medicine
oracknows | October 15, 2007Today is a very sad day in the autism blogosphere. The news I am going to discuss saddens me and should sadden anyone concerned with autism, particularly in combating the antivaccination hysteria and the outright quackery that flows from it promulgated by so many these days, from J. B. Handley to Jenny McCarthy, who couldn't be more different other than their being twits.
One of the longest-running and best autism blogs, Left Brain, Right Brain, is closing.
It would be one thing if the trials and tribulations of everyday life had led Kev to make this decision, as they do for so many other…
denialism | October 15, 2007The inability to achieve erection has been a source of consternation for men for, well, a really long time. But the recent history of treatments for impotence, wait, I mean Erectile Dysfunction, oh no, now they're calling it Male Sexual Dysfunction, represents a medical revolution. In the last 100 or so years, we've gone from nonspecific and largely ineffective treatments, to progressively more successful treatment, finally resulting in a highly specific and effective pharmaceutical solution to the problem. The goal of this post is to share a history of this unique field of medical…
oracknows | October 14, 2007Yes indeed, if you ever want to cite any of the pearls of brilliance laid down on a regular basis here, you can. Heck, you can even cite comments on blogs!
So now you know.
Here's a sample citation.
oracknows | October 14, 2007About a week ago, I posted about a truly execrably credulous article on alternative medicine published at CNN.com, which basically took a panel of true believers and asked them which five alternative medicine modalities had the best evidence to show that they "work."
Now, Steve Novella weighs in. His key point, with which I agree, is that "alternative" medicine advocates (or "complementary and alternative medicine," or CAM) have been wildly successful in framing their favored woo as being on an equal footing with "conventional" medicine, all the while carving out a double standard that allows…
oracknows | October 13, 2007The Skeptical Surfer informs me of a rather disturbing programming decision by PBS:
I first caught wind of the autism film "Beautiful Son" through the surfing community. Surf filmmaker Don King has an autistic son. Being a filmmaker, Don always has a video camera at hand and has documented his "journey" of discovering that his child has autism. This, along with other footage and interviews, have become a film about autism called "Beautiful Son."
[...]
The film has not yet premiered, but there is enough supporting evidence via a web site and film preview to draw a few conclusions. Let's start…
oracknows | October 12, 2007Woo-meisters will not be pleased. While perusing this week's Skeptics' Circle, I was reminded of something that I had meant to post about a couple of days ago.
I don't know how he did it or where he got it, but somehow he has found the Holy of Holies for woos everywhere. He found The Woo Handbook. In it, he finds the twenty main strategies for dealing with Skeptics. They're pretty much all there: shifting the goalposts, labeling skeptics as "close-minded," introducing quantum mechanics, and appeals to ignorance, along with #18, the technique of woos that probably annoys me the most (at least…
oracknows | October 12, 2007
Regular readers of this blog are probably aware of my general opinion about Reiki and other "energy healing" modalities. In short, they're woo, pure and simple. Consequently, one might reasonably ask why I've never featured the woo that is Reiki in Your Friday Dose of Woo. There's a simple reason for that.
Basic Reiki is boring.
Really, I mean it. In and of itself, it just doesn't reach the level of sheer ecstatic nuttiness that I like to feature every week. Oh, sure, there's lots of handwaving about "channeling the universal energy" through the healer to augment the life force of the…
moleculeoftheday | October 12, 2007Diazolidinyl urea is a broad-spectrum biocide that is ubiquitous in cosmetics:
It does an admirable job. You'll see it EVERYWHERE once you start reading labels. It tends to be pretty benign, but a contact allergy can result, which makes it hard to find a usable suite of hygeine products for those afflicted.
oracknows | October 11, 2007One of the biggest complaints from alternative medicine practitioners is that some vast cabal, presumably made up big pharma, the CDC, the NIH, the AMA, and "conventional" doctors, is "suppressing" alternative medicine. Yes, true believers like, say, Mike Adams will claim that big pharma is going to suppress their free speech about "alternatives" and thus deny you your "heath freedom," which is in reality the freedom of quacks to push quackery without being hassled by pesky things like government agencies requiring that practitioners practice evidence-based medicine.
So what happens when…
terrasig | October 11, 2007[Aufmerksamkeit! Begrüßen Sie deutsche Freunde und Leser des Focus Wissenschafts-Community. Glückwünsche zu Profs Ertl und Grünberg auf dieser enormen Ehre!]
I'm intentionally being dramatic but an interesting discussion emerged in the comment thread of my post on the work of Germany's Gerhard Ertl being recognized with this year's Nobel Prize for Chemistry. One reader had a perception that the work of an American contributor to surface chemistry was being ignored. Dr Gerald Harbison followed up on this notion at his own blog, The Right Wing Professor.
