medicine
oracknows | January 14, 2008I'd be remiss if I didn't note that Mark Hoofnagle of denialism.com has exited the rarified (and much less stressful world) of the laboratory and has dived headlong right into the clinic again, starting out with his surgery rotation.
As an old geezer (OK, middle-aged; it just feels old when each year's crop of new interns looks younger and younger), I'm amazed that he has any time at all to blog. Certainly, back in the day when giants walked the earth, such blogging would have been unlikely at best. It must be the 80 hour work week. In any case, he's made some observations about surgery, many…
j7uy5 | January 14, 2008
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has been shown, in at least one case, to result in…
oracknows | January 14, 2008I haven't written before about the tragic case of Katie McCarron, the three year old autistic girl whose mother killed her in May 2006. It's an incredibly sad tale, and others have covered it better. However, the trial started last week, and on Friday there was some testimony that suggests an effect of all the antivaccination fear-mongering that blames autism on either mercury in thimerosal-containing vaccines (a contention against which strong evidence was published just last week, to add to all the other studies that show no link between thimerosal and autism) or vaccines in general. Indeed…
palmd | January 14, 2008"These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease."
This "Quack Miranda Warning" is on every just about every woo-meister's website. I see dozens of patients every day, and I never Mirandize them, so whats the deal?
There are three ways to look at this: the truthful way, the sinister way, and the bat-shit insane way.
Truth: Anyone who wants to sell you something that's a load of crap must use this statement to cover themselves legally.
Sinister: Variation of above--someone wants to…
denialism | January 13, 2008One only has to be minimally involved in a surgical procedure to understand the appeal of this profession. It is instantly gratifying and very rewarding to be able to just fix something. That, working under time pressure and mixture of physical and mental skill make it a very exciting way to practice medicine.
So after a week of this, and just getting off call around 1:00 this AM after scrubbing in on a liver transplant I'll tell you what has surprised me about surgery so far, and some of the things I didn't realize going in.
Surgeons are famous for having little traditions and quirks…
oracknows | January 12, 2008I don't really care if this is cynical viral marketing or not. I don't even care that half the science blogosphere has picked it up (with no doubt the other half to pile on in the next few days). This is just so frikkin' brilliant that I'm going to join in, lemming-like, too, heedless of whether I'm being manipulated by Bio-Rad or not:
A higher quality video can be found here.
"PCR, When you need to know who the daddy is."
Best. Lyric. Ever.
oracknows | January 12, 2008Someone sent me a transcript of part of the appearance of Deirdre Imus on her husband's radio show that's been making the rounds in various discussion groups. I'm glad I don't listen to the show, as this segment might have made me take a baseball bat to my radio, if I had enough neurological function to do so after being exposed to the toxic, intelligence-sucking effects of her black hole of ignorance. If you think her two Huffington Post articles that I deconstructed a while back were bad, just listen to her on Imus. Truly, it is hard to do so without losing some brain cells, but give it a…
tqa | January 11, 2008
There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of…
oracknows | January 11, 2008
If there's one thing I've learned about woo in the more than a year and a half that I've been doing this regular Friday feature, it's that there's definitely a religious element to virtually all woo. In essence, it requires believing in something that cannot be demonstrated scientifically, often despite science outright refuting it. For example, there have been several "victims" (I mean subjects) for this Friday feature that have been explicitly fundamentalist Christian in nature1, 2, 3, 4, even a parody of such beliefs. Of course, if you're a New Age-type woo, you wouldn't call it "…
oracknows | January 10, 2008The other day, I mentioned what Prometheus termed the "arrogance of ignorance," in which people with no training in a complex, scientific issue have the hubris to think that they know enough to be able to lecture medical scientists on shortcomings of their research. Here's another example of just such arrogance by antivaccinationist Barbara Loe Fisher:
As usual, it is not the M.D. or Ph.D. "experts" but parents of vaccine injured children, who understand the bigger picture involving accumulating clinical evidence that many children are regressing and becoming chronically ill after receiving…
jstemwedel | January 10, 2008
"Why don't they make a birth control pill for men?"
There are important considerations from medical ethics that might explain why a birth control pill for men has not happened yet.
