medicine
oracknows | October 24, 2007I've always wondered, as I'm sure many of my readers have, whether human beings have it in them to delay their own death, even briefly. Very early in the history of this blog, a mere 11 days after I started it, I discussed a study that strongly suggested that we cannot. In brief, it looked at the common belief that people dying from cancer can somehow, through sheer force of will, hold death at bay for brief periods of time, usually until some milestone that they wanted to see one more time is reached, be it a birthday, anniversary, holiday, or whatever. After they reach that milestone, the…
oracknows | October 23, 2007For those not in academic biomedical research, "PI" stands for "principal investigator"; i.e., the person who wrote the grant that funds the laboratory effort and (usually) the leader of the laboratory. Unlike Revere, I've only been a PI for around 8 years and an NIH-funded PI for only around two and a half years, I still remember what it was like to be a graduate student and then a postdoc laboring away under my PI, all for the greater glory of his name (and, hopefully, mine), as well as to produce preliminary data to bolster the next grant application.
Via Revere, I find this rather amusing…
oracknows | October 23, 2007Regular readers know that I've long been disturbed by the increasing infiltration of non-evidence-based "alternative" medical therapies into academic medical centers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8). I've come across another example of how much this has occurred. This time around, it's come in the form of a "debate" being held at 2 PM on Thursday, October 25 at the University of Connecticut Health Center entitled Homeopathy: Quackery Or A Key To The Future of Medicine? It's being touted thusly:
On October 25, 2007, the University of Connecticut Health Center will be hosting a historic debate on…
oracknows | October 22, 2007I was thinking of calling this post Jenny McCarthy and Julie Deardorff: Two crappy tastes that taste crappy together, but I've already used that joke with Jenny McCarthy and Oprah Winfrey. Besides, Julie Deardorff isn't nearly as famous as Oprah, although, as I've discussed before, she's probably even more credulous than Oprah towards the lastest dubious feel-good story about autism. Of course, this means that Deardorff and McCarthy are custom-made for each other, and, unfortunately, the antivaccination columnist for the Chicago Tribune has finally hooked up with the former Playmate of the…
clock | October 21, 2007More than 234 journals throughout the world will simultaneously publish articles devoted to the topic of poverty and human development tomorrow, on October 22nd, 2007. You can get more information, including the links to all the participating journals at The Council of Science Editors.
Out of those hundreds of papers, seven were specially chosen (by a panel of NIH and CSE experts) and will be presented, by their authors, at an event in Masur Auditorium, NIH Clinical Center (Bldg. 10) at 10 a.m. - 1:30 p.m. today. It is free for public, so if you are in the area, you should go and see this…
oracknows | October 19, 2007DNA is an amazing molecule. How evolution could have, over eons, fashioned such an amazingly simple yet complex method of storing biological information and coding the proteins that carry out the functions of life is one of the great wonders of biology. Harnessing the power of DNA, through genetic engineering, the study of the genome, and epigenetics, has allowed scientists a deeper insight than ever before possible into diseases as diverse as cancer, cardiovascular disease, and inherited metabolic disorders, to name a few. I manipulate DNA in my laboratory, in order to make it do my bidding…
sb admin | October 19, 2007
Look Around You: Brain. "The brain is basically a wrinkled bag of skin filled with warm water, veins, and thought muscles. ... The opposite of the brain is probably the bum." Brief vintage BBC parody of science education films about the brain. Watch through to the end, when a brain in a jar is rewarded with a special treat for performing a task.
moleculeoftheday | October 18, 2007Lewisite is nasty stuff, which I'll cover tomorrow. Tonight, it's an antidote, which is simply the dithio analogue of glycerine. It enjoys the more colorful name of BAL, or British Anti-Lewisite.
BAL is an antidote to Lewisite. It's one of the few compounds that enjoys the use of a longish common name in the literature because, honestly, it's just such a great name. "British Anti-Lewisite." I much prefer it to 1,2-dithioglycerol or anything like that...
Being a geometrically fortunate dithiol, BAL is an antidote to many other heavy metals. Dunno if anyone pays attention to the chiral center.
oracknows | October 18, 2007PZ seems to think that the whole "LOL" thing has gone too far. He may be right. In fact, I've even commented on it before.
Even though I have a bit of trouble wrapping my mind around the whole "LOLCats" phenomenon and its various bizarre spinoffs, I do have to admit that I've found one LOL spinoff that's pretty darned amusing.
Are you ready for LOLQuacks?
