medicine
omnibrain | June 20, 2007Seriously!
According to the BBC News:
Drinking coffee protects against an eyelid spasm that can lead to blindness, a study suggests.
Italian researchers looked at the coffee drinking and smoking habits of 166 people with blepharospasm.
Sufferers have uncontrollable twitching of the eyelid which, in extreme cases, stops them being able to see.
One or two cups of coffee a day seemed to reduce the risk of the condition, the team reported in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry.
Not that I've ever heard of blepharospasm ;) It is a great disease name though - I'll give you that!
purepedantry | June 20, 2007Oh wow:
Men are 12 times more likely than women to sustain severe human bite injuries for which surgery may be necessary, according to a study published in the July issue of the Emergency Medicine Journal.
Injuries are most likely to occur during brawls at weekends or public holidays and in most cases alcohol is involved.
The researchers reviewed the 92 patients requiring assessment for human bite wounds by the plastic surgery service at St James�s Hospital Dublin, Ireland, between January 2003 and December 2005. Eight five of them (92%) were men and the 92 patients had a total of 96 bites…
oracknows | June 20, 2007Having exhausted myself for the time being on two things that irritate me a lot (namely creationist neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Egnor and the antivaccination pseudoscience being presented as "evidence" that vaccines cause autism at the Autism Omnibus), it's time for a change of pace. For all my tendency to deride certain "alternative medicine" modalities as pseudoscientific nonsense (homeopathy, anyone?), you may have noticed that I tend to take a softer line with acupuncture. No, it's not because I'm a believer. Certainly, I don't buy for a minute that somehow sticking needles in "meridians" in…
oracknows | June 19, 2007Lest I forget my medblogging duties, let me just post a brief plug for this week's edition of Grand Rounds, hosted this time by Code Blog: Tales of a Nurse.
I'm such an idiot; I forgot to submit some of my work to the carnival!
oracknows | June 19, 2007While I'm back on the topic of vaccines and autism after a long hiatus, thanks to the Atuism Omnibus, don't know how I missed this article by Sharyl Attkisson, entitled Autism: Why the Debate Rages. I can't recall the last time I saw so many logical fallacies and doggerel packed into an article on an ostensibly "mainstream news" site. In fact, I don't think I've seen such antivax idiocy on a mainstream news site ever, but it's possible that I blocked it out of my mind. I don't have time to do a thorough fisking, but I will hit the main points. Here are the "reasons" that Attkisson lists as…
oracknows | June 19, 2007If you leave aside the problem with the Autism Omnibus trial, which has just entered its second week, that annoys me the most, namely a hypothesis so poorly supported by science and so badly argued by a panoply of nonexperts could make it so far in our legal system and possibly even endanger the Vaccine Injury Compensation System with 4,800 almost certainly frivolous claims that vaccines or the mercury in the thimerosal preservative in vaccines, you're left with the more minor annoyances that this whole trial brings. Foremost among these lesser annoyances, which, let's be frank, do not…
hrynyshyn | June 18, 2007I take a keener interest in the autism-vaccine conspiracy nonsense, now that I'm taking my very young son to the doctors every few months for his shots. It bothers me no end that not every parent does the same, and that some are stubbornly clinging to the discredited notion that autism is caused by non-existent mercury-containing vaccines. Absent anything original to add to the debate, I recommend a column by Apoorva Mandavilli, which the editors of Nature have seen fit to make freely available to one and all. Here's a bit of what she has to say:
I sympathize with these parents and can…
oracknows | June 18, 2007In blogging, there are some topics that I know that I really shouldn't bother with; yet, somehow they suck me in. A number of things can cause that. Perhaps it's a topic that just gets under my skin to the point where I can't hold back a commentary, even when I know that it might be wiser to remain quiet, be it because of the flak that my commentary will bring (antivaccination lunacy, HIV denialists, certain forms of quackery) or because of the threat to my sanity if I allow the irritation of them to go unanswered.
I address this topic because of the latter reason.
I've discussed why…
clock | June 17, 2007Here is an example of perfect science blogging. It starts seemingly innocuously, with a quiz: Monday's Molecule #30, where you are supposed to figure out what the compound is.
Then, after a couple of days, there is a post that you may not even realize at first is related to the first one: Bacteria Have Cell Walls
Another day or two, and A and B get connected: How Penicillin Works to Kill Bacteria
But how do we know this? Well, some people figured it out: Nobel Laureates: Sir Alexander Fleming, Ernst Boris Chain, Sir Howard Walter Florey - and now you know how we know.
