medicine
oracknows | August 23, 2007This story's been floating around the blogosphere for a few days now, and I've been wanting to weigh in. Basically, Medicare is saying that it will no longer pay for conditions and treatments that result from hospital errors. Sounds reasonable on the surface, right? After all, if a surgeon leaves a sponge in a patient, why should the patient or the patient's insurance company have to pay for the extra operation that it takes to remove the object and the additional hospital time? Most surgeons, at least, don't charge a fee for the reoperation to remove a retained surgical instrument or object…
oracknows | August 22, 2007Good news! Dr. Roy Kerry, the quack whose careless use of intravenous chelation therapy for autism resulted in the death of a five year old autistic boy named Abubakar Tariq Nadama, will be charged with involuntary manslaughter:
PITTSBURGH - A doctor was charged with involuntary manslaughter Wednesday for administering a chemical treatment that state police say killed a 5-year-old autistic boy.
The child, Abubakar Tariq Nadama, went into cardiac arrest at Dr. Roy E. Kerry's office immediately after undergoing chelation therapy on Aug. 23, 2005.
Chelation removes heavy metals from the body…
grrlscientist | August 22, 2007tags: researchblogging.org, Egyptian Rousette, Egyptian fruit bat, Rousettus aegyptiacus, Marburg hemorrhagic fever virus, Ebola hemorrhagic fever virus, Uganda, zoonoses, pathogen
Portrait of an Egyptian Rousette or Egyptian fruit bat, Rousettus aegyptiacus.
Image: Wikipedia
Like something out of a sci-fi novel, a man from Uganda died a horrible, bloody death from Marburg hemorrhagic fever this past July. As a result, scientists from the USA and the African nation of Gabon raced to the area to search for the source of this disease, and they may have finally discovered it. The team tested…
oracknows | August 22, 2007Fellow SB'er Tara Smith, and academic neurologist Steve Novella have written an essential primer on the dangerous pseudoscience and quackery that is HIV/AIDS denialism. It's published in PLoS and is entitled HIV Denial in the Internet Era.
It makes a number of excellent points about the deadly quackery that is HIV/AIDS denialism, including how its advocates portray science as "faith," shift the goalposts when asking for evidence for the HIV/AIDS hypothesis, and in general engage in all the same sorts of logical and scientific fallacies beloved by pseudoscientists and cranks like creationists…
oracknows | August 22, 2007Thanks to Blake, I now have The Enemies of Reason, Part 2:
My review of this episode is below the fold. I managed to BitTorrent the episode and watch it on my laptop on my flight back from Chicago last night. If you don't want to be influenced by my opinion before watching, watch the episode first and then see if you agree with my assessment.
Part 2 of Richard Dawkins' The Enemies of Reason, The Irrational Health Service, is, as you might imagine, right up my alley. Moreover, it's the stronger of the two parts of this documentary in many ways, although I think it continues the theme of…
j7uy5 | August 22, 2007In 2005, there was a plague. It started
inadvertently, as
most do, but spread rapidly, resulting in many deaths.
Officials scrambled to find a solution. Eventually
it was contained.
The plague was caused by a miscoded spell (
href="http://wiredblogs.tripod.com/gadgets/index.blog?entry_id=1230071">Corrupted
Blood), in the massively-multiplayer
online role-playing game (
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MMORPG" rel="tag">MMORPG),
href="http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/index.xml">World of
Warcraft. The people who died were not
real people. Nonetheless, it may be that the…
clock | August 21, 2007My Scibling Tara Smith together with Steven Novella, published an article in PLoS Medicine last week that all frequent readers of science blogs will find interesting:
HIV Denial in the Internet Era:
Because these denialist assertions are made in books and on the Internet rather than in the scientific literature, many scientists are either unaware of the existence of organized denial groups, or believe they can safely ignore them as the discredited fringe. And indeed, most of the HIV deniers' arguments were answered long ago by scientists. However, many members of the general public do not…
oracknows | August 21, 2007I've been meaning to mention this post by Sid Schwab of Surgeonsblog for a while now. It's a wonderful example of how nothing heals like surgical steel in even the most humble-seeming conditions. In this case, he's talking about anal fissures, a condition that makes defecation very painful. It turns out that, for cases that won't heal with conservative measures, there's a very simple and underutilized operation that can be done in the office known as the lateral sphincterotomy, which can relieve the pain and in essence "cure" the condition instantly. Few operations provide such instant…
oracknows | August 20, 20071-899-SCAMDOC? Want an double decker MRSAwich--with extra MRSA? Or how about prolotherapy? (But don't forget the pixie dust!)
