medicine
oracknows | January 23, 2007The latest Grand Rounds has been posted over at Signout. It has a theme this time that, as any regular reader of this blog is aware, is near and dear to my heart: the interface of scientific evidence with health and health care; so I'm expecting that it will be of more than usual interest to most of my readers as well.
oracknows | January 23, 2007Well, it's finally been posted, video of the debate between Arthur Allen, author of Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver (a book that I am about 2/3 of the way through and plan on reviewing before the end of the month if possible) and mercury militia vaccine fearmonger David Kirby, author of Evidence of Harm and arguably one of the two people who have done more than anyone else to bring the bogus claim that mercury in vaccines is the cause of the increase in the number of diagnoses of autism over the last 15 years or so to a wider audience. (The other is Robert F…
omnibrain | January 22, 2007Interesting...
State prison inmates, particularly blacks, are living longer on average than people on the outside, the government said Sunday.
Inmates in state prisons are dying at an average yearly rate of 250 per 100,000, according to the latest figures reported to the Justice Department by state prison officials. By comparison, the overall population of people between age 15 and 64 is dying at a rate of 308 a year.
For black inmates, the rate was 57 percent lower than among the overall black population - 206 versus 484. But white and Hispanic prisoners both had death rates slightly above…
oracknows | January 22, 2007I would have written about this one on Friday, except that Your Friday Dose of Woo had to be served up. (You did read last week's YFDoW, didn't you? It was a particularly loopy bit of woo, with a bad computer interface grafted on to it, to boot!) The reason I wanted to write about it is because the responses to this particular bit of news in the blogosphere grated on me, for reasons that will become apparent soon.
It's about a new cancer drug that I learned about from both fellow ScienceBlogger Jonah and readers who forwarded articles about it to me. If you believe some other bloggers (one of…
oracknows | January 21, 2007It looks like someone over at BlogCritics is undertaking the task of reviewing each of the component blogs of ScienceBlogs. So far, he's not particularly impressed with anyone except Martin and, to a lesser extent, Afarensis. Although he makes a few good points in checking out the first five blogs (he's proceeding in alphabetical order) and I have to applaud an attempt to do a critique of nearly 50 blogs, he clearly needs a gentle (for the moment) beating with a clue stick about a couple of things.
For one thing, he's full of crap when he says this about Janet:
My major criticism of this blog…
oracknows | January 21, 2007I had originally intended to use this one for a segment of Your Friday Dose of Woo. Unfortunately, when I tried to start writing, I realized it was unsuitable. No, it wasn't unsuitable because the content wasn't delightfully loopy enough to deserve targeting. The problem was that it was an insufficient--shall we say?--target-rich environment. Again, this wasn't because the overall concept wasn't bizarre enough. No, it is certainly more than strange enough to qualify. It was that there was so little information on how this supposedly works and the little information that was there was vague in…
oracknows | January 19, 2007The winners of the 2006 Medical Weblog Awards have been announced at Medgadget. Winners include our favorite pediatrician Flea (and if he manages to tick off the antivaccination loons, you know he's alright with me) for Best New Medical Weblog; NHS Blog Doctor for Best Medical Weblog; and Anxiety, Depression, and Addiction Treatments for Best Clinical Sciences Weblog.
Go here to find out who else won.
Congratulations to all the winners!
oracknows | January 19, 2007I admit it.
I'm a gadget freak. I sometimes think I should have gone into radiology. If you're a radiologist and work with MRI, CT scans, PET scanners, and numerous other cool gadgets. Of course, you also have to sit in dark rooms in the basement of the hospital and stare at films for several years to learn the basics of reading simple radiographs in order to qualify to work with the cool toys, not to that you also have to learn how to do barium enemas and other similarly unpleasant tests. Other times, I think that I should have become a radiation oncologist. Radiation oncology is a great…
oracknows | January 18, 2007If you want to know the skinny about the physiological mechanism by which a person can die of water intoxication, Radagast has posted A Look at Osmosis and Water Balance, a nice primer on the distribution of water in the human body and how it can be affected by drinking too much water too quickly.
ddobbs | January 18, 2007Now comes more news -- unflattering to the company -- about Eli Lilly's, um, selective release of data about its antipsychotic drug Zyprexa. Lilly is trying to squash the full release (aka "leak" or "unauthorized publication") of internal company documents that allegedly reveal its attempt to cover up Zyprexa's dangerous side effects. But as Jake at Pure Pedantry outlines and the New York Times details, the attempt -- which itself hardly looks good -- will likely fail, partly because many of of the documents have already been posted on web servers outside the U.S. ,and thus out of reach of U…
oracknows | January 18, 2007Geez, I might as well just put a paper bag over my head right now around my fellow ScienceBloggers.
