medicine
oracknows | March 1, 2008A couple of days ago, I wrote about a particularly deceptive and idiotic article by David Kirby about the settling of a case of vaccine injury by the U.S. government. Fellow skeptical physician Steve Novella couldn't resist taking a shot at Kirby as well and in doing so came up with one of the best lines about Kirby that I've ever heard in reference to Kirby's attempt to bring AZT into the discussion:
Among stiff competition, this is perhaps the most absurd and scientifically ignorant thing Kirby has every written.
Damn. I wish I had thought of that line. However, I would say to Steve that he…
oracknows | March 1, 2008I've always been a bit skeptical of most recommendations by religious figures, but for once I've come across one that I can whole-heartedly support:
Florida pastor Paul Wirth wants his parishioners to make love -- a whole lot of love.
The pastor for Relevant Church in Ybor City is challenging the couples in his congregation to get busy in bed every night for a month.
Wirth said the supposed 50 percent divorce rate is the reason behind the 30-Day Sex Challenge.
He said too many couples let the stress of jobs and daily life get in the way of intimacy.
So far, so good. But wait! There's a catch…
hrynyshyn | March 1, 2008Add to the long list of reasons not to support John McCain's bid for the U.S. presidency his inability to distinguish between medical science and ignorant fear-mongering. By accepting the discredited link between vaccines and autism, McCain has shown his judgment falls far short of that required for the head of a modern nation-state. Orac jumped on the story early this morning and I feel compelled to help spread this a widely as possible, in hopes of doing my bit to inoculate the country against the threat posed by a McCain presidency.
Here's what McCain said on Friday night:
"It's…
oracknows | February 29, 2008Well, now I'm really in a pickle as far as the 2008 Presidential election goes. I really don't like Hillary Clinton and consider Barack Obama not ready for prime time; i.e., he's too inexperienced and too liberal for my liking. On the other hand, I used to like John McCain--at least until he started pandering to the religious right and became a cheerleader for the Iraq war. Now I have another reason not to vote for John McCain, which leaves me with not a single Presidential candidate that I can see myself voting for right now.
John McCain has credulously fallen for the blandishments of…
oracknows | February 29, 2008Earlier today I was perusing incoming links. (Yes, most bloggers do that because we like to know who's linking to us; any blogger who doesn't do this from time to time is atypical or lying about it.) What to my wondering (and I do mean wondering) eyes should appear, but Respectful Insolence appearing on a most unusual list, so much so that I didn't know whether to be proud or embarrassed.
That's right, this blog is listed as one of the Top 50 Alternative Medicine Blogs on Live Smarter. Now, I'm as vain as the next blogger, possibly even more so, but even my vanity did not protect me from the…
ddobbs | February 29, 2008The ripples from the PLOS Medicine antidepressants-don't-work study by Kirsch et alia, which I covered below, just keep spreading. Those who want to follow it can do well by visiting or bookmarking this search I did (an ingenious Google News search for "Kirsch SSRI"). It seems to be tracking the press coverage pretty well. Note that the heavier and higher-profile coverage comes mainly from UK. As far as I can tell, none of the top 3 or 4 US papers have yet covered it.
This blog search should help as well.
Some of the more notable responses since yesterday:
Science weighs in. The Times…
oracknows | February 29, 2008It's very bad when I have a week off. Very, very bad.
The reason is that when I have a week off I have this rather unfortunate tendency to stay up late at night, and when I stay up late at night I have an even more unfortunate tendency to check out late night infomercials that show up between the hours of 2 AM and 4 AM. Such was the case the other night when I found myself sitting in bed bathing in the glow of the LCD screen, staring in utter awe at the woo I found until my wife's annoyed retort told me that I was yelling at the TV screen. Even so, I still wondered whether I should use it for…
grrlscientist | February 28, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, bipolar disorder, clinical depression, mental illness, mood disorder, functional genomics, blood test, biomarkers
Image: Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
According to the United States Department of Health and Human Services, serious mental illnesses affect approximately 44 million Americans. Serious mental illnesses include mood disorders; depression and bipolar disorder. Unfortunately, correctly diagnosing mental illnesses, such as bipolar disorder, appears to be a sort of voodoo science that depends upon the skill of the mental health professional…
oracknows | February 28, 2008In the two days since I first mentioned an attempted home invasion of a researcher at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) by bandana-masked animal rights terrorists, there have been new developments worth posting an update here.
First, last night the Santa Cruz Sentinel posted a story indicating that the FBI are now involved in the investigation:
SANTA CRUZ - The FBI is investigating a possible connection between a militant animal rights group and the weekend attack on the home of a UC Santa Cruz researcher, a spokeswoman confirmed Wednesday.
"The reason we said we'd look into it…
ddobbs | February 28, 2008The Kirsch study I wrote about a couple days ago, which found that antidepressants seem to have no more effect than placebo, has generated a wide variety of reactions in the blogosphere and press. Several things of note here:
1) In a pattern I've noticed repeatedly of late about other types of stories about things in the U.S., this story got much more attention in the British press than it did here in the U.S. (The authors were from the UK, but the paper was published in a U.S.-based journal, and antidepressant use is a huge issue in the U.S.)
