medicine
oracknows | May 10, 2007A common refrain among practitioners and advocates of alternative medicine is that the reason randomized clinical trials frequently fail to find any objective evidence of clinical efficacy for their favorite woo is because, in essence, science is not the right tool to evaluate whether it works. In essence, they either appeal to other ways of knowing, invoke postmodernist nonsense claiming that science is just one way of knowing that is not any better than any other ways, or both. The most outrageously absurd example of postmodernist silliness in this regard that I've ever seen was the…
oracknows | May 8, 2007Via Kevin, MD, here's a piece that almost could have been written by me:
CAM exists in an alternate universe from real medicine. It wants to be legitimate but manages to avoid the responsibilities and liability of real medical practice. As most CAM treats nebulous symptoms with equally nebulous modalities, there is no measurable standard for efficacy of any of the treatments. Acupuncturists, for example, diagnose perturbations of "qi," a mystical life force which apart from serving as the basis for Star Wars has no physiological equivalent and cannot be measured in any way except through…
tfk | May 8, 2007The Senate is considering a bill that would have allowed the reimportation of drugs from Canada. This is a measure that overwhelming majorities support, and that many people have already supported with their wallets. Some states have even explored reimporting drugs.
Of course, a popular idea that could ease the suffering and financial hardship of sick people couldn't be allowed to stand, and an amendment by Mississippi's Senator Cochran was passed requiring the administration to specifically approve that one provision.
Senator Pat Roberts, apparently not concerned about the cost of his…
oracknows | May 8, 2007In rapid succession after the last pontificating and bloviating article claiming that there will never be a cure for cancer because it would be too financially disastrous to the medical economy, I've been made aware of another pontificating and bloviating article decrying the state of cancer research today, entitled Curing Cancer: Running on Vapor, Remedy: More Brainpower, Less Hype, by George L. Gabor Miklos, Ph.D. and Phillip J. Baird, M.D., Ph.D. On first glance, it looks like a bold proposal for a necessary change of direction in our cancer research effort. Sadly, it doesn't deliver on…
oracknows | May 7, 2007This one's been going around the medical blogosphere. It's pretty hilarious, based as it is on perhaps the funniest Saturday Night Live Digital Short from the entire 2006-2007 season (warning: may not be work-safe, depending on how uptight your workplace is):
Kids these days. I tell you. I don't think we could have gotten away with this in our medical school's end-of-the-year play back in the 1980s.
oracknows | May 7, 2007It's a simple question that we as medical professionals often have to ask, but one that is a minefield when it comes to answers.
To take a cue from our former President, I suppose it depends on what the meaning of the word "active" is.
oracknows | May 7, 2007Readers who don't like me might think that the title of this post refers to what I am about to write. I know, the title perfectly encapsulates the verbose style that is my stock and trade. In reality, though, it's referring to a couple of articles floating around the blogosphere of which I've become aware and about which I've been meaning discuss because of their similarities. One is a pretty worthless piece of conspiracy-mongering; the other, although it makes some appropriate criticisms of how we go about cancer research, comes to a wildly incorrect conclusion about what we should be doing…
oracknows | May 6, 2007Our intrepid mascot has been revealing sides of himself this year of which I had previously been unaware. After all, who knew he was so into art that he'd pose nude without embarrassment? Or that he was a Shakespearean actor? Or that he has a way with the ladies?
Maybe it's because he's so suave and debonair, as we see this month:
I ask again: What's he got that I haven't got? Is it the tux? Is it--gasp!--the appliance on top of his head.
Best not to go there.
j7uy5 | May 5, 2007"
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/04/AR2007050401976.html?hpid=topnews">Resilient
Infections Worry Military Doctors" is a headline in the
Washington Post. It reflects a serious concern often noted
here at ScienceBlogs. I read it and worried, again.
But perhaps there is hope: maggots. From
News@Nature.com:
href="http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070430/full/070430-13.html">Maggots
eat up resistant bacteria
Creepy
crawlies are the latest weapon in the anti-MRSA arsenal.
Published
online: 4 May 2007
doi:10.1038/news070430-13
Katharine…
j7uy5 | May 5, 2007Sometimes
newspapers raise more questions than they answer. In the case
of this WaPo editorial about Medicare, I find myself wishing that they
had done a little more research.
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/04/AR2007050401871.html">Unsustainable
Medicare
Fixes
for the program's funding will be needed soon.
