medicine
oracknows | December 22, 2006Another week in the can.
It's been an eventful one, with prizes won, memories revived, and a couple of pesky Holocaust deniers descending to spew their bile. Hard as it is to believe, the year's almost over and the holidays are upon us. You're probably like me, tired of the Christmas carols, commercials urging you to buy, buy, buy since late October, coupled with the frenzy of preparing for the season. After all that, Christmas is only four days away. Perhaps, like me, you would like to take a little break. And, as always, I know just the thing.
It's time once again for a little bit of tasty…
moleculeoftheday | December 21, 2006I picked this molecule for one main reason: I was flipping through a physiology book and read this statistic: your body goes through on the order of one liter of bile per day! Did you have any idea? That is up there on my goofy big numbers in your body list, the champion of which is still this: your body contains a few tens of grams of ATP. The vast majority of your energy is supplied through the agency of this ounce or two of ATP. However, it's recycled thousands of times per day, and you go through the equivalent of a hundred pounds of ATP in one day, just to live!
Back to bile. Life faces…
ddobbs | December 21, 2006
from Furious Seasons
______________________________
In my preceding post, about Eli Lilly pressing primary-care physicans to prescribe the antipsychotic drug Zyprexa for elderly dementia, I meant (but forgot) to mention a blog that is following the much wider Zyprexa saga of which this "Dementia is the message" scandal is only a small part. The eminently readable Furious Seasons, written by a reporter who like tens of millions of Americans is, as the author puts it, "a long-time psych patient," follows psych and psych-med issues with great energy and insight; its Zyprexa Chronicles are…
oracknows | December 21, 2006I'm about a week late on this one.
In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if some of my readers were wondering why I hadn't weighed in on this story when it broke late last week. (Either that, or no one was wondering, and I'm just displaying some of my surgeon's ego for all to see.) Part of the reason was perhaps because Dr. Charles had handled this whole study well, and I didn't see any need to weigh in. Another part of the reason is because the study came out right when I had to come up with another Your Friday Dose of Woo for last Friday. But, the more I thought about it, the more I thought that…
ddobbs | December 20, 2006
I try to keep on top of controversies about drug companies, but lately it's hard to keep up with all the latest revelations and laundry spills -- and to wrap your head around the variations. Today the New York Times reports that Eli Lilly mounted an organized effort to convince doctors to prescribe its powerful schizophrenia and bipolar-disorder drug Zyprexa for elderly patients with symptoms of dementia -- despite that dementia in the elderly rises from causes quite different than those of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, is far less serious problem than schizophrenia, and that Zyprexa…
clock | December 20, 2006Just for the holidays, you get two for the price of one - two simultaneous editions of the Pediatric Grand Rounds: the reverent version and the irreverent version. And no, not all the entries can be found on both. Beware of the pirates on that second one, though.
oracknows | December 20, 2006Pediatric Grand Rounds, vol. 1, no. 18 has been posted at Breath Spa for Kids:
No cuddly Santa for us, My Hearties. This is a swashbuckling, buccaneering sort of Paediatric Grand Rounds, I have looted and pillaged various blogs and seized control of the Good Ship PGR.
For those so inclined, there's also a non-pirate version at Blog, MD.
oracknows | December 20, 2006Dr. Flea's a guy after my own heart. He's been blogging about vaccines, and now he's getting into specific diseases. He's posted an installment about the vaccine against Haemophilus influenza type B:
The first American children to receive the Hib vaccine are turning 20 years old this year.
Flea wasn't practicing medicine in the pre-Hib era, so I asked an older nurse what office-based Pediatrics was like before the vaccine.
"About once a year, a kid would come in with an ear infection. They'd write him a prescription for antibiotics, then he'd go home and die."
Haemophilus influenzae type b (…
oracknows | December 19, 2006Well this looks interesting, a new blog by the author of Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver, Arthur Allen.
Looks like something I may have to check out. Allen captures why various conditions like autism are so readily attributed by parents to vaccines:
The history of vaccination is criss-crossed with controversies. The allegation that vaccines cause autism is only the latest example. What is it about vaccines that attracts so much passion?
The obvious answer is that many vaccines-and most of the ones discussed in this book-are injected with sharp needles into…
tfk | December 19, 2006Yes, I'm stealing Yakov Smirnoff jokes, but it's true. According to Improbable Research, Russian scientists have tested a theory:
If a depressed individual receives a physical punishment, whipping that is, it will stir up endorphin receptors, activate the ‘production of happiness’ and eventually remove depressive feelings.
Russian scientists recommend the following course of the whipping therapy: 30 sessions of 60 whips on the buttocks in every procedure. A group of drug addicts volunteered to test the new method of treatment: the results can be described as good and excellent.
