medicine
oracknows | December 30, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on November 21, 2005 and is the first of a two-part discussion of what has come to be known as the Al-Bayati Report. Part 2…
oracknows | December 30, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on November 16, 2005. I'm now wondering why I never wrote more in this series...
Last week, I wrote about my visit to the…
grrlscientist | December 29, 2006
.
This study, carried out by Cancer Research UK, showed that women who did 16-17 hours of housework per week cut their risk of breast cancer by 20% for postmenopausal women and 30% for premenopausal women. Further, it was housework specifically that has this beneficial effect, not other forms of physical activity;
Women who exercise by doing the housework can reduce their risk of breast cancer, a study suggests.
The research on more than 200,000 women from nine European countries found doing household chores was far more cancer protective than playing sport.
[ .. ]
Out of all of the…
oracknows | December 29, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on November 7, 2005. As for this particular post, it occurs to me: Geez, why haven't I continued this series past part 2?
Over…
oracknows | December 29, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on January 9, 2006 and seems to fit in with the whole "Friday Dose of Woo" thing; so I'll repost it as such. Enjoy!.
I was…
oracknows | December 28, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on November 22, 2005.
A couple of months ago, there was a minor dust-up here regarding an unfortunate autistic boy who died…
oracknows | December 28, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on January 5, 2006.
Remember how I said yesterday that I was going to post something today that I had been planning since…
oracknows | December 27, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on January 25, 2006
I hate spammers.
On the scale of Internet scumbags, spammers rank just one notch above pedophiles (barely…
oracknows | December 27, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on January 24, 2006
I was made aware of a most interesting study today appearing in the journal Cancer, which is the official…
oracknows | December 27, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on January 26, 2006, which means that more of you are likely to remember it. However, given the discussion from last week, I…
terrasig | December 27, 2006A week after my colleague Orac posts on the conundrum of bringing religion into medicine, Michael Conlon reports on a nurse's book about how religious and cultural influences can compromise medical care:
Any nurse can walk into a bad situation. The one Luanne Linnard-Palmer can't forget came as she readied a little boy for a blood transfusion only to be told by his mother "You know you're damning his soul to hell!"
The child's mother was a Jehovah's Witness, a faith that rejects blood transfusions. Her son had sickle cell anemia and had become extremely weak.
"It blew me away," Linnard-Palmer…
j7uy5 | December 27, 2006NEJM has a very interesting article about the use of PET
scans to differentiate between persons with normal cognitive function,
those with mild cognitive dysfunction, and those with Alzheimer
Disease (AD). Unfortunately, you need a subscription to view
the
full article, but you can read the abstract for free, so I've taken the
liberty of copying it here, then providing some plain-language
commentary. You also can read a more extensive review on
href="http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/549894">Medscape
(free registration required).
href="http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/abstract…
oracknows | December 27, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on April 27, 2005.
Since I've started blogging, I notice things that I probably wouldn't have noticed before. I suspect it's…
oracknows | December 26, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on January 21, 2006.
I know I'm a bit of a stickler, a curmudgeon, if you will, when it comes to medicine. Call me crazy, but…
oracknows | December 26, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on March 7, 2005 after I arrived home from a meeting.
I'm back at home. The meeting went fairly well and my talk was well-received.
Surgical meetings are odd beasts.…
oracknows | December 26, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on July 20, 2005.
Today in Washington, there will be a march, called (with unintentional irony) the Power of Truth march. Its organizers claim that it will be to "…
oracknows | December 26, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts.) This post originally appeared on December 12, 2004 and could be considered the first "substantive" post that wasn't an introduction that I ever did for this blog. See what you think as far as the evolution of my writing style. And, of course, feel free to chime…
oracknows | December 24, 2006This one's too good for me to ignore even on vacation. It's the perfect gift for the skeptical.
Remember the Friday Dose of Woo in which I had a little fun with the whole concept of trepanning (drilling a hole in your head to "improve blood flow")? Well guess what?
The trepanation guy (Randall W. Haws) has shown up right here in the comments of that post. And he thinks that I (and those of you who chimed in) are truly, truly misguided, not to mention hypocrites. He's also pointing out how he is "free" and we're all still "imprisoned."
I can't think of a better blog Christmas present. Well, OK…
j7uy5 | December 23, 2006I've been following the fish oil story for a while, ever since a
href="http://archpsyc.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/56/5/407">small
study in 1999 showed potential benefit in patients with
bipolar disorder. The theoretical basis for the study was
that omega-3 fatty acids alter neurotransmission in a way that is
similar to lithium and valproic acid. A
href="http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/163/6/969">recent
review in Am J Psych. Says the same thing that most other
articles have said over the past seven years:
CONCLUSIONS: Deficits in omega-3 fatty acids…
j7uy5 | December 22, 2006The reason it is interesting, is that it is unexpected, to me
at least. I'm always curious when it turns out that something
known to affect one bodily system turns out to have an effect somewhere
else.
Enalapril
is a drug used to treat high blood pressure. It works by
slowing the action of an enzyme. The enzyme, angiotensin
converting enzyme, is part of the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system.
I guess it is too complicated to go in to detail here, and it
is not really the point. The point is that there is a system
in your body that regulates blood pressure by monitoring the kidneys to…