medicine
oracknows | November 14, 2007...Then go and visit Aggravated DocSurg, who's hosting the latest edition of SurgXperiences, the only blog carnival for surgery blogging, although his title makes me wonder a bit.
oracknows | November 14, 2007Over the last couple of days, I've discussed "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) in terms of a meme upon which evolutionary forces are acting to select certain forms of woo over others in academia. Although, in my usual inimitable fashion, I probably carried the concept one step too far, in the end I concluded that the relationship between CAM and academic medical centers is probably best characterized as parasitic rather than symbiotic.
After I finished that post, I started thinking (always a dangerous thing). Regular readers know that I've sometimes raised a bit of a ruckus by…
oracknows | November 13, 2007I was always wondering when he'd finally weigh in on alternative medicine, and now Sid has.
It's a slapdown worthy of Orac, Dr. R.W., or Panda Bear MD.
Go forth and read it. Not quite as snarky as Orac (but, then, Sid's a classy guy), but every bit as outraged.
oracknows | November 13, 2007Today's the day, everyone.
I haven't mentioned this before, but the documentary on the trial over the teaching of "intelligent design" creationism in the classroom in Dover, Pennsylvania two years ago is set to premiere on your local PBS station tonight at 8 PM. The Nova documentary, Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial, already has the Discovery Institute up in arms because from all reports thus far (and indeed from the content of the documentary website, which presents fossil evidence and a detailed discussion of evolution) it is uncompromising in its viewpoint that ID is not science…
oracknows | November 13, 2007Yesterday, inspired by a post by fellow ScienceBlogger Martin, I had a little fun discussing the evolution of "alternative" medicine (a.k.a. "complementary and alternative medicine" or CAM), specifically speculating about the possible selective pressures, positive and negative, that have influenced the course that its evolution took. Essentially, the discussion centered around whether, by its very nature CAM undergoes negative selective pressure for having as little effect as possible, positive or negative, a point I found somewhat, but not entirely, convincing. Although the post inspired a…
oracknows | November 12, 2007Abel Pharmboy at Terra Sigillata has the full story.
In brief, Medicare has slashed reimbursement for two radioimmunotherapy drugs Bexxar (131I-tositumomab) and Zevalin (90Y-ibritumomab) to below acquisition cost. This is not some experimental therapy that's being denied, but rather a therapy with a established clinical efficacy. Naturally, this is likely to lead to most centers abandoning these drugs. Even worse, because private insurers base their reimbursement on the Medicare reimbursement rates, usually paying some percentage above them, this decision will almost certainly lead insurance…
oracknows | November 12, 2007I wish I had thought of this one, but I didn't. However, I never let a little thing like not having thought of an idea first to stop me from discussing it, and this particular idea is definitely worth expanding upon because (1) it's interesting and (2) it combines two of my interests, alternative medicine and evolution. I agree with parts of the idea, but it's not without its shortcomings. Indeed, I'd very much welcome any of the evolutionary biologists who read this blog to chime in with their own ideas.
Fellow ScienceBlogger Martin Rundkvist over at Aardvarchaeology has proposed a rather…
j7uy5 | November 10, 2007Is it just me, or do others find this article to be
offensive?
href="http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1681838,00.html?xid=feed-yahoo-healthsci">When
the Patient Is a Googler
By SCOTT HAIG
Thursday, Nov. 08, 2007
We had never met, but as we talked on the phone I knew she
was Googling me. The way she drew out her conjunctions, just a little,
that was the tip off — stalling for time as new pages loaded.
It was barely audible, but the soft click-click of the keyboard in the
background confirmed it. Oh, well, it's the information age. Normally,
she'd have to go through…
oracknows | November 9, 2007Orac gets e-mail from time to time. This time around, a person working at The Ohio State University writes about a disturbing incident there demonstrating yet more evidence that academic medical centers are having increasing difficulty distinguishing between evidence-based medicine (which they should champion) and non-evidence-based medicine, which they should not. This e-mail comes from someone who wishes to remain anonymous:
Time after time I've read Orac's accounts of woo infiltrating the medical community. Last month I witnessed its encroachment into the Ohio State University. Each year…
oracknows | November 9, 2007Now this is unexpected.
Normally, I find my victims/targets/subjects for my usual end-of-the-workweek bit of fun and skepticism from one of two sources. Either a reader sends a link to some woo or other that desperately deserves a little bit of Orac's loving attention, or in my wanderings across blogosphere I find some little (or huge) bit of woo that catches my attention and holds it long enough to make the case for a spot on my weekly feature. This time around it was different. While applying a sorely needed bit of skepticism to a story that's been going around the more credulous parts of…
denialism | November 9, 2007Multiple news sources have been covering this recent article in JAMA (1) which provides epidemiological evidence that being overweight (but not obese) may decrease the risk of some illnesses, while not increasing one's overall mortality from cardiovascular disease.
