medicine
moleculeoftheday | November 3, 2006Potassium iodide isn't much of a structure:
It's a source of iodide. Thyroid hormones contain iodine; the source of this is dietary iodide.
The human dietary requirement for iodine is vanishingly small; on the order of 100 micrograms per day. Trace iodine is present in seawater and many soils, so most people get some from seafood, fruits, or vegetables. In the absence of iodine, thyroid hormone levels are low. This induces a cascade of hormone releases; the last of which is the release of thyroid stimulating hormone. This enhances production of thyroid hormones. In excess, this induces…
oracknows | November 3, 2006I feel for you, ScienceBlogs compatriot Afarensis. I really do.
Sure, your Cardinals beat my Tigers in the World Series last week. Sure, the Tigers made a lot of embarrassing errors and showed every sign of letting their youth and inexperience lead them to choking under the pressure. Sure at times the Tigers looked like a Little League team, throwing balls away hither and yon to let unearned runs score, looking nothing like the lean, mean baseball machine that had earlier dispatched the mighty Yankees with such aplomb after losing the first game. Sure the Cardinals managed to win it all after…
oracknows | November 3, 2006There are times when the struggle to keep cranking out Your Friday Dose of Woo every week starts to get to me. No, it's not because I don't enjoy putting together these little light-hearted but pointed analyses of some of the strangest woo that I've come across. Believe me, many times it's the highlight of my blogging week. It's just that, now that I've been doing this a while, no matter how hard I try to put something together the weekend before, so as to be ahead of the game, somehow I almost never quite manage to do it. Thus, all too frequently I end up writing away late Thursday night…
j7uy5 | November 2, 2006Two former US Surgeons General have announced that the United States
has unacceptable levels of
title="sexually transmitted diseases">STDs
and that abstinence-only education has not helped.
Note that the Presidents "
href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/achievement/chap14.html">Record
of Achievement" boasts:
A new abstinence initiative will double
the funding for abstinence-only education;
develop model abstinence-only education curricula; review all Federal
programming for youth addressing teen pregnancy prevention, family
planning, and STD and HIV/AIDS prevention, to ensure…
oracknows | November 2, 2006Let Abel Pharmboy put all the hype over the study showing that resveratrol, a compound found in red wine, can extend the lifespan of mice by 20-30% in better perspective for you.
clock | November 2, 2006Shelley has already explained the recent study about the life-span increasing properties of Resveratrol, a compound found in wine.
Article in NYT tries to make a quick calculation (apparently erroneous) as of how much wine a person would have to drink in order to receive the same dose as the lab mice got in this study - "from 1,500 to 3,000 bottles of red wine a day"!
Perhaps the dose would be smaller if you could stand drinking the super-sweet Scuppernong (from muscadine grape - Vitis Rotundifolia) wine from Duplin Winery here in Rose Hill, North Carolina. As horribly sweet as it is, I…
oracknows | November 2, 2006Suzanne Somers annoys me.
She annoys me because, despite the fact that her statements and activities over the last 25 years reveal her to be probably no more intelligent than the character that she played on Three's Company, she still feels the need to spread misinformation about diet and medicine in several books that she has written. Indeed, my annoyance at her was manifested very early in the history of this blog, when I mentioned her in the context of testimonials for alternative medicine treatments for breast cancer. The reason? In 2001, Somers was diagnosed with breast cancer. She…
oracknows | November 1, 2006The latest edition of Change of Shift, the blog carnival about nursing, has been posted at DisappearingJohn RN.
oracknows | November 1, 2006Seen pulling into the hospital parking lot this morning, a cardiologist with a vanity license plate on his car. The vanity plate read:
LUB DUB
(For nonphysicians who may not be aware of the significance of the above, "lub-dub" is the way the two parts of the heart sound with each beat are usually represented in medical texts, as in lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub, lub-dub.")
That's got to be about the best physician vanity plate I've ever seen.
oracknows | November 1, 2006I had been planning on finally getting around to writing that review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion that I've been meaning to write since I finally finished the book two weeks ago. Then a Google Alert hit my mailbox last night for a preset search that I keep active on "Abraham Cherrix," and the article that the link in the search results lead to not only contained a a disturbing amount of credulity towards alternative medicine (in the form of he-said-she-said "balance" when two outlooks are not anywhere near equally supported) but offered a positive portrayal of Abraham Cherrix and Dr.…
j7uy5 | November 1, 2006Jonah Lehrer, at
href="http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2006/10/depression_induces_bone_loss_1.php">The
Frontal Cortex,
points out a recent PNAS article (published online ahead of print) that
indicates an unexpected finding. Using a mouse model or
depression, they find that the risk of osteoporosis is increased.
Furthermore, they find that treatment with an antidepressant
reduces the risk.
href="http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/0604234103v1">Depression
induces bone loss through stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system
Raz Yirmiya, Inbal Goshen, Alon Bajayo, Tirzah…
clock | October 31, 2006Check out the freshly unvailed Open Healthcare Manifesto, designed to foster "open media" in healthcare and medicine and to implement "some sort of a new "integrity standard" ... needed to help people sort through the junk that openness unfortunately tends to generate."
To see the details, download the HealthTrain - the Open Healthcare Manifesto (pdf) and the HealthTrain Press Release (pdf)
clock | October 31, 2006When doctors get scary, than it is really scary - go check it out on Doctor Hébert's Medical Gumbo
oracknows | October 31, 2006A little more than a year ago, an autistic boy named Abubakar Tariq Nadama died of a cardiac arrest due to hypocalcemia at the hands of an "alternative medicine" practitioner named Dr. Roy Kerry while chelation therapy was being administered to him intravenously. Dr. Kerry, who trained as an ENT doctor, now bills himself as an "allergist" and an alternative medicine practitioner. Tariq's tragic and unnecessary death lead to a round of posterior covering by mercury militia enabler David Kirby and a rather blithe acceptance and dismissal by some who routinely go ballistic whenever someone…
oracknows | October 30, 2006Last week, I wrote a couple of posts about Rush Limbaugh's despicable attacks on Michael J. Fox for appearing in an ad for a Democrat who supports loosening the federal ban on funding for embryonic stem cell research. Somehow, I missed the fact that Jon Swift also wrote on the topic. And, as is typical, he did it in a much more humorous fashion than I could.
moleculeoftheday | October 30, 2006Another theme week: Iodine.
Iodoform is, as the name suggests, the iodine analogue to chloroform.
Iodoform, as the Wikipedia entry mentions, isn't the best antiseptic in the world, but they're mistaken in saying it's not used anymore: iodoform impregnated gauze is still found in hospitals.
Another notable application of iodoform, also antiquated, is the iodoform reaction. This is one of a number of "wet tests" that were once used to characterize compounds. Before spectroscopic techniques became as robust as they are now, they had a place in the lab. Now, two groups of people bother reading…
oracknows | October 30, 2006Institutional review boards (IRBs) are the cornerstone of the protection of human subjects in modern biomedical research. Mandated by the federal government in the 1970's in the wake of research abuses of the 20th century, in particular the the horrors of the infamous Nazi biomedical experiments during World War II that were documented in during the Nuremberg trials and the Tuskegee syphilis experiment in which black men with syphilis in rural Alabama were followed without treatment in order to study the natural course of the disease, a study that lasted into the early 1970's. In the wake of…