medicine
oracknows | April 16, 2007Crab spider preparing for take off, Misumenoides formosipes
Humans have known for quite a while that some spiders engage in a kind of flying called "ballooning." To balloon, spiders release a parachute-like web into the air (with themselves attached) and allow the wind to pick them up and deposit them in greener pastures. What humans did not know until very recently, however, is that these spiders actually check the weather before taking flight.
Biologists and mathematicians with Rothamsted Research in England first calculated the ideal flying conditions for spiders, finding cloudy fall and…
oracknows | April 16, 2007...because he's sure as heck doing his best to cause it damage with his latest antievolution "broadsides," even to the point where it needs the loving ministrations of a neurosurgeon! His latest screeds produce in me a nearly irresistible urge to pound my head against the nearest hard surface to make the psychic pain stop. He's placing me in danger of real, physical pain, from epidural hematoma (in fact, I wonder if I'm in the middle of a lucid interval right now) to subdural hematoma to cerebral contusions.
First of all, regular readers may have noted that I haven't yet responded to the…
j7uy5 | April 15, 2007This
is a continuation of the first post,
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/04/things_that_affect_you_pdufa_a.php">Things
That Affect YOU: PDUFA and AERS. PDUFA is
the Prescription
Drug User Fee Act. AERS is the
href="http://www.fda.gov/cder/aers/default.htm">Adverse
Event Reporting System.
The PDUFA is up for review soon, as it expires in September.
If it expires, 40% of the funding for premarketing drug
approval
will disappear.
This has been covered only minimally by the mainstream media.
There is an article on Bloomberg.com (
href="http://www.bloomberg.…
oracknows | April 15, 2007Granted, it is the print media, rather than the bubble-headed TV doctors that I railed against a couple of days ago, but even so I had a hard time believing this article in the Washington Post when it was forwarded to me.
Compare:
Washington Post article
Part 1 and Part 2 of Early Detection of Cancer, by me.
It's like a distilled version of what I wrote and excellent--dare I say it around here these days?--framing of a complex medical/scientific issue for a lay audience. Remember, as you read this, the term "overdiagnosis," which I should have discussed. Also remember that I (and the authors…
j7uy5 | April 14, 2007The
href="http://content.nejm.org/" rel="tag">New England
Journal of Medicine has a set of three
early-release editorials, all pertaining to prescription drug safety,
and all openly accessible:
href="http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/NEJMp078041">Paying
for Drug Approvals — Who's Using Whom?
Jerry Avorn, M.D.
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">
href="http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/NEJMp078057">Drug
Safety Reform at the FDA — Pendulum Swing or Systematic
Improvement?
Mark McClellan, M.D., Ph.D.
href="http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/NEJMp078048…
oracknows | April 13, 2007In February of this year Jill Pruetz, an anthropologist with Iowa State University, witnessed Kenyan chimpanzees break off branches from trees, sharpen them using their teeth, and then use these spears to hunt lesser bush babies, a kind of small primate. The bush babies sleep in the hollows of trees, and the chimps were repeatedly seen jabbing their spears into the hollows and pulling them back out with fresh bush baby babies impaled on the end.A chimpanzee, seen here, finishing up his degree in Information Technology from the University of Phoenix Online.
Pruetz recorded a video of the…
oracknows | April 13, 2007Having done a lot of trauma coverage in my time (although the last time I covered trauma call was nearly eight years ago), I have to admit that, when I first heard of the motor vehicle collision (I never call such crashes "accidents" because they rarely are) in which New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine was seriously injured, the first question that popped into my mind after "How did this happen?" was:
Was the Governor wearing seatbelts?
Of course, I strongly suspected that I already knew the answer, and, indeed, I did. The answer was no. Here's what apparently happened:
Gov. Jon S. Corzine was…
oracknows | April 13, 2007...and how!
Who knew our intrepid mascot liked hockey so much? I wonder if he's Canadian. Maybe so.
oracknows | April 13, 2007
Believe it or not, it's been almost nine months since, almost on a whim, I first started this little indulgence of mine known as Your Friday Dose of Woo, with some truly fine woo known as quantum homeopathy. Before you know it, we'll be celebrating a full year of woo. (Yes, I know that woo is eternal, and my little project represents a mere grain of sand on all the beaches of, for instance, California. If I'm going to be overwhelmed with woo and unreason, though, I might as well have a few laughs along the way.)
One thing I've noticed over these months is that there are definitely recurring…
j7uy5 | April 13, 2007This
is from Medpage Today, which often carries the same things as Medscape,
but does not require registration (hint, hint).
