medicine
clock | June 27, 2007Everyone always blogs about Bush...
After all, Bush is such an easy target - there is not a day that he or some of his buddies do not do something outrageously bad. And with the Media covering it as if it was OK, where else can one voice outrage if not on blogs.
So, it is refreshing to see people, for once, blogging about something else, for instance about bush...
Ooops, not the Burning Bush...
And not this kind of bush either....
But bush in the sense of "hair" you know....
No, not that hair...
No, not that hair either, this is a science blog, after all....
But, this kind of hair and…
oracknows | June 27, 2007It was with sadness that I saw fellow medical blogger Dr. Charles' announcement that he is taking a break ("perhaps a long break," as he puts it) from blogging. He points out that he's been at it for almost three years.
My first thought was that I was sad to see him go and hope that he eventually finds his way back to the blogosphere.
My second thought was: Geez, in blogosphere time, I've been at this a long time now.
I started blogging in December 2004, which means that I'm rapidly approaching three years at it. Dr. Charles was actually one of the first bunch of medical blogs that I…
clock | June 27, 2007My friend (and the driving force behind all bloggy events in the Triangle area) Anton Zuiker has a new job! And not just any job - but a perfect job:
In August, I will take a new job at Duke University Health System as manager of internal communications. This will be a chance for me to mold a communications strategy that uses traditional tools (magazines, newsletters, posters) with new media tools (blogs, videocasts, wikis). I'm looking forward to the opportunities and challenges.
They really, really need Anton. Finding information online about anything that has to do with Duke University…
oracknows | June 27, 2007J. B. Handley never ceases to amaze me how much he is willing to torture me with his abuses of science, never mind his childish attempts to annoy me by cybersquatting domain names that he thinks I want. So there I was, all set to blog about a rather amusing homeopath that I've come across, when what comes to my attention, whether I want it to or not?
Yes, hot on the heels of its reinvention of itself from being all about mercury all the time to a kinder, gentler entity making an intentionally much more difficult to test and falsify hypothesis that, oh, by the way, lots of other "environmental…
denialism | June 27, 2007The New York Times writes an editorial about hospital rankings based on mortality of medicare patients from cardiac disease, and not surprisingly, misses the point on metrics of patient survival comparisons between hospitals.
Famed medical institutions like Johns Hopkins, the Cleveland Clinic and Massachusetts General Hospital are lumped into the broad national average category when perhaps they deserve better (we can't tell), and no doubt many other hospitals deserve a lesser ranking. In the next round of evaluations, the Medicare program ought to make public every institution's mortality…
oracknows | June 26, 2007If you're not into the ins and outs of applying for NIH funding, this one may be a bit too wonky for you. I'm linking, however, to a rather interesting discussion of how to go about getting funding from the NIH in this presently hostile funding climate. One spot-on point is this in reference to letters of support from mentors:
A senior study section member in the audience confirmed this - but added that the letters must clearly demonstrate that the mentor (or whoever) has read the R01 and helped refine the narrative ... a glowing letter of support appended to an unfundable narrative backfires…
oracknows | June 26, 2007The Autism Omnibus trial continued last week, which was devoted primarily to the government's case. Consequently, there were a variety of real experts, as opposed to the pseudoexperts called by the prosecution last week. With only the occasional hiccup, they are taking serious bites out of the plaintiff's case, as documented on a near daily basis by Autism Diva and Kevin Leitch. Today, I want to focus on Day Eight of the testimony, not so much to beat up on those claiming that vaccines cause autism (although there's plenty of opportunity to apply some much deserved Respectful Insolence⢠to…
oracknows | June 25, 2007Finally, there's a word for a feeling that many people have no doubt experienced many times:
Some call it "phantom vibration syndrome." Others prefer "vibranxiety" -- the feeling when you answer your vibrating cellphone, only to find it never vibrated at all.
"It started happening about three years ago, when I first got a cellphone," says Canadian Steven Garrity, 28, of Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. "I'd be sitting on the couch and feel my phone start to vibrate, so I'd reach down and pull it out of my pocket. But the only thing ringing was my thigh."
Though no known studies have…
jstemwedel | June 24, 2007Since it has come up in the comments on my review of Kazuo Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go, I'm going to go ahead and discuss some of the issues around cutting-edge biomedical technologies in the book that might, or might not, be plausible when pondered. (As Bill points out, the scientific details in the novel itself are pretty minimal -- the focus is squarely on the interactions between characters -- so plausibility is only an issue if you're not good at suspending disbelief.)
WARNING: This post will be packed with spoilers!
Unless you've already read the book, or you have sworn a blood-…
jstemwedel | June 23, 2007
Last May, on my way back from a mini-conference in Stockholm, I had a long layover in Munich. Since major airports are now essentially shopping malls with parking for commercial jets, I used a little bit of that time to wander through a pretty impressive airport book store, where I picked up a copy of Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. I had heard a bit about it (maybe in reviews on the radio, if memory serves), and knew that it had some connection to ethical issues around biomedical technologies that seem not to be too far off from where we are now.
