medicine
oracknows | October 3, 2007Yes, it's true that PZ probably gets ten times the amount of crank e-mail that I do. It's also true that, because he has the most popular ScienceBlog, his readers have a tendency to put extra effort into their "correspondence" with him. But I do occasionally get the long, rambling screed from an alternative medicine aficionado or a tirade from a Holocaust denier telling me that Hitler was actually a really great guy who couldn't possibly have ordered the extermination of European Jewry. But, what am I to make of this e-mail? (Below the fold):
From: Adam Smith
To: oracknows@gmail.com
DateOct…
oracknows | October 3, 2007One of the stranger aspects of being a general surgeon or a colorectal surgeon can be summed up by this abdominal X-ray (click on the picture for a bigger image):
Yep. From time to time, every general surgeon will be called upon to pull something out of someone's ass. It's not super common, but common enough that pretty much every general surgeon's seen a few. In the case above, it would appear that the offending object is an aerosol can. I know what you're probably thinking first: Why? I also know what you're thinking next: How? (As in: How on earth did he get that up there?)
Believe me,…
oracknows | October 2, 2007Last week, I wrote about an overhyped acupuncture study that purported to show (but didn't, really) that acupuncture is more effective than "conventional" therapy in the treatment of low back pain. This story reverberated through the Internet and blogosphere as "proof" that acupuncture "works" when in reality the study was very weak evidence of any effect due to needles being placed into the skin and only showed that meridians are a meaningless concept (i.e., the finding that sham acupuncture was just as effective "real" acupuncture). If acupuncture does do anything, this study was pretty…
oracknows | October 1, 2007I've written a lot about dichloroacetate, a.k.a. DCA (my last post here, along with links to my previous posts), the small molecule drug that burst onto the scene after Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta published a paper in Cancer Cell in January describing strong anti-tumor activity in preclinical models (in this case, a rat model) of several different cancers.
Scientifically, DCA is interesting because, unlike many previous chemotherapeutic agents, it targets the energetics of the cell, specifically an alteration in cancer cells known as the Warburg effect. This is an idea…
oracknows | October 1, 2007One of the best retorts to the claims of faith healers is the simple question: If faith healing works such miracles, why has there never been a documented case of faith healing regrowing an amputated limb? Now that would be truly miraculous. That would make even a curmudgeonly old skeptic like me sit up an take notice.
Now, a woman named Carole Miller McCleery-Greene is claiming just that; so I had to check it out.
When I came across this Carole's site on a mailing list, I originally filed it away, thinking it would make a good installment of Your Friday Dose of Woo. Then I thought about it.…
oracknows | September 30, 2007I think the title says it all. Perfect!
Whoever wrote the book sure knows her potential readers!
oracknows | September 29, 2007Science and medicine are beautiful things. The range of knowledge and research that can be encompassed under their rubric is truly astounding. Indeed, some scientists have all the luck. Some scientists seem to have all the luck. Some scientists seem able to latch onto the best projects:
London, England (CNS) - There is one scientist who is using his knowledge of anatomy to help Hollywood look even more perfect.
Patrick Mallucci has thoroughly researched pictures of celebrity women to compile images of the best looking breasts. His work is supposed to help plastic surgeons create the perfect…
omnibrain | September 28, 2007Ok... maybe not for real reals but there are some brain eating amoebas taking over the world. Ok maybe they're not taking over the world but they really (for real this time!) have killed a few people.
According to the AP:
A killer amoeba living in lakes enters the body through the nose and attacks the brain where it feeds until you die.
Even though encounters with the microscopic bug are extraordinarily rare, it's killed six boys and young men this year. The spike in cases has health officials concerned, and they are predicting more cases in the future.
Panic!!! Don't swim in lakes! You…
oracknows | September 28, 2007Because if you're going to make health claims and claim to treat patients, you should be held just as accountable as any physician:
A Carson City "anti-aging" doctor has pleaded guilty to malpractice for failing to diagnose an elderly patient with the cancer that ultimately killed him.
It is Dr. Frank Anthony Shallenberger's second discipline by the Nevada Board of Medical Examiners in 12 years.
