medicine
clock | January 29, 2007If you discover a brain chemical which, when missing or malfunctioning (due to a mutation in its receptor) abruptly puts people and animals to sleep when they don't want to - a condition called narcolepsy - then you can work on creating a drug that acts in the opposite way and induces sleep when you want to.
Apparently, that is what a Swiss team just did (Nature news report here and Nature blog commentary here). The drug, still without a sexy name, is known by its "code-name" ACT-078573.
The target of the drug is the orexin system. Orexins (also known as hypocretins - the discovery was…
oracknows | January 29, 2007The latest Pediatrics Grand Rounds has been posted over at Unintelligent Design: Grand Rounds, Volume 1 Edition 21: What Dreams May Come.
omnibrain | January 29, 2007Lincoln seemed to have all sorts of problems - bipolar depression, unipolar depression, thyroid problems, bad gas, gargantuanism - you name it and someone has claimed he had it! But now it looks like, according to a study of worms, his nerves shattered?
Abraham Lincoln may have suffered from a genetic disorder that literally shattered his nerves, a new study on worms suggests.
Many of the president's descendants have a gene mutation that affects the part of the brain controlling movement and coordination, researchers discovered last year. The mutation prevents nerve cells from "communicating…
oracknows | January 29, 2007Critics who don't like my insistence on applying the scientific method to the claims of alternative medicine sometimes accuse me of unrelenting hostility towards alternative medicine, as though no amount of evidence would ever convince me of the efficacy of various alternative medicine therapies. Nothing could be further from the truth; I merely insist, as I have from the very beginning, that, at the very least, the claims of alternative medicine should be subject to the same testing by the scientific method that "conventional" or "scientific" medical treatments (a.k.a. evidence-based…
oracknows | January 28, 2007PZ mentioned it, but, after having seen it, I thought I'd give it a plug too, mainly because my readership skews more towards the medical blogosphere than PZ's does, and a new blog this promising should be publicized to other medical bloggers. It's by a graduate student in Biomedical Visualization at the University of Illinois at Chicago and is called Street Anatomy.
As a surgeon, I'm a sucker for a good anatomic illustration and a history lesson, and the blog promises to teach a bit on how the medical illustration biz runs.
oracknows | January 28, 2007Everyone who reads this blog regularly knows my dismay at the infiltration of the curriculum of American medical schools with increasing amounts of non-evidence-based woo. It's even gotten to the point where one medical school (Georgetown University) has is integrating alternative medicine into the mandatory curriculum during all four years, even though these modalities are not based in convincing scientific evidence and therefore are not considered standard of care. Well, this distressing trend just gets more and more disturbing. Now, it seems, you can do a residency or fellowship in "…
j7uy5 | January 26, 2007In response to a question, where can I sign up for a clinical trial
on...?
The answer is: go to www.clinicaltrials.gov,
to find out. For example, if you search on "Transcranial
Direct Current Stimulation", you get
href="http://www.clinicaltrials.gov/ct/search?term=Transcranial+Direct+Current+Stimulation&submit=Search">16
results. However, no current trial involves
treatment for pain. There is one for treatment of depression,
but it is at the University
of New South Wales. UNSW is a fine institution, but
it's a bit far to travel, for those of us in North America.
If you're…
tfk | January 26, 2007A bill was filed in the House to mandate HPV vaccinations for all sixth grade girls.
The bipartisan group of Kansas House members who sponsored the bill have added Kansas to a list of states — including Virginia, New Jersey, California, Georgia, Texas, Kentucky and Michigan — where legislators are considering similar measures.
Rep. Delia Garcia, D-Wichita, is the lead sponsor of the bill that would add the vaccine for the human papillomavirus, known as HPV, to the list of inoculations required for sixth-grade girls attending Kansas public schools.
The predictable opponents have emerged:
"What…
oracknows | January 26, 2007I hate to end the week on a downer, but I came across this last night and, given my attention to the case of Katie Wernecke (the girl whose parents chose dubious alternative medical therapy over the radiation therapy she needed for her lymphoma) over the last several months and the recent news that her cancer had returned with a vengeance, it's hard for me not to mention what I've found now, rather than waiting until the weekend or Monday.
First, Katie's father has posted a story written by Katie on the family blog: Hope. It was really hard for me to read this, as it's a heart-wrenching tale…
omnibrain | January 26, 2007
SMOKERS who suffer damage to a particular part of their brains appear to be able to quit their nicotine habit easily - a discovery that might open new avenues of addiction research.
A study of smokers who had suffered brain damage of various kinds after a stroke showed that those with injuries to a part of the brain called the insula were in many cases able to quit smoking quickly and easily - saying they had lost the urge to smoke altogether.
The insula receives information from the body and translates it into subjective feelings such as hunger, pain and craving, including craving for drugs…
j7uy5 | January 26, 2007Fibromyalgia
is a disorder of chronic generalized muscle pain and joint stiffness
with the presence on physical exam of at least 11/18 designated tender
points. (The formal definition is a bit more involved.)
