medicine
terrasig | March 9, 2008Your Humble Blogger has suddenly become the go-to guy in the blogosphere for all things vasectomy. I don't know why.
So I've embraced becoming an ambassador for the double-snip and bring you a clever radio marketing campaign from the Oregon Urology Institute in Springfield:
Guys, what would you endure for a weekend in paradise? To not only be able to watch a potential of 48 first- and second- round games of the NCAA men's basketball tournament on TV, but to do so with free pizza and total sympathy from your spouse?
Together with Justin Myers of the ESPN Radio "Sports Idol" radio show, the…
denialism | March 8, 2008Has anyone noticed how my sciblings are really ornery at the moment?
We've got PZ bringing out the angry stick over Wilkins' criticism of Dawkins. Physioprof is getting ready to pop Greg Laden in the nose over this thread (and I tend to agree it needs a rewrite).
And then Shelley broke my heart by posting
this video mocking anesthesiologists that I posted a couple months ago. And here I thought my sciblings paid attention to me *sob*.
Mommy and Daddy fighting and my sciblings ignoring me are making me feel insecure and frightened and as a result I'm going to lash out at Jake for this…
oracknows | March 8, 2008Yesterday was annoying.
It started out hearing about the vaccine injury case conceded by the government in a story on NPR on during my drive into work. As I walked through the clinic waiting area on the way to my lab, the TVs in the waiting rooms were all on CNN, where--you guessed it!--there was more ignorant blather about how the government supposedly had "conceded" that "vaccines cause autism." I'll give the Polings and the antivaccinationists who are trying to use their case (with, apparently, them as willing accomplices) as a propaganda tool, they're good propagandists. Try as I might, I…
oracknows | March 7, 2008I really have no idea how valid this is (I suspect not very), but every blogger likes a bit of ego stroking from time to time, and I'm no different. So, take this with an enormous grain of salt, but somehow on a new system of blog ranking on Wikio, Respectful Insolence is ranked #8 among science blogs and #466 among general blogs.
What this means, I have no idea, particularly given that the blog doesn't show up at all in the Health section. I suppose I can console myself that I'm ranked #3 on the Medicine Blog Directory. Again, I have no idea what this means; so take it with a huge grain of…
oracknows | March 7, 2008Sometimes my readers save my butt.
There I was earlier this week, looking through my Folder of Woo, as is my wont, and oddly enough nothing much was floating my boat. I know, I know, I've started this little weekly exercise before lamenting a lack of enthusiasm for the woo of which I am aware. Then as before then, I briefly wondered whether perhaps I had exhausted all the interesting woo. That seemed highly unlikely, given that I've only been at this about 20 months or so. After all, the woo supply is seemingly inexhaustible, and if I ever got tired of medical woo, there are so many other…
oracknows | March 6, 2008There's an idiotic poll up at Larry King Live with the question: "Do you believe vaccines cause or contribute to autism?" Idiotic, because it's science that says whether or not vaccines cause or contribute to autism. Whether the public thinks they do or not is irrelevant to the biological, medical, and clinical science that say, to the best of our knowledge, they do not.
Even so, please go tell him the real science about vaccines and autism. The pseudoscientists have already stacked the deck, and clearly antivaccinationists are voting, as the numbers are running around 80% to 20% in favor of…
oracknows | March 6, 2008I should have seen this one coming a mile away in light of the concession of vaccine injury in the case of one child that led to the incredibly shrinking causation claim when it comes to vaccines and autism. Having had it conclusively demonstrated through several large studies in multiple countries that mercury in vaccines does not cause autism (nor do vaccines themselves), the mercury militia are rapidly changing course. No longer is autism a "misdiagnosis for mercury poisoning."
Now it's a "misdiagnosis for mitochondrial diseases."
Or it soon will be. Just wait. The new propaganda from the…
ddobbs | March 6, 2008With so much written here lately about placebos and drug effectiveness, I would not want to leave out this remarkable study: Placebo effect is stronger, apparently, if you pay more for the placebo.
This is a fascinating study described in a letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association. A crudely shortened version: Some researchers at MIT (none of them Bill Murray, as far as I can tell) gave light shocks to volunteers, then gave them some placebos that were costly and some that were cheap. The costly ones worked better.
It sounds like a bit of a stunt, but as Respectful…
ddobbs | March 6, 2008A quick heads-up: Nature weighs in on the flap over the Kirsch SSRI study that found antidepressants no more effective than placebo. I've given a lot of attention to the placebo issue. Nature stresses another point: That the Kirsch study underscores the need for clinical trial data to be public. At present it is not, as the drug companies have persuaded the FDA that releasing all trial data might reveal trade secrets. Nature argues -- as have many -- that what's being hidden is not proprietary trade secrets but information vital to public health:
No more scavenger hunts
The recent media…
moleculeoftheday | March 6, 2008Well, it finally happened. I made it almost two years, but I repeated a molecule for what I think is the first time.
Hooray! Any pressure to be original is off! Here's the first of many best-of posts to come!
One thing I've done from time to time is crude experimentation on a recent household molecule, with accompanying photos. Here's a compilation of the ones I can remember putting up. If you have an idea or remember one I missed, leave it in the comments!