You'd think that there would be an ethical impetus for the development of a birth control pill for men, given that men (or at least, their sperm) are a necessary component of human reproduction and that men have an interest in controlling their fertility, too. Men might view such a pill as a useful option. The question is whether that benefit outweighs the potential risks.
The Belmont Report (which lays out the…
clock | January 10, 2008"Why isn't there a birth control pill for men?" is the latest "Ask A ScienceBlogger" question. I am sure my SciBlings will rise to the occasion and explain both the biological and social barriers to the development, production and marketing of such a pill. I will be more light hearted, with a brief look at alternative methods proposed over the years intended to make guys temporarily infertile. Let's start with this delightful, funny, yet informative, movie:
The movie can be found here, via Science of the Invisible (Thanks for the heads-up).
Perhaps this quack had a point after all! Would…
oracknows | January 10, 2008In recent years, there has been a lot of interest in improving surgical outcomes. One strain of research tends to examine the "volume-outcome" relationship, which in essence asked the question if the volume of cases that a surgeon or hospital does has a relationship outcome. In other words, are mortality rates lower, survival rates better, or the correction of symptoms more reliable for a given surgical procedure in the hands of surgeons who do more of them per year or hospitals in which more of them per year are done? On the surface, it would seem self-evident that the answer must be yes,…
denialism | January 9, 2008Eight hours standing in a single spot, how do surgeons do it? I'm hoping my endurance will build, especially knowing that some of the procedures I'm going to see in the next few weeks such as the "Whipple" or pancreaticoduodenectomy may take twice as long.
The good news is that I have lucked into working with great people - the misbehavior of surgeons is greatly exaggerated - and have learned lots of interesting things. The coolest yet was running the camera on a laparoscopic or "keyhole" surgery - it looked something like this.
Although what we did was more complicated (and harder to…
oracknows | January 9, 2008I'll admit that I've been a bit oblivious to honors and awards in the blogosphere lately, but it's come to my attention that I'm actually a finalist for Best Medical Weblog.
I also note that the competition is fierce. Fellow surgeon Sid Schwab is there for Surgeonsblog, as is one of the pioneers of medical blogging, Kevin, MD. Oddly enough, I'm also nominated for Best Health Policies/Ethics Weblog.
In any case, thanks to all who nominated me, and be sure to head over and vote for your favorite, especially if it's me, and don't forget to vote in all the other categories. Polls close on Sunday…
grrlscientist | January 9, 2008tags: Tangled Bank, blog carnivals
This is it, folks, the blog carnival that you've all been waiting for; Tangled Bank. The 96th edition has just been published, so get on over there for some science-y goodness.
denialism | January 9, 2008 This time the Ask a Scienceblogger Challenge is to explain why a male contraceptive pill does not exist.
Good question! It's because medical researchers are all sexist bastards. Didn't you know?
Actually that's only part of the reason. Research into hormonal or pharmaceutical contraception for men is a hot topic. Male hormonal contraception is actually fairly effective. Using a combination of testosterone and other hormones to suppress the secretion of luteinizing hormone (LH) and follicle-stimulating hormone (FSH) from the pituitary you can, after several months, prevent men from making…
oracknows | January 9, 2008(NOTE ADDED 12/7/2010: Kim Tinkham has died of what was almost certainly metastatic breast cancer.)
Cancer is scary. It's very, very scary, even when it is a cancer that is treatable and potentially curable. It's such a common disease that, by the time we reach a certain age, the vast majority of us have seen at least one friend or loved one die of some form of cancer. All too often, that death is horrific, and even when it is not the wasting and weakness that is often seen before the end provokes a visceral reaction matched by few diseases. Moreover, the treatments of cancer can be toxic.…
oracknows | January 8, 2008Cectic tells us why we should be afraid:
But who will save us from this menace? Click on the picture to see!
oracknows | January 8, 2008I've pointed out before how MotheringDotCom and its associated discussion forums are supportive havens for the worst antivaccinationists, HIV/AIDS denialists, and anti-amalgam wingnuts, which is one reason why I do not recommend them for any parent as a source of health information. So, out of curiosity, before I move on to other topics tomorrow, I was curious what the reaction on the MDC discussion boards was to the study by Schechter and Grether yesterday that provided strong evidence against a link between the mercury in thimerosal-containing vaccines (TCVs) and autism/autism spectrum…