medicine
sb admin | April 19, 2008Last night I was reading a book to my daughter at bedtime. It was all about a kid who had chickenpox. I looked at my wife and said, "this is a bit outdated."
"So what, it's cute," she accurately replied.
Wow. I hadn't thought about it much lately, but chickenpox in the U.S. is disappearing rapidly. "Pox parties" are gone. Kids aren't missing weeks of school. Pediatric ICUs aren't seeing much varicella pneumonia. Now that I think about it, a number of important lessons I learned in medical school are becoming historical oddities. On my pediatric rotation, we learned to watch for the…
oracknows | April 18, 2008...death from pertussis.
Delaying effective treatment by taking the baby to a naturopath first didn't help either. With antivaccinationists making so much noise, look for more cases like the one above in your local emergency department soon. That will be the true legacy of the so-called "green our vaccines" movement.
oracknows | April 18, 2008
The woo is good again.
Regular readers may have caught an undercurrent of whining in the last few installments of my little Friday feature? Whining about what? A bit of burnout. In fact, looking back at my last few installments, I now wonder whether I was starting to show signs of burnout. There I was, complaining about having trouble coming up with new bits woo that really floated my boat enough to inspire me to ever more fevered bits of Respectful Insolenceâ¢. What a downer, man! Fortunately, this week was different. This week, there was an abundance of riches. This week, there were at…
oracknows | April 17, 2008I've lamented the infiltration of woo into academic medicine. I've even gone so far as to try to keep a list of all the academic medical centers in North America that have "integrative medicine" programs that credulously teach and promote non-evidence-based medicine as though it were evidence-based with my Academic Woo Aggregator. I've speculated that the reason academic medical centers are susceptible to the blandishments of woo-meisters is because patients want it and are willing to pay for it. Given that insurance companies won't pay for this stuff, it's cash on the barrelhead direct from…
oracknows | April 17, 2008As I wing my way back home from San Diego, I've had a bit of time to digest what I saw and learned at the AACR meeting. Overall, it was an above average but definitely not outstanding meeting, and I may discuss specifics more at a later time. One key theme that seems to be increasingly emphasized is cancer prevention, and indeed the AACR launched a new journal, Cancer Prevention Research, dedicated to publishing high quality research on just that topic. This new emphasis on prevention is long overdue because once cancer has developed the cat is out of the bag, so to speak, and even our best…
sb admin | April 16, 2008Southeast Michigan's Genesee county is experiencing an outbreak of syphilis. The largest city in the county is Flint, made (in)famous in Michael Moore's film Roger and Me.
Syphilis is a nasty sexually transmitted disease with an interesting history. It may have originated in the New World. It was the subject of the infamous "Tuskegee Experiment". It has enough different symptoms that it is sometimes called "the great imitator".
In 2007 there were 15 reported cases in the county; so far in 2008, there are 33. According to the county health department:
Certain risk behaviors that…
oracknows | April 16, 2008I'm not normally one to do link roundups or Instapundit-style one sentence "link and comment" posts. Sure, I do them occasionally, but I think the reason that I don't is that to me blogging is a way to express my views, not just to point to the views at others (in other words, because I'm just too enamored of my own prose). However, because of a bizarre confluence of my being at the AACR meeting and a bunch of good stuff showing up, there were some items that I just didn't have the chance to comment on, even though I wanted to. Moreover, because I want to do a couple of posts on the AACR…
j7uy5 | April 16, 2008“Doctors think, ‘Well, of course
she’s depressed — she’s dying of breast
cancer,’” he said.
I do see that kind of response sometimes, not just with regard to
terminally ill patients. The physician does not think the
depression should be treated, because it is felt to be an expected
response to the situation.
If I even show up in an emergency department with a gunshot wound in my
abdomen, I sure hope the doc doesn't refuse to treat it, saying "of
course he's bleeding to death, he's been shot in the spleen."
The fact is, some patients with terminal cancer do develop major
depression. But…
oracknows | April 15, 2008I love my iPhone. I really do.
There is, however, one thing I don't like about it, a characteristic that (or so I've learned) the iPhone shares with many other "smart" phones, and that's its annoying tendency to interfere with poorly shielded electronic devices. The phenomenon, known as radiofrequency interference, manifests itself as hysterical bursts of mid-frequency electronic buzzing that sound something like "dit-dit-dit-dah-dit-dit-dit-dah," or Morse code on speed with a continuous buzz behind it. The problem appears to be most common with GSM-based phones, such as AT&T (the iPhone'…
oracknows | April 15, 2008Regular readers may have noticed that the usual prodigious amount of verbiage has fallen off a bit over the last few days. That's just because I've been very busy and not always around a reliable Internet connection. In some ways, I almost like the way I've been forced to write a bit better in that my posts are shorter. However, I know that after I return home from San Diego, my old habits will probably return fairly quickly.