Thrill to:
CSI:MOTD: in which I use cyanoacrylate to expose latent fingerprints on stuff I've handled!
Paper chromatography: in which I…
oracknows | March 6, 2008Yesterday was a rather long day, starting with a long commute in the morning, followed by a long day in the office mainly doing grant paperwork, and capped off by getting home late. Even so, I couldn't ignore this particular story for two reasons. First, it's about so-called "alternative" medicine. Second, it's about Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computer and the creative, if at times arrogant and abusive, creative genius behind Apple's recovery from the brink of bankruptcy 11 years ago to its current situation, where its computers are cool; its operating system rocks; and it rules over the…
oracknows | March 5, 2008Perusing the news early this morning, I noticed an article on ABC News about placebos. One thing I found interesting about it was that it was a story about a research letter to JAMA, not a full study. Heck, there isn't even an abstract.
Even so, the study was rather interesting and described thusly:
The more expensive your pain medications are, the better the relief you get from taking them -- even if they're fake.
That's according to a study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which suggests that sugar pills labeled as expensive drugs relieve pain better…
jstemwedel | March 4, 2008Abel Pharmboy and Drugmonkey are having a conversation that I wish I could approach completely abstractly, about what parents ought to be telling their kids about drugs (whether legal or illegal) and their use. (Also, Page 3.14 has a reader's poll about whether teens can be scared off illegal drugs. Poll results will be published in the ScienceBlogs Weekly Recap newsletter, for which you can sign up here.)
Of course, having two kids who are not yet teens but don't seem to be getting any younger, the issue doesn't feel abstract at all. The clock is ticking.
Here's what is currently…
oracknows | March 4, 2008I saw this and was going to write about it, but it turns out that Abel Pharmboy at Terra Sigillata beat me to it. Basically, the makers of Airborne have been slapped down bigtime for false advertising:
WASHINGTON--The makers of Airborne--a multivitamin and herbal supplement whose labels and ads falsely claimed that the product cures and prevents colds--will refund money to consumers who bought the product, as part of a $23.3 million class action settlement agreement. The company will pay for ads in Better Homes & Gardens, Parade, People, Newsweek, and many other magazines and newspapers…
oracknows | March 4, 2008If there's one type of so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" that I've always been very up front about, it's that I consider homeopathy to be the ultimate in pseudoscientific twaddle when it comes to CAM. The reasons should be obvious to anyone with a background in basic science. After all, homeopathy is nothing more than the most magical of magical thinking writ so large that it's a wonder than anyone can believe it.
Think about it. What are the two main principles of homeopathy? The first is "like cures like," which postulates on the basis of the prescientific observations of…
oracknows | March 3, 2008In case you had any doubt that it's about vaccines and the concept of vaccination itself, here's video of the protest held outside of the American Academy of Pediatrics a couple of weeks ago:
I'm not sure it was such a great idea to release video of this protest, given how tiny the demonstration looks and how obviously antivaccine their signs and rhetoric are. Either way, Dr. Eisenstein (whose "research" skills are legendary) makes me wonder how he earned his M.D. if he doesn't understand that the whole "toxins in vaccines" is a canard, and Dr. Ayoub is a conspiracy-monger. However, it's…
jstemwedel | March 3, 2008A colleague of mine (who has time to read actual printed-on-paper newspapers in the morning) pointed me toward an essay by Andrew Vickers in the New York Times (22 January 2008) wondering why cancer researchers are so unwilling to share their data. Here's Vickers' point of entry to the issue:
[A]s a statistician who designs and analyzes cancer studies, I regularly ask other researchers to provide additional information or raw data. Sometimes I want to use the data to test out a new idea or method of statistical analysis. And knowing exactly what happened in past studies can help me design…
oracknows | March 3, 2008I'm not sure why, but it's been a while since I've delved into the cesspit of pseudoscience that is the Discovery Institute's propaganda organ, Evolution News & Views. Perhaps it was because I simply got tired of diving into the depths of stupid. Of course, that then begs the question of why I've been spending so much time diving into the Age of Autism website or the sophisticated-sounding yet ultimately vacuously pseudoscientific blather that is David Kirby. Trying to decide which is stupider, AoA or ENV, is rather like deciding whether it would be better to die of cancer or Lou Gehrig's…
oracknows | March 2, 2008As I mentioned in January, everybody's favorite blog mascot has seemingly undertaken a new career in show biz. In fact, he's become a big movie star, even popping up in some fairly avant garde movies.
This month, however, he's popping up in a most unexpected place: In one of the greatest science fiction movies of all time:
Even better, though, there's something that my readers would most definitely appreciate. You--yes, you!--can, if you so desire, peruse the various movies that EneMan is slated to appear in through the course of 2008 and vote for your favorite at EneMan Goes to Hollywood…
j7uy5 | March 2, 2008One of the darker chapters in the history of the
title="American Medical Association">AMA is
their historical opposition to universal, single-payer health care
coverage. The term socialized
medicine came into use in the post-World-War-II period, in
an attempt to falsely conflate such a health care plan with the menace
of Communism.
Evidently, many people did not bother to discern the distinction
between socialism and Communism; nor did they appreciate the fact that
we have a mixed
economy anyway.
I recall those days. That is, I recall the days when the
invocation of Communism…