medicine
oracknows | August 16, 2007It's here, and it's on Google Video. I watched it last night, and it was a blistering attack on the irrationality that is so common in our society:
Part I begins with Richard Dawkins sitting in on some sort of New Age chanting ceremony (the discomfited look on his face is priceless to watch), after which he goes to a New Age fair, and concludes with an attack on the crappy science that lead to the MMR vaccine scare over autism in the U.K. In between, Dawkins takes on astrology, dowsers, spiritualists, and mediums, no holds barred.
Next Monday: Richard Dawkins versus alternative medicine.…
oracknows | August 16, 2007[Note: Part I is here.]
I tell ya, I stay up all night putting the finishing touches on a grant, and what happens? Mark Hoofnagle over at Denialism.com finds a real hum-dinger of stupidity published in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal. Unfortunately (or fortunately, given the rampant stupidity that appears to be going on in this article), I do not have a subscription to the WSJ; however, a little Googling found the whole text here. I've written about this conflict before, and it's a recurring theme in the multiple posts that I've done regarding dichloroacetate (DCA), the small…
j7uy5 | August 16, 2007This is from a small study, so it would be inappropriate to
draw a broad conclusion from it. Still, it is kind of
interesting.
href="http://baywood.metapress.com/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&backto=searchcitationsresults,2,2;">
href="http://baywood.metapress.com/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&backto=searchcitationsresults,2,2;">Bupropion
in the Treatment of Outpatients with Asthma and Major Depressive
Disorder
E. Sherwood Brown, Lana A. Vornik, David A. Khan, A. John Rush
The International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine
Issue:
Volume…
oracknows | August 15, 2007Remember a couple of months ago, when I discussed testimony at the Autism Omnibus trial that showed how Andrew Wakefield had failed to do the controls when running PCR that would have revealed that the results that he interpreted as the presence of the measles virus from a vaccine strain in the guts of autistic children was nothing more than a bunch of false positives due to widespread contamination of the laboratory with plasmid containing measles sequences?
It turns out that it's not just autism pseudoscientists who forget to do the right controls when running PCR. Mike the Mad Biologist…
denialism | August 15, 2007No. But the WSJ would like you to believe so.
One libertarian talking point I hear a lot (Cato of course loves this story), and is repeatedly pushed by the WSJ, is that the market and consumers should decide the safety and efficacy of drugs - not dirty gov'mint bureaucrats who want nothing but death and suffering for cancer patients. The latest is this commentary from Ronald Trowbridge and Steven Walker which has some fun with math to suggest the delay in approval of cancer drugs has led not to dozens, or hundreds, or thousands, but hundreds of thousands of premature deaths.
Is there…
oracknows | August 15, 2007I'm guessing there will be a lot of--shall we say?--disagreement with this one.
I'm always appropriately skeptical of IQ studies, including this one. However, if you actually believe this survey (and what physician wouldn't want to believe it?), apparently as a profession physicians have the highest IQ.
Heh. I wonder where M.D./Ph.D.'s like yours truly would rank on the scale.
I'm sure that there will be a horde of people telling me what's wrong with the survey and why its results are not valid, but please let me enjoy my little fantasy of intellectual superiority for at least a few minutes…
oracknows | August 15, 2007Yikes!
In my grant writing frenzy the last few days, this could easily have been me:
Jasmine Willis, 17, developed a fever and began hyperventilating after drinking seven double espressos while working at her family's sandwich shop.
The student, of Stanley, County Durham, was taken to the University Hospital of North Durham, where doctors confirmed she had overdosed on caffeine.
She has since made a full recovery and is now warning others about the dangers of excessive coffee drinking.
Ms Willis, who had thought the coffees were single measures, said the effects were so severe that she began…
oracknows | August 14, 2007Via Pure Pedantry, I've become aware of a post that resonates over here, given the recent series of posts I did about a certain comic who, unable to dispute the science behind global warming or the health hazards of secondhand smoke in any serious way, has a penchant for labeling scientists who support such positions and think that indoor smoking should be banned as fascists (or Maoist), power hungry, bureaucrats who don't view people as individuals, geeks who got beat up on the dodgeball court and are now taking their revenge, or avid players of role-playing games such as Dungeons &…
grrlscientist | August 14, 2007tags: research, medicine, grand rounds, blog carnivals
The 47th issue (third volume) of the medical blog carnival, Grand Rounds, is now available for you to read. There are 41 entries that they linked to, so there's plenty there to keep you informed and entertained.
oracknows | August 14, 2007It's that time of year again! Time for the one Center of the NIH dedicated to studying "remedies," regardless of how scientifically implausible or lacking in evidence to support them, the National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) to put forth its budget request for FY 2008. What's the bill for government-funded studies of woo?
