medicine
purepedantry | November 14, 2006Saliva, is there anything it can't do?
A new painkilling substance has been discovered that is up to six times more potent than morphine when tested in rats -- and it's produced naturally by the human body. Natural painkillers are very rare, and researchers hope that this recent find might be harnessed as a clinical treatment.
Naturally produced painkillers might help to avoid some of the side effects experienced by patients treated with synthetic compounds such as morphine, including addiction and tolerance with prolonged use. But the new substance will first have to be tested to confirm…
oracknows | November 14, 2006Light blogging today, I'm afraid. My high speed Internet access was on the fritz last night, leaving odds and ends. Truly annoying. (On the other hand, maybe it's the FSM's way of telling me to slow down a bit.)
Patch Adams, the famous doctor who advocates humor in medicine and has been known to dress up in a clown outfit, as shown in the movie starring Robin Williams, displayed a distinctly non-amusing side of his personality in a speech at Vanderbilt University last month:
Patch Adams, M.D., an unconventional doctor who became a household name through a 1998 movie starring Robin Williams,…
j7uy5 | November 13, 2006I noticed this a few days ago and meant to comment on it.
Then, I noticed
href="http://scienceblogs.com/drcharles/2006/11/attention_paging_dr_google_1.php#more">Dr.
Charles beat me to it. He even gave some examples
in actual use. If you've already read his, skip the excerpt
and go directly to the few thoughts I've added at the end.
href="http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/547620">Web-Based
Search Engines Help Diagnose Difficult Cases
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) Nov 10 - Using Google to conduct web-based
searches on the internet can assist in the diagnosis of difficult
cases,…
oracknows | November 13, 2006If you're a physician, there comes a certain point in your career when you start caring a lot more than you did about the next generations of physicians in the training pipeline. While you're in the middle of training, you are the next generation; besides, you're too worried about just getting through medical school, residency, and Board certification to be all that concerned about those behind you in the pipeline, anyway. Then, when you're early faculty, you're concerned about establishing yourself, getting your career on track, and, if you're in academics, getting promoted. True, physicians…
oracknows | November 10, 2006Let's get one thing straight.
There's just no way on earth that I can imagine topping last week's Your Friday Dose of Woo. I can only be as good as my source material lets me be (well, maybe a bit better), and Toby Alexander and his "DNA Activation" represented such unbelievably potent, bizarre, and concentrated woo that I can't imagine that I'll find its like anytime soon again, much less find something that tops it. Even if I were to find woo more potent than Toby's, it would probably rend the fabric of the space-time continuum. Of course, given his "multidimensional spectra of DNA…
clock | November 9, 2006
Welcome to the fifth international carnival of pozitivities, blog carnival about HIV and AIDS founded and managed by my friend and neighbor (and great blogger) Ron Hudson.
I have to say that preparing this carnival has been quite an eye-opener for me and that I have learned so much. I feel it would be presumptious of me to write any editorials for today's entries so I will just list them with brief quotes from each post, but I warmly recommend that you take your time and read each and every post here - perhaps they will be eye-openers for you as well.
Eric Jost of Confessions of a gay…
purepedantry | November 9, 2006Here is an audio recording of the oral arguments in the case of Gonzales vs. Carhart (as an mp3).
Gonzales vs. Carhart is a case about the federal partial birth abortion ban:
The Supreme Court on Wednesday heard oral arguments on the federal late-term abortion ban, the first major abortion issue before a more conservative court now that Samuel Alito has replaced retired justice Sandra Day O'Connor.
The procedure in question in the current cases, Gonzales v. Carhart and Gonzales v. Planned Parenthood, is called by critics "partial birth" abortion and is medically known as "intact dilation…
oracknows | November 8, 2006The new Tangled Bank is up at Eastern Blot. Had enough politics? Read some science, instead!
purepedantry | November 8, 2006I meant to post this early, but the Neurophilosopher has an excellent history of Alois Alzheimer, for whom the disease is named:
On November 25th, 1901, a 51-year-old woman named Auguste Deter (below right) was admitted to the hospital, and was examined by Alzheimer. Deter at first presented with impaired memory, aphasia, disorientation and psychosocial incompetence (which was, at that time, the legal definition of 'dementia'); her condition gradually worsened, and she started losing other cognitive functions and experiencing hallucinations. Because of her age, Deter was diagnosed with…
purepedantry | November 8, 2006Suck on that title. Anyway, this is actually an important public health issue. Circumcision cuts your STD risk:
Circumcised males are less likely than their uncircumcised peers to acquire a sexually transmitted infection, the findings of a 25-year study suggest.
