medicine
j7uy5 | October 8, 2007This is from a site on Medscape, Infosite. It is a multimedia
program about
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2006/10/update_on_nrp104_less_potentia.php">Vyvanse®
(lisdexamfetamine dimesylate), a long-acting amphetamine. The
video is positively mind-blowing:
This shows a person who is about to take a Vyvanse capsule.
Next we see the capsule going down the esophagus.
Pretty much everything in the educational material has
already been covered here and elsewhere (
href="http://carlatpsychiatry.blogspot.com/2007/07/vyvanse-watch.html">1
href="http://richardgpettymd.…
oracknows | October 8, 2007No IgNobels here, the 2007 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Mario R. Capecchi, Martin J. Evans, and Oliver Smithies for a technique that is so incredibly important to modern biomedical research that it's a wonder they didn't get the prize before:
This year's Nobel Laureates have made a series of ground-breaking discoveries concerning embryonic stem cells and DNA recombination in mammals. Their discoveries led to the creation of an immensely powerful technology referred to as gene targeting in mice. It is now being applied to virtually all areas of biomedicine - from…
tqa | October 8, 2007
One of the alleged facts that President Bush loves to point at when he's trying to justify his veto of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (S-CHIP) expansion is that the new bill would have allowed New York to enroll children from families making up to 400% of the federal poverty level. For a family of four, that works out to an annual income of about $83,000. The President and his staff appear to find $83,000 to be a very impressive number. It's certainly one that they talk about a heck of a lot - as far as I can tell, everyone from the White House who has said anything about the…
oracknows | October 8, 2007Regular readers know that I've long been dismayed at the increasing infiltration of non-evidence-based "alternative" medical therapies into academic medical centers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7). It's gotten such a foothold that it's even showing up in the mandatory medical curriculum in at least one medical school. I've speculated before that academic medical centers probably see alternative medicine as both a marketing ploy to make themselves look more "humanistic" and a new revenue stream, given that most insurance companies won't pay for therapies without solid evidence of efficacy, meaning that…
terrasig | October 8, 2007This morning, Drs Mario R. Capecchi, Martin J. Evans, and Oliver Smithies were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries of "principles for introducing specific gene modifications in mice by the use of embryonic stem cells."
The technology for homologous recombination in embryonic stem cells permits specific targeting of genes for disruption or modification in the resulting animal. Known as transgenic gene "knockouts" (and more recently, "knock-ins"), the methodology has allowed the study of specific processes in normal development, adult physiology, and…
oracknows | October 7, 2007I've had this story sent to me by a few readers over the weekend, and I think it's worth a brief comment.
I'm basically a child of the 1970s. Although I didn't watch it much, if ever, I remember Charlie's Angels when I was in junior high and high school. Like any adolescent who came of age in the late 1970s, I remember the famous and hot-selling poster of Farrah Fawcett, which graced the bedroom of more than one of my friends, although I never actually owned a copy. A while back, I heard that Fawcett had been successfully treated for anal cancer. Now, I hear from my readers that her anal…
terrasig | October 7, 2007Via Clinical Cases and Images, I just learned that Mark Rabnett at the University of Manitoba has just compiled a comprehensive list of medical student bloggers.
No one source is complete, so I hope this list will be of help to the fevered mind that cannot rest until every blogging student in the health sciences has been tracked down. I see a permanent job for a few people who are willing to work for no salary while exposing themselves to resident evil, anger, fear, and cadaver fumes. As for me, if I don't wake up screaming I just may have to go back to renegotiating Nietzsche in the…
terrasig | October 6, 2007I've got to admit that I've really enjoyed reading Health Blog from the Wall Street Journal. Short, pithy, and great bites about health/pharma stories that make it into one of the best sources for news in the US (its op-ed page notwithstanding).
So, I was tickled on Friday to see Health Blog interview AggravatedDocSurg. Little did I know that the Aggravated One was a general surgeon in APB's former stomping grounds of The Centennial State.
Here was the quote that made the interview from one of his public service announcements.
We've got advertisements on TV continuously for Plavix. It's not…
oracknows | October 6, 2007Ah, yes, it's that time of year again. The winners of the 2007 IgNobel Prize have been announced. There have been several "worthy" winners, for example:
Mayu Yamamoto from Japan won the Ig Nobel prize in chemistry for her development of a novel way to extract vanillin, the main component in vanilla bean extract, from cow dung. In tribute to Yamamoto's achievement, Toscanni's imitated her achievement and distributed samples of the resulting ice cream to Nobel laureates seated on the stage. Loud chants of "Eat it! Eat it!" from the audience finally persuaded the skeptical Nobel laureates to try…
clock | October 6, 2007That is one very interesting idea! This provision is usually used for getting medicines to 3rd world countries in times of emergency. So, why not research papers if the emergency warrants it? Gavin writes:
Imagine a scenario in which a developing country is facing a national health emergency, and there's a research article that contains information that is highly relevant to addressing that emergency. Let's say the emergency is an alarmingly high rate of mother-to-child transmission of HIV, and a new study shows a major breakthrough in preventing such transmission. And let's say that…
grrlscientist | October 5, 2007The pathology tests are finally back regarding the sudden death of Alex the Congo African Grey parrot.
