medicine
oracknows | March 20, 2008I have to hand it to Dan Olmsted. As Dr. Michael Egnor is for "intelligent design" creationism, ol' Danny Boy is the Energizer Bunny of antivaccinationism. Tag-teaming with fellow "journalist" David Kirby, who seems able to live rather well without actually, you know, having a regular job, ex-UPI correspondent Olmsted form the not-so-dynamic duo of vaccine and autism pseudoscience, the unrelenting propagandists who, despite all evidence to the contrary, keep insisting that it really, truly is the mercury in the vaccines and then, when science shows that it really isn't the mercury in…
oracknows | March 20, 2008It's a rare, rare situation, but the sheer craziness of this (hat tip PZ) knocked the wind out of me, so that I'm having a hard time finding something to say about it:
Health officials in the Philippines have issued a warning to people taking part in Easter crucifixion rituals.
They have urged them to get tetanus vaccinations before they flagellate themselves and are nailed to crosses, and to practise good hygiene.
On Good Friday dozens of very devout Catholics in the Philippines re-enact the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
[...]
The health department has strongly advised penitents to check the…
oracknows | March 20, 2008There's no doubt about it: Stem cells are hot.
Yes indeed, they're not only hot, but they're hip, they're happenin', they're right now, baby. Scientists are falling all over themselves with excitement at the potential applications that could potentially come from stem cell technology. True, no validated therapies for embryonic stem cells have yet made it into clinical practice, and the challenges that need to be overcome before that can happen are arguably greater than what was believed in the heady days a few years ago, before President Bush declared his ill-advised restriction on embryonic…
j7uy5 | March 20, 2008A reader pointed me to this article, by Miriam Axel-Lute, about the
Nonsensical Gyrations that Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield (of New
Jersey) is going through to try to avoid paying for health care:
href="http://www.metroland.net/back_issues/vol31_no10/looking_up.html">What’s
Healthy?
If you were an insurance company trying to cut your costs, how would
you do it? Emphasize prevention over cure? Cover birth control? Allow
coverage of cheaper alternatives, like in-home care over nursing homes
or examine ways to encourage use of primary care providers over the
emergency room?
Or…
oracknows | March 19, 2008Imagine that you're a soldier in Iraq. Imagine further that you're on patrol in a dangerous area in the middle of summer, the desert heat penetrating your 80 lb pack much the way boiling water penetrates the shell of a lobster. Your heart is racing as you and your unit nervously dart to and fro, every shadow a potentially deadly threat, every alley a refuge from which the enemy can attack and kill. The area's thick with insurgents and terrorists, and you feel as though you have a huge bullseye painted on both your chest and back.
A loud roar fills your ears, and you feel as though you have no…
oracknows | March 18, 2008Imagine you're a medical student in a dreaded "allopathic" medical school other than Georgetown. Imagine further that you're finding the grind of learning science- and evidence-based medicine a bit tiresome. After all, there's so much to learn: principles of biochemistry, physiology, anatomy (and not with acupuncture points), and neuroscience. You're reading multiple chapters a night, staying up all night cramming your mind full of minutiae of various signaling pathways and eponyms for anatomic structures. All those facts, all that evidence, it's all so...hard! It's all so soulless. Where's…
oracknows | March 17, 2008One of the greatest threats to the preclinical research necessary for science-based medicine today is animal rights activism. The magnitude of the problem came to the forefront again last month with the news that animal rights terrorists tried to enter the home of a researcher at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) whose research uses mice to study breast cancer and neurologic disease while she and her husband were having a birthday party for one of their children and assaulted her husband, who had gone to the front of the house to confront them. This unrelenting attack on the use…
j7uy5 | March 17, 2008When generic drugs started to become popular, many people were
skeptical. Many people got switched from brand name to
generic products, and complained that the generic did not work as well.
These complaints often were treated with skepticism. After
all, generic drugs contain the same active ingredient(s) as the
brand-name product, but cost less. Plus, the FDA assured us
that they were bioequivalent.
Over the past decade or so, public acceptance of generics has
increased. Many people want to get the generic equivalent.
But now there are questions about the validity of the testing
done…
oracknows | March 16, 2008I'm about to head home from the conference; so I don't have much time to do one of my usual posts. However, there is a brief bit that irritated me regarding the Hannah Poling case, and it comes from Dr. Sanjay Gupta:
I want to continue the discussion today. Couple of points. First of all, it seems as if parents bring up concerns about vaccines, they are automatically portrayed as anti-vaccine. Why is that? Is it possible to completely believe in the power and benefits of vaccines, but still have legitimate and credible concerns?
This statement shows that Dr. Gupta is rather clueless about the…
oracknows | March 15, 2008I got in somewhat late last night and was tired from the meeting, but there's been something that's been bugging me more and more, and Kimball Atwood's recent posts about the distortions of language used by "complementary and alternative medicine" advocates brought it to the forefront. I first noticed this particular term being used by alties a few months ago by quantum homeopathic woo-meister supreme Lionel Milgrom, and I've been seeing it more and more, particularly in antivaccinationist circles.
I'm talking about the term "dis-ease."
