medicine
oracknows | May 2, 2007I had come across a rather amusing mea culpa by GruntDoc in which, while discussing an amazingly inappropriate notice regarding guidelines for emergency room chiropractic reimbursement, he admits to having in the past referred our best and bravest to chiropractors. I can understand why he did it, given the circumstances he described. However, what bothered me was this statement:
In my six-plus years of being on-call in the hospital emergency department (ED), I have seen numerous ED physicians gain familiarity with the indications for chiropractic consultation. I have enjoyed seeing the…
j7uy5 | May 1, 2007
Every once in a while one of the world's most physically fit persons
drops over and dies. In fact four persons have died during
or shortly after running the Boston Marathon.
It has been
href="http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/short/352/15/1550">known
for a while that the cause, in at least some cases, is an abnormally
low concentration of sodium in the blood (hyponatremia.)
The reason is that some people, especially the slower runners, drink
too much water during the race. But the exact mechanism
(pathophysiology) has not been fully understood.
Now, in a short piece on Medpage…
j7uy5 | May 1, 2007Data
presented at a Neurology conference shows structural changes in the
brain of Gulf War vets who are highly symptomatic of
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War_Syndrome" rel="tag">Gulf
War Syndrome.
It appears that the findings have not yet been published; in fact, the
study has not been completed. So it is early to draw firm
conclusions. They've done MRIs on 36 persons; 18 with a high level of
symptoms, 18 with milder symptoms. The findings were
presented at the 59th annual meeting of the American Academy of
Neurology. The study is being done at Boston
University and…
oracknows | May 1, 2007There are times when, as a scientist, I look at an idea and its execution and simply stand in awe. It's particularly satisfying when it's a relatively simple idea that could conceivably do a lot of good for a lot of patients. Oddly enough, whether it's because I've been out of the loop or because it hasn't garnered that much attention in the blogosphere (not even here in ScienceBlogs), but I only just heard of it now. It's a new drug in phase II clinical trials that has the potential to obviate or reverse the effects of a wide variety of genetic mutations that cause human disease:
A pill that…
clock | May 1, 2007A guy 'jebo jeza', ahem, literally fucked a hedgehog in Serbia and ended up in the ER. Do kids there these days don't even know their slang? 'Jebo jeza' means something along the lines of 'being in big trouble' or 'having everything go wrong for you'. This guy accomplished that for himself, I guess....unless this is, as is likely, an urban legend.
oracknows | April 30, 2007As a male, this bit of woo from Serbia causes me pain just to contemplate it. I'm not sure if it's true or not because--well--I have a hard time believing that anybody can be this stupid. It has the whiff of urban legend about it. However, one underestimates the stupidity of men in their quest to solve sexual problems; so it's possible that this is true. Just don't tell Bora; I don't know if he could stand that this happened in Serbia, if it actually happened:
A Serbian man who went to a witchdoctor in search of a cure for premature ejaculation rather foolishly took the shaman's advice, viz:…
j7uy5 | April 30, 2007Just
in case you are a physician looking for a reason to avoid drug reps,
you should read this article on PLOS Medicine. It is an
enlightening, if sickening, inside view of pharmaceutical sales
practices.
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">
href="http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0040150">Following
the Script: How Drug Reps Make Friends and Influence Doctors
Adriane
Fugh-Berman*, Shahram Ahari
April
24, 2007
...Unlike
the door-to-door vendors of cosmetics and vacuum cleaners, drug reps do
not sell their product…
tfk | April 30, 2007Nail gun injuries on the rise with growth of DIY trend:
Doctors in the nation’s emergency rooms are used to seeing so-called bagel cuts — the injury that results from slicing a finger or palm instead of a bagel and is most common on weekends.
Now North Carolina researchers report that ER physicians are increasingly treating another kind of painful household injury: wounds inflicted by pneumatic nail guns wielded by weekend carpenters who bought the machines at home improvement stores.
Such accidents more than tripled between 1991 and 2005, the researchers found, and 96 percent of victims were…
oracknows | April 30, 2007Now here's something you don't see every day. Nature Neuroscience has weighed in about the pseudoscience that claims that mercury causes autism. Based on British experience with animal rights activists, it points out a parallel that I hadn't considered before:
The idea that autism is caused by vaccination is influencing public policy, even though rigorous studies do not support this hypothesis. Legislators are right to take into account the concerns of parent groups and others directly affected by autism, but policy decisions should be based on hard evidence rather than anxiety. More…
oracknows | April 29, 2007I don't know if this is a good thing or a bad thing. Certainly it's a bad thing that another physician is diving head-first into the pseudoscience that is "intelligent design" creationism and making a of himself in the process.
On the other hand, at least this time it's not a surgeon:
A Columbia medical professor made his case for scientific acceptance of "intelligent design" last night and found himself taking fire from his peers for his view.