Alex died quickly. He had a sudden, unexpected catastrophic event associated with arterosclerosis ("hardening of the arteries"). It was either a fatal arrhythmia, heart attack or stroke, which caused him to die suddenly with appparently no suffering. There was no way to predict his demise. All of his tests, including his cholesterol level and aspergillosis levels, came back normal earlier that week. His death could not be connected to his current diet or his age; the veterinarian said that…
oracknows | October 5, 2007Some readers have been sending me links to this article on CNN.com entitled 5 Alternative Medicine Treatments That Work. Unfortunately, Your Friday Dose of Woo took up the time that normally would have gone into given this article the lovingly Respectfully Insolent⢠treatment that this utterly credulous article so richly deserves and that you, my faithful readers, demand. Fortunately Mark over at denialism.com has taken the time to fisk this one in detail. Does that mean Orac has nothing more to say on this article?
You know the answer to that one. Mark just made it so that I can restrain my…
tqa | October 5, 2007
I've spent part of this morning doing some fairly serious research on health insurance in the United States, and who doesn't have it. My curiosity on the subject was stirred up by a couple of things: after looking at a lot of DonorsChoose proposals from schools with high poverty rates, poverty is on my mind; and the President's veto of the Children's Health Insurance Program expansion got me thinking about what it actually means to be poor in this country, and what (if any) relationship the official poverty threshold has to actually being able to afford to provide for your family.
I was…
oracknows | October 5, 2007Over the last 15 months that this regular Friday feature has been in existence, I've come across some real doozies in the world of woo. Who could forget, for example, quantum gyroscopic theories of homeopathy? Or the DNA activation guy? Or the "no plane" conspiracy theory of 9/11? Or a certain disgusting "feedback loop" for curing cancer? A few others stand out from the pack, like Healing Sounds and Dr. Emoto, as rare examples of just the right amount of superficial plausibility married to over-the-top craziness to be memorable.
This week's installment might just be one of these. It is truly…
sb admin | October 5, 2007
Via The Center for Narcolepsy at Stanford School of Medicine], this video explains:
Various narcoleptic episodes in dogs. Sporadic cases of narcolepsy in dogs is due to hypocretin peptide deficiency while the familial form is due to mutations in one of the two hypocretin receptor genes (hcrtr2). Various dogs are shown here in a clip narrated by Dr. Emmanuel Mignot.
Or for the tabloid take, watch Skeeter the Narcoleptic Poodle from Inside Edition. "Skeeter's troubles staying awake are heartbreaking..."
Visit the Sleep Foundation to learn more.
oracknows | October 4, 2007I've made no secret how much contempt I have for Kevin Trudeau, whom I have likened to David Irving, at least with respect to his respect for the truth. He has made many, many millions of dollars selling books with titles like Natural Cures "They" Don't Want You to Know About and its followups, in which he claims that there are "natural" cures for all sorts of diseases that the usual cabal of big pharma, the AMA, and the FDA are keeping away from you--yes, you!--in order to protect the profits of big pharma and the hegemony of us "conventional" physicians. Obviously, Trudeau is a total hack…
denialism | October 4, 2007
The New England Journal has an article on the phenomenon known as chronic Lyme disease. Lyme disease, is a tick-borne infectious disease caused by an bacterium known as Borrelia burgdorferi carried by ticks in certain regions of the United States and Europe in which it is endemic. Here is the US map of cases below.
It can result in a fever-like illness with a characteristic rash (although not in all cases) called erythema migrans, and if left untreated, can cause more serious problems like arthritis, and cardiovascular and neurological complications.
A small number of people and doctors…
j7uy5 | October 3, 2007This device, a
href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071003/sc_nm/germany_pillow_life_dc">computerized
pillow, may have a medical justification. But I
would recommend caution.
Daryoush Bazargani, a computer science professor in Germany, has
invented a device that he
believes can be used to help stop a person from
href="http://www.entnet.org/healthinfo/snoring/snoring.cfm">snoring.
The
device uses a microphone to detect and analyze the noise of snoring.
It then adjusted air-filled bladders in the pillow to
reposition the person's head.
Snoring is one of the cardinal symptoms of…
tqa | October 3, 2007
There are times when I wish I was a right-wing hack. If I was, I could let the title of this post stand just as it is, and attack the President for his lack of support for military families. It is true, after all. He did just veto such an act. In fact, he did it twice! Our President, a man who uses the military as a backdrop for a photo op at least once a month, just vetoed both "The Support for Injured Servicemembers Act" and "The Military Family Job Protection Act."
If I was one of the many cogs in the Right-Wing Noise Machine, I would be able to take those facts - those incontrovertibly…
clock | October 3, 2007Before two papers passed the peer-review and got published, WHO (which was given the data) made its own interpretation of the findings and included it in its press kit, including the errors they made in that interpretation. A complex story - what's your take on it?