Finally, putting…
oracknows | June 17, 2007The latest Pediatric Grand Rounds has been posted over at Med Journal Watch. There's lots of good stuff, including some posts about the Autism Omnibus trial.
oracknows | June 17, 2007I've seen ads like this before in issues of LIFE Magazine from the 1940s that I inherited from my uncle, but they never cease to make me cringe when I see them:
(Click for a larger image and to read the text of the ad more clearly.)
Get a load of the text:
Family physicians, surgeons, diagnosticians, nose and throat specialists, doctors in every branch of medicine ... a total of 113,597 doctors ... were asked: "What cigarette do you smoke?" And more of them named Camel as their smoke than any other cigarette! Three independent research groups found this to be a fact.
One thing I could never…
oracknows | June 17, 2007Via Modern Mechanix, an ad from 1938:
Does this make you think of something other than a medical ad? Maybe it's the whole thing about the "human hand" being placed on the groin as a truss.
Actually, the best "support" for a "rupture" (a.k.a. an inguinal hernia) these days is some polypropylene mesh sewn into place properly as either a sheet and/or plug to hold the "rupture" in. Back in 1938, the best "support" was some conjoined tendon sewn to the appropriate ligament, the most common of which when I was a resident, back in the days right before mesh became popular, was the Bassini repair…
oracknows | June 16, 2007With the Autism Omnibus trial having finished its first week looking at the first test case of Michelle Cedillo, a very unfortunate girl with multiple medical problems and autism, for whose "vaccine injury" her parents are seeking compensation, it's not surprising that we'd find some slime bubbling up to the surface. First off, we have the ludicrous spectacle of a website that's allegedly supposed to be a source of good information about autism providing a forum for a lawyer named Robert J. Krakow looking to encourage parents of children with autism to sue. Negative comments over his being…
oracknows | June 15, 2007Alright, now they've gone too far.
I can take a lot from woo-meisters. I can watch them claim that water has some sort of "memory" and that diluting a compound to nonexistence somehow seemingly by magic makes it more powerful and chuckle at their silliness. I can listen to them claim that by "alkalinizing your body" you can cure all manner of disease. I can even sit back and be somewhat amused when woo-meisters claim that making wine in a pyramid aligned to true north infuses it with pyramid power and makes it better or when they claim that drinking your own--shall we say?--reproductive…
j7uy5 | June 14, 2007This
is kind of a rambling rehash of an old
href="http://corpus-callosum.blogspot.com/2004/03/multidrug-resistant-tb-lessons-about.html">post.
But it turns out to be topical now. What is more it
illustrates some interesting points about evolution: some obvious,
others subtle. One thing is shows very nicely is that once
nature solves a problem, the same solution keeps cropping up in other
places.
On March 16, 2004, the World Health Organization released a report on
multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. This is a serious problem,
especially in the former Soviet states of eastern Europe…
oracknows | June 14, 2007Things have been very quiet as far as the story of Katie Wernecke, the 14-year-old girl with lymphoma whose parents fought a legal battle with the State of Texas to be able to choose "alternative" therapy involving high dose vitamin C, despite the fact that her conventional therapeutic options had not been exhausted and she still stood a reasonable chance of being saved with chemotherapy and radiation. More recently, we learned the sad news that her cancer had relapsed in a big way, with tumors in her chest. When last we saw her, she had written a heartbreaking story about a dying girl with…
oracknows | June 14, 2007At the monthly faculty meeting of our cancer center the other day, we had just finished listening to an invited talk by an ethicist about medical technology and the ethics of end-of-life care, when one of my colleagues happened to mention an article in the New York Times about how a perverse incentive system encourages oncologists to use chemotherapy even in patients for whom it may not benefit or may only provide marginal benefit. It's rare for something in the news to mesh so closely with the topic at hand; so I couldn't resist looking up the article, which appeared Tuesday morning, and was…
oracknows | June 13, 2007Is your qi weak? Is your aura not glowing as brightly and colorfully as it should? Is your ability to take on ten masked men who conveniently come at you no more than one or two at a time getting shaky, so that you're no longer sure that you can handle more than, say, five evil-doers? Do you feel the need for a "natural energy drink packed with vitamins and exotic botanicals"?
Wait no more! B-movie hack Steven Seagal has your back with his Lightning Bolt energy drink:
Then look no further for the true meaning of life then Master Sensei Seagal's Lightning Bolt Energy Drink!
Lightning Bolt, the…
oracknows | June 12, 2007I normally like Crooks and Liars.
However, this time around, while blogging about the Autism Omnibus, Nicole let me down. Saying that "I don't pretend to have any special medical knowledge; so I will link both sides of the thimerosal debate," she then linked to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s totally dishonest fearmongering piece of crap from two years ago and Arthur Allen's voice of reason.
This is the sort of lack of critical thinking that comes from "presenting both sides of a debate" as though they are roughly equivalent when they are not. It's like the press presenting creationist arguments…