According to the report in the November issue of Pediatrics, circumcision may reduce the risk of acquiring and spreading such infections by up to 50 percent, which suggests "substantial benefits" for routine neonatal circumcision.
The current study is just one of many that have looked at this controversial topic. While most research…
oracknows | November 8, 2006I've written before about how frequently alties like to point to testimonials as "evidence" that their treatments work. Indeed, from the very beginning, in one of the earliest posts I ever wrote, I explained just why breast cancer testimonials for alternative medicine should be taken with a huge grain of salt. Of course, most of these testimonials are either given by true believers or used by people selling alternative medicine, and they are used mainly to sell product. That's one reason why I've emphasized that evidence from well-designed clinical trials is the best way of assessing what…
oracknows | November 7, 2006Grand Rounds no. 3, vol. 7 has been posted at MSSP Nexus Blog. Time to get your weekly fix of the best of the medical blogosphere.
oracknows | November 7, 2006After not having written anything about the case of Abubakar Tariq Nadama, the five year old autistic boy who died as a result of chelation therapy administered to him to "cure" him of his autism, I revisited the case last week in light of the State of Pennsylvania filing charges against Dr. Kerry, the "alternative medicine" practitioner who delivered the lethal dose. I've now gotten a copy of the full list of charges, and it makes for some interesting reading if you can stand all the legalese. (The charges can also be found here.)
Here's the note in Tariq's medical chart from his initial…
clock | November 6, 2006
Making connections (from January 22, 2006)...
---------------------------------------------------
I love Miss Frizzle from the cartoon "The Magic School Bus". She always says "Make connections, kids, make connections!" Here I'll try to make some tentative connections between two recent papers, both concerning health issues in humans.
The first paper, brought to my attention by Corpus Callosum, a blog I belatedly placed on my blogroll here only today, is titled Commonly Used Antidepressants May Also Affect Human Immune System, which is a high-hype way of presenting a finding that some…
purepedantry | November 6, 2006Eugene Volokh has written an article in the Harvard Law Review arguing that abortion is constitutional. This is not shocking. The Supreme Court has made clear that abortion is constitutional. However, he is arguing -- rather than from the point of view of right to privacy -- abortion to save a woman's life is constitution because of the right to self-defense:
Three women lie in adjoining hospital rooms. A fourth lives a block away. All are in deadly peril.
Alice is seven months pregnant, and the pregnancy threatens her life. Her fetus has long been viable, so she no longer has the Roe/…
moleculeoftheday | November 6, 2006Fundamental to learning how energy is moved around in biology is understanding ATP equivalents. You've probably heard about how ATP is "the energy currency of life" - and rightly so; every mole of ATP hydrolyzed is equivalent to about 10 kcals. Bioenergetics isn't really a direct food-to-ATP transaction, though. One crucial part of the indirect dance that is bioenergetics is called oxidative phosphorylation. Here, some molecules (NADH and FADH2) that constitute the business end of a lot of the enzymes responsible for oxidation reactions get regenerated (becoming NAD+ and FAD).
Still…
oracknows | November 5, 2006Pediatric Grand Rounds, vol. 1, no. 5 has been posted at Tales from the Womb. Some good reading for your Sunday afternoon.
j7uy5 | November 4, 2006The BBC reports
on a study that shows that computers with flat keyboards could reduce
the transfer of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.
A hospital has developed a computer keyboard which it
says could cut cases of the MRSA superbug by 10%.
Research shows as many as 25% of keyboards carry MRSA - one of a number
of hospital-acquired infections which kill 5,000 people each year in
the UK.
That is wonderful. Now we just need flat doorknobs, flat
inkpens, and flat toilets.
j7uy5 | November 3, 2006This is another one of those studies that shows pretty much what you
would expect. There are some surprises, though:
href="http://www.medpagetoday.com/EmergencyMedicine/EmergencyMedicine/tb/4434">Night-Shift
Nap Awakens ER Residents and Nurses
By Judith Groch, Senior Writer, MedPage Today
November 03, 2006
STANFORD, Calif., Nov. 3 -- Allowed a 40-minute nap midway through
12-hour night shifts, emergency room residents and nurses responded
with more vigilance and vigor, found researchers here.
Nevertheless, the randomized study that compared nappers
with
non-nappers working the…