Indeed, the three scientists that…
clock | October 11, 2007Ghosts, drugs, and blogs:
By its hidden nature, it is obviously a challenge to determine the exact prevalence of "ghost management," defined by Sismondo as the phenomenon in which "pharmaceutical companies and their agents control or shape multiple steps in the research, analysis, writing, and publication of articles."
Of course they fight against Open Access Publishing - too much sunshine scares them and would make them scurry away in panic...
oracknows | October 11, 2007I should have guessed.
Leave it to uber-crank (a. k. a. One Crank To Rule Them All) Mike Adams, the "intellect" behind what is perhaps the crankiest website known to humankind (at least when it comes to medicine), NewsTarget.com, to try to slime Breast Cancer Awareness Month. As fellow ScienceBlogger Mark points out, in his "report" Breast Cancer Deception, Adams accomplishes this by characterizing Breast Cancer Awareness month as nothing more than part of a conspiracy by the "male-dominated" cancer industry to keep women down.
I have to admit, in the realm of sheer wingnuttery, I've seldom…
denialism | October 11, 2007I will never forget the very first patient history I ever took. Part of medical school training is they send you onto the wards to gather patient histories and physicals so you learn to gather information effectively as a clinician. My first patient history was on a woman about 35 years old on the orthopedics ward, who was a triple-amputee. She had her legs removed below the thigh, and one arm amputated below the elbow. The cause was imminently preventable. She had type II diabetes that was poorly controlled. She was obese, weighing about 180 lbs despite the removal of large parts of…
oracknows | October 10, 2007Here we are, a third of the way into Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and I haven't yet written a piece about breast cancer. Given that it's my primary surgical specialty, perhaps some readers were wondering why not. Truth be told, I've always been a bit ambivalent about Breast Cancer Awareness month. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that my job makes every month Breast Cancer Awareness month. Or maybe it has something to do with the crassness of some of the promotions designed to attract donations, well-meaning though such campaigns undoubtedly are. From my perspective, any month…
denialism | October 10, 2007The first from the NYT discusses the fallacy that childhood illness somehow builds up the immune system making them healthier adults. Rather, it emphasizes correctly, that exposure to lots of harmless antigens seems to be the key to making kids less susceptible to asthma and allergies, not exposure to harmful ones. In other words, let your kids go outside and eat dirt, but don't take them to chicken-pox parties (vaccinate them instead).
In a similar vein, Slate has an articleon eating more crap. While the point is made more carelessly, the idea is the same, that exposure to common…
oracknows | October 10, 2007One of the most important responsibilities of health care workers and hospitals is to protect the privacy of the patients for whom they care. Unfortunately, in the case of George Clooney's recent hospitalization for injuries sustained in a motorcycle crash, a consequence of electronic medical records was revealed when dozens of employees, some of whom apparently leaked the information to the press, accessed Clooney's medical records. Of course, these employees didn't seem to realize that EMRs allow the tracking and identification of anyone who logs on to the system. Anyone who logs on leaves…
oracknows | October 10, 2007One development that will increasingly pose an interesting and perhaps uncomfortable question for newspapers is the increasing addition of blogs run under the banner of newspapers. I'm not sure if it's cluelessness about the blogosphere leading newspapers to think that they can have bloggers write whatever they want under the newspaper's banner and not have it reflect on their reptuation, but reputable papers have in some cases allowed some seriously credulous people to spread misinformation in a seemingly respectable form.
This thought occurred to me when I was made aware of a blog entry by…
denialism | October 10, 2007The latest crankery from Adams is the evil male-chauvinist conspiracy to perpetuate breast cancer for fun and profit being led by none other than those dastardly villains of the American Cancer Society. With his stunning report and links to the thinkbeforeyoupink campaign, he rails against the ribbons that are a "symbol of male-dominated control over women", and exposes the insidious lies of those who spend their lives looking for cures for this deadly disease.
In this report, you'll learn how the cancer industry -- which is dominated by powerful men -- uses the same tactics today to…
terrasig | October 9, 2007
The monthly Denver mag, 5280, made its way to Chez Pharmboy last week with a very familiar face staring back - and not because I've had a cardiac cath...yet!
w00t!
For our readers in the Queen City of the Plains, read more here about your favorite cardiologist.
oracknows | October 9, 2007On occasion, I've thought of inaugurating awards for the looniest quackery, alternative medicine, or antivaccination craziness of the year. I was thinking of calling them the Woo Awards, but I've never actually gotten off my lazy posterior to do the work it would take to set up some sort of voting system, and I'm not so sure that a list picked out only by me wouldn't just end up reflecting my personal idiosyncrasies. Be that as it may, with the end of the year fast approaching, if I were going to do it now would be the time to start looking for nominations.
If I were going to give a prize for…