Some examples:
OK, I know the above has nothing to do with quackery, but as a fan of the Fantastic Four and a connoisseur of pareidolia, I couldn't resist. On with a few homeopathy-related examples:
This one is amusing because I…
oracknows | October 18, 2007Whatever criticisms I may have had for prominent atheists like Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris otherwise, one area that I'm totally down with both of them on is their criticism of the undue respect and consideration we as a society give to religious ideas. This consideration is rarely, if ever, based on the merit of the ideas, but rather solely because they are religious ideas. Many of these ideas, if they were not based on religion, wouldn't be given anywhere near the respect or deference that they are now. But, because they are based on a faith in the supernatural, for some reason we as a…
oracknows | October 17, 2007Via Health Care Renewal, I've learned of a study that, certain people may be surprised to learn, troubles me. Published yesterday in JAMA, it is, as far as I know, the most comprehensive quantification of one type of tie between industry and academia, specifically how many department chairs have ties to industry and what kind. Here's the abstract:
Institutional Academic-Industry Relationships
Eric G. Campbell, PhD; Joel S. Weissman, PhD; Susan Ehringhaus, JD; Sowmya R. Rao, PhD; Beverly Moy, MD; Sandra Feibelmann, MPH; Susan Dorr Goold, MD, MHSA, MA
JAMA. 2007;298:1779-1786.
Context…
denialism | October 17, 2007WaPo reports on the appointment of Susan Orr:
The Bush administration again has appointed a chief of family planning programs at the Department of Health and Human Services who has been critical of contraception.
Susan Orr, most recently an associate commissioner in the Administration for Children and Families, was appointed Monday to be acting deputy assistant secretary for population affairs. She will oversee $283 million in annual grants to provide low-income families and others with contraceptive services, counseling and preventive screenings.
In a 2001 article in The Washington Post,…
cevans | October 17, 2007Dr. Oliver Sacks is a rare bird in the world of medicine: not only is he one the country's top neurologists, but he also has a knack for weaving clinical profiles of his most exceptional patients into lovely, thoughtful books that open up the complex workings of our minds to the peering eyes of layfolk. His charm has much to do with the fact that he's the embodiment of a long-musty archetype of scientist: blustery, with a lisp, brilliant, and eccentric, a member of the American Fern Society, and fascinated with fluorescent minerals.
His latest book, Musicophilia, tackles our intimate mental…
oracknows | October 17, 2007I've written before about how one of the favorite tactics of those who do not like my insistence on applying skepticism, science, and critical thinking to the claims of alternative medicine or my refusal to accept a dichotomy between "alternative" and "conventional" medicine is to try so smear me as some sort of "pharma shill." It's happened so often ever since my Usenet days that I even sometimes joke about it preemptively sometimes when writing skeptical posts or make smart aleck comments asking where I can sign up to get those big checks from big pharma, given that they'd almost certainly…
oracknows | October 16, 2007I know, I've been a bad blogger about this lately, but better late than never. A couple of blog carnivals for you:
surgeXperiences #106
Cancer Research Blog Carnival #2
Grand Rounds, vol. 4, no. 4
oracknows | October 16, 2007Work and a conference intervene to prevent a fresh dose of Respectful Insolence today. Fortunately, there's still classic Insolence from the archives that hasn't been moved over to the new blog. This one originally appeared on March 7, 2005.
The short answer is: Yes. The long answer is below.
When I first posted on this yesterday, I had hoped things weren't as they appeared. Although representing himself as a free-thinking skeptic who proudly trumpets his atheism and calls religion a "neurologic disorder," Bill Maher has, sadly, apparently officially passed from the realm of "smug but…
j7uy5 | October 15, 2007Yeah. Private companies are always more efficient
that government programs. According to a
href="http://www.commondreams.org/news2007/1015-06.htm">recent
study by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee:
The private Part D insurers report
administrative expenses, sales costs, and profits of almost $5 billion
in 2007 -- including $1 billion in profits alone. The administrative
costs of the privatized Part D program are almost six times higher than
the administrative costs of the traditional Medicare program.
Another tidbit:
The drug price
rebates negotiated by the…
clock | October 15, 2007Just watching someone give a talk is often not enough to remember it later. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. And certainly, seeing is believing. But, this presentation is impossible to forget, even if one would rather not remember it so vividly. Oh, and it was absolutely NSFW!
Obligatory Reading of the Day.
oracknows | October 15, 2007It's rare that one sees an editorial this spot on, but it happened a couple of days ago in The Washington Post:
The debate over vaccine litigation has thus shifted from a presumption of innocence to a presumption of guilt. While the number of major studies that have failed to find any substantive link between vaccines and developmental disorders or autism is now in the double-digits (including a September 27th CDC study in the New England Journal), critics are effectively demanding that scientists prove that thimerosal does not cause illness -- an impossible standard.
The very success of…
oracknows | October 15, 2007About a week ago, I wrote about how the wooiest of woo, reiki, has infiltrated one of the best academic trauma centers in the U.S. In it, I lamented that I was feeling increasingly alone in being disturbed by this infiltration of religious pseudoscience into bastions of scientific medicine.
Fortunately for me, Dr. RW is as dismayed as I am:
Out here in the hinterlands I can only wonder what's going on in academic medicine these days. Is there anyone there for whom the standards of science mean anything at all? Well, there must be. There are plenty of people who teach and write about evidence…