medicine
oracknows | March 8, 2007...That all around evolution-ignorant but nonetheless eager lapdog of the Discovery Institute, SUNY Stonybrook Professor of Neurosurgery Dr. Michael Egnor, is back.
Rats. I thought that the utter drubbing he took at the hands of myself and my fellow ScienceBloggers (in particular PZ Myers) might have given him the message that he needs to lay low for a while. Apparently not. I guess he must have the monumental ego that more than a few neurosurgeons are famous for. (After all, it takes supreme confidence in one's own abilities to be able to cut into the human brain and believe that the patient…
oracknows | March 7, 2007Flea has a rather amusing response to a letter about GI symptoms in autistic children that left him scratching his head...
Don't feel insulted, Flea; occasionally, we get mass mailings from cancer advocacy groups or--much more annoying to me and unfortunately much more frequent--pharmaceutical companies that sound as though they're telling us how to treat various cancers.
tfk | March 7, 2007The stories about conditions at Walter Reed hospital are appalling, as are stories about problems at VA hospitals and other care for veterans and returning soldiers. It is unacceptable that anyone at all should suffer so greatly under such horrific conditions.
And I do mean anyone. I imagine a survey of urban hospitals would show that those which remain open in low-income neighborhoods probably have some of the same hygiene problems described at Walter Reed. And many communities in urban areas and in rural America have hospitals without modern equipment, and without doctors trained in the…
oracknows | March 7, 2007I've posted many times about the pseudoscience of the mercury militia, that group of parents, bolstered by those Don Quixotes tilting at the mercury windmills in the cause of extracting more money from the government to compensate "vaccine-injured" children with autism, Mark and David Geier. These and other luminaries of the mecury militia blame vaccines for lots of bad things, be it autism, immune problems, "autistic enterocolitis," and generalized "mercury toxicity," all the while asserting piously (and, most amazingly of all, with a straight face) that, oh no, they aren't in any way "…
j7uy5 | March 7, 2007At least that is what the headline says. Of course
the article is
not really about sex; the sex part is only a small part of the findings
of the study. But headline writers know how to get attention.
What is really striking to me about this report is not that
it
shows that sleep problems impair a person's sex life, but that sleep
problems contribute to many risk factors for mood disorders.
It
is not one of the conclusions of the study, at least as reported in the
summary. But it is rather worrisome, to me at least.
Major depression is a serious problem; it is, in fact, one of the…
oracknows | March 6, 2007Last week, I wrote a quick and (semi-) facetious piece about how my colleague and I are sweating to the NIH payline, as we wait to find out whether our R01 application will be funded or not. With its being rumored that National Cancer Institute (NCI) paylines will be in the range of the 12th percentile, it's going to be really, really tight whether we make it below that line or not, although my colleague's being a new PI will certainly help.
Wouldn't you know it that Writedit, the blogger whose excellent and highly useful blog, Medical Writing, Editing & Grantsmanship I discovered and…
oracknows | March 6, 2007The latest Grand Rounds has been posted at the abode of everyone's favorite blogging emergency medicine doc, GruntDoc. It's the fourth time that he's hosted; so he's an old pro at it now.
Enjoy!
oracknows | March 6, 2007One byproduct of blogging that I had never anticipated when I started is how it sometimes gets me interested in scientific questions that I would never have paid much attention to before or looked into other than superficially. One such scientific question is whether dichloroacetate (DCA), the small molecule that was shown to have significant anti-tumor activity against human tumor xenografts implanted in rats, media reports about which caused a blogospheric hysteria in late January representing DCA as a "cure" for cancer that "big pharma" doesn't want you to know about, mainly because it's…
oracknows | March 5, 2007Sorry I'm a bit late on this. (Yes, I know that Tara and John pimped this contest nearly a month ago, but somehow it slipped by me to mention it myself; that is, until Skepchick reminded me of it as I caught up on my blog reading over the weekend.
If you've read my Medicine and Evolution series, you'll know I'd be interested in this contest. From the Alliance for Science, it is an essay contest for high school students. The topic is Why would I want my doctor to have studied evolution? They're asking for an essay of 1,000 words or less, and the due date is March 31. Official rules are here.…
oracknows | March 5, 2007One of the claims most frequently made by "alternative medicine" advocates regarding why alt-med is supposedly superior (or at least equal) to "conventional" medicine and should not be dismissed, regardless of how scientifically improbably any individual alt-med modality may be, is that the treatments are highly "individualized." In other words, the "entire patient" is taken into account with what is frequently referred to as a "holistic approach" that looks at "every aspect" of the patient, with the result that every patient requires a different treatment, sometimes even for the same disease…
oracknows | March 4, 2007In all the confusion, work, and excitement of the last week, including an NIH study section and a trip to give a talk, you may have thought that I've forgotten about a monthly feature that has been ongoing here since the very beginning and that will likely continue as long as (1) this blog exists and (2) Fleet keeps sending me calendars.
