medicine
oracknows | June 5, 2007One of the common refrains you'll hear from alties about "conventional" medicine is that it's a business, that it's all about money. Never mind that, for instance, it's not uncommon for primary care doctors like family practice and pediatricians to net well under $100,000 a year and that many physicians are struggling to maintain their practices, squeezed between lower reimbursements and higher office expenses. Don't get me wrong; I'm not claiming that most doctors aren't making a comfortable living. Most are. Some even do quite well, particularly procedure-intensive specialties, although the…
grrlscientist | June 4, 2007tags: No One Dies Alone, death, hospice care, medicine
One of the jobs I held as I worked my way through school was a nurse's aide in nursing homes and convalescent centers. Even though it was never explicitly part of my job, I sat with people who were dying because I just couldn't bear to know that someone was dying in their room, alone, while the aides were chatting merrily in the breakroom.
But in fact, there are many people who are dying in hospitals, nursing homes and convelescent centers have neither family or friends who are available to sit with them at this crucial time. Some are…
oracknows | June 4, 2007It's day three of the ASCO Meeting here in Chicago.
So far, I have to say, it's been a bit underwhelming. Unlike some years past, there don't appear to have been any real blockbuster results to report; rather, lots of incremental studies were presented. There's really only one study presented that I might blog, mainly because it relates to posts that I did before about early detection of cancer and using MRI to screen for breast cancer, but that will probably have to wait until tomorrow or after I get back. In this impression, I don't appear to be alone, as Dr. Len Lichtenfield, the CEO of…
oracknows | June 4, 2007It was a nondescript room, a board room much like board rooms found in corporate offices across the length and breadth of the U.S., or even around the world. There was the tasteful built-in wood bookshelves loaded with books and journals, for instance. Given the nature of this company, the journals included titles such as the Journal of Biological Chemistry, Pharmacology, and other scientific titles, and the textbooks included Goodman & Gilman's The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics, among other weighty tomes. Lining the walls were pictures of men in either suits or lab coats, the…
oracknows | June 3, 2007Just as a brief followup to my post about being carded twice in a bar despite being a member of the over 40 crowd, I can't help but make a brief comment on something else that happened while we were sitting back enjoying some beer.
We were inside, but there was an outdoor sidewalk cafe area with tables as well. As I was sitting there sipping my brew, I noticed a guy in surgical scrubs showing up in the outdoor area. Not surprisingly, he appeared to be trying to chat up a couple of young women who were also out there.
I had to restrain myself from bursting out in laughter.
OK, I suppose it's…
oracknows | June 2, 2007Infophilia finds Dr. Michael Egnor's invocation of the Stalin Zombie from a couple of months ago and tears it apart.
Come to think of it, Egnor's been laying down some silliness about evolution lately. I had been restraining myself from commenting due to my previous oversaturation blogging about his antics, but I think I've given the blog a suitably long Egnor-free interval that it might be time to have some dismayed fun with our creationist neurosurgeon again...
oracknows | June 2, 2007Those who still desperately cling to the concept that mercury in thimerosal in vaccines causes autism have been known to write some really stupid stuff trying to justify their position or attack someone else's rebuttal of the whole "hypothesis." This week has produced a bumper crop of such fallacy-laden "defenses" of the thimerosal gravy train--I mean, hypothesis--that two of them are worth a brief mention.
Beware, though: The stupid, it burns.
First up is a guy named Mike Wagnitz, who bills himself as having "over 20 years experience evaluating materials for toxic metals" and currently…
grrlscientist | June 1, 2007tags: body bugs, emerging infections, streaming video
This streaming video shows an astonishing news report about people whose bodies are infected with "bugs"; insects and arthropods. Apparently, there are more and more of these infected people around the country every year, but nothing is being done for them. Instead, they are labeled "crazy" by friends, family and the medical establishment and they are often suicidal due to the pain, shame and helplessness associated with this infection. Why are these mysterious "bugs" infecting their bodies? What can be done to help these people? [5:06].
oracknows | June 1, 2007Bummer.
A while back, I asked, "Where's Flea?" The question was asked in response to the mysterious disappearance of his blog a couple of weeks ago, leaving only a blank Blogger blog. Flea, as you may remember, was one of my favorite physician-bloggers. A pediatrician, he consistently provided pithy and interesting commentary on life as a solo practice doctor, his battles with emergency room physicians who don't call him when his patients show up in the ER, and various other issues, not to mention the occasional tussle with antivaccination loons. His disappearance seemed related to a…
oracknows | June 1, 2007Let's face it, energy woo can get boring. It's always "resonance this" and "vibration that," to the point that it all starts to sound the same. Such is the reason that I've become somewhat reluctant to take on more energy woo for Your Friday Dose of Woo. It takes a truly bizarre bit of energy woo to get me interested anymore, and this has me worried that either (1) I'm running out of woo (probably not a problem, as the Woo Folder is still pretty full) or (2) I need to diversify the woo, so to speak. This brings me to a little housekeeping about Your Friday Dose of Woo. It occurs to me that it…
j7uy5 | May 31, 2007I
wrote about a similar topic a bit ago, it which a relationship was
found between
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/04/depression_and_pain_in_retired.php">chronic
pain and depression in retired pro football players.