Believe it or not, I'm not all-knowing about such issues…
oracknows | March 14, 2008The must-read post of the day comes from Mark Crislip of the (in)famous Quackcast and was posted over at the Science-Based Medicine blog. It's about two things primarily: How evidence and science result in physicians practicing science- and evidence-based medicine to change their practice and why that seems disturbing to those who don't understand how science works and would prefer unchanging certainty and how this changeability of practice based on the lastest evidence is in marked contrast to most so called "complementary and alternative" medicine, the vast majority of which is based on…
oracknows | March 14, 2008Readers who have followed my little Friday bit of fun every week have probably, like me, at times sat in front of their computer screens, jaw drooping, a little bit of spittle starting to drip out of the corners of their mouths, and eyes agape with wonder at just how anyone on earth could believe some of this stuff. Indeed, it is truly unbelievable to anyone with just a modicum of critical thinking skills. Sometimes, as I have, you've almost certainly laughed out loud at the silliness. Sometimes, as I have, you've probably had to stop reading because you feared that the concentrated woo in…
oracknows | March 13, 2008As an NIH-funded surgeon/scientist, I just had to read this report at BrokenPipeline.org when I became aware of it, courtesy of Bora and Drugmonkey. Basically, it describes how bleak the NIH funding situation has become, particularly for young investigators. The report (PDF) comes from several prominent research universities and warns that we are at risk of losing a generation of new biomedical researchers. Even taking into account the knowledge that this report is anything but unbiased (indeed, it is explicitly in favor of increased NIH funding), the situation it paints is still pretty grim…
ddobbs | March 12, 2008The Kirsch study published a few weeks ago has stirred much discussion of the placebo power of antidepressants (or is it the antidepressant power of placebos?); it's clear that the act of taking a pill that you expect to help you often does help you.
But can the availability of a pill meant for depression make you feel (or think of yourself as) depressed? That's the question behind another part of the drug debate, regarding whether the drug industry encourages us to medicalize ordinary experience.
In pondering these things I ran across this fascinating New York Times >article from 2004…
oracknows | March 12, 2008After a bit of ranting earlier this week, I thought now would be a good time to cool it down a bit, if only for a moment. There's plenty more out there to rant about, but I'm intentionally ignoring it, if only for a day (or even half a day). If there's one thing I've learned about blogging in the three years I've indulged in this little habit of mine, it's that a blogger has to mix things up. Too many rants in a row, and even I start to get bored. And if I'm bored you're almost certainly bored.
We wouldn't want that, now, would we?
So it was with great interest that I came across, albeit…
j7uy5 | March 12, 2008XP13512 is an experimental new drug currently
href="http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?term=XP13512">in
phase III trials for the treatment of
href="http://www.merck.com/mmpe/sec16/ch215/ch215f.html"
rel="tag">restless legs syndrome. I was
reminded about this after seeing a post at
href="http://sleepdoctor.blogspot.com/2008/03/restless-legs-syndrome-and.html">sleepdoctor,
and following the link to Sleep Expert, and browsing from there.
The author, Dr. Poceta, wrote about
href="http://www.revolutionhealth.com/blogs/stevepocetamd/new-medicine-for-rls--12134"
rel="tag">…
oracknows | March 11, 2008Buried in yesterday's post was a link to a post on the Science Business blog, which is one of the blogs of Forbes magazine that was a dangerous gratification to my ego in that it mentioned this humble blog as one of the Autism Debate Go-To Blogs. Although Matthew Harper, Associate Editor at Forbes, left out three go-to blogs about autism that probably surpass this blog (namely, Left Brain/Right Brain, Neurodiversity, and Autism News Beat), Harper did make an interesting observation about yours truly:
Respectful Insulence is written by a surgeon who goes by the nom-de-blog Orac. He blogs on…
oracknows | March 11, 2008You may remember from yesterday that I wrote about a concerted propaganda effort by antivaccinationists to torture the facts and science behind a case of a girl with a rare mitochondrial disease whose condition may have been exacerbated by vaccination, resulting in an encephalopathy with some autism-like symptoms. Actually, I had had in mind an entirely different topic for yesterday, but news events drove me. Basically, I couldn't stand all the B.S. I saw emanating from antivaccinationists on news broadcasts and radio, and I had to do my little part to counter it. Fortunately (or…
oracknows | March 10, 2008Damn you, mercury militia.
I had had another topic entirely in mind for this week's post, but, as happens far too often, news events have overtaken me in the form of a story that was widely reported towards the end of last week. It was all over the media on Thursday evening and Friday, showing up on CNN, Larry King Live, the New York Times, and NPR. It happens to be the story of a girl from Georgia named Hannah Poling whose case before the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP), which had originally part of a much larger proceeding known as the Autism Omnibus, was settled. This settlement…
denialism | March 10, 2008Also pissing me off this week is the continuing nonsense from Cato's anti-universal health care club which is suggesting that increasing health care coverage will lead to an increased number of deaths because of increasing medical errors.
Sack notes that "at least twice as many Americans are estimated to die each year from medical errors as from lack of access to care." He quotes economists Helen Levy and David Meltzer's conclusion that there is "no evidence" that expanding coverage would be the best way to improve health and save lives.
...
If there is no evidence that expanding coverage…