medicine
oracknows | February 6, 2007I've written a lot about alternative medicine, much of which I consider to be woo; i.e., treatments for which there is no medical efficacy and the belief in which often requires magical thinking. I've expressed my disappointment in medical physicians who fall prey to and become purveyors or woo, doctors such as Dr. Deepak Chopra, Dr. Joseph Mercola, those pushing to "integrate" woo into medical school curricula, and physicians who sell expensive "screening tests" such as breast MRI whose value has not been shown in valid, well-designed clinical trials. All of these activities represent, to me…
oracknows | February 5, 2007Amazing!
I had thought that one of my favorite skeptical blogs, Photon in the Darkness, had gone the way of the Dodo. With no posts since last July, I thought Prometheus had given up blogging for good, never to be seen again. Hoping against hope that he'd reappear, I left his RSS feed in NetNewsWire, even as the months ticked by and the application labeled it a "dinosaur," signifying that it hadn't been updated in 60 days.
Amazingly, yesterday, I noticed a new entry. So please, let me be among the first to welcome Prometheus back to the blogosphere. Head on over and say "hi" for me, will ya?
oracknows | February 5, 2007Since DaveScot has made an appearance or two in the comments here, annoying everyone he comes in contact with, it's worth pointing out that mine isn't the only cluestick that could be used to pound some science into him about dichloroacetate, the supposed "cure" for cancer that's being "ignored" or "suppressed" by Big Pharma. Since my original article on the subject, two more excellent (and realistic) overviews of the promise and peril of DCA as an inexpensive chemotherapeutic agent to treat cancer have appeared, one of them by fellow ScienceBlogger Abel Pharmboy and one actually appearing on…
oracknows | February 5, 2007Pity poor David Kirby.
After all, he made his name by hitching his star to a losing hypothesis, namely that the mercury in thimerosal in vaccines causes autism. He wrote a book about it, Evidence of Harm, back in 2005 and has milked that sucker dry ever since. Most recently, his appearances culminated in a "debate" last month with Arthur Allen, whose book Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver just garnered a very favorable review in the New York Times, during which he did a most amusing dance around the issue by pointing to "other sources" of environmental mercury…
clock | February 4, 2007A good reason not to de-blogroll blogs on hiatus - they may come back as much as TWO YEARS later. Like the I Love Colonoscopies blog just did. I know you want to click on that link and explore the archives. Go ahead!
grrlscientist | February 4, 2007Surprise, surprise! A school in Texas has made it a law that all 11 and 12 year old girls must have proof they have been vaccinated against cervical cancer. If someone had asked me which state would make this mandatory, I would never have chosen Texas would be the first to do it. Congratulations to the governor of Texas for making a courageous and life-saving stand on behalf of all female students who live in his state.
Texas on Friday became the first state to require all 11- and 12-year-old girls entering the sixth grade to be vaccinated against a sexually transmitted virus that causes…
j7uy5 | February 4, 2007Yesterday, both
href="http://scienceblogs.com/terrasig/2007/02/lavender_and_tea_tree_oils_may.php">Abel
and I posted about the unexpected effects of lavender and tea-tree
oils: they've been implicated as causing gynecomastia in boys.
href="http://www.blogpulse.com/search?query=gynecomastia&image22.x=20&image22.y=18">Blogpulse
indicates that the Blogosphere has reacted quite a bit to this: the
blog at
href="http://blog.wired.com/biotech/2007/02/lavender_oils_f.html">Wired
News picked it up, as did
href="http://skepchick.org/blog/?p=377">Skepchick,
href="http://…
j7uy5 | February 3, 2007Regular readers know I am not globally opposed to the use of various
natural products. Even so, I do, from time to time, point out why
we need to be cautious about some herbal or alternative medicine
products. A good case in point was reported recently, pertaining
to breast enlargement in young boys.
(Not Self-Portrait)
href="http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/short/356/5/479">Prepubertal
Gynecomastia Linked to Lavender and Tea Tree Oils
Derek V. Henley, Ph.D., Natasha Lipson, M.D., Kenneth S.
Korach, Ph.D., and Clifford A. Bloch, M.D.
NEJM 356:479-485
February 1, 2007
SUMMARY…
oracknows | February 3, 2007Here's a blog that Shelley discovered and that I've been meaning to mention for a week now: Drug Rep Toys.
Yep, it's a blog whose purpose is to review and rate the various bits of swag that drug reps hand out to us doctors in the hopes that (I guess) we'll prescribe or use their products. It's mostly pens and lights, though. He's missing some of the--shall we say?--over the top toys. For example, remember this post from long ago?
Yes! It's the very first time our intrepid blog mascot appeared, way back in December 2004, when I posted a picture of the stuffed EneMan doll and the multiple…
j7uy5 | February 2, 2007This morning, or noon, or whatever, I read Jonah's post at The
Frontal Cortex,
href="http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2007/02/the_nfl_and_mental_illness.php">The
NFL and Mental Illness. It is a tragic story, but there is
one thing about it that I want to comment upon, regarding the reported
Adderall prescription.
But first, a digression. Reporters are expected to do at least a
little fact-checking. But in addition to checking facts,
sometimes it is appropriate to check for consistency.
