medicine
oracknows | November 21, 2007He's baaack.
Yes, that radio voice of the mercury militia, the shock jock Don Imus, who was so ignominiously booted from his nationwide syndicated radio show last spring is coming back to the airwaves on December 3 on WABC radio in New York, with plans to syndicate him again nationwide. Personally, although I consider Imus a clueless twit, I'm not sure that he should have been fired over that remark after he apologized, but CBS had every right to can him over it if it so desired. In any case, as some may know, I live within AM radio range of New York; the reasons Imus' impending reappearance…
oracknows | November 20, 2007In the past, I've characterized chiropractors, at least the ones who claim to be able to treat anything other than back pain, as "physical therapists with delusions of grandeur who don't know their limitations." It appears that Panda Bear, MD agrees with me, and he's particularly disturbed about such chiropractors increasingly targeting the pediatric population:
Apparently chiropracty can resolve asthma, ear infections, colic, allergies, and headaches to name just a few. What then, exactly, are pediatric chiropractors doing if it's not treating conditions or diseases...or is your poor Uncle…
grrlscientist | November 20, 2007tags: mouse party, drugs, drug mechanisms, illegal drugs, video game, educational tool
Now that the school year has started again, I think it is worthwhile to repeat an earlier blog entry where I linked to a really interesting interactive game, called Mouse Party. This interactive game is a great educational tool, teaching you how various legal and illegal drugs work in the brain.
Have you ever wondered how various drugs work in the brain to produce the symptoms they do? Well, this wonderful interactive website, Mouse Party, shows you the molecular details of how heroin, exstacy, alcohol,…
j7uy5 | November 20, 2007Any time something related to a
medical use for cannabis is found, it
makes headlines. Mostly, the interest is generated by the
relationship to an illegal drug. Sometimes, though, the media
do a decent job of reporting the real issue.
href="http://www.researchblogging.org/">Researchers
at the California
Pacific Medical Center Research Institute
have announced that one of the compounds found in cannabis,
cannabidiol,
inhibits a gene that is important for the growth and metastasis of
breast
cancer.
Note that this has nothing to do with medical marijuana, really.
Cannabidiol is not…
moleculeoftheday | November 20, 2007Marijuana is a puzzling drug, and a contentious one at that. Pure THC is sold pharmaceutically (and DEA-OK), but the whole plant isn't OK with the feds. That said, many states have decriminalized it for medical use. The pharmacology of cannabinoids is complex; marijuana aficionados report the drug exhibits a certain capacity to make eating 99 cent frozen pizza a more sublime experience than it would be sober. This rationale has resulted in the use of rimonabant, a cannabinoid antagonist (that is, it blocks its effects, like yesterday's molecule does with nicotine) to treat obesity.
Currently…
oracknows | November 20, 2007I'm not sure what to think of Michael Siegel. I'm really not. Even now, I remain of two minds on him.
Dr. Siegel first came to my attention back in July, around the time I was getting into online tussles with a certain opponent of indoor smoking bans, before which I had never heard of him. He's a Professor in the Social and Behavioral Sciences Department at Boston University School of Public Health who's made quite a reputation for himself casting a skeptical eye on what he considers to be extreme exaggerations, bad science, and even lies about the risks of tobacco and secondhand smoke. My…
clock | November 19, 2007As we are trying to help gather some funding to help the Tasmanian Devil from extinction due to the nasty infectious cancer, I thought it would be of interest to you to read more about it in this article: To Lose Both Would Look Like Carelessness: Tasmanian Devil Facial Tumour Disease to which I was alerted by a secret fan:
This paper uses the Tasmanian devil facial tumour disease (DFTD) as a case study of the wider issue of how to manage an emerging disease threat that poses a serious conservation threat: how should you proceed when you know very little? This is a question common to many…
j7uy5 | November 19, 2007It is common for tension to occur in the doctor-patient
relationship occurs when the patient reports symptoms that are
distressing to the patient, but which do not seem serious to the doctor.
Each instance of this is different, so it is hard to make
generalizations. However, in the case of sleep problems,
patients
have one thing working against them. All too often, doctors
relent, or try simply to save time, by writing a prescription.
The problem is described nicely in the New York Times Magazine:
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/magazine/18sleep-t.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1…
oracknows | November 19, 2007There's a rather interesting bit of vaccine politics going on in Prince George's County, Maryland being reported by the AP and The Baltimore Sun:
Scores of grumbling parents facing a threat of jail lined up at a courthouse today to either prove that their school-age kids already had their required vaccinations or see that the youngsters submitted to the needle.
The get-tough policy in Prince George's County was one of the strongest efforts made by any U.S. school system to ensure its youngsters receive their required immunizations.
Two months into the school year, school officials realized…
sb admin | November 19, 2007I couldn't wait for Multimedia Friday to post this video, it's just too funny.
I Am the Very Model of a Psychopharmacologist is set to Gilbert and Sullivan's classic song with animation. Created by Stephen M Stahl, MD, PhD, of the Neurosciences Education Institute, Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California San Diego, author of Essential Psychopharmacology. Credentials for neuropsychopharmacological hilarity.
clock | November 18, 2007Tasmanian Devils are suffering from a strange form of cancer, one that is infectious, i.e., it can be transmitted from one animal to another through contact.
