medicine
j7uy5 | March 19, 2007Various
ScienceBloggers have been thumping all over Egnor's case, which is a
well-deserved thumping.
href="http://scienceblogs.com/afarensis/2007/03/18/sunday_paleopathology_blogging/?utm_source=sbhomepage&utm_medium=link&utm_content=sublink">The
Egnor Challenge: Tooth Decay and Human Origins (afarensis)
href="http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2007/03/pigheaded_egnorance_antibiotic.php?utm_source=sbhomepage&utm_medium=link&utm_content=sublink">Pigheaded
Egnorance, Antibiotic Resistance, and Tautologies (MarkCC)
href="http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2007/03/…
oracknows | March 19, 2007It figures.
Whenever I go away for a conference, things of interest to me that I'd like to blog about start happening fast and furious. Indeed, I could only deal with one of them, and I chose to post my challenge to the Paleyist "intelligent design" creationist surgeon, Dr. William Egnor. Now that I'm back, I'll deal with the other major issue that's been a frequent topic of blogging over the last couple of months and bubbled up again into the blogosphere over the weekend.
Remember all the posts that I did on dichloroacetate (DCA), the small molecule chemotherapeutic agent that targets the…
tfk | March 18, 2007I forgot to advertise the campus blood drive that just ended, and I apologize for that. Your blood really can save lives and blood drives make it that much easier to do the right thing. They had plasmapheresis machines set up, which meant I got to give two units of cells rather than my usual one unit of whole blood.
What I love about giving blood is that it's a way for me to do something good at no real cost to myself. I feel better afterward, and I know I've helped one person, possibly several people.
Crooked Timber's Harry (or someone whose name starts with H) wishes he could give…
oracknows | March 18, 2007I'll be on the road as this posts. However, for your edification, enjoy a tag-team smackdown of some truly ignorant "mercury causes autism" evidence-free handwaving, courtesy of Dad of Cameron and Not Mercury. In keeping with the theme of twos, it's done in two parts, separated by two weeks:
Part 1: A Hot Cup of Jack Squat
Part 2: Wagnitz Pours a Second Cup
oracknows | March 18, 2007Yesterday, at the end of a post about the fallacious statements about evolution that Dr. Mike Egnor, a Professor of Neurosurgery, has been routinely serving up at the Discovery Institute, I made a challenge. I think I'll repeat it daily for a while until we see if he's up to answering it. It should be a very easy challenge for him to meet, given the number of times that he has made the two assertions that I plan to challenge him about.
Here are the two assertions that Dr. Egnor has made on more than one occasion, but most recently on Friday, and I'll quote him directly:
In fact, most research…
oracknows | March 17, 2007Reflexology, as you may know, is the pseudoscientific "alternative medicine" modality whose central dogma is that each body part or organ maps to a certain place on the feet or hands and that by pressing on those locations on the feet (for example), the reflexologist can have a therapeutic effect. The question, however, is: Why the feet? I mean, why not other parts of the body? For example, there's a part of the body that's larger than the feet, and mapping different parts of the body to it makes just as much sense as mapping them to the feet. I'm referring to butt reflexology (warning:…
oracknows | March 17, 2007Agh!
I say: Agh! Again.
Remember how it was just a mere three days ago that I administered some Respectful Insolence⢠to Dr. Michael Egnor, the Energizer Bunny of jaw-droppingly, appallingly ignorant anti-evolution posturing based on his apparently nonexistent understanding of what the theory of evolution actually says? Remember how I said how much I sincerely hoped that I could ignore him for a while? I really did mean it at the time.
Really, I did.
And then Afarensis and Mike Dunford had to and let me know that Dr. Egnor's at it yet again.
Dr. Egnor just won't stop, and as a fellow surgeon…
oracknows | March 16, 2007Ah, yes, Washington, DC.
That's where I am right now, deep in the belly of the government beast, attending the meeting of The Society of Surgical Oncology. It's usually a great meeting, except for the distressing tendency of surgeons here to act, well, too much like surgeons. For example, consider when the very first session today, which happened to be about my area of interest breast cancer, started. Was it 8 AM? No. 7 AM? No.
It was 6 AM.
I kid you not. 6 AM in the freakin' morning! The week after the switchover to Daylight Savings Time, yet! There was a time when I used to actually get up…
oracknows | March 15, 2007If not, then American Medical Student Association's got it for you, all in a nice, compact 15 page pocket manual. True, there's some standard advice about diet and some useful information about herbal remedies, but there's the now usual (from AMSA, anyway) credulous treatment of all sorts of woo, including homeopathy, Reiki, fasting, vitamin supplements, reflexology, and naturopathy. All the woo you need to know, all in a little manual you can stuff in the pocket of your labcoat.
