medicine
j7uy5 | March 24, 2007Finally,
we have a nice succinct statement from a politician on the
subject of health care coverage.
I know this is controversial, in the sense that, so far, the mainstream
operatives in both major parties reject this. Still, I truly
believe that if most people understood the issue, they would agree with
Kucinich.
Most
of the stated objections are based upon ideological concerns, totally
divorced from any sort of objectivity. That is the case
within the Republican party.
Within the Democratic party, it is probably more accurate to say that
it is concern about corporate influence…
oracknows | March 24, 2007Regular readers will know my opinion of Reiki or "energy healing." No need to rehash it here, at least not at the moment. But if you're a believer and looking for a Reiki practitioner, Reiki Blogger has some suggestions for you of things that "are NOT OK" in a first Reiki session:
I recently read what I can only say was a very disturbing account of a persons first ever reiki session. The person went along to a "friends" husband who was, as well as a reiki person, a medical doctor.
Now, you would expect to be reasonably confident to follow this persons instructions. Well, think again. He asked…
grrlscientist | March 23, 2007Physicians from around the world urged Elsevier Group PLC., the publisher of The Lancet medical journal and other scientific and medical journals, to cut its links to weapons sales, calling on the editors to find another publisher if Reed Elsevier refused to stop hosting arms fairs.
"The Lancet is one of the most respected international medical journals and should not be linked to an industry involved in weapons designed to cause physical harm and death," wrote Dr. Ian Gilmore, president of the Royal College of Physicians, and Dr. Michael Pelly, the association's international adviser.…
oracknows | March 23, 2007It's been another eventful week on the ol' blog, staring out with a post on despereate cancer patients self-experimenting with dichloroacetate, continuing on to do another fisking of the anti-evolution neurosurgeon and discussing real individualization of treatments, provided a little basic cancer biology, and ended up with some of the first straight medblogging that I've done in a long time. And then things finished up with the depressing news that Elizabeth Edwards' breast cancer has recurred in her rib and possibly in her lung. Things have somehow gotten a bit too serious around here, even…
oracknows | March 22, 2007As odd as it seems, my timing in posting about removing chemotherapy ports yesterday was eerily coincidental.
I've alluded to this before, but I'm most definitely not a big fan of John Edwards and would never vote for him for President. That being said, I can't help but feel for him and, even more so, his wife Elizabeth, given their announcement today that Elizabeth's breast cancer has recurred (see here as well), with a biopsy proving that it has metastasized to a rib. Neither she nor he nor their family deserve this, nor does any patient with cancer. I've gotten a few e-mails asking what…
oracknows | March 22, 2007I've been remiss about this (mainly because I've been aware of it for a few days now), but it turns out that Mark and Chris Hoofnagle have started a rather promising-looking blog, Denialism.com. It's a blog dedicated to discussing six main areas:
HIV/AIDS Denialism
Global Warming denialism
Creationism/Intelligent Design Denialism
Holocaust Denial
Anti-Vaccination denialists
Animal testing denialists
Hmmm. Looks like they're muscling in on my territory a bit, although I seldom write about global warming for the simple reason that I don't know as much about it as I know about other topics.
Oh…
oracknows | March 22, 2007[Note: The following is based on an aggregation of multiple patients. It does not represent any single patient's case.]
It was a little case.
I know, I know, I've said in the past that there's no such thing as a little operation, at least not when it's happening to you, and that's true. Nonetheless this case was as close to "minor surgery" as you could get while still actually having to wield a scalpel to cut through skin. As I spoke to her before the operation to get informed consent, the patient ran her fingers across her short hair, only now starting to grow back after her having completed…
omnibrain | March 21, 2007I started a thread on the old Omni Brain asking what the coolest name in science was. These are a few we came up with:
James Intrilligator (Psychology - vision)
Ray Jackendoff (Psychology - language)
Dr Martin S. Angst (Neuroscience - Pain)
Dr Jules Angst (Psychiatry)
There are some great names out there yet to be discovered! Share your favorites?
oracknows | March 21, 2007...like this (explanation here):
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oracknows | March 21, 2007Late yesterday afternoon, I was lazily checking my referral logs to see who might be linking to Respectful Insolenceâ¢, as most bloggers like to do from time to time (and any blogger who claims otherwise is probably feeding you a line), when I noticed a fairly large number of visits coming from one location, namely here. I was wondering when this would happen, but it looks as though the regulars at The DCA Site have finally noticed some of my writing. Surprisingly, what they say about me is not that bad, although that's probably because they seem to have found the least--shall we say?--…
j7uy5 | March 21, 2007Yet
Another Critique of Pay for Performance
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The concept of Pay for Performance is one of those things that seems
sensible and appealing on the surface. But if there was ever
a better example of the maxim, "the devil is in the details," I haven't
seen that particular devil yet.
