medicine
oracknows | January 30, 2008A few days ago, I was amused by a term coined by Dr. R.W. The term, "quackademic medicine," was meant to describe the unholy fusion of non-science- and non-evidence-based woo that has infiltrated academic medicine to a disturbing extent over the last decade or two. There was a lot of reaction, mainly positive, to the new term, and I even got an e-mail from a certain skeptical podcaster vowing to use the term every opportunity that he got. One reader, Jim Benton, made a comment that got me to thinking. Here's the comment:
My 'crusade of the year' this year (other than getting a Democratic…
oracknows | January 29, 2008Last week, I did one of my inimitable rants about an ABC television show set to air on Thursday called Eli Stone, in which a lawyer sues a pharmaceutical company for "mercuritol" (an obvious allusion to thimerosal) in vaccines and how it supposedly caused a child's autism. Basically, I called it an irresponsible bit of antivaccination propaganda, given that in the story the jury awards the child $5.2 million, while the lawyer (Eli Stone) is portrayed as a "prophet" crusading for the "little guy."
Now Steve Novella weighs in. In the process, he can't resist doing in his much less--shall we say…
oracknows | January 29, 2008The other day I mentioned the now-infamous magic Alzheimer's helmet, a device being hyped to the press by a group of scientists on the basis of very little data. Believe it or not, of all organizations, ABC News has published an article citing the skeptics' side. It starts:
What if the secret to stopping the progression of Alzheimer's disease -- and perhaps even reversing its ravages -- lay in the use of a special hat?
Too crazy, too goofy, too good to be true, warn experts on the debilitating disease.
Some more:
But Alzheimer's researchers not affiliated with the work say the chances that…
clock | January 29, 2008From SCONC:
On Thursday, February 7, SCONCs will migrate to the Morehead Planetarium and Science Center in Chapel Hill. MPSC will open its exhibits to SCONC members for a special viewing at 6:00 p.m. in the NASA Digital Theater, followed by Morehead's Current Science Forum at 7:00 p.m. in the Banquet Hall. This month's topic, "Victory At Any Cost?" covers the arresting subject of performance-enhancing drugs. Dr. Mario Ciocca, head physician for six UNC athletic teams, will talk about the effects of steroids, growth hormones and other banned substances, and the science used to detect them.…
palmd | January 28, 2008(This post has been migrated from my old blog for reference. --PalMD)
But should you? Needles administering vaccines have saved millions of lives. Needles draw blood to help diagnose disease. They save diabetics' lives daily. Of course, they also help heroin addicts get high and catch diseases. So needles themselves must be good...or evil...or something...right?
To add more to the mix, an interesting study was just published in the Archives of Internal Medicine (Hakkke, et al. German Acupuncture Trials (GERAC) for Chronic Low Back Pain. Arch Intern Med/Vol 167(17), Sept 24, 2007, pp…
oracknows | January 28, 2008Several readers have e-mailed me this story. It's about a device developed in the U.K.. Based on near infrared light (NIR), the device, it is claimed by its creator, will be a major step forward for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease. He even made some very bold claims that it could not just slow the cognitive decline associated with dementia due to Alzheimer's disease but actually reverse it.
Fortunately, a friend over at Science-Based Medicine has taken the time to separate the hype from the scientific basis behind this device. Suffice it to say that, although it's not totally…
hrynyshyn | January 28, 2008The latest example of irrational, Medieval policy-making in Washington to outrage these parts of the blogosphere is a three-week-old story from NPR in which we learn that federal officials oppose the distribution of cheap "overdose-rescue" kits to heroin addicts. Why? Well, according to Dr. Bertha Madras, deputy director of the White House Office on National Drug Control Policy...
the rescue programs might take away the drug user's motivation to get into detoxification and drug treatment.
"Sometimes having an overdose, being in an emergency room, having that contact with a health care…
oracknows | January 28, 2008Pity poor David Kirby.
Nearly three years ago now, he published his now-infamous Evidence of Harm: Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic, A Medical Mystery. Hooking up with the most vocal of the mercury militia, his book blamed mercury in vaccines as the major cause of autism. Unfortunately for Kirby, time has not been kind to him. Although he still manages to retain his rock star status among the antivaccination glitterati, each successive study failing to find a link between thimerosal-containing vaccines (TCVs) and autism put another nail in the coffin of Kirby's relevance, to the…
oracknows | January 27, 2008With all the woo infiltrating hospitals these days, as I've lamented about in constructing my Academic Woo Aggregator, it was only a matter of time until these ways of thinking started to infiltrate other lines of work.
Why not "alternative janitorial services" as well? After reading about it, I wonder how long before it spreads any further. How about "alternative" auto repair? Or even "alternative" plumbing? The possibilities are endless.
oracknows | January 27, 2008This story is a couple of weeks old, but I've only just come across it. It reminds me that there may be some things worse than death, and this is one of them:
To see the face of 32-year-old Huang Chuancai is to witness a rare genetic condition in its most terrible form.
