medicine
oracknows | August 9, 2007Somehow, I don't know how, I managed to wind up on the mailing list of über-woomeister Dr. Joseph Mercola, who's almost as bad as Mike Adams, only less blatantly crazy in pushing conspiracy theories.
Yesterday, I received this pitch by e-mail:
I've got a quick question for you:
How does your energy compare to the salmon swimming and jumping upstream for hundreds of miles?
Facing tremendous obstacles -- fish ladders, rapids, predators -- they swim and jump for hundreds of miles to complete their incredible journey (without eating along the way).
Could it be that their ocean diet gives them…
oracknows | August 9, 2007I'm a bit cranky right now.
Long time readers are familiar with the logorrhea that usually characterizes this blog. Fans love it; detractors hate it, Some may have noticed a bit of paucity of blogging, at least relatively speaking. There's a good reason for this. Not only was I out of town last weekend, but I got to come back to be on call (i.e. on service) for the group while at the same time trying to finish a grant application that my institution had "honored" with a nomination to fill out--only two weeks before it was due. Yes, now is not a great time to be around Orac; his crankiness is…
oracknows | August 8, 2007This is an example of a WordPress page, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many pages like this one or sub-pages as you like and manage all of your content inside of WordPress.
oracknows | August 8, 2007Turns out the monkey isn't the only creature in the forest getting bombed. Check out this video of the African booze tree.
Special thanks to Tom Ferriss for finding this clip.
Add to: Slashdot del.icio.usredditnewsvineY! MyWeb
oracknows | August 8, 2007Check out the Carnival of Healing (which should be called the Carnival of Woo, if this recent edition is any example).
They're looking for hosts, you know. Perhaps I should volunteer. Or maybe one of my favorite skeptical bloggers would volunteer.
I know, it's an evil thought.
grrlscientist | August 7, 2007tags: researchblogging.org, coffee, memory, cognition, women, aging
Recent research has shown that women older than 65 years old who drink more than three cups of coffee per day were protected from some types of age-related memory declines.
"The more coffee one drank, the better the effects seemed to be on (women's) memory functioning in particular," reported Karen Ritchie, epidemiological and clinical researcher at La Colombiere Hospital and at the French National Institute of Medical Research (INSERM), in Montpellier, France.
To do this research, the researchers studied more than 4,197…
purepedantry | August 7, 2007A woman who fell when she was four and got a pencil in lodged in her head has one of the craziest MRIs ever (on the right, click to enlarge):
Margret Wegner fell over carrying the pencil when she was four. It punctured her cheek and part of it went into her brain, above the right eye.
The 59-year-old has suffered headaches and nosebleeds for most of her life.
Surgeons in Berlin were able to remove most of the pencil in a two-hour operation, but a 2cm section was so embedded it was impossible to remove.
...
The pencil measured 8cm (3.1 inches) long, and had narrowly missed damaging an optical…
oracknows | August 7, 2007The third season of Doctor Who is over. There's nothing on the horizon for many months (such as the return of Doctor Who or Torchwood) that's interesting enough to me coming out of the U.K. that I'd go to the trouble of firing up BitTorrent to check it out, rather than wait until it somehow finds its way to these shores.
Until now.
Yes, it's Richard Dawkins' long-promised investigation of alternative medicine and New Age practitioners, entitled The Enemies of Reason:
Prof Dawkins launches his attack in The Enemies of Reason, to be shown on Channel 4 this month. The professor, the author of…
grrlscientist | August 7, 2007tags: Grand rounds, medicine, blog carnivals
This week's edition of Grand Rounds, Grand Rounds at the Beach, is now available for your reading pleasure. This blog carnival focuses on medicine, so I am sure that plenty of you have an interest in reading this particular carnival.
j7uy5 | August 7, 2007The
problem, specifically, is that patients with insurance
have higher copays and deductibles. According to an article
on Medscape (free registration required):
href="http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/560983">U.S.
Hospitals Struggle Over Who Can Afford to Pay
By Kim Dixon
CHICAGO (Reuters Life!) Aug 06 - For-profit hospitals, which are
blaming unpaid medical bills for tamping down profits, are struggling
with a simple question: Which patients have the ability to pay their
hospital bills? ...
HMA and LifePoint Hospitals are among the major chains that posted
falling profits in…
oracknows | August 7, 2007After a long run of arguing against global warming and indoor smoking bans, it appears that our favorite Libertarian comic with a penchant for bad arguments and ad hominem attacks on scientists has temporarily left the field of blog combat in a huff of "giving up" that reminds me of a certain Black Knight telling a certain King that he's not beaten and that it's "just a flesh wound." I'm not worried; I'm sure he'll be back whenever he returns from his vacation to speak for himself. In the meantime, while the blog silence is golden, I'd like to step back a minute. I don't want to rehash old…
j7uy5 | August 6, 2007Put
this near the top of things you don't want to do to yourself.