Interestingly, the term was not accepted by the AMA until
1987; the formal definition was not developed until 1990(1).
Prior to that, it was widely assumed to have a psychological
basis.
In fact, there still is a tendency in some medical circles, and in some
persons in the general population, to attribute fibromyalgia
Despite a substantial research effort (see
href="http://fm-…
oracknows | January 26, 2007
After posting about the Donnie Davies, an alleged "youth minister" in Houston who has garnered a lot of attention throughout the blogosphere for his website in which he provides a hilariously off-base list of "gay bands" to avoid and "safe" bands, I was perusing my Folder of Woo, looking for this week's target, but it was hard. After all, whether Donnie is a big hoax or not, whether his atrocious video saying that "homosexuality is a choice" and that "God hates a fag" is meant to be satire or not, he was going to be hard to top. In fact, I don't think I'll even try. However, Donnie did…
oracknows | January 25, 2007Grant season is upon us. Every day that I'm not in the clinic and the O.R., I find myself holed up in my office pounding my head against my monitor trying to write just that perfect mixture of preliminary data, blarney, and grantsmanship to persuade the Powers That Be to give me just a taste of that increasingly precious and scarce elixir of life for my lab, grant money. All I want is just enough to keep my lab going another couple of years and to try to add another person to my lab. Right now, I'm working on an grant to go to the Army for breast cancer research and a grant to a private…
clock | January 24, 2007Which of the two I am interested in for entirely scientific reasons and which one for more personal reasons, you guess:
Spray Could Offer New Front-line Treatment For Men With Premature Ejaculation:
Patients with premature ejaculation who used a topical anaesthetic spray were able to delay ejaculation for five times as long, according to a study in the February issue of the urology journal BJU International. Researchers from the UK and Netherlands studied 54 men with premature ejaculation, randomly assigning them to a treatment and control group. Both groups reported that without any therapy…
oracknows | January 24, 2007The other day, I did a reality check on a story making the rounds through the blogosphere about an alleged new cure for cancer that, if you believe some hysterical bloggers, is being suppressed because it would cut into their profits. I took one blogger to task for what I characterized as the "utterly ridiculous title" of his post (Objectively Pro-cancer). Well, he apparently didn't like that and showed up in my comments claiming that he was joking.
It sure didn't sound like a joke to me, but I thought I'd poll my readers to see if anyone thought I was out of line in my criticism. So, look at…
omnibrain | January 24, 2007I posted this story a week or so ago about Nobel prize winners living longer. Some people didn't seem to believe the study and now it seems that even some Nobel Prize winners are questioning the results.
Winning the Nobel Prize can add almost a year and a half to a laureate's life, two British economists say. But though he's 81, Harvard physicist Roy J. Glauber, a 2005 Nobelist, isn't buying it.
So why doesn't Roy buy it?
But Glauber said the study might have been biased by the fact that many laureates aren't selected until they're quite old.
Glauber won his Nobel 40 years after publishing…
oracknows | January 24, 2007At the risk of muscling in on Bronze Dog's territory, I've encountered a phenomenon that ought to be in his list of doggerel but doesn't appear to be. It appeared in the comments of my post about the Arthur Allen-David Kirby debate and my discussion of how the human tendency to see patterns where none really exist, coupled with the emotional investment the parents of autistic children have in their children and fueled by unscrupulous purveyors of harmful woo like Mark and David Geier, manages to keep the myth that mercury in vaccines is responsible for the "epidemic" of autism alive. My point…
oracknows | January 24, 2007Via Kevin, MD, a picture of a complication I hope I never have:
A description of the complication:
A 40-year-old man with Crohn's disease underwent an uncomplicated operation involving lysis of adhesions that were causing intestinal obstruction. After surgery, a cardiologist inserted a central venous catheter through the left subclavian vein. No problems with catheterization were noted. Three weeks later, after discharge, mild pain and edema developed in the patient's right lower leg. He was treated with antibiotics for 1 week, and his symptoms diminished. Six months after the operation, the…
oracknows | January 23, 2007The commentary on the Arthur Allen-David Kirby debate is coming in fast and furious. The latest is this excellent deconstruction of Kirby's parroting of the claim that autistic children are "poor excretor's" of mercury. I guess I can say that Dad of Cameron took this one on so that I don't have to...
oracknows | January 23, 2007I came across an interesting tidbit about dichloroacetate (DCA), the compound that the media and all too many bloggers are touting as some sort of cheap "cure" for cancer whose development is being ignored or suppressed by big pharma because it wouldn't be profitable enough. I poured a bit of cold water on all of them yesterday, because most of their comments were based on false hope, given how few drugs that show promise in cell culture and animals actually pan out in human trials, and ignorance of how clinical trials for new cancer drugs work.
This particular tidbit is posted on the…