Because I was taking a stab at using my…
oracknows | June 23, 2007After attending the ASCO Meeting in Chicago over two weeks ago, I can't believe I forgot to post about this. More than two years ago, back in my favorite city (Chicago), a vision of the Virgin Mary appeared. It appeared, oddly enough, as such visions are wont to do, in a rather mundane spot. Specifically, it appeared under a freeway overpass where W. Fullerton Avenue passes under the Kennedy Expressway.
As I was heading to the airport on my way out of the city, traffic happened to be better than I had expected, leaving me with some time. I decided, therefore, to head back to the area and see…
oracknows | June 23, 2007There are lots of medical discoveries today that are breathlessly hyped far beyond what their actual benefits are likely to be. This, apparently, is not a new phenomenon, as this story shows.
(Click on the pictures above for larger images of all four pages of the article, which appeared in 1939.)
On the other hand, given the advances in medical care that have come about because of X-rays, such as radiographs, CT scans, nuclear medicine scans, and the use of radiation to treat cancer, this story is actually not exaggerating all that much. Unfortunately, there didn't appear to be a clue…
oracknows | June 22, 2007The Cheerful Oncologist, noting my recent post about the relapse of Abraham Cherrix's lymphoma in the lung, has done an analysis from--of course!--an oncologist's viewpoint. Given that I don't treat lymphoma, other than doing the occasional lymph node biopsy to diagnose it, his viewpoint is well worth reading.
He quite correctly points out that Abraham's reasoning, where he observes that his tumor has "only" recurred in one place and concludes that what he's doing is working is the fallacy of moderation. He points out that for Hodgkin's lymphoma (and, I personally would add, for all cancer…
oracknows | June 22, 2007In my rigid, Western, scientific way of thinking, things generally have a beginning, a middle, and and end, the arrow of time marching relentlessly onward. However, it occurs to me that this is the very last edition of Your Friday Dose of Woo of its first year. Last June, when I started this, almost on a whim, I had no way of knowing how it would take on such a life of its own. Indeed, I fear that all the woo to which I subject myself on a weekly basis may be having an effect. I'm ceasing to see life as a straight line any more; such rigid thinking no longer suits me.
Instead, like the more…
grrlscientist | June 21, 2007tags: cancer, liposarcoma, trabectedin, Ecteinascidia turbinata, sea squirt
A toxin derived from a humble sea squirt, Ecteinascidia turbinata (pictured, right), shows great promise as an anti-cancer drug. This toxin, known as trabectedin (ecteinascidinin-743), shrinks and even completely removes cancerous tumors in more than half of the patients treated with it, according to a new study. The patients treated with this drug suffered from a specific type of liposarcoma cancer, which is associated with chromosomal mutations. Liposarcomas are a rare but malignant tumor that grow in the fat cells…
oracknows | June 21, 2007I've written extensively before about Starchild Abraham Cherrix, the (now) 17-year-old who was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease when he was 15 and who, after one course of chemotherapy, refused any further evidence-based medicine in favor of the quackery known as Hoxsey therapy. His refusal led to a big legal battle in Virginia, and the court ultimately (sort of) compromised, letting Abraham go to Mississippi to be treated by a radiation oncologist with taste for alternative medicine named Dr. R. Arnold Smith, who would give him low dose radiation and an unconventional variety of…
denialism | June 21, 2007Hooray for science! The New England Journal reports on the imminent eradication of the Guinea worm.
For those who haven't heard of this nasty little parasite, it is a really horrible infection to get. It starts with the ingestion of Dracunculus medinensis infected water. The larvae, when freed from their copepod carriers, migrate from the GI tract, copulate, work their way to the skin, and the adult worms then cause a painful, burning blister as they emerge. The human host, seeking relief, will often seek to immerse the blister in water - and when it bursts the cycle continues as the…
oracknows | June 21, 2007Has it really been two years?
Amazingly, it has indeed. On June 16, 2005, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. deposited the biggest, steamingest, drippiest (not to mention stinkiest) turd I had as yet seen in my then young blogging career, specifically an article published simultaneously by both Salon.com and Rolling Stone entitled Deadly Immunity. Along with David Kirby's Evidence of Harm: Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic: A Medical Mystery, which had been published a couple of months earlier, RFK, Jr. arguably did more than almost anyone else besides the aforementioned David Kirby to…
clock | June 20, 2007Circumcision is always one of the topics with the most spirited discussions on science blogs. Here, a brand new paper on PLoS-ONE will likely stir up the conversation yet again (hopefully on the annotations and discussions attached to the paper itself, so please go there if you have questions/comments on the study):
Size Matters: The Number of Prostitutes and the Global HIV/AIDS Pandemic by John R. Talbott
HIV/AIDS prevalence rates across countries of the world vary more than 500-fold from .06% in Hungary to 33.4% in Swaziland. One of the most cited research papers in the field, utilizing…
oracknows | June 20, 2007I've done my fair share of ranting about Scientology, be it about Tom Cruise's aggressive and arrogant antipsychiatry nuttiness a couple of years ago or the very recent piece I wrote about the disturbing and idiotically conceived anti-psychiatry museum run by the Church of Scientology. The Church of Scientology is, of course, a target-rich environment, given the sheer nuttiness of it all. Indeed, there'd be nothing other than laughter from me if Scientology didn't push a rabid anti-psychiatry pseudoscience in the name of religion and if it didn't go after its critics with the tenacity of a…