters like Mike Adams as some sort of vindication of the scientifically discredited hypothesis that mercury in vaccines somehow causes autism.
It doesn't.
It is, however, somewhat interesting in that their embrace of this bit of questionable research shows how desperate the mercury militia is to grasp to any bit of peer-reviewed published research that they can spin…
oracknows | May 1, 2008...because Paul Offit's written a book:
AUTISM'S FALSE PROPHETS
Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure
Paul Offit, MD
Columbia University Press
September 2008
Genre: Non-Fiction/Medicine
Format: Hardcover
AUTISM'S FALSE PROPHETS will show the reader the incredible history of how greedy lawyers, doctors, and unknowing parents have helped prevent the search for the real cause of autism. As these forces conspire to blame vaccines or the preservatives used in vaccines for causing autism, the search for a real cure is hampered while millions of dollars go chasing after the wrong…
oracknows | April 30, 2008
I may have joked a bit about certain surgeons whom, because they say such dumb, pseudoscientific things with alarming regularity, I consider embarrassments to the noble profession that is surgery. Usually, it's been surgeons who reveal an astonishing ignorance of the science of evolution as they parrot long discredited and debunked canards about evolution while spouting creationist nonsense. You know about whom I speak: surgeons like neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Egnor and general surgeon Dr. Henry Jordan. But, as mind-numbingly dumb as some of the things that, for example, Dr. Egnor has said…
oracknows | April 29, 2008About a month ago, I wrote about an unbelievably sad story of a 12-year-old girl in Wisconsin who died of untreated diabetic ketoacidosis because she had been unfortunate enough to have been born into a family in which the parents believed in prayer rather than medicine. I say "unbelievably" because I find it truly difficult to believe that anyone in this day and age would willingly eschew effective medicine for their suffering child in favor of wishful thinking. Tragically and not surprisingly, prayer didn't work, and their child died. One of the unresolved issues at the time of the incident…
oracknows | April 29, 2008One of the most contentious and difficult aspects of trying to improve medical care in this country is enforcing a minimal "standard of care." Optimally, this standard of care should be based on science- and evidence-based medicine and act swiftly when a practitioner practices medicine that doesn't meet even a minimal requirement for scientific studies and clinical trials to support it. At the same time, going too far in the other direction risks stifling innovation and the ability to individualize treatments to a patient's unique situation--or even to use treatments that have only scientific…
moleculeoftheday | April 28, 2008Niacin is also known as Vitamin B3. Interestingly, it's also called "nicotinic acid," and the similarity of the name to "nicotine" isn't coincidental:
Take a look at nicotine and you'll see the structural similarity.
Interestingly, high doses of niacin have been noted to modulate cholesterol (hundreds of times the RDA). A few problems can occur, though - the most common is prostaglandin-mediated flushing of the face. The most serious are heart and liver problems.
Merck was going after a cholesterol drug that incorporated niacin, with a prostaglandin blocker to mitigate the side effects.…
oracknows | April 28, 2008It's that time again: The 20th edition of the only blog carnival (that I know of, at least) for blogging about surgical topics has landed over at Surgeonsblog. Yes, Sid Schwab takes on the 20th SurgeXperiences, with limericks, even!
Head on over!