(Hat tip, as is usual for AMSA-related woo, to Dr. R.W.)
oracknows | March 15, 2007You may recall Dr. Lorraine Day, the former Chief of Orthopedic Surgery at San Francisco General Hospital in the 1980's who, after developing breast cancer, became a consummate altie, selling various dubious "natural, alternative therapies for all diseases, including cancer and AIDS." Somewhere along the line, sadly, she also became a rabid anti-Semite and Holocaust denier. I've had an interest in her conspiracy-mongering for a while now, because she's the perfect storm of two of my biggest interests: "alternative medicine" and Holocaust denial. I used to refer to her as purveying both…
j7uy5 | March 14, 2007
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/09/AR2007030901894.html">Don't
flush your old prescriptions, or other medications.
They end up in the water, and that is bad. Just
throw them away. If you are concerned about someone digging
through your trash, then mix them with used kitty litter or some other
noxious substance.
Also, remember that those prescription labels have personal information
of them. You might want to obliterate that before you throw
out the bottles.
And of course, the federal government has
href="http://www.whitehousedrugpolicy.gov/…
oracknows | March 14, 2007...over at the latest Tangled Bank, hosted over at Living the Scientific Life.
Enjoy!
oracknows | March 14, 2007I need some β-blockers STAT.
I say that not because I'm hypertensive or because I'm having heart palpitations--at least not at the moment. I'm saying it because, after reading the latest brave foray into antievolutionary ignorance by--as much as I hate to admit it--a fellow surgeon named Dr. Michael Egnor, I need to do something for prophylaxis against such problems. Yes, Dr. Egnor is back again, hot on the heels of taking massive and much-deserved abuse from the science blogosphere (including a heapin' helpin' of Respectful Insolence⢠from me) over his spreading of misinformation and…
grrlscientist | March 14, 2007Welcome everyone to the 75th edition of Tangled Bank! There is plenty of material here to read so I think that you all will find something to interest you in this collection of the most recent stories about science, nature and medicine. So without further ado, I will let you jump right in.
Science and Religion
Tara at Aetiology wrote about a recent talk about Intelligent Design by Fred Skiff -- a presentation that was long on rhetoric, short on light.
I wrote a book review about God: the Failed Hypothesis by Victor J. Stenger. The book critically examines both empirical data and scientific…
oracknows | March 13, 2007For the last 50 years, zoo animals around the world have been tricked into painting. In many cases, the "art" has fetched big bucks: up to $25,000 for Chimp and Orangutan work. It's time for a comprehensive art show to compare styles:
Maggie, Sea Lion, Pittsburgh Zoo
Congo, Chimpanzee, London (1950's)
"Make Me Fly" by Seng Wong, Indian Elephant, Bali, Indonesia
Nonja, Orangutan, Schoenbrunn Zoo, Vienna, Austria
Lomako, Bonobo, Milwaukee County Zoo, Milwaukee WI, USA
Anonymous Great Ape, Mefou Forest Reserve, Camaroon
oracknows | March 13, 2007I'm on the record multiple times as saying that I reject the entire concept and nomenclature of "alternative medicine" as being distinct from "conventional" medicine as a false dichotomy, when in reality there should be just "medicine." Moreover, this "medicine" remaining should, whenever possible, be based on sound scientific and clinical trial evidence. In essence, I advocate treating "alternative" medicine the same as "conventional" medicine subjecting it to the same scientific process to determine whether it has efficacy or not, after which medicine that is effective is retained and used…
oracknows | March 12, 2007It figures.
After my having written repeated debunkings of various physicians who are creationists (mostly of the "intelligent design" variety), in retrospect I should have seen this one coming. I should have seen that the Discovery Institute, eager to use anyone they can find whom they can represent to the public as having scientific credentials (never mind whether those credentials have anything to do with evolutionary biology) and thus dupe the public into seeing them as having authority when they start laying down ignorant brain farts about how they "doubt Darwinism," would settle on…
oracknows | March 10, 2007Well, not exactly "no comment." You know that Orac, being the annoyingly obnoxious skeptic that he is, has to put at least two cents in.
This one's just plain odd. I knew Rosie O'Donnell's not exactly the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree, and she also borders on being a creduloid, at least with respect to almost buying the myth that mercury in vaccines causes autism (although she does get props for slapping down David Kirby) and waxing antivax about Gardasil, the new vaccine against human papilloma virus. But last week, she revealed that she has been using "inversion therapy" for years to…
oracknows | March 9, 2007It's Friday, which means that it's time once again to delve deeply into the world of woo, all for your edification and (I hope) education. Even though I started out with less motivation than usual for tending to the blog, it actually turned out to be yet another rather eventful and surprisingly productive week on the old blog, with topics ranging from plumbing the depths of antivaccination lunacy, to doing some nice straight science blogging about the anticancer drug dichloroacetate (which actually gave me some ideas for my research), to discussing the "individualization" of treatments in…
oracknows | March 8, 2007The latest Change of Shift, the blog carnival for nursing, has been posted at Emergiblog. Enjoy!