Saturday,
May 5, 2007; Page A16
THE
RELEASE last week of the annual report of the Medicare trustees
underscores an unavoidable fact that too many politicians have
nonetheless been avoiding for too long: Of all the entitlement
programs,…
j7uy5 | May 4, 2007For
some completely inexplicable reason, MT won't let me reply to the
comment under my last post. But I can still post posts, so
here is the question and the answer:
Q: Wow, is this serious? I have amblyopia, and would
really, really love to get some of my vision back. In part because it's
a pain in the butt, but also because I have a cavernous angioma in the
left side of my brainstem that affects my balance. My neurologist has
told me that I would have fewer problems if my right-eye (the weak one)
were better.
Interestingly, I have been taking benzos for neuropathy and ataxia
(clonazepam…
ddobbs | May 4, 2007As the folks at Pure Pedantry point out, the discovery that stress precedes volume reductions in the hippocampus in PTSD is a significant insight and settles a long-running debate: Do stress and depression shrink the hippocampus (a brain area vital to learning, memory, and navigation), or does a small hippocampus make you vulnerable to stress and depresison?
We've known for a while (courtesy of research by Yvette Sheline and others) that people who've been repeatedliy or severely depressed have smaller hippocampi. But it wasn't clear which was chicken and which egg. This new study shows that…
oracknows | May 4, 2007Everybody (well, mostly everybody) learns in science and physics class the Three Laws of Thermodynamics:
Energy cannot be created or destroyed, meaning that the increase in the internal energy of a thermodynamic system is equal to the amount of heat energy added to the system minus the work done by the system on the surroundings.
The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium.
As temperature approaches absolute zero, the entropy of a system approaches a constant.
These three laws pretty much describe the…
oracknows | May 3, 2007You may remember how, almost in passing as part of a longer post, I mentioned how much cranks can't stand critics of theirs who write under a pseudonym and try to out them at every opportunity. Indeed, one of the biggest cranks of all, J.B. Handley, the man whose mantra used to be that autism is nothing more than a misdiagnosis for mercury poisoning but who is now backpedaling furiously to blame "live viruses" and "toxic loads," tried to do just that the other day in the comments of this post (as if I'd let that happen on my own blog).
Not all outing is always bad. Kevin Leitch, in fact, has…
grrlscientist | May 3, 2007tags: paralysis, nanotechnology, medicine
A group of lab mice were intentionally paralyzed by cutting their spinal cords. As a result, they ended up dragging their hind legs behind them instead of scurrying around as mice do. But a group of these mice have partially recovered movement in their hind legs without the aid of surgery or drugs, thanks to a new field of medical research known as regenerative medicine.
Samuel Stupp and his colleagues are several of the pioneers in the field regenerative medicine, and they have developed a liquid that is injected into the severed spines of these…
oracknows | May 3, 2007If there's one undeniable aspect of "intelligent design" creationism advocates, it is their ability to twist and misrepresent science and any discussions of evolution to their own ends. Be it Dr. Michael Egnor's twisting of history to claim that eugenics is based on Darwinism, rather than the artificial selection (or, as we snarky ones like to call it, intelligent design), claims that "Darwinism" is a tautology and irrelevant to the question of antimicrobial resistance, or blaming evolution for atheism, the decline of Western mores, and, if you believe the ID advocates, bad breath, key to the…
oracknows | May 2, 2007Dr. Steven Novella, an academic neurologist, President of the New England Skeptical Society, and organizer of what's become my favorite skeptical podcast, The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, took the time to weigh in on the Nature Neuroscience article that I discussed the other day and that engendered dozens of comments, as posts about antivaccination irrationality tend to do around here.
Besides my being interested in what a neurologist has to say about these issues, the reason that I want to bring your attention to his article is because he issues a clarion call to arms for those who…
oracknows | May 2, 2007It's time once again for Change of Shift, the nursing blog carnival. This time, it's being hosted at Emergiblog. Check it out.
oracknows | May 2, 2007Polar bears in the southern Beaufort Sea have begun to cannibalize one another according to a recent study in the online publication Polar Biology. The polar bears' main food source in the area, ringed seals, are accessible only across ice shelves. Global climate change has melted these shelves, cutting off the bears from their food and forcing them to turn on one another.What would you do for a Klondike Bar?
Polar bears often kill their own kind as a form of population control, territorial dominance and reproductive advantages, but killing each other for food had rarely been witnessed…
oracknows | May 2, 2007One amusing little tidbit that came out of my recent post about how the mercury militia tries to intimidate scientists who are willing to speak out against the antivaccination wingnuttery is that the Generation Rescue website, home of J. B. Handley and his merry band of mercury militia chelation junkies, has undergone a makeover. Gone is the dogmatic site that proclaimed that autism and autism spectrum disorders are all "misdiagnoses" for mercury poisoning. Here now is a kinder, gentler Generation Rescue site, although it's still chock full of the same looniness that you've come to expect…