medicine
oracknows | December 1, 2006It's been five months since I first started Your Friday Dose of Woo. I started it on a whim, after wondering if I should have a Friday feature, as so many other ScienceBloggers do (Friday Cephalopod, Friday Sprog Blogging, The Friday Fermentable, among others). In those five months, this thing has taken on a life of its own, producing woo more woo-ey than any that I had ever encountered before, woo like DNA activation, quantum homeopathy, Dr. Emoto's water woo, spiritually guided surgery, detoxifying boots, and the global orgasm. Sometimes the woo had religious overtones; sometimes it abused…
oracknows | November 30, 2006Change of Shift, the blog carnival for nursing, has been post at Fat Doctor.
oracknows | November 30, 2006When I wrote a post about how Richard Dawkins was being unjustly smeared as supporting Hitler-style eugenics by the religious blogosphere, I figured I might provoke some criticism, particularly since I didn't just stop there. No, in a bit of what some may consider blogging hubris, I couldn't resist trying to discuss under what circumstances eugenics might be morally justifiable and under what form. (Of course hubris is almost a job requirement to be a blogger; so none of this should be surprising.) In any case, not surprisingly Vox Day wasn't all that happy about what I wrote. (If you're…
purepedantry | November 29, 2006Benjamin Zycher, fellow at the Manhattan Institute, questions of the wisdom of allowing Medicare to negotiate prices with drug companies.
Actually what I don't like about this debate is that is called "negotiating" drug prices. There is no negotiation that is going to take place. What will happen is that Medicare is going to tell the drug companies how much they are willing to pay, their opinions be damned.
Anyway, he compares the formulary in the Medicare system with the formulary in the VA system (the VA system is allowed to negotiate prices). He finds that the VA system has…
j7uy5 | November 29, 2006I just love the title; it's from a
href="http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/333/7578/1129">recent
editorial (link to abstract; subscription required for full
access) in the British Medical Journal. The author, Jonathan
Waxman, argues that the medical profession should protect patients from
exploitation from the alternative medicine industry. He
points out the potential down side to some alternative treatment,
particularly in the area of his specialty, oncology:
It is estimated that up to
80% of all patients with cancer take a complementary treatment or
follow a dietary programme…
oracknows | November 28, 2006Grand Rounds, vol. 3, no. 10 has been posted at the blog of fellow skeptic Dr. R.W. Enjoy!
oracknows | November 28, 2006Remind me to mark April 10 down on my calendar. I never realized it was such an important day, and, in any case, I wouldn't want to miss it. Nor should the rest of the skeptical blogosphere. Why? It's World Homeopathy Day, "celebrated" (or, if you're a fan of evidence-based medicine, as I am, lamented) in "honor" of Samuel Hahnemann, the originator of homeopathy, who was born on April 10, 1755.
Oh, joy. (On the other hand, I'm sure I can think of some sort of blog fun to have next April 10.)
Homeopathy, as you may recall, is the "alternative" medical therapy in which, it is postulated, a…
oracknows | November 27, 2006With the internecine sniping that's been going on lately throughout ScienceBlogs ove Larry Moran's intemperate "flunk the IDiots" and "Neville Chamberlain school of evolutionists" remarks, or, more specifically, whether opposing ID requires that one oppose religion in general as well, I hesitate to tread here. However, given my interest in the Holocaust, World War II history, and how Nazi racial hygiene programs laid the groundwork for Germany's plan to exterminate the Jews and all others viewed as threats to the regime, I can't resist putting my two cents in about this issue.
Before I…
oracknows | November 26, 2006If I taught a class in these days of professor evaluations depending so much on student evaluations, I'm not sure I'd have the guts to respond to a student's request to be excused so that he can go to a bowl game the way the Angry Professor responds.
Of course, if the school were the University of Michigan, the request would only be granted if the Wolverines were playing in said bowl game.