$121,699,000.
Depressing. Let's see what the possible justification is for sending $121 million on studying things such as homeopathy:
Large numbers of American health care consumers are using CAM modalities in an effort to preempt disease and…
grrlscientist | August 13, 2007tags: science, nature, medicine, tangled bank, blog carnivals
Aaand yet another blog carnival was published today. This time, the 86th edition of the Tangled Bank blog carnival is now available. They also include a submission from me, so be sure to go over there to see what all the noise is about.
clock | August 13, 2007Sarah Wallace is interviewing some amazing people while doing her research in the Ukraine:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Obligatory Readings of the Day
choofnagle | August 13, 2007It's a few weeks old, but I just came across this oped in the San Francisco Chronicle by Robert Restuccia and Lydia Vaias. They've painted a big target on the American Medical Association for its role in prescription data mining. It's important to note exactly what AMA is doing here, because, from the oped, it appears that AMA is simply selling lists of doctors that are later enhanced for prescription mining purposes.
Few people recognize the role the AMA plays in making physician information available to companies that use it for pharmaceutical marketing purposes. The AMA sells information…
oracknows | August 13, 2007I debated for a while about whether or not I wanted to comment on this one. The reason, of course, is that, to some extent, I've commented on a similar article before. Also, given the utter contempt that the blogger who posted this series holds me in and his delusion that I am somehow "obsessed" with him, I worried that commenting about this series, which he posted with some fanfare, might feed that delusion some more. In the end, though, because the series was by someone other than this particular blogger and because, as before, it was presented as a stinging indictment of our system of…
oracknows | August 12, 2007
Science tattoos have been all the rage lately. Even though I'm a scientist, I'm also a surgeon; so naturally I was wondering if there was anything that I'd like to see too.
There is.
Over at Street Anatomy, there's a great collection of anatomy tattoos. Anyone who has any surgery-related tattoos, send a picture of them to me, and maybe I'll get in on the action by posting it. A tattoo of the abdominal contents on someone's abdomen would be really cool.
grrlscientist | August 11, 2007tags: researchblogging.org, osteocalcin, type 2 diabetes, obesity, bones, medicine
Even though bones seem to be metabolically inactive structures, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, bones are rebuilt constantly through the action of cells known as osteoblasts while old bone is destroyed by other cells known as osteoclasts. Bones also produce red and white blood cells, help maintain blood pH and store calcium. However, exciting new research has shown that bones also act as an endocrine organ. Not only do bones produce a protein hormone, osteocalcin (pictured), that regulates…
clock | August 11, 2007I have linked to and posted pictures of Eva Vertes from SciFoo before and you may ask: "Who is she? Why was she invited there?" The Wikipedia page I linked to earlier is a short stub and full of errors. So, to make it clear, see this page as well as comments on this talk she gave two years ago when she was 17:
oracknows | August 11, 2007This is disturbing.
Yesterday, I did a rather light-hearted edition of Your Friday Dose of Woo about "ionic foot detoxification." A reader pointed out that in a story in which Randi had also discussed this woo, there was a comment along the lines of "I think autistic children should really do this."
How prophetic! Sadly, it turns out that autistic children are already being subjected to this woo. For example, I found this particular video on YouTube that has to be seen to be believed:
It's a woman named Ashley discussing "ion cleanse" foot detox for her 4 year old autistic son Braden. Her…
oracknows | August 10, 2007After over a year of doing Your Friday Dose of Woo, I can't believe I've never come across this one before. Sometimes there's a bit of woo that comes my way that's so off the wall, so unexpected, the claims for which are so unrelated to reality that it startles even me. Moreover, unlike truly over-the-top woo like quantum homeopathy, DNA activation, or the SCIO, this one is utterly brilliant in the simplicity of its concept. It also makes me wonder about whether certain alties have a thing about feet. We know they have a thing about "detoxification" (without, of course, ever being able to…
j7uy5 | August 9, 2007When
unemployment is high, there is more penetrating trauma (bullets,
knives). When employment is high, there is more blunt trauma
(automobile crashes).
href="http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/Health/2007/08/09/unemployment_predicts_hospital_trauma/5157/">Unemployment
predicts hospital trauma
Published: Aug. 9, 2007 at 9:48 PM
NEW ORLEANS, Aug. 9 (UPI) -- A University of Tennessee study found a
link between unemployment rates and a type of trauma seen in hospital
emergency rooms in pre-Katrina New Orleans.
Atul Madan of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center and
colleagues…