medicine
grrlscientist | May 18, 2007tags: hair, baldness, hair regeneration, wound healing, Wnt protein
A group of American scientists have discovered how to make the skin of laboratory mice grow new hair follicles, complete with hair, by using a protein that stimulates follicle generating genes in skin cells under wound conditions. They hope this discovery may one day lead to treatments for baldness and abnormal hair growth.
George Cotsarelis and his colleagues from the Department of Dermatology, Kligman Laboratories, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, in Philadelphia, found that when skin is wounded, the cells of…
oracknows | May 17, 2007Dr. R. W. asks (and answers) the question, pointing out in detail how:
Promoters of unscientific claims often reject ordinary scientific standards for experimental design and evidence.
Even government funded CAM research is troubled with serious methodologic flaws.
Research on complementary and alternative methods is conducted without regard to biologic plausibility.
The proponents and funders of alternative medicine research do not accept negative results.
Government oversight is biased in favor of complementary and alternative medicine.
He's right on all points, although he forgot that…
grrlscientist | May 16, 2007tags: medicine, heart attack, angina, health
Do you think life is unfair? According to a new study, people who think they have been treated unfairly are more likely to suffer a heart attack or chest pain.
One of the largest and longest studies of its kind analyzed medical data from 6,081 British civil servants. In the early 1990s, they were asked how strongly they agreed with this statement: "I often have the feeling that I am being treated unfairly." According to the results, published yesterday in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, people who reported that they had…
oracknows | May 16, 2007Here are a few typical eugenicist quotes from early last century:
"It is an excellent plan to keep defective people in institutions for here they are not permitted to marry and bear children."
"[Scientists who are working at the task of improving the human race] would like to increase the birth rate of families having good heredity, while those people having poor heredity should not marry at all."
"At the present time there are in the United States more than a million people with serious hereditary defects, and to reduce their numbers by even a few thousand would reduce the amount of…
grrlscientist | May 16, 2007tags: health care, medicine, health insurance
America has the best health care in the world? Think again. This should come as no surprise to anyone, but according to two different studies that were published recently, Americans have the poorest health care among all the richest nations on earth. According to the two studies funded by the Commonwealth Fund, even though the US has the most expensive health system in the world, it consistently underperforms those of other countries and the biggest difference is because Americans have no universal health insurance coverage.
Also according to one…
oracknows | May 16, 2007One of the favorite targets of pseudoscientists is the peer review system. After all, it's the system through which scientists submit their manuscripts describing their scientific findings or their grant proposals to their peers for an evaluation to determine whether they are scientifically meritorious enough to be published or to be funded. Creationists hate it. HIV/AIDS denialists hate it. Indeed, pseudoscientists and cranks of all stripes hate it. There's a reason for that, of course, namely that vigorous peer review is a major part of science that keeps pseudoscientists from attaining the…
j7uy5 | May 15, 2007Often,
on this blog, I've ranted about the risks that our government, and our
corporate citizens, e.g. pharmaceutical companies, expose us to on a
daily basis.
Perhaps it would be good to put some of those risks in perspective.
That is, to compare the risks of various medications to
others risks that we take on a routine basis. In the May/June
issue of the journal, Health Affairs, there is an article on the
subject. The full thing is behind a pay wall, but we'll get
to the heart of the matter anyway.
href="http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/content/abstract/26/3/636">What's…
grrlscientist | May 15, 2007tags: health, obesity, exercise, employment
This is really nifty, if you ask me. A workstation has been designed by the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota that will allow sedentary office staff to work out while they work. This workstation, designed to be used between two and three hours per day, has a treadmill, along with a plexiglass panel with two adjustable arms bolted to it that are designed to hold a computer and keyboard/mouse. The treadmill speed can be adjusted by the user, and also can be used to stand and work or to sit and work.
A study was recently published in the British Journal of…
oracknows | May 15, 2007Good God Almighty....(From Sir David Attenborough's "Life in the Undergrowth")
Add to: Slashdot del.icio.usredditnewsvineY! MyWeb
oracknows | May 15, 2007The winners of the Alliance for Science essay contest that I mentioned a couple of months ago, where high school students were asked to write an essay of 1,000 words or less about the topic Why would I want my doctor to have studied evolution?, have been announced.
My only question is why the actual essays aren't posted on the Alliance's website. I did find, however, that the winner, Gregory Simonian, has a blog, where he describes his struggle to write the winning essay:
I'll give you some behind-the-scenes commentary. I had a super tough time cutting that essay within the word limit. I had…
j7uy5 | May 14, 2007
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">Domestic violence and
other forms of childhood trauma are all too common. The
effects of trauma on children have been studied in a variety of ways,
but much of this research has not employed strict diagnostic criteria.
Now, the Archives of General Psychiatry
has published an article that addresses this. It is
subscription-only, but there is a
href="http://www.medpagetoday.com/Psychiatry/Depression/tb/5602">good
summary of it on MedPage Today,
so nonspecialists don't really need access to the full article.