(Via Kevin, MD.)
oracknows | August 20, 2007After a lot of the not-so-Respectful Insolence⢠of the last couple of weeks, I've been meaning to get back to living up to the name of the overall mega-blog, namely ScienceBlogs. Meeting up with my fellow SB'ers over the weekend in New York Fortunately, last week a topic just so happened to pop up related to my area of expertise, when a study in The Lancet was published evaluating the use of MRI in breast cancer. It happened to get a bit of press when it came out last month, some of it a bit breathless, as though this were a revolutionary observation. (To some extent it was unexpected, but…
oracknows | August 19, 2007Yes, I was there on Friday and Saturday, when more than half of the present complement of ScienceBloggers (a.k.a. "SB'ers" or "Sciblings") gathered in New York to meet, greet, and talk science, that is, between bouts of heavy drinking. (Fortunately, I was wise enough not to show up for the karaoke; if PZ's description is any indication, I wasn't nearly inebriated enough to enjoy it.) I didn't take nearly as many pictures as certain others there, one of whom bought a rather snazzy camera from a store on 42nd Street (something I would have cautioned him about, had I been there before Friday),…
oracknows | August 19, 2007Blog friend Abel over at Terra Sigillata pointed me to a story claiming that Oscar the Death Kitty, who became famous (or notorious) for his alleged ability to detect the impending death of residents of the nursing home at which he lives, so much so that some of the staff had even started calling family to tell them that time was short whenever the Grim Reaping Kitty curled up with their loved one, is no more:
PROVIDENCE, RI - Oscar, the nursing home cat who could seemingly sense the impending death of patients, was found dead early yesterday. The cat gained recent notoriety when reports of…
oracknows | August 18, 2007For those of you who missed it, Steve Colbert explains what DNA is with Twisty the DNA Helix:
DNA: It's what makes you you.
I do have to admit, though, that it irritated me when Colbert referred to DNA as a "wonder protein" even though I'm sure it was part of the joke...
oracknows | August 17, 2007I knew it.
I knew it wouldn't be long before this happened. About three weeks ago, we had the Oscar the Death Cat, a.k.a. the kitty of doom. Given the discussions of animals and death and speculation that other animals might be able to "predict" impending death, you knew it was coming.
Behold the Doggy of Death:
His name is Scamp, and he lives at a nursing home in Ohio:
Scamp, a Schnauzer, lives at The Pines nursing home in Ohio - where his owner, a staff member, claims he has been present for the death of virtually every patient for the past three years. That's around forty deaths, twice…
oracknows | August 17, 2007So, after nearly two weeks of torturing myself trying to put together an R01-level grant on short notice and make it actually competitive, I'm finally free. The grant has been submitted (amazingly, the online submission process went through without a hitch), and, sleep-deprived but still hopped up on the Sudafed that kept the mucus membranes in my nasal passages from exploding outward at a high velocity, scattering watery goo everywhere.
Not a pretty sight when it happens, hence the Sudafed.
Fortunately, the pollen has subsided to the level where I am only mildly miserable, allowing my…
j7uy5 | August 17, 2007How refreshing: a Presidential appointee speaks out
unequivocally
against Administration policy. This is from a Medscape
News article (free registration), which is from
Reuters Heath Information. The report quotes a professor of
Immunology who is on the
href="http://deainfo.nci.nih.gov/ADVISORY/pcp/pcpchr.htm">President's
Cancer Panel at the
rel="tag">National Cancer Institute.
href="http://www.mdanderson.org/departments/immunology/print.cfm?displayPrint=1&id=6BA754F9-6AD2-4220-93954E0F8682EE69&method=displayfull&pn=082E88E7-B295-43D1-94D38FA20872EC4E&PrintPage=…
denialism | August 17, 2007One of the problems with denialists is that they simply can't accept that science doesn't conform to their ideology. For instance, it's not enough to just be morally opposed to abortion, the anti-choice organizations have to misrepresent risks of the procedure, including promoting the false link (NCI) between abortion and breast cancer.
Recently, Talk to Action exposed the lies of Crisis Pregnancy centers, and the dishonest tactics they use to misrepresent the services they offer and lie about the risks of abortion. These centers which use federal money to misrepresent the science, are…
jstemwedel | August 16, 2007On the basis of this article about emissions from laser printers, our department administrator came by this week to take my HP 1200 series LaserJet away.
I said I wanted to keep it.
The worry is that the particles of toner emitted when printing with a laser printer may be just as bad for human health as secondhand cigarette smoke.
But ... I like my laser printer! It yields a higher quality printout than the inkjet printers I've used. And it's still working really well. And it's not like I'm printing stuff on it all day, every day. There are some days when I don't print anything at all.…
oracknows | August 16, 2007Yes!
As intelligent and powerful as he is, Orac has always lacked something, and that's mobility. He's always been more or less at the mercy of the humans with whom he travels when it comes to locomotion. In short, being a clear box of blinking lights, he has to be carried everywhere, sometimes in a rather undignified fashion:
In this week's edition of the Skeptics' Circle, Bronze Dog gives Orac exactly what he needs:
Yes, a giant robot! Controlling such awesome machinery directly, finally, Orac is unshackled from his dependence on irrational humans to take him where he wants to go!…