The disease is devastating the population of this already endangered species and if some cure is not found quickly, the species will go extinct. Thus, the research and conversation work is needed in these six areas:
1. Investigating the tumour and its chromosomes, looking for clues to resistance
2.Keeping some area or areas of Tasmania free from the disease i.e. wild management
3.Maintaining backup captive populations of devils in…
oracknows | November 18, 2007So busy was I last week blogging about other things, somehow I missed an amazingly, jaw-droppingly idiotic defense of homeopathy Jeanette Winterson published in The Guardian earlier this week. As you might imagine, it was just begging for a heapin' helpin' of not-so-Respectful Insolenceâ¢. I mean, it was the dumbest article I've seen in a very long time. Unfortunately, other topics kept me from finding my way to it in a timely fashion. Fortunately, two excellent skeptical bloggers have torn the article to shreds, so much so that there is nothing left but a smear on the sidewalk where once…
oracknows | November 18, 2007Note: The Aggregator was updated on May 18, 2008.
Last week, almost on a whim, I decided to try to figure out just how much woo has infiltrated academic medicine by trying to come up with an estimate of just how many academic medical centers offer woo of some form or another in the form of centers of "integrative medicine" or "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM). I was shocked that the list numbered at least 39, with at least 12 offering reiki and five or six offering homeopathy. Dr. RW has expressed his support for this effort and at the same time given me an idea:
I knew such a…
j7uy5 | November 17, 2007The cost of health insurance has been increasing, typically
at
double-digit annual rates.
With the expansion of information technology, particularly electronic
claims processing, one would expect that the insurance companies would
be operating much more efficiently now that they were ten years ago.
Perhaps they are. Some would insist that they certainly are
more efficient that any government program could ever be.
However, take a look at these data:
I had to shrink it a bit to fit, so it is hard to read.
Let me explain. In the past ten years, the number
of persons employed in the…
oracknows | November 17, 2007Ever since I started blogging about a story about a youth named Chad Jessop who, it was claimed, developed melanoma and cured himself of it with "natural" remedies, with the result that his mother was supposedly brought before the Orange County Superior Court and his mother thrown in maximum security prison and denied the right to hire her own attorney, I've been fascinated at the contortions of the person most recently responsible for spreading this story, a blogger who goes under the pseudonym of the Angry Scientist. For one thing, the first person to spread this story by e-mail, Thomas…
j7uy5 | November 16, 2007In 1984, the Hatch-Waxman Drug Price Competition and
Patent Restoration Act was passed. This was an
important development that changed forever the economics of the
pharmaceutical industry.
NEJM has a nice, short, open-access
href="http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/357/20/1993">article
on the history and consequences of the Act.
The author, Richard
G. Frank, Ph.D., points out some interesting facts:
Today, generic drugs account for 63% of all U.S.
prescriptions for drugs
Between 2007 and 2010, roughly 110 drugs will
lose their patent protection
The first firm that files…
oracknows | November 16, 2007It may take a long time, but sometimes justice does eventually move to act against a wrong:
A Butler County doctor will stand trial on charges he caused the death of a 5-year-old autistic boy by negligently ordering a controversial treatment, a district judge ordered Thursday.
Dr. Roy Kerry of Portersville ordered chelation therapy - which the federal Food and Drug Administration approves for treating acute heavy-metal poisoning, but not for autism - on Abubakar Tariq Nadama in 2005. During a third treatment, on Aug. 23, the boy went into cardiac arrest and died.
Kerry, 69, is charged with…
oracknows | November 16, 2007Pity poor Nikola Tesla.
Again.
It looks as though the woomeisters have found a way to abuse him yet again. I don't know what it is about Tesla, but he seems to be a magnet for such woo. Well, actually, I sort of do. Tesla was definitely a character and was known for a variety of strange beliefs during his lifetime. I'm pretty sure, though, that he never came up with anything like the Tesla Purple Energy Shield, which was lovingly described in this very forum about seven months ago. I'm also pretty sure that he never came up with anything like the Body Regenerator Tesla Coil, which starts out…
oracknows | November 15, 2007Earlier this week, I did a couple of posts about applying evolutionary principles to the meme of complementary and alternative medicine. In one of them, I mentioned how CAM therapies never seem to "go extinct." They may wax and wane in popularity and "evolve" into other therapies, but they never go extinct. PalMD of Whitecoat Underground has noticed the same thing and has posed a question and a challenge:
So today I issue a challenge to both of my readers. Find me examples of "alternative" medicine that have been abandoned because evidence showed them to be failures. Post away, but please…
oracknows | November 15, 2007Yesterday's mega-post left me a bit drained; consequently I've throttled my ambitions back a notch today in order to leave some energy to put together the weekly installation of Your Friday Dose of Woo tomorrow. Fortunately, just the topic presented itself: A story that's interesting and instructive (hopefully) but that won't take as much of my time to deal with.
But first, a brief recap. A couple of months ago, I discussed a highly dubious fundraising e-mail that was going around, apparently pushed by an organization known as Natural Solutions Foundation, about what seemed on first blush to…