The latest critique is in the New England Journal. This has
already been mentioned at
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but I want to add some points.
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omnibrain | March 20, 2007It was one year ago today that I made the first post to Omni Brain. I never imagined we would do this well.
In the last year Omni Brain has undergone many many changes, the biggest of which have been Sandra of Neurofuture fame joining the blog, and moving to ScienceBlogs.
We started with not-even 3000 page views in our first full month and now receive tens of thousands of page views and visitors - which is pretty great for a smart ass little science blog! Our Technorati ranking has also grown by leaps and bounds; near 14,000 today.
Thanks everyone, for reading and for all your lively…
oracknows | March 20, 2007Day four and still no answer to the challenge.
I think I agree with some of my readers who've complained about this; I'll cut back on the frequency of reminders to something less than every day...
oracknows | March 20, 2007Although I've been blogging alot about dichloroacetate, the small molecule chemotherapeutic agent that has shown promise against a variety of cancers in preclinical animal tumor models, but I'm not the only one. Fellow ScienceBlogger Abel Pharmboy, whose knowledge of pharmacology surpasses my own, has also been on the case and has produced some articles worth checking out:
The dichloroacetate (DCA) cancer kerfuffle
Where to buy dichloroacetate...
Local look at dichloroacetate (DCA) hysteria
Edmonton pharmacist asked to stop selling dichloroacetate (DCA)
Four days, four dichloroacetate (DCA)…
j7uy5 | March 20, 2007Not
only that, but the genetically modified "organism" is an engineered
HIV. At least, that is what researchers at Emory College in
London are contemplating.
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href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article1533745.ece">Disabled
Aids virus could provide cure for cystic fibrosis
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Mark
Henderson, Science Editor
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March
19, 2007
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From
The Times
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oracknows | March 20, 2007The longer I maintain this blog, the more I find unexpected (to me, at least) intersections and relationships between various topics that I write about. Of course, a lot of it simply has to do with the fact that one of the overarching themes of this blog is skepticism and critical thinking, which leads one to seek patterns in various pseudoscience, but sometimes it's a little more interesting than that. For example, a couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about the "individualization" of treatments in "alternative" medicine and how it's largely a sham that alt-med practitioners claim that their…
clock | March 20, 2007The first four books in the Cherry Ames series are back in print, published by Springer Publishing Company.
Apparently, many people, upon reading them, decided to join the nursing profession. Mind you, that was between 1943 and 1968. when these books first came out.
I bet Kim was the first one to order the new reprints (although I bet she still keeps her old originals somewhere around the house). My wife is ordering her set today.
clock | March 19, 2007It has been known for quite a while now that bipolar disorder is essentially a circadian clock disorder. However, there was a problem in that there was no known animal model for the bipolar disorder.
Apparently that has changed, if this report is to be believed:
"There's evidence suggesting that circadian genes may be involved in bipolar disorder," said Dr. Colleen McClung, assistant professor of psychiatry and the study's senior author. "What we've done is taken earlier findings a step further by engineering a mutant mouse model displaying an overall profile that is strikingly similar to…
jstemwedel | March 19, 2007One of my students raised a really good question in class today, a question to which I do not know the answer -- but maybe you do.
We were discussing some of the Very Bad Experiments* that prompted current thinking** about what it is and is not ethically permissible to do with human subjects of scientific research. We had noted that institutions like our university have an Institutional Review Board (IRB) that must approve your protocol before you can conduct research with human subjects. At this point, my student asked:
Are there cases where researchers send protocols to the IRB that are…
oracknows | March 19, 2007I had been planning on blogging about a couple of recent studies identifiying multiple genes that appear to be associated with autism and autism spectrum disorders, thus adding to the body of evidence showing that autism and ASDs have a significant genetic basis as part of their etiology. It turns out, however, that Steve Novella, who also happens to be a neurologist, the Director of the New England Skeptics' Society, and the host of my favorite skeptical podcast, The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, has already beaten me to it, leaving me with little to say.
No big deal. There was so much to…