Chinese doctors say Huang, of China's southern Hunan province, suffers from a disease known as neurofibromatosis, a genetic disorder of the nervous system that primarily affects the development and growth of neural cell tissues.
For many of its sufferers, the disease means abnormal growth of these tissues and, as a result,…
oracknows | January 26, 2008I'll give Don Imus credit for one thing. He's predictable and consistent. He never fails to deliver the stupid when it comes to vaccines and autism. True, his wife may take the stupid to hysterically malignant levels when she decides to rant about her belief in the undead myth that mercury in vaccines was a major cause of autism, but he's the calm and reliable voice of vaccine stupidity, spitting out the same antivaccination lies over and over again in that sleep-inducing mumbling drone that he calls a voice. He's only been back on the air for a month and a half now, and it's become…
oracknows | January 25, 2008
One of the favorite failings in logic and science among the woo-friendly crowd is the ever-famous one of confusing correlation with causation, also known as non causa pro causa, which means "non-cause for the cause." Examples of this are rampant, and include the antivaccinationists who confuse correlation with vaccination and the age at which autism is usually first recognized with vaccines causing autism, taking a homeopathic remedy shortly before having their symptoms resolve spontaneously and mistaking this for the efficacy of the homeopathic remedy, chelating children with autism and…
denialism | January 25, 2008Surely no one can be pissed at me for pointing out that surgeons have some of the coolest tools, so I think I'll describe a few of them that I've seen used a great deal in general surgery.
The one most frequently in use is referred to simply as "the Bovie" and it is used for electrocautery. Named for William Bovie it was first used by the famous surgeon Harvey Williams Cushing almost a century ago. The patient in the OR is laying on a large conductive pad that grounds them, and the Bovie device, which resembles a little plastic pencil with a flat, rounded metal tip, generates an…
oracknows | January 24, 2008Word of the day: "Quackademic medicine." I love it.
Dr. R.W. explains.
I very well may have to steal that term. As they say about artists, good ones borrow but great ones steal. (Just living up to the arrogance of my namesake...)
oracknows | January 24, 2008...because then I could attend Dr. David Colquhoun's lecture at the University of Toronto tomorrow.
Dr. Colquhoun, for those not familiar with him, is the eminent pharmacologist with the name that is exceedingly difficult to remember how to spell who runs DC's Improbable Science, an excellent skeptical, scientific, and medical blog that routinely takes on dubious medical and scientific claims. A while back, his university (the University College of London) kicked his blog off its servers in response to complaints by disgruntled "alternative" therapists who did not like his science-based take…
oracknows | January 24, 2008My post from Monday finally goaded me to do it. Yes, it's time to update the Academic Woo Aggregator. I've been far too remiss in doing so, and at least a couple of new candidates have come to my attention as I continue to keep my eye out for more.
First, from the U.S. News & World Report article, I find a "worthy" candidate for inclusion, namely Children's Memorial Hospital, which is affiliated with Northwestern University. As evidence, I submit excerpts from its website:
Energy healing: Our bodies are always trying to move toward balance and health. Energy healing encourages the flow…
clock | January 23, 2008The Duke Medical Center News Office is seeking a Sr. Science News Writer to be responsible for planning, developing, implementing and analyzing strategic comprehensive and diversified media relations programs and tactics. Through direct support of Duke Medicine strategic objectives and the associated strategic plan, the Sr. Science News Writer accrues value to the Duke brand through local, regional and national news exposure.
The ideal candidate will have a Bachelor's degree in Journalism, English or a related discipline and at least 5 years of extensive media relations or science news…
jstemwedel | January 23, 2008Maybe you saw the story in the New York Times about new research that may show that ingesting too much caffeine while pregnant increases the chances of miscarriage. And, if you're like me, one of the first things you did was try to track down the actual research paper discussed in the newspaper article.
If so, I hope you've had better luck than I have.
The New York Times article (dated January 20 -- that was a Sunday) describes the research as "to be published Monday in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology" and identifies "the lead author of the study" as De-Kun Li. Writing…
oracknows | January 23, 2008I'm a little late on this, but Avery Comarow, the reporter who wrote the big story three weeks ago in U.S. News & World Report about the infiltration of woo into academic medicine, has responded to criticisms of his column in his blog.
His response, I'm afraid, is underwhelming.
First, he starts out with the claim that he is an "evidence" guy:
A few words about that story and how it evolved. Regular readers (scratch "regular"--anybody who's read a single post) can tell I'm an evidence kind of guy. Claims without backup data give me the urge to turn the page, click on another link, get off…
oracknows | January 23, 2008It's times like these that I wish the Hollywood writers' strike had really and truly shut down production of new dramas completely. A new series on ABC set to premiere on January 31 looks as though it's going to dish up a heapin' helpin' of the vilest antivaccination lies and propaganda that will potentially endanger children's lives by stoking fears about the safety of vaccines:
LOS ANGELES -- A new legal drama making its debut this month on ABC is stepping into a subject that is the source of heated debate among some parents -- the relationship between autism and childhood vaccines -- and…