John Marshall, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Missouri-Columbia, argued in front of about 100 people in a University Hospital…
oracknows | April 27, 2007This is a bit science policy wonky, but here's some interesting news from Medical Writing, Editing & Grantsmanship:
My *favorite* new factoid from the NIH ... the oldest "new investigator" to date received his first R01 last year at age ... 82. You go, guy!
On the other hand, a nobel laureate was triaged.
As a low-level scientific peon (compared to any Nobel laureate, that is), I find it nice to know that occasionally even the gods of science have a bump in the road to funding. ("Triaged" means that the reviewers all agreed that the grant was in the lower 50-60% of all the grants…
oracknows | April 27, 2007I've said it once before, but this week's woo compels me to say it again: I happen to love gadgets.
I've been a bit of a technogeek since very early on in my life, with a lot of the things that go along with it, including a major interest in science fiction, awkwardness around the opposite sex, When at their best, gadgets can do things that need to be done and, if well designed, can do them with panache, making drudgery almost fun Then of course, there's the almost Dilbert-like joy males into technogeekery have in one-upping each other, almost like the surgeons I described yesterday one-…
oracknows | April 26, 2007When I saw this, I thought it had to be a joke. But it's not:
Doctors in New York have removed a woman's gallbladder with instruments passed through her vagina, a technique they hope will cause less pain and scarring than the usual operation, and allow a quicker recovery. The technique can eliminate the need to cut through abdominal muscles, a major source of pain after surgery.
The operation was experimental, part of a study that is being done to find out whether people will fare better if abdominal surgery is performed through natural openings in the body rather than cuts in the belly. The…
oracknows | April 26, 2007Just when I start to think that maybe, just maybe, I could stop worrying and learn to love the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM, with apologies to Stanley Kubrick and Peter Sellers), damn if it doesn't go and do something that renews my cynicism about the entire Center. This time around, Dr. RW has turned me on to a proposed project that leaves me scratching my head, Omics and Variable Responses to CAM: Secondary Analysis of CAM Clinical Trials.
Given the nature of the woo to be studied, my first inclination was to start making light of the whole "oooommmmm"-…
oracknows | April 25, 2007Ever wonder what happened to Roger Ebert, who has been absent from the balcony in his Ebert & Roeper Show for quite some time battling cancer?
So did I. I always liked his style and mostly agreed with his movie reviews, but since moving away from Chicago I haven't heard much or watched the show as much, given that it never seems to be on when I'm around to watch TV. Well, wonder no more:
My Ninth Annual Overlooked Film Festival opens Wednesday night at the University of Illinois at Urbana, and Chaz and I will be in attendance.
This year I won't be speaking, however, as I await another…
clock | April 25, 2007It is the malaria week right now, isn't it? Check out this nifty website about the efforts to fight malaria in Kangaba, Mali. Just click and drag on each picture and you can swing it around full 360 degrees.
Hat-tip: Anton
clock | April 25, 2007If you have a moment, this is a useful study to participate in:
Do you blog? If yes, then please consider participating in an online survey from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. The study, Blogger Perceptions on Digital Preservation, is being conducted under the guidance of the Real Paul Jones. The study team is interested in hearing from all bloggers on their perceptions on digital preservation in relation to their own blogging activities, as well as the blogosphere in general. To hear more about this survey, please visit the study'…
oracknows | April 25, 2007This is the sort of thing that really irritates me.
Shelley, over at Retrospectacle posted a rather nice analysis of a paper that appeared in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture entitled Natural volatile treatments increase free-radical scavenging capacity of strawberries and blackberries. She was skeptical about news reports and press releases about the article, and did an analysis that showed that the paper did not show quite what the press was representing it as showing. In her post, she used a figure from the paper under the "fair use" doctrine to illustrate her point, and…
oracknows | April 25, 2007A lot of readers (well, a couple, anyway) have been asking me about the recent article by Peter Duesberg in the most recent issue of Scientific American entitled Chromosomal Chaos and Cancer. I suppose it's because I'm not only a cancer surgeon (which in and of itself is not enough to qualify me to comment on this topic) but rather because I'm also a cancer researcher and a molecular biologist (which, I submit, does make me qualified to comment on this topic). Peter Duesberg, as you may know, is the controversial scientist who is perhaps the foremost advocate of the discredited hypothesis…
oracknows | April 24, 2007Given all the verbiage (see the link list below) about dichloroacetate (DCA) that I've spewed into the blogosphere decrying the hijacking of a promising cancer therapy by conspiracy-mongers (it's the cancer cure "big pharma" is keeping from you because they can't make money on it) and opportunistic entrepreneurs like Jim Tassanno preying on the desperation of terminally ill cancer patients, I had thought that I would be taking a break on the topic for a while. But wouldn't you know it? My blogging colleague Abel at Terra Sigillata unearthed another fascinating article on the effects of this…