If you're in college, as apparently our intrepid blog mascot and promoter of colon health is, March is usually the month during which your spring break appears. Of course, when I was in college at the University of Michigan, spring break used to be at the…
oracknows | March 2, 2007I didn't get back home until late last night; unfortunately there was no time to do a segment of Your Friday Dose of Woo that was up to my standards. Fortunately, there's something that I've been holding in reserve for just such an occasion that fits right in. Long-timers may remember that, near the very beginning of my blog, I did a post entitled What is an altie? It was basically a Jeff Foxworthy-like listing of "You just might be an altie if..." statements that, I think, had a good point. For those of you not familiar with the term "altie," it was coined about three or four years ago on…
terrasig | March 2, 2007For those who have been asking over the last couple of days, here are the oath of a pharmacist as recited at US colleges of pharmacy and a code of ethics adopted in 1994 by the then-American Pharmaceutical Association (now the American Pharmacists Association; still APhA). There seems to be a strong focus on the patient in the code of ethics but there's also a bit of wiggle room that can be interpreted as one sees fit.
Oath of a Pharmacist
At this time, I vow to devote my professional life to the service of all humankind through the profession of pharmacy.
I will consider the welfare of…
terrasig | March 1, 2007Yesterday's discussion of a pharmacist's right to refuse filling prescriptions based on moral or legal grounds generated some great discussion. I appreciate the thoughtful discussion of the commenters as well as two posts on the topic by Prof Janet Stemwedel. The first draws from her older post on the topic nearly two years ago, illustrating that we haven't come very far in this debate. As Janet noted then
Obviously, we've got a tug-of-war here between the moral convictions of the health care professionals and the moral convictions of the patients.
I'm also going to quote Janet heavily…
jstemwedel | February 28, 2007On Abel's post on conscience clauses, Bob Koepp left this comment:
It's a pretty warped understanding of professionalism that would require professionals to violate their own sincere ethical beliefs. After all, someone lacking personal integrity probably isn't going to be much concerned with professional integrity. "You can trust me because I lack the strength of my convictions."
I think the connection between personal integrity and professional integrity is an important one, so here are some preliminary thoughts on it.
Joining a profession requires some buy-in to the shared values of that…
jstemwedel | February 28, 2007Abel at Terra Sigillata has a post about coscience clauses for pharmacists that's worth a read. In it, he takes issue with the stand of the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP), a professional pharmacy organization, recognizing "a pharmacist's right to decline to participate in therapies that he or she finds morally, religiously, or ethically troubling" while supporting "the establishment of systems that protect the patient's right to obtain legally prescribed and medically indicated treatments while reasonably accommodating in a nonpunitive manner the pharmacist's right of…
oracknows | February 27, 2007Like many biomedical investigators, I've been sweating it over the resubmission of an R01 grant my collaborator and I worked furiously on and submitted on November 1. He's the principal investigator, but I'm a coinvestigator with 25% effort; I also wrote one of the three specific aims and most of another, the justification for animal use, and the IACUC (animal use) protocols for the project. Consequently, I have almost as much invested in the success or failure of this grant proposal as its PI does, although he certainly gets props from me for pulling us two co-investigators together with…
oracknows | February 27, 2007I should know better. I really should. I'm referring, of course, to my having forgotten my usual avoidance of purely political posts yesterday. I'm beginning to remember why I so seldom blog about political matters in general and why I've never in two years discussed abortion on this blog in particular. I don't know what came over me. Given all that, I think it's high time for a straight science post, don't you? After all, I could beat up on Dr. Egnor again or do another dichloroacetate post, but what would be the point? Dr, Egnor's clearly an ideologue who is not likely to stop pushing "…
oracknows | February 26, 2007I'm getting really, really tired of this.
You've all read my rants at the propensity of surgeons who clearly don't have clue one about evolutionary theory spouting off ignorantly about the alleged shortcomings of evolution as a theory while either explicitly or implicitly promoting the pseudoscience of "intelligent design" creationism. I don't think I have to expound much on just how much this phenomenon irritates me other than to repeat my desire to find a more permanent solution to the question of hiding my face in shame over the antics of my fellow surgeons on this. Perhaps it truly is…
oracknows | February 25, 2007Somehow, in all the blogging about dichloroacetate earlier this week, I somehow missed a mention of a truly annoying thing that the editors of Lancet Neurology did. In essence, they allowed ethically challenged mercury warrior Mark Geier a forum to review Richard Lathe's book Autism, Brain, and Environment.
Egads! How desperate wer the editors of Lancet Neurology for reviewers, that they'd let the biggest mercury-autism crank of all sully its pages with a dubious review of a rather fringe book?
Fortunately, Ben Goldacre's on the case. Money quote:
As I say, I'm not hostile to people like…