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/02/sports/football/02concussions.html?ei=5090&en=…
oracknows | February 2, 2007I know, I know, I said last time that I probably wouldn't post on dichloroacetate and the hype some of the more credulous parts of the blogosphere are falling for over its being supposedly a "cancer cure" that big pharma is either willfully ignoring or actively suppressing. However, when DaveScot and the sycophants on Uncommon Descent join in with the "cure for cancer" hype and conspiracy-mongering (with apparently only one voice of reason trying to counter DaveScot's cluelessness), it's really, really hard for me to resist the urge to introduce the mutual admiration society over at UD to a…
oracknows | February 2, 2007
You know, I really wish I could have made it to The Amazing Meeting this year. It would have been really cool to have a chance to hear in person such skeptical luminaries, such as The Amazing Randi, Penn and Teller (although I do concede that Penn's Libertarianism does occasionally border on credulity for some dubious propositions), and Phil Plait. And who wouldn't want to meet the purveyors of what's become my favorite skeptical podcast, The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, such as Steve Novella and The Skepchick? And, of course, it's been a long time since I've had the opportunity to…
j7uy5 | February 2, 2007I almost wrote about this yesterday: a pair of articles indicating that
the FDA is getting more serious about protecting people:
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/30/AR2007013001496.html">FDA
Revamps Process for Safety of Drugs After Approval
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/01/30/AR2007013001388.html">FDA
to Monitor Post-Market Drug Safety
The need to bolster post-marketing surveillance has long been a sore
spot with FDA-watchers. It seemed that improvements were on the
way. Plus, it appeared to be the case, that…
ddobbs | February 1, 2007
Mind Matters, the "blog seminar" I edit at sciam.com, this week hosts a debate (which readers can join) about a) how best to estimate the prevalence of post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) in Vietnam veterans and b) ultimately, how to calculate the cost-benefit ratio of war. Three researchers (Harvard psychologist Richard J. McNally, UC San Francisoc psychiatrist Charles Marmar, and psychologist William Schlenger, of Abt Associates) with a long history of work in PTSD among Vietnam vets grapple with the implications of a recent study that seemed to revise sharply downward long-standing…
oracknows | February 1, 2007It's things like this over at Over My Med Body! that show our friend Graham really knows how to make a humble guy like Orac feel the love:
Big name bloggers like Orac and Dr. RW and KevinMD are all up in arms about how "medical schools are going the wrong way" and asking "Does anyone in academic medicine care about the integrity of medical education?" They like to talk about the fluffy "woo" of medical school, as if we're all hippies out in our commune who have sacrilegiously sacrificed our Evidence and Data to a golden cow.
Give. Me. A. Break.
They're whining as if this is the most…
oracknows | January 31, 2007Three announcements about blog carnivals of interest to my readers:
Medical blogging: Grand Rounds, vol. 3, no. 19 has been posted at Envisioning 2.0.
Science blogging: Tangled Bank #72 has been posted at Ouroboros.
Skeptical blogging: The Skeptics' Circle will be appearing tomorrow at Slicing with Occam's Razor. If you're a blogger who writes about critical thinking and the application of the scientific method to everyday life, you still have a few hours to get your entries to Okcam at OkcamsEdge@gmail.com. And, as always, if you're interested in hosting, drop me a line at oracknows@gmail.…
oracknows | January 30, 2007At the risk of irritating a fellow ScienceBlogger again, I thought I'd point out this little post forwarded to me by Norm Jenson as yet another example of exactly the inflated hype for dichloroacetate as a "cure for cancer" that will "never see the light of day" because it has little profit potential (and, by the way, that pharmaceutical companies will "probably lobby against it with all their might") that I was talking about in my original post on the subject.
I should have taken a β-blocker before clicking on the link.
Given the level of silly rhetoric in the post above and even despite…
omnibrain | January 30, 2007 GW Pharmaceuticals has developed a diet drug derived from Marijuana which suppresses the appetite. This is especially surprising for obvious reasons - perhaps a little ironic?!
Clearly the marijuana plant contains many many different compounds - but who would have thought that one of them suppressed the urge to gorge yourself on cheeze doodles and icy pops. The drug will soon be entering into human trials to combat obesity.
Don't get too exited about getting high on the drug though since that doesn't happen to be one of the side effects. Well...that is unless you want to find the secret…
oracknows | January 30, 2007Via Black Triangle, I'm made aware of another example of religious fundamentalism interfering with sound health care:
A MUSLIM doctors' leader has provoked an outcry by urging British Muslims not to vaccinate their children against diseases such as measles, mumps and rubella because it is "un-Islamic".
Dr Abdul Majid Katme, head of the Islamic Medical Association, is telling Muslims that almost all vaccines contain products derived from animal and human tissue, which make them "haram", or unlawful for Muslims to take.
Islam permits only the consumption of halal products, where the animal has…
j7uy5 | January 30, 2007And what an unflattering light it is.
It occurs to me that often, when I write about the pharmaceutical
industry, I have something negative to say. Really, my thoughts
are not all negative. It's just that it is easier to come up with
criticisms when responding to news items.
Anyway, this one (from Washington Post) deserves comment:
href="http://blog.washingtonpost.com/thecheckout/2007/01/drug_ads_taking_medicine_never.html">Drug
Ads: Taking Medicine Never Looked So Good
Remember all those tricks drugmakers used to get you to take medicine
as a kid? They made cough syrup sweet…