medicine
moleculeoftheday | December 18, 2007Mutual funds are such a common instrument, it's hard to imagine they were once a novel concept. In 1924, $10M were invested in US mutual funds. In 1964, $35B were invested. Skip ahead to today and the number is $12T - that's $12 x 1012. Such logarithmic growth is due to boosters like Jack Dreyfus (and more robust securities laws) bringing mainstream these newfangled "mutual investment funds," as this credulous Life Magazine profile describes them.
What, then, does Jack Dreyfus have to do with chemistry? You see, this Wall Street titan had a favorite molecule.
Phenytoin was discovered a…
oracknows | December 18, 2007If you listen to what advocates of homeopathy, acupuncture, or whatever form of so-called "alternative" medicine you can think of (in reality, non-evidence-based medicine for the most part), you'd think that physicians are in the pockets of Big Pharma, hopeless slaves to its propaganda, addicted to its tchotchkes and swag. Sadly for Big Pharma, they may not be having quite the effect it had hoped, if this roundtable discussion of primary care doctors about a study on NSAIDS and pain is any indication:
Should we believe this study?
Bob: When I decide to read an article, I first look at the…
oracknows | December 18, 2007Several months ago, i wrote quite a few posts about a new anticancer drug that had not yet passed through clinical trials but had demonstrated efficacy against tumors in rat models of cancer. The drug, called dichloroacetate (DCA), is a small molecule that targeted a phenomenon common in cancer cells known as the Warburg effect. Because DCA is a small molecule that is relatively easy to synthesize, the misguided news stories proclaiming it the "cure" for cancer that big pharma wouldn't fund because it was not patentable spawned a cottage industry of charlatans who used the Internet to sell…
oracknows | December 17, 2007Regular readers of this blog know that I have been becoming increasingly disturbed by what I see as the infiltration of non-evidenced-based "alternative" medicine into academic medical centers. Indeed, about a month ago, I went so far as to count the number of medical schools that offer some form of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) in their curricula. (What a fantastic marketing term for what are in the vast majority of cases therapies without a plausible scientific basis or compelling clinical evidence for efficacy above that of a placebo!) The end result was the Academic Woo…
oracknows | December 16, 2007...well, not really:
OK, I don't really hate them. But it used to be that science journalists stood between scientists and the public. The scientists did research, then we asked questions and translated their dry jargon and complicated ideas into scintillating prose. Sure, there were a few scientists, like Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould and Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who wrote engagingly about the mysteries of the natural world, but they were relatively few.
Now look what's happened. Go to the Science Blogs website and you'll find dozens of actual scientists, commenting in real time on every aspect…
oracknows | December 15, 2007...when another blogger refers to your linking to him by adding "-lanche" to your 'nym?
I can't say I've ever had that happen to me before.
oracknows | December 15, 2007It's been a while since I mentioned the Autism Omnibus hearings. The Omnibus proceeding is the culmination of all the legal cases brought to the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program by nearly 5,000 families who "feel" that their children's autism was caused by vaccines. Many, but not all, of the plaintiffs blame the mercury in the thimerosal in childhood vaccines, despite there being no good evidence to support such a link. The way that the hearings are being run is that several "test cases" are being chosen by Special Masters, who hear evidence presented by the plaintiffs and the defense…
oracknows | December 14, 2007
It's almost here.
No, not Christmas, although that's almost here too. what I'm talking about is the fast-approaching 76th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle, which is due to land at Aardvarchaelogy on Thursday, December 20, right in time for the holidays. (And what better time to indulge in a serious dose of skepticism than in the midst of all this pre-Christmas cheer?) Ebenezer Scrooge would be proud. Well, the pre-visitation Scrooge, anyway. The post-visitation Scrooge clearly believed in ghosts and other paranormal happenings, like visitations promised to happen in over three nights…
oracknows | December 14, 2007
I have to confess, the ol' Folder of Woo was looking a little thin this week.
No, it's not that I'm running out of topics (a.k.a. targets) for my usual Friday jaunt into the wacky world of woo. Far from it. It's just that, in the run-up to writing this, perusing the odd stuff therein just wasn't getting me fired up to do the feature the way that it usually does. There just wasn't anything there that was grabbing my attention and refusing to let it go, as has happened so often in weeks past. I began to worry whether Your Friday Dose of Woo has been going on too long (it's approaching a year…
oracknows | December 13, 2007There's been a bit of bad news on the vaccination front:
ATLANTA - More than a million doses of a common vaccine given to babies as young as 2 months were being recalled Wednesday because of contamination risks, but the top U.S. health official said it was not a health threat.
The recall is for 1.2 million doses of the vaccine for Hib, which protects against meningitis, pneumonia and other serious infections, and a combination vaccine for Hib and hepatitis B. The vaccine is recommended for all children under 5 and is usually given in a three-shot series, starting at 2 months old.
Drug maker…
oracknows | December 13, 2007Oh, no, not again.