Now, there is an NTY article that reviews some findings about
a relationship between concussions and depression.
title="NYT permanent link via RSS"
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/31/sports/football/31concussions.html?ex=1338264000&en=aa42809a8c7be226&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss">Concussions
Tied to Depression in Ex-N.F.…
oracknows | May 31, 2007I've been a bit remiss when it comes to writing about the lunacy in which it is claimed that vaccines cause autism, allegedly due to the mercury in the thimerosal preservative that was in most childhood vaccines until the end of 2002, when it was removed from all but flu vaccines. It turns out that the class action suit by parents who think that vaccines caused their children's autism will be going to court in June. Hearings for this suit, known as the Autism Omnibus, will mark a new phase in the pseudoscientific pursuit of "compensation" for nonexistent "vaccine injuries." Even though…
moleculeoftheday | May 30, 2007Acetaminophen/paracetamol is a great drug. It comes without a lot of the GI irritation problems of aspirin and other typical COX inhibitors. Unlike aspirin, it doesn't increase clotting time. No nagging feeling you're going to give your kid Reye's syndrome. However, it has an unusually low threshold for overdose, due to a quirk in its metabolism.
Most acetaminophen is conjugated to a sugar derivative and excreted. A small fraction, however, gets converted to a toxic metabolite: NAPQI.
NAPQI is a potent hepatotoxin - much at all and your liver is shot. As I intimated yesterday, glutathione…
oracknows | May 30, 2007I love it.
You see I noticed an old "friend," the Herbinator, making this comment about me regarding dichloroacetate:
I was listening to CBC Radio - the Current, as is my want, and there was a show on about DCA, or Dichloroacetic acid. DCA is a molecule so simple and cheap to make that drug companies are unable to patent it ... so they simply pass on researching it. Some say that DCA is a most excellent and effective cancer treatment.
I have to confess that I had never heard of DCA before. And so I perked an ear toward listening to the radio show as simplicity itself and uppity people…
oracknows | May 29, 2007Last fall, I and quite a few other bloggers wrote about the Tripoli Six. These are six foreign medical workers arrested for allegedly intentionally infecting over 400 children with HIV in a Libyan hospital and, thanks to the ignorant hysteria whipped up against them and the need of the Libyan government to find scapegoats for unhygienic conditions in the hospital, sentenced to death by firing squad, despite allegations that they were tortured while in a Libyan prison to extract "confessions."
Now, five months after their being sentenced to death, the international dance by which Bulgaria and…
oracknows | May 29, 2007"Some people call me Maurice." Humpback whale, Megaptera novaeangliae
A study from two Australian researchers from the University of Sydney shows that male humpbacks who sing while migrating have better luck with the ladies than those who don't.
Michael Noad and a group of colleagues tracked a population of humpbacks while it migrated to its Antarctic breeding grounds.
Noad found that male humpbacks who sing while migrating averaged only 2.5 km/hour as opposed to non-singing males who averaged 4 km/hour. Noad and his team are speculating that by slowing down and singing the males allow…
grrlscientist | May 29, 2007tags: blog carnivals, medicine
The May edition of the new blog carnival, All Things Medical, has just been published. It's rather large, so there is plenty there to read. They also include several pieces that I wrote.
oracknows | May 29, 2007It never seems to end, does it?
I'm talking about the hype and questionable practices revolving around dichloroacetate (DCA), the small molecule chemotherapeutic agent that targets the Warburg effect, in essence normalizing the metabolism of tumor cells and thereby inhibiting their growth. (See here and here for more details.) A report by Evangelos Michelakis at the University of Alberta in Cancer Cell in January reported strong antitumor activity against a wide variety of tumors in rat tumor models resulted in a phenomenon ballooning out of control in a way that he could never have imagined…
oracknows | May 27, 2007Recently, I discussed a story by the BBC news show Panorama about the Church of Scientology and its ridiculous anti-psychiatry museum. Unfortunately, the show doesn't always do things right. Over at Bad Science, I find how badly Panorama messed up a story on Wi-Fi, claiming health dangers on the basis of bad science and interviews with activists that sell shielded netting and hats that supposedly protect the user from microwaves and radio waves.
This definitely looks like a case of going from the sublime to the ridiculous.