Shallenberger's plea last week regarding patient David Horton's care came on the heels of the board's dismissal of another family's complaint related to Shallenberger's treatment of their sister,…
oracknows | September 28, 2007
In looking back at all the various bizarre incarnations of woo that I've covered during the last year or so since I started doing Your Friday Dose of Woo, I was wondering if there was a form of woo that I had not covered yet. Woo seems to come in several forms, such as energy woo, water woo, pH woo, "detoxification" woo, religious woo, and psychic woo, among others, with certain themes that just keep recurring over and over. I'm sure there's enough material there for a Ph.D. thesis on the classification of woo, if some intrepid graduate student were interested. For this week, I was looking…
grrlscientist | September 27, 2007tags: blog carnivals, medicine, all things medical
The September issue of All Things Medical blog carnival is now available for you to read and enjoy. It appears that I have quite a few submissions to this blog carnival, so I think you should go over there and give them some support by poking through their linked stories, you know, just so I can extend my influence over the known world and stuff like that.
oracknows | September 27, 2007Damn that Factitian! Now he's gone too far! In hosting the 70th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle, he's revealed some of the deepest darkest secrets of the Skeptical Atheistic Darwinist Scientific Conspiracy to Conquer All (SADSCCA), also known as The Conspiracy Factory in some circles. And you'll never believe who the leader of the conspiracy from whom we all take our marching orders is!
I may have to become more insolent and less respectful. After all, our leader has commanded it:
Yes. Put Orac on it. And someone tell him to stop being so respectful, and more insolent. I prefer the insolence…
grrlscientist | September 27, 2007tags: blog carnivals, nature, science, medicine, tangled bank
Good news, everyone; the 89th edition of The Tangled Bank blog carnival is now available for you to enjoy. Sorry I am late with this announcement, but you know, shit is what happens as you try to life your life.
oracknows | September 27, 2007I'm almost beginning to feel sorry for the mercury militia.
Think about it. They've been claiming for the past several years that the mercury in the thimerosal used as a preservative in childhood vaccines is a cause of autism. If you believe Generation Rescue, A-CHAMP, SAFEMINDS, and various other activist groups, vaccines are the root of all neurodevelopmental evil, culminating in what to them seems to be the most evil of evil condition, autism. Yet, in study after study in the new millennium, no correlation has been found to implicated their favorite bête noire thimerosal, which serves as…
oracknows | September 26, 2007I hadn't thought of this possible consequence of global warming before if homeopathy were actually true, but it's frightening to contemplate.
Fortunately, I think that even in this case the level of dilution wouldn't be enough.
oracknows | September 26, 2007Never let it be said that Orac doesn't give the people what they want.
Well, most of the time, anyway.
What I'm referring to is a recent German study about acupuncture for low back pain that's been making its way around the media. I had actually been planning on commenting about it yesterday, but Iranian President (and Holocaust denier) Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speech at Columbia University intervened and took me on one of my occasional diversions away from science and medicine into the history of the Holocaust, Holocaust denial, and politics. In just that two day interval, I've been deluged…
j7uy5 | September 26, 2007I was prompted to rant again about health insurance, after
reading a post at Blogcritics. The author was highly critical
of the
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/25/AR2007092501474.html">SCHIP
proposals.
href="http://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/09/25/185410.php">SCHIP:
It's for the Insurance Companies, Not the Children
Written by Dave Nalle
Published September 25, 2007
Whenever someone in government makes a proposal and says it's 'for the
children' you know you're about to be screwed. The 'for the chidren'
argument is one of pure emotion…
j7uy5 | September 25, 2007The long-awaited details of the Hillary Clinton health care
finance
plan have been revealed. The plan has received lukewarm
support
from columnists at NYT (
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/21/opinion/21krugman.html?hp">Paul
Krugman) and
href="http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9833354"
rel="tag">The Economist.
It has been criticized by
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitt_Romney" rel="tag">Mitt
Romney, oddly, as it is
href="http://colorado.mediamatters.org/items/200709200002">quite
similar to the plan he enacted while governor of…
omnibrain | September 25, 2007
From the official website:
Hypochondriacs have long had to satisfy their needs for self-diagnosis with medical reference materials written for the masses, but this revolutionary book is dedicated entirely to the hypochondriac's unique perspective on health. The world's worst maladies, conveniently organized by symptom (real or imagined), will ignite even the mildest hypochondriac's fantasy life. We're all going to die of something--why not choose an ailment that's rare and hard to pronounce?
Features:
* Profiles of over 300 deadly diseases
* Organized by symptom for ease of self-…
j7uy5 | September 24, 2007A new report on sleep disorders in pain patients reveals a
not-very-surprising finding: chronic opioid treatment is associated
with very high incidences of both obstructive and central sleep apnea.
href="http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/81771.php">Higher
Risk Of Sleep Apnea When Patients Use Opioid-Based Pain Medications
Opioid-based pain medications may cause sleep apnea, according to an
article in the September issue of Pain Medicine, the journal of the
American Academy of Pain Medicine.
"We found that sleep-disordered breathing was common when chronic pain
patients…