They report on the finding of a genetic variant that increases the risk
of obesity. the more copies of the allele, the greater the
risk. The association was found when researchers at were
looking for a genetic basis for type II diabetes mellitus.
They thought they found one, but when they controlled for
body mass, the association disappeared. So the allele is not
a direct cause of diabetes, but does increase the risk by increasing
the risk of obesity.
The article…
oracknows | April 12, 2007If you ever want to wonder why I'm sometimes of the mind that the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine should be disbanded and its functions distributed among the other Institutes of the NIH, you just have to consider the sorts of woo-filled studies (like the Gonzalez protocol) funded by NCCAM mixed in among the more reasonable studies of herbal remedies and other modalities that have at least a modicum of scientific plausibility. With that in mind, I came across a study that seems to be getting a fair amount of play in the press, at least around here. The study purports…
clock | April 12, 2007I made only a brief mention of the study when the press release first came out, but the actual paper (which is excellent) is out now. It is on PLoS so it is free for all to see: Mania-like behavior induced by disruption of CLOCK:
Circadian rhythms and the genes that make up the molecular clock have long been implicated in bipolar disorder. Genetic evidence in bipolar patients suggests that the central transcriptional activator of molecular rhythms, CLOCK, may be particularly important. However, the exact role of this gene in the development of this disorder remains unclear. Here we show that…
oracknows | April 12, 2007I sometimes wonder if those doctors who do health segments for various TV news outlets are "real" doctors, given the sorts of things they actually say. Oh, Dr. Dean Edell is a pretty evidence-based guy most of the time (one of his finest moments being his takedown of Dr. Lorraine Day on the air), but for all too many of these other docs, their brains shut down when the TV lights shine on them. Sadly, there were a couple of doozies of examples this week.
First up is Val Wadas-Willingham, producer for CNN's medical news on Paging Dr. Gupta:
My husband's best friend, Hans, was supposed to be in…
j7uy5 | April 11, 2007
[Update: Retired Doc's Thoughts has a more complete review of the varied potential benefits from statins.]
This
morning, Effect Measure
href="http://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/2007/04/the_statin_story_continues_to.php">posted
about a retrospective study that indicates that there may be a
protective effect if statins are taken by persons with COPD (Chronic
Obstructive Pulmonary Disease.) In also appeared that statins
lowered the risk of death from pneumonia.
This is a so-called pleiotropic effect, meaning that the drug has an
effect other than that which is originally intended…
grrlscientist | April 11, 2007The 77th edition of the Tangled Bank is now available for your reading pleasure. This edition included two pieces that I wrote, so be sure to go over there to figure out which stories made the cut!
.
tags: blog carnival, science, natural history
oracknows | April 11, 2007The latest Grand Rounds, that blog carnival for medicine and health care issues, has been posted at the ironically named (I hope) Dr. Dork. Check it out.
oracknows | April 11, 2007It's been a couple of weeks since we last checked in with The DCA Site, that dubious advertising site for BuyDCA.com, where a chemist named Jim Tassano sells to desperate cancer patients non-pharmaceutical grade and non-FDA-approved dichloroacetate, the small molecule chemotherapeutic agent with an interesting and unusual mechanism of action that has shown promise in rat models of cancer but as yet has not undergone clinical trials in humans to determine if it is effective in cancer. Based on a lot of hype by the credulous and proudly ignorant, a lot of distrust of big pharma (some justified…
oracknows | April 10, 2007You never touch me anymore. Is it because you think I'm fat? Damon diadema
Scientists have recently witnessed two species of arachnids that caress family members and seem to enjoy snuggling. Two kinds of whip spiders--dime-sized Phrynus marginemaculatus found in Florida and the larger Damon diadema which live in Tanzania and Kenya--spend their days in constant tactile touch with their relatives. In one experiment, siblings were put in a cage among many other unrelated whip spiders and within minutes had gathered back together in their family group. Mothers were routinely witnessed stroking…
grrlscientist | April 10, 2007The 3rd volume, issue number 29 of Grand Rounds is available for your reading pleasure. This blog carnival focuses on the best medical writing recently posted on a blog. This is a large issue so there is plenty to read.
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tags: blog carnival, medicine
oracknows | April 10, 2007Today, in case you didn't remember, is World Homeopathy Day, a day for the credulous to celebrate the woo that is homeopathy by celebrating the birthday of the originator of homeopathy, Samuel Hahnemann. I had thought of making a "homeopathic" mention of this great event (in other words, no mention, just like there's no active ingredient in a homeopathically diluted and succussated remedy), but then I remembered that, according to the principles of homeopathy, the more you dilute something, the stronger it is. Thus, by homeopathic "reasoning," not mentioning World Homeopathy Day would be even…