Respectful Insolence⢠has been invaded over the last few days by a particularly idiotic and clueless homeopath named Sunil Sharma, who's infested the comments of a post about how U.K. homeopaths are complaining about all of us mean skeptics who have the temerity to point out the mind-numbingly obvious about homeopathy, namely that it is based on magical thinking, goes against huge swaths of well-understood science and thus would require some very compelling evidence indeed to be worth being taken seriously by scientists (evidence that homeopaths have been thus far unable…
sb admin | December 13, 2007 December 13 is my birthday! Yippee, you say, how old am I? Old enough to not say... I will shamelessly mention the Amazon wish list linked from my contact page, and remind you that Omni Brain has a tip jar in the sidebar (shared with Steve). But I'm not desperate for anything and there are plenty of deserving charities who need your money (I recommend UNIFEM). I'm thankful they are helping people in a more direct way than I can.
Anyway. I'm celebrating aging with a new tattoo, and am very excited about it! I've been interested in intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (ipRGCs…
oracknows | December 12, 2007Readers may have noticed (or maybe they haven't) that I haven't commented at all on the Guillermo Gonzalez case. As you may recall, Gonzalez is an astronomer at Iowa State University, as well as advocate of "intelligent design" creationism. In May 2007, ISU denied tenure to Gonzalez. Not surprisingly, the ID movement in general and its propagnda arm (Discovery Institute) in particular have done their best to try to portray Gonzalez as a martyr who was "persecuted" for his beliefs and denied his "academic freedom." Despite the attempts of the DI to milk it for all its PR value, as usual, the…
oracknows | December 11, 2007How could I have been so remiss? I totally forgot to plug a new blog carnival that I really should be plugging, given my area of scientific interest. Yes, indeed, it's a new edition of the Cancer Research Blog Carnival, with lots of scientific bloggy goodness to enjoy.
Worse, I forgot to submit anything to it. I'll have to remedy that next time...
oracknows | December 11, 2007It's been a while since I've visited the cesspool that is Uncommon Descent, a.k.a. Bill Dembski's home for wandering sycophants, toadies, and lackeys. There's a good reason for this; I just get tired of the sheer stupidity that routinely assaults my brain every time I make the mistake of taking a look at UD's latest attempt to try to refute evolution. Worse, there's lots of other pseudoscience there these days, from the promotion of the use of cancer therapies that haven't been subjected to clinical trials yet to anthropomorphic global warming "skepticism." Yes, every time I peruse the posts…
purepedantry | December 10, 2007Shelley has an exquisite example of why radiologists no longer do double-takes:
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report on intestinal obstruction caused by ingestion of a condom filled with alcoholic beverage and its successful transcutaneous treatment.
Question #1 (of many): why was the condom filled with beer?
No, I actually want to know. Is there some drinking game that I was not presently aware of that involves condoms filled with beer? Is this an example of fraternity hazing gone horribly awry? Was this individual misinformed about the legality of alcoholic beverages…
oracknows | December 10, 2007Dr. Rashid Buttar is a quack. There, I've said it. It's my opinion, and there's lots of evidence to support that opinion. As you know, I seldom actually invoke the "q-word." Indeed, for the longest time after I started blogging I tended to go out of my way to avoid using it, even to the point of being a bit ridiculous, but in Dr. Buttar's case I now have little choice but to make my opinion of him plain.
I've noticed before that, as far as antivaccination cranks and the mercury militia go, when it rains it pours, and stories about such lunacy seem to come in waves. Weeks can go by without my…
oracknows | December 9, 2007Andrew Wakefield is an incompetent "scientist." Of that, there is no longer any doubt whatsoever, given how poorly he and his collaborators did the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) studies that he did looking for measles RNA sequences in colon biopsy specimens taken from autistic children, studies in which they failed to do even the most basic, rudimentary controls for detecting false positives due to contamination with plasmid DNA sequences. The harm that came from his now falsified findings of that study, in which he claimed that the MMR vaccine was associated with autism and…
j7uy5 | December 9, 2007Last year, on the occasion of
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_AIDS_Day">World
AIDS Day, President Bush promised to reform a discriminatory
policy that blocks most persons with HIV from entering the USA.
The current rule does allow for waivers, but the process is cumbersome
and unscientific.
Now, one week after this year's World AIDS Day, we learn that the
proposed new rule is worse than the one it would
replace.
As reported in
href="http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/91059.php">Medical
News Today:
The proposed rule further discriminates
against visitors with HIV…
oracknows | December 8, 2007See what happens when I actually manage to keep myself from checking my blog for nearly 24 whole hours?
The trolls take over.
Well, they're not exactly trolls. Trolls often don't believe in what they post; they merely post it to get a reaction, for example, like rabid Hillary Clinton opponents posting on pro-Clinton discussion forums. However, true believers invading the discussions on blogs that oppose their viewpoint can produce much the same result as trolls who troll just for the sake of getting a reaction. Think creationists or fundamentalist Christians posting on Pharyngula or HIV/AIDS…