This woman developed fever and abdominal pain, but did not
disclose to her physician what she had done. That was her
second mistake.
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">
The oval darkish thing near the top of the CAT scan (marked by arrow)
is not supposed to be there. That white round thing in the
photo on the right is not supposed to be there. It looks like
a caseating granuloma, but is rather large for that...
Surgery
was performed, obviously. It was discovered that she had
inserted a plastic bag of cocaine…
oracknows | August 5, 2007...Eneman!
I was remiss in July. It happens that I totally forgot to post the monthly feature that has become a tradition over the last two years of blogging. Oh, I tried to make up for it by resurrecting a rather amusing EneMan article from nearly two years ago as an installment of Your Friday Dose of Woo when I didn't have time to come up with new material.
What I can't figure out is this: If EneMan is so busy being the industrious and hard-working student, where does he get the time to do all this extracurricular stuff?
JULY 2007
I have to say, I'd be pretty scared if I saw a 6 foot…
oracknows | August 4, 2007I really, really wish the Discovery Institute would stop putting out idiocy like this:
We have blogged in the past about the growing numbers of doctors who are skeptical of Darwinian evolution to explain the complexity of life.
Those numbers are continuing to grow, and conesquently doctors are beginning to organize themselves and reach out to others who hold similar positions. Physicians and Surgeons for Scientific Integrity (PSSI) has for sometime had a website at www.doctorsdoubtingdarwin.com. Recently they have begun using the site to organize and promote conferences about Darwinian…
oracknows | August 3, 2007Michael Behe, that Don Quixote of "intelligent design" who never tires of tilting at windmills of "fatal flaws" in evolutionary theory that he think he's identified, did quite a bit of tilting at HIV in his book.
Watch his blathering taken down by a pre-graduate student named Abbie. It's so good it's been republished at Panda's Thumb.
Enjoy.
oracknows | August 2, 2007While I'm back on the topic of vaccines again (and that topic seems to me less and less rancorous these days, not because antivaccination "activists" have gotten any less loony but because the smoking cranks, at least the ones showing up on my blog these days, threaten to make antivaccinationists seem low key by comparison), it turns out that one of the premiere journals of medical research, Nature Medicine, has weighed in on the topic. If you want any more evidence that the antivaccination movement is becoming more and more like the radical animal rights movement in its willingness to try to…
oracknows | August 1, 2007How low will Andrew Wakefield supporters go in protecting the discredited and disgraced doctor whose shoddy and biased research sparked an antivaccination hysteria that led to falling vaccination rates in the U.K. and the subsequent return of measles and mumps?
This low.
Yes, it's a Wakefield apologist website. It misrepresents the science; whines about the hearings in the U.K. looking at Wakefield's dubious science, unreported conflicts of interest, and parrots the antivaccination lies that the MMR vaccine and thimerosal on vaccines causse autism.
In actuality, the purveyors of this…
oracknows | August 1, 2007Mike, Mike, Mike, why did you have to show me this story?
Don't you know that stories like this drive me crazy?
Basically, the story from Boston Now reports on how more and more parents in are claiming religious exemptions to vaccination in Massachusetts:
More Massachusetts parents are sending their children to school without the required vaccines, and some may be lying to get around state law.
Records obtained by Team 5 Investigates show that while the number of medical exemptions has remained flat, the number of parents claiming that vaccines violate their religious beliefs is going up -…
j7uy5 | July 31, 2007
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/images/Carmona-CTAGlobalHealthdraft.pdf">This
report (PDF 260KB file) is what set off the controversy over
the former Surgeon General of the United States. It is a
draft report, entitled The Surgeon General’s Call
to Action on Global Health 2006. It was written by
the former Surgeon General, Dr.
href="http://www.hhs.gov/about/bios/sg.html">Richard Carmona.
In this post, I will review the history of Dr. Carmona's service as
Surgeon General, outline the controversy, and end with a discussion of
of some recent criticism of the controversy…
grrlscientist | July 31, 2007tags: marijuana, pot, cannabis, medicine, health problems
According to a group of experts from the Medical Research Institute of New Zealand (who did not receive any funding from the NIH or any other American Health agencies), smoking one cannabis (marijuana) cigarette ("joint") is as harmful to a person's lungs as smoking up to five cigarettes.
Up to.
To do this study, the researchers tested 339 people, which they divided into four groups; those who smoked only cannabis, those who smoked only tobacco, those who smoked both, and non-smokers. Cannabis ("pot") smokers were included if they…