2) The responses -- some by bloggers, writers,…
terrasig | February 28, 2008[Note: Mr. Tweedy's first post, Shaking It Off, went up on 5 March 2008]
Yesterday, London-based blogger Mo at Neurophilosophy alerted us to a new blog at the New York Times website entitled, Migraine: Perspectives on a Headache. A notable cadre of prominent migraine sufferers have started blogging about their experiences and answering reader questions. Bloggers include author Siri Hustvedt, author-journalist Paula Kamen, German neurologist and psychiatrist Dr Klaus Podoll, and noted Columbia professor and author Dr Oliver Sacks. The blog description is as follows:
More than 28 million…
oracknows | February 28, 2008I didn't want to blog about this. I really didn't.
No, the reason why I didn't want to blog about this latest screed by mercury militia enabler David Kirby is not because it is about any sort of slam-dunk proof that vaccines do after all cause autism, a mistaken impression that you might get if you just looked at the crowing throughout the antivaccination blogosphere. Rather, it's because I've been forced once again to wade through Kirby's smug, self-congratulatory, and intentionally obfuscatory prose to try to figure out just what the hell he was talking about and then try to make sense of…
terrasig | February 27, 2008I was remiss in noting that Hungarian medical student and Medical Web 2.0 guru Berci Meskó has hosted the current and rather large Grand Rounds medical blog carnival at his excellent blog, Science Roll. Fresh off his US tour that included a presentation at the Medicine Meets Virtual Reality conference and a talk at Yale University, Doctor-to-be Meskó returns in stride with the week's wide spectrum of medical blogging.
For those new readers, blog carnivals are periodic compilations of posts organized around general topical areas. For example, Grand Rounds is a general medicine carnival begun…
oracknows | February 27, 2008In case you haven't heard it enough on this blog and elsewhere: Antivaccination lunacy has consquences. In the UK, measles cases have jumped to a record high:
The number of measles cases in England and Wales jumped more than 30% last year to the highest level since records began in 1995.
The Health Protection Agency (HPA) recorded 971 cases during the year - up from 740 in 2006.
The agency issued a warning last summer urging parents to get their children immunised with the MMR jab.
Experts have repeatedly stressed that public concerns about the safety of the jab have no foundation.
As I've…
oracknows | February 27, 2008A few days ago, I came across an article on Engadget that mentioned almost in passing some studies that seemed to indicate health problems or no health problems, depending on the specific study, due to the ubiquitous and maligned cellular telephone. Not having dealt with this issue much on my blog, I decided to take a look, mostly out of curiosity. The claims that cell phones somehow cause cancer have been circulating for many years, and the studies marshaled to show such a link have in general been not that impressive. However, even though radiofrequency radiation of the sort used in cell…
oracknows | February 26, 2008
...and this time it's a home invasion.
Abel Pharmboy at Terra Sig pointed me to this incident, which has all the markings of still more animal rights terrorism. This time, the attack occurred at the University of California Santa Cruz and involved a home invasion by masked intruders:
SANTA CRUZ - A UC Santa Cruz faculty member whose biomedical research using animals sheds light on the causes of breast cancer and neurological diseases was the target of an attack Sunday afternoon, reportedly by animal rights activists.
UCSC Chancellor George Blumenthal confirmed late Monday that an off-…
hrynyshyn | February 26, 2008Another study purports to find that, for most people, Prozac and the other members of the antidepressant family of pharmaceuticals are no better than sugar pills. Expect Big Pharma to object, but not too loudly. At least, don't expect them to expend too much effort and money denouncing the findings. We've heard this before, and it would seem that neither patients nor the doctors that prescribe antidepressants care much about whether or not the drugs actually do what their makers claim they do.
You can go all the way back to 1998 to find studies casting doubt on the efficacy of antidepressants…
oracknows | February 26, 2008In a way, I have to hand it to Mike Adams.
As you may recall, Mike Adams is the man behind what is arguably one of the top two or three woo-filled sites on the Internet, NaturalNews.com (formerly known as NewsTarget.com). I'm hard-pressed to come up with an example of someone who can deliver delusional paranoid conspiracy-mongering against the FDA, CDC, and big pharma, antivaccination lunacy, overblown claims about cancer, and (in my considered medical opinion, of course), dangerous cancer quackery, all in one tidy, ranting package. Sometimes the stuff Adams writes is so over-the-top that I…
denialism | February 26, 2008I've almost come to the end of the core 8 weeks of my surgery rotation (4 more weeks follow in electives) and am currently working on the trauma service for another couple days before taking exams.
I don't have a great deal to say, the hours stay long, the medicine remains interesting etc. I'm enjoying the decrease in laundry that wearing scrubs entails. I enjoy how much doctors tend to take joy in their work. Medicine is a great field that way, as it gives you a feeling of accomplishment as you see what you do day to day really can make a big difference in people's lives. The debt may…
oracknows | February 25, 2008One way that pseudoscience tries to maintain a patina of respectability to the outside world, a patina that sometimes even manages to take in researchers unacquainted with its methods, is through the "research conference" that has all the trappings of a research meeting but whose topics reveal the pseudoscience at the heart of it all. Such a conference is coming up this spring in Chicago from May 21-25.
Yes, I'm talking about the AutismOne conference, which, year after year, has managed to attract luminaries of the mercury militia and antivaccination movement, along with dubious practioners…