oracknows | November 25, 2006The PathGuy makes the case, with a large number of case studies of rock and pop stars who died at young ages. Unfortunately, there's no systematic epidemiological study that I'm aware of about whether rock 'n' roll stars have a shorter life expectancy or higher rate of traumatic death or death due to disease. We could certainly postulate that certain aspects of the lifestyle of a rock 'n' roll star would be detrimental to health, such as polysubstance abuse, long months on the road (probably eating lots of fast food along the way), and sleep deprivation, but there's no hard data that I'm…
oracknows | November 25, 2006Here's something I've been meaning to post for a while that somehow got buried in my list of cool, weird, or interesting links. One of the things they teach surgeons and emergency medicine doctors about is how to use common materials at hand to do, MacGyver-like, a cricothyroidotomy to save the life of someone who has an airway obstruction and is choking. But that's just so inelegant. Why use such crude methods (and take the chance that the necessary materials, like a straw or a Bic pen whose plastic body you can use as a tube, aren't readily available)? Get a hold of LifeStat, the…
j7uy5 | November 25, 2006I was a bit perplexed by a recent study on a new treatment for alcohol
withdrawal. Ordinarily, I am in favor of new treatment
options, based on the supposition that nothing works for everyone, and
having more options is good. This counterbalances, to some
extent, the anti-pharma screed about "me-too" drugs, but that is
another story.
href="http://www.aafp.org/afp/20040315/1443.html" rel="tag">Alcohol
withdrawal is a significant clinical problem. While
most people who drink alcohol can simply stop, with no danger, people
who routinely drink too much may go into withdrawal. That is…
oracknows | November 24, 2006One year ago today, I discovered a rather amusing bit of chicanery on the part of an old "friend," namely J. B. Handley, the proprietor of and driving force behind Generation Rescue, the group that claims that all autism (not just some, not just some, but all) is a "misdiagnosis" for mercury poisoning. Given that today is one year later to the day, I thought it would be amusing to repost this. And, yes, one year later to the day, the domain oracknows.com still redirects to Generation Rescue, although, shamed, J. B. did stop having the domain autismdiva.com redirect to GR.
INTERNET SQUATTER: J…
oracknows | November 24, 2006For the holidays, I thought I'd include a brief little bit of woo that seems not quite extensive enough for a full treatment in Your Friday Dose of Woo but is nonetheless a tasty woo morsel for your edification that fits in with the usual Thanksgiving theme of overindulgence in various foods and the deleterious effect such overindulgence can have on one's waistline. Here's one that I've never heard of before, namely ear stapling for weight loss:
Marie Fallaw says she lost 83 pounds in six months simply by "stapling" her ears.
The Mississippi entrepreneur, owner of Staple Lean LLC, has…
oracknows | November 23, 2006Here's some reading to keep you entertained while the Respectfully Insolent gang loads up on turkey:
1. Grand Rounds Vol. 3, No. 9 (albeit a couple of days late)
2. Tangled Bank #67: Giving Thanks for Science
3. The Carnival of Bad History No. 11
j7uy5 | November 23, 2006The NEJM has another open-access article about drug safety.
As usual, when they publish something on an open-access
basis, it is something of interest to the general public, pertaining to
health care policy.
This one describes specific instances of drug companies concealing
information from the FDA and the public.
href="http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/355/21/2169">Dangerous
Deception — Hiding the Evidence of Adverse Drug Effects
Volume 355:2169-2171 November 23, 2006 Number 21
Jerry Avorn, M.D.
September 30 is becoming a day of infamy for drug
safety. On that date in…
oracknows | November 22, 2006So hit him.
Hit him hard.
He's 40,000 hits away from 1,000,000 visits.
Help get him over the top.
Given that I'm starting to get in that range (866,000 hits as of this morning), here's hoping someone will help me out in around two or three months, which is when I estimate that I'll be approaching 1,000,000.
Of course, I'm looking forward to the blogging death match that Dr. DB will have to participate in once he hits 1,000,000.
oracknows | November 22, 2006Fellow ScienceBlogger Alex Palazzo has discovered autism quackery.
I'm hurt.
I'm hurt because apparently Alex doesn't read my blog. (Just kidding; I don't read every ScienceBlog, either, although I do read many of them and peruse the Last 24 Hours Feed regularly for topics of interest.) If he did, he'd know that simply giving useless RNA from yeast in supplements (it's useless because, as Alex points out in detail, RNA is highly unstable and broken down quickly in the stomach to its component ribonucleic acids) is actually one of the more benign forms of autism quackery. At least it probably…
oracknows | November 22, 2006This time around for 48th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle, a skeptic by the 'nym of decorabilia presents his Last Will and Testament to the Circle, and bequeaths his worldly possessions to his fellow skeptics:
I am old and tired, my son. I feel the creeping chill of death in these creaking bones. I smell the heather of heavenly meadows and hear the distant strains of Gabriel's flugelhorn. Listen as I croak out my last will and testament. Lean in close. No, not that close. Your breath stinks.
Read the rest.
Next up to host is Dad of Cameron over at Autism Street on December 7. Start getting…