Given that we've talked about overweight and obesity recently on the blog, I think it's worthwhile to go over these findings in context, and discuss what this paper, and related ones in the literature, actually mean in terms of our health.
Sorry, the news is not all good, you don't want to start putting on the pounds, and the…
terrasig | November 8, 2007About 10 days ago, I wrote a post on my thoughts regarding gender issues in science and medicine. In the post, I made note of the recent recruitment of Nancy Andrews, MD, PhD, from Harvard to become the new medical school dean at Duke University. In my post, I noted:
What would normally be a modestly newsworthy story for a dean who happened to be a man is instead noted in the press release and on the webpage as:
Andrews, 48, is the first woman to be appointed dean of Duke's School of Medicine and becomes the only woman to lead one of the nation's top 10 medical schools.
When I read that, I…
j7uy5 | November 8, 2007Athletic regulatory bodies have a new headache.
This time, the pain is being caused by placebos (an
unexpected side effect!)
As
href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19626285.400-placebo-boost-is-a-conundrum-for-sports-regulators.html">reported
in New Scientist, athletes have found
that they can exert themselves to a greater extent, while under the
influence of opioid pain killers. That is not permitted in
competition, of course, but there is a wrinkle. If they train
while under the influence, then get a placebo prior to competition,
their brains react to the placebo as if…
oracknows | November 8, 2007I hadn't intended to write about this again, at least not for a while, but curiosity got the better of me. About a month and a half ago, I discussed a highly dubious story that was going around by e-mail about a 17-year-old boy with melanoma whose mother supposedly "cured" him with "natural" treatments. As you might imagine, the story was riddled with incorrect-sounding medical information and inconsistencies. Earlier this week, through a highly credulous blogger going by the 'nym the Angry Scientist, I became aware of an update to the story, in which the names of the mother and child (Laurie…
sb admin | November 8, 2007
A depiction of delusional parasitosis in Dave Kellett's webcomic Sheldon. DP, a fixed delusion in which one believes s/he is infested with bugs despite no evidence, was famously described in Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly. Superblogger and psychologist Vaughan Bell wrote a nice article on the subject, check it out.
Thanks again, Dave, for permission to share your comic (with slightly modified layout to make it blog-friendly).
oracknows | November 7, 2007Along with Dr. R. W., I've become known for my rather vociferously expressed dismay at the ever increasing infiltration of unscientific and non-evidence-based woo in the form of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) into academic medical centers. Well, thanks to a reader, I've seen a vision of the future of American medicine, and it's frightening. Imagine, if you will, an academic medical center where the infiltration of woo is complete, where all manner of "alternative" modalities are viewed as equal or even superior to our unfeeling and nonwholistic scientific medicine.
Imagine, if…
j7uy5 | November 7, 2007A recent study indicates that the lifetime cost of medical
care for
Iraq and Afghanistan veterans will be greater than the cost of the war
to date. We really have no choice, but it is going to cost
us. A lot. Of course, the ones really paying are
the troops themselves. From Medscape (free registration
required).
href="http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/565407">High
Rate of PTSD in Returning Iraq War Veterans
Bob Roehr
November 6, 2007 (Washington, DC)
—
Estimates of the rate of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among
veterans returning from Iraq range from 12% to 20%. With…
oracknows | November 7, 2007This is getting depressing.
Yesterday, I did a brief post on the tragic story of a nine month old baby named Gloria Thomas whose father, a homeopath, put his faith in homeopathic medicines to treat her severe eczema and who as a consequence did not receive the necessary medical treatment she needed and died of massive sepsis, probably from a staph infection of her skin. It was clearly a case where faith in an irrational and unscientific system of medicine directly contributed to an unnecessary death by delaying necessary care.
But misguided faith in alternative medicine is not the only kind…
oracknows | November 6, 2007Panda Bear MD has posted the second part of his series about the irrationality behind much of "alternative" (a.k.a. non-evidence-based) medicine. He makes an excellent point:
At no time however, will your physicians ever promise a magic cure, a therapy that will definitively fix the problem with no ill effects leaving alone the precarious balance of your fantastically complicated body. At best they will promise good results with minimal and easily tolerated side effects. At worst the therapies they will reluctantly propose are almost as bad as the disease they will ameliorate and the subject…
grrlscientist | November 6, 2007tags: researchblogging.org, supermouse, Phosphoenolpyruvate Carboxykinase, PEPCK-C, glucose metabolism
Like a Lance Armstrong equivalent among ordinary mice, a group of American scientists report that they altered a single gene involved in glucose metabolism in a mouse and discovered that this genetically altered mouse demonstrates remarkable athletic abilities. For example, this supermouse runs 20 meters per minute for five hours or more without stopping -- a distance of 3.7 miles (6 kilometers)!
"They are metabolically similar to Lance Armstrong biking up the Pyrenees. They utilize…