You've heard me lament before about the woeful ignorance about biology and evolution common among all too many doctors. (You haven't? Well check here, here, here, and here.) Heck, you've even heard me lament about it just a few days ago, my irritation being piqued by a physician by the name of Dr. Geoffrey Simmons.
Now, as if to rub my face in it, Dembski's crew over at Uncommon Design have made me aware of an orthopedic surgeon named David A. Cook, M.D., who's adding to my embarrassment. As…
oracknows | January 17, 2007The other day, I commented on the very sad death of a young woman named Jennifer Strange. In essence, Ms. Strange died after a radio contest to see who could drink the most water without urinating. The prize? A Wii. This was pretty clearly a case of water intoxication leading to hyponatremia, an impression that was reinforced by a later report (now confirmed) that she had drunk 2 gallons of water in a short period of time. Since then, the three DJs involved in the contest, plus seven other employees of the radio station, have been fired for "violating the terms of their employee agreements."…
oracknows | January 17, 2007Drat! Real life has once again interfered with my blogging. Fortunately, there's still a lot of what I consider to be good stuff in the archives of the old blog that has yet to be transferred to the new blog. Today looks like a perfect time to transfer at least a couple more articles from the old blog. This particular article first appeared on January 12, 2006. For those who haven't seen it before, pretend I just wrote it. For those who have, savor its Insolence once again.
I was perusing some journals yesterday, including the most recent issue of Nature, when I came across a rather…
oracknows | January 17, 2007Drat! Real life has once again interfered with my blogging. Fortunately, there's still a lot of what I consider to be good stuff in the archives of the old blog that has yet to be transferred to the new blog. Today looks like a perfect time to transfer at least a couple more articles from the old blog. This particular article first appeared on April 25, 2005. One reason I reposted it is that I recently forgot the very precepts that I discussed in it when over the holidays a relative brought up the topic of Sylvia Browne, provoking a clearly too vigorous response about her being a fraud. (…
grrlscientist | January 17, 2007tags: Napoleon, stomach cancer,poisoning
After careful study, scientists revealed that the French Emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte, died from an advanced case of gastric cancer and not arsenic poisoning as had been widely speculated. At the time of his death, an autopsy determined that stomach cancer was the cause of his death. But because arsenic was found in his hair in 1961, this led to speculation that Napolean had been poisoned. Certainly, murder was possible because, if Napoleon had escaped exile on St. Helena, an island in the South Atlantic Ocean, he could have changed the balance of…
oracknows | January 17, 2007Drat! Real life has once again interfered with my blogging. Fortunately, there's still a lot of what I consider to be good stuff in the archives of the old blog that has yet to be transferred to the new blog. Today looks like a perfect time to transfer at least a couple more articles from the old blog. This particular article first appeared on December 5, 2005. For those who haven't seen it before, pretend I just wrote it. For those who have, savor it once again.
There was an interesting article in this week's New York Times Magazine about Susan Sontag's last battle with cancer, written by…
j7uy5 | January 17, 2007The January 12, 2007 issue of MMWR reports on cases of infant deaths due to (presumably) unintentional overdoses on cough and cold preparations. With this being the season that such products are most likely to be used, I thought I'd call attention to this. Many people do not realize that there are very few different active ingredients in over-the-counter (OTC) cough/cold products. Basically, you have antihistamines, decongestants, analgesics, cough suppressants, expectorants, and junk (such as alcohol). Yet if you look down the aisle at a drugstore, you see a bewildering array of products.…
oracknows | January 16, 2007On our backchannel discussion forum, we ScienceBloggers have been discussing a rather interesting idea that we could use to provide extra value to our readers. The idea is to do short articles about basic concepts in science. It's an intriguing idea, and, while I could try my hand at posts about a number of basic concepts in science, I think that, given my background, my strongest contribution would be basic concepts in my areas of expertise. These could include questions such as:
What is cancer?
What is a randomized clinical trial?
How does chemotherapy work? (Certainly The Cheerful…
oracknows | January 16, 2007Here's an interesting concept that's just been released for purchase, either as a digital download or as a bona fide book: The Open Laboratory: The Best Writing on Science Blogs 2006. It's edited by fellow ScienceBlogger Bora Zikovic.
Oh, and it happens to contain a couple of posts by yours truly. In any case, it's a chance to see the best science blogging of the last year or so, all contained in one nice package.