I wouldn't…
oracknows | December 19, 2006I wish I could say that this was unexpected, but, given the politics and backwardness of Libya, it wasn't. The Tripoli Six (a. k. a. the Benghazi Six) have been found guilty by a kangaroo court in Libya:
A Libyan court has sentenced five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor to death for knowingly infecting hundreds of Libyan children with HIV.
The medics have been in detention since 1999, during which time 52 of the 426 infected children have died of AIDS.
The nurses and doctor were sentenced to death in 2004, but the Supreme Court quashed the ruling after protests over the fairness of…
clock | December 19, 2006The five Bulgarian nurses and the Palestinian doctor were found guilty earlier today, against all the scientific evidence of their innocence. I second PZ's sentiment about this.
j7uy5 | December 19, 2006A hospital in the UK has reported an outbreak of nasty MRSA infections.
This time, the organisms are the PVL-producing MRSA.
MRSA stands for Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.
PVL stands for Panton-Valentine leukocidin. PVL is
a toxin produced by the bacteria. As the name suggests, it
kills white blood cells.
href="http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/health_medical/article2083867.ece">PVL:
New strain of superbug targets the young, and its latest victim is an
NHS nurse
By Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor
Published: 18 December 2006
A nurse and a patient have died from a…
terrasig | December 18, 2006Wasn't able to get off an original post today so I'll direct Terra Sig readers to an excellent interview written by Carl Zimmer. As Carl writes,
Discover chose Jay Keasling as their scientist of the year and asked me to interview him. Keasling, who directs the Berkeley Center for Synthetic Biology, is trying to get either E. coli or yeast to crank out a powerful malaria drug normally only made by the sweet wormwood plant. I had already been getting familiar with Keasling's work, since it is a great example of the sort of work that's being done on E coli, the subject of my book. So it was a…
oracknows | December 18, 2006I don't think I could have done it much better, if at all.
Dr. R.W. presents, in FAQ-form, a primer on the difference between woo and conventional medicine, even conventional modalities that are weakly grounded in evidence.
A couple of examples:
Many of mainstream medicine's conventional treatments are not evidence based. Aren't they a form of woo?
No. Although some conventional methods fail to measure up to best evidence they are at least based on known anatomy and physiology. They have some plausibility in the observable biophysical model in contrast to the "vital forces", nebulous "energy…
j7uy5 | December 18, 2006Psychiatrists sometimes try to get people to take omega-3 fatty acids,
in order to reduce symptoms of mood disorders. Although the
evidence is not rock-solid, it is fairly good. There is no
evidence that it can hurt, and some evidence that it can help with
cardiovascular health. I've mentioned all that before.
But I've never yet run into anything like this:
Recipe for better sex: What to eat to add spice
By Forbes.com staff
src="http://msnbcmedia3.msn.com/i/msnbc/Components/Sources/Local/sourceForbes.gif"
border="0" height="20" hspace="0" vspace="0"
width="140">
Updated: 1:16 p…
j7uy5 | December 18, 2006Ever hear the phrase, "well, it's not brain surgery!" It
seems to imply that brain surgery is a tricky business, requiring a
high level of knowledge and skill. Perhaps it does.
If you have ever been curious about exactly what brain
surgery entails, now you can find out. What's more, you can
find out what it is like from the patient's perspective.
Since the brain surgery done on Senator Johnson has been
href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16199440/">in the news,
you may be curious about it.
href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/hampshire/6174489.stm">Wide
awake having…
oracknows | December 18, 2006You may recall how I've criticized the infiltration of woo into medical school and medical education in general. Such an infiltration threatens the scientific basis behind the hard-won success of so much of modern medicine over the last century. Unfortunately, woo isn't the only threat to scientific medicine. Now, there is a growing movement that insists that doctors should ask you about your spiritual life and make religious practices a part of medicine, as Dr. Richard P. Sloan described in an editorial in the L.A. Times that I can't believe I missed:
HOW WOULD you like your doctor, at your…
clock | December 18, 2006Just How Useful Are Animal Studies To Human Health?:
Animal studies are of limited usefulness to human health because they are of poor quality and their results often conflict with human trials, argue researchers in a study online in the British Medical Journal.
Before clinical trials are carried out, the safety and effectiveness of new drugs are usually tested in animal models. Some believe, however, that the results from animal trials are not applicable to humans because of biological differences between the species.
So researchers compared treatment effects in animal models with human…
clock | December 17, 2006Fluid Displacement From Legs To Neck Can Lead To Obstructive Sleep Apnea:
When a person lies down, a small amount of fluid displaced from the legs to the base of the neck can narrow soft tissue around the throat and increase airflow resistance in the pharynx by more than 100 percent, predisposing the person to obstructive sleep apnea.
----------------------
In obstructive sleep apnea, a blockage in the throat or upper airway causes victims to repeatedly stop breathing long enough to decrease the amount of oxygen in the blood and increase the carbon dioxide.
--------------------------
"Our…