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif…
oracknows | May 14, 2007Be careful what you ask for; you just might get it.
I say this in light of a commenter, who decided to show up in one of my old posts to claim "positive results" from dichloroacetate (DCA), the small molecule experimental cancer drug that has shown promising activity in rat models of cancer but has not yet been subjected to testing in human trials, and invite me to check out new testimonials. Because DCA is a small molecule that is inexpensive to produce and can't itself be patented (although a patent for its use in treating cancer, a weaker form of patent, is possible), pharmaceutical…
j7uy5 | May 13, 2007The
LA Times reports on the Senate passage of a bill that should enhance
the oversight of drug safety by the FDA. Numerous posts here
on ScienceBlogs, and elsewhere, have commented on the problems with
safety oversight. The existence of these problems has been no
secret since the Vioxx problem came to light a few years ago.
href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-fda10may10,1,7947418,full.story?coll=la-headlines-nation">
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">
href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-fda10may10,1,7947418,full.story?coll=la-…
oracknows | May 13, 2007I don't know where EoR finds this stuff, but I like the way Deborah Ross thinks when she discusses offering alternative medical practitioners alternative methods of payment. Not surprisingly, they aren't interested:
There has been much fuss this week about the 'scientific status' of homeopathy, just as there is always a fuss about 'alternative' treatments generally. Personally, I have no patience with the dismissive and often contemptuous attitude these therapies can attract, as there are many useful treatments and products on offer out there. These include:
THE ALTERNATIVE CREDIT CARD (…
scientificactivist | May 11, 2007This week's New England Journal of Medicine is a virtual smorgasbord of articles on HPV (human papilloma virus) vaccination. Although HPV also causes unsightly genital warts, HPV is more or less the sole cause of cervical cancer. I've written quite a bit here about Merck's HPV vaccine, Gardasil, since a February 2007 executive order by Texas governor Rick Perry made the vaccine mandatory for sixth grade girls in the state but was subsequently overturned by the state legislature (and Perry announced just this Tuesday that he would not veto the bill, which had been passed by a veto-proof…
oracknows | May 11, 2007Remember the SCIO? It was featured in Your Friday Dose of Woo two weeks ago. It's an amazingly woo-ey piece of woo that was just perfect for my little weekly feature.
Unfortunately, not everyone appreciates my having a little fun with it. For example, one of the woomeisters responsible for the SCIO has appeared on my blog to complain and defend Professor William Nelson, the luminary of woo who's had a hand in not one, but two pieces of woo featured in YFDoW. This woomeister, who signed his comments "Dr. D," is displeased and showed up in the comments to tell me so:
ill Nelson hasn't yet won…
oracknows | May 11, 2007I really love Life Technologyâ¢. I really do. Heck, I could spend the next several weeks mining it for topics for Your Friday Dose of Woo. The stuff there's so over-the-top that I find it hard to believe that these guys are serious. I mean, really, look at some of their products, a couple of which I've featured on YFDoW before; specifically the Ultra Advanced Psychotronic Money Magnet Professional Version 1.0⢠(a.k.a. The Ultimate in Financial Abundance Engineering Technologyâ¢) and the Tesla Purple Energy Shieldâ¢, two pieces of such amazingly tasty woo that it's pretty hard to top them.…
j7uy5 | May 11, 2007Some
call it "hillbilly heroin," something I could not bring myself to say
aloud. But that illustrates the strong feelings that people
have about the drug,
href="http://www.fda.gov/cder/drug/infopage/oxycontin/">Oxycontin.
As painkillers go, it is pretty strong. Sometimes
it is an appropriate choice, particularly in cancer patients.
Now, we hear that the company, Purdue
Pharma LP, and its top executives have been given heavy fines
for the way they marketed the drug.
href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10118248&surl=http%3A//www.michiganradio.org/&…
grrlscientist | May 10, 2007tags: bipolar disorder, manic-depressive illness, mental health, molecular biology
Bipolar disorder depends upon small, combined effects from variations in many different brain genes, none of which is powerful enough by itself to cause the disease, according to a new genome-wide study. Despite this revelation, this new study shows that targeting one enzyme produced by one of these altered genes could lead to development of new and more effective medications.
The research, conducted by Amber E. Baum, Francis J. McMahon, and their colleagues, is the first study to genetically scan thousands of…
tfk | May 10, 2007An LA Times report on a study of the HPV vaccine summarizes it by saying "Overall, the new results indicate that the vaccine is not living up to its initial prospects." But is that true? Here's what the reporter said mere paragraphs earlier about the findings:
Among women who had not previously been exposed to types 16 and 18, the vaccine reduced the risk of precancerous lesions caused by those two strains by 98%.
"The overall message, in my mind, is that among susceptible young women, the vaccine was highly effective in preventing HPV-16 or -18 precancerous cervical lesions," [study author…