I actually wasn't going to post anything today other than the plug for the Expelled Exposed website (oh, look! another plug!), mainly becauase I got in rather late last…
oracknows | April 14, 2008Between sessions here at the AACR meeting, I started thinking. (I realize that's often a dangerous thing to do, but sometimes I can't help myself.) What I was thinking about was my annual bit of "fluff with a bite," the 2008 edition of "What is an altie?" Why, I don't know, but I was. Then, this morning while quickly perusing a few blogs and reading my e-mail before heading off to the meeting's morning session, I noticed something in yesterday's post about the commonality between creationists (evolution denialists), Holocaust deniers, and other forms of denialists. It was a term, a throwaway…
oracknows | April 13, 2008So there I was, wandering through the exhibit hall at AACR when I came across the National Cancer Institute booth. The NCI has a booth at AACR and ASCO every year, and this year is no different. As I do most years, I wandered through the booth to see if there was anything that caught my interest, such as information that might help me stay funded.
There it was. No, not any information that could help me keep my NIH funding, alas. Worse, it was something that might make it even more difficult if in this tight funding environment the NCI is actually spending money on this stuff. The sign read…
terrasig | April 12, 2008". . .you got marijuana in my lead."
Two great tastes that do not go great together (with apologies).
[Welcome Fark.com readers on 12 Oct 2008 - I comment on the recent story here and you can read our other posts on drugs of abuse here. Thanks for stopping by - APB]
A concise but fascinating medical detective story appears in the letters of this week's (10 Apr 2008) issue of the New England Journal of Medicine (free full text at the time of this posting.).
An astute group of physicians at Leipzig Hospital in Germany noted a local surge of young people presenting with classic symptoms of…
oracknows | April 12, 2008...I don't know when I'll be back again.
Well, actually, I do. I'll be back Wednesday night. But as you read this I should be in the air and on my way to sunny San Diego to attend the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research. It's a big one, too. Around 12,000-15,000 cancer researchers, give or take, will be descending upon the San Diego Convention Center to discuss the latest and greatest basic and translational cancer research. It's one of my two favorite meetings each year, one that I try not to miss. It's also often a good source for blog material about the latest…
sb admin | April 11, 2008Skepchick has apparently discovered that, as of yesterday, this is World Homeopathy Awareness Week. (Yes, starts on a Thursday...they were going to start on Monday, but the succussion took a while.)
Well, I can get behind a public service like this. My contribution will be a side-to-side comparison of a homeopathic treatment and a real one. Let's pick a fun disease, say, heart attacks (the website I found offered homeopathic remedies for anthrax, but I think I'll skip that).
Unfortunately, this will require a brief tutorial on myocardial infarctions (MIs, heart attatcks). As is usual with…
oracknows | April 11, 2008It's that time of year again. Actually, it's well over a month past that time of year.
Long-timers may remember that, near the very beginning of my old Blogger blog over three years ago, I did a post entitled What is an altie? It was basically a Jeff Foxworthy-like listing of "You just might be an altie if..." statements that, I think, had a good point. For those of you not familiar with the term "altie," it was coined on the Usenet newsgroup misc.health.alternative to describe a certain hardcore variety of alternative medicine aficianado who is utterly immune to evidence or reason. The…
oracknows | April 10, 2008Whenever I'm looking at fringe scientific claims, I'm always on the lookout for things that help me conclude whether I'm looking at "legitimate" fringe ideas or pseudoscience and woo. One observation that I've found helpful in leading me in one direction or the other is to look for certain dead giveaways that what we're looking at is almost certainly pseudoscience or woo is the presence or absence of conspiracy-mongering based on unverifiable "evidence." I find a lot of it, and the other day I found one of the best examples of it I've ever seen. It comes, not surprisingly, from Dan Olmsted,…
ddobbs | April 9, 2008We've seen our brain on drugs. Here's the dope on brainy people on drugs.
Survey results of 1400 scientists (or Nature readers, anyway) on use of neuroenhancers
Figure from Nature, "Poll results: look who's doping"
With baseball's steroid scandals seemingly behind us now -- or at least considered less newsworthy -- the press has recently turned some of its steroidal attention to neuroenhancement among major league academics. The journal Nature has taken the lead here, publishing a commentary in early March by two Cambridge University researchers who "reported," as a nicely turned New York…
oracknows | April 9, 2008I don't much like The Huffington Post.
My dislike for The Huffington Post goes way, way back--all the way back to its very beginnings. Indeed, a mere three weeks after Arianna Huffington's little vanity project hit the blogosphere, I noted a very disturbing trend in its content. That trend was a strong undercurrent of antivaccination blogging, something I wrote about nearly three years ago. At the time, I pointed out how Santa Monica pediatrician to the stars and "vaccine skeptic" Dr. Jay Gordon had found a home there, long with David Kirby, author of the mercury militia Bible Evidence of…
oracknows | April 8, 2008I am presenting this without comment, other than that this message from David Kirby and Dan Olmsted was e-mailed to me yesterday evening in response to my open letter from three days ago.
This is Kirby and Olmsted's reply to me:
We both take this matter very seriously, and strongly oppose any effort to subpoena the records of Ms. Kathleen Seidel. We have also clearly expressed our feelings to Mr. Shoemaker. While we may not agree with her opinions, we consider Ms. Seidel to be a colleague. Rights to privacy, and to free speech as guaranteed by the First Amendment, must be upheld for all. We…