medicine
j7uy5 | October 28, 2006A while back, I wrote about the new treatment for
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADHD" rel="tag">ADHD
that is under
development,
href="http://www.nrpharma.com/products/NRP104.htm" rel="tag">NRP104.
The original post is
href="http://trots.blogspot.com/2005_02_27_trots_archive.html">here.
In that post, I reviewed the pharmacology of NRP104.
The basic idea is that the company took an old molecule,
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dextroamphetamine" rel="tag">dextroamphetamine,
and tacked a molecule of
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysine">lysine
onto it. …
j7uy5 | October 27, 2006Just for kicks, in case anyone cares, and is not already familiar with
these sites, here are a few that I use:
class="inset" alt=""
src="http://a248.e.akamai.net/7/248/430/20060421021059/www.merckmedicus.com/ppdocs/us/hcp/images/redesign/img_mm_logo.jpg"
align="left" border="0" height="39" width="140">
href="http://www.merckmedicus.com/pp/us/hcp/hcp_home.jsp">Merck
Medicus is a great site. I had to provide
some medical license information, so I don't think it is available to
everyone. That is annoying, but I understand why they do
that. The site provides free access to…
oracknows | October 27, 2006Tired of doing Google searches for evidence-based discussions of dubious-sounding medical treatments and finding that the first 100 sites (or, if you're unlucky, the first 1,000 sites) that pop up are nothing more than altie woo, shills selling alternative medicine and supplements, and CureZone or Whale.to wannabes? Here's a useful tool. Le Canard Noir has put together a QuackSafe⢠Search Engine:
The Search Engine will only return matches from sites and blogs that are known to supply reliable information about quackery, quacks, medical fraud and pseudoscience. It is based on the newly…
oracknows | October 27, 2006No, I'm not talking about "Iron Justice," a guy who regularly posts to misc.health.alternative and seems obsessed with iron metabolism as the be-all and end-all of health and disease, with a particular affinity for iron overload as the cause of seemingly all disease, although he might make an amusing target at some point in the future. This time, it's something different. This week, as every week since inaugurating Your Friday Dose of Woo, I was sitting back, contemplating what flavor of woo I should have a little fun with. As is often the case, it was hard. No, it wasn't hard because of lack…
scientificactivist | October 26, 2006When you live in the wealthiest nation in the world but can still claim over 40 million people without health insurance--despite spending more than twice as much per capita on health care as any other nation--you might have a problem. Nowhere is this more apparent than in my home state, Texas, which leads the nation with 24.5% of its population uninsured.
Since the state government has done little to address the situation (often making things worse, by significantly defunding the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIPS), for example), others are taking up the slack. Yesterday's New York…
purepedantry | October 26, 2006I hadn't actually known this, but the creator of the Dilbert cartoons, Scott Adams, was diagnosed about two years ago with a rare disease called spasmodic dysphonia. Apparently he just recovered -- in spite of overwhelming odds against that happening.
First a bit about spasmodic dysphonia. Spasmodic dysphonia is a movement disorder involving the muscles of speaking. It is characterized by spasms in the adductor and/or abductor muscles of the larynx (the adductor muscles bring the vocal cords together and the abductor muscles bring the vocal cords apart). Spasms in either muscles prevents…
oracknows | October 26, 2006The Skeptics' Circle has been hosted in many places and in many forms, but leave it to Kev at Left Brain/Right Brain to bring it to the one place that it's been hosted before.
We're talking Heaven, people.
Naturally, the assembled skeptics were a bit disconcerted by this particular venue, as amusingly recounted by Kev:
It was one of the greatest moments of my life. Persuading a bunch of Skeptics' to affirm their belief in the blood of Jesus in order to attend a conference in Heaven. Admittedly, they didn't look very happy about it, but it worked. Skeptics' in Heaven. Marvellous.
Once the…
oracknows | October 26, 2006You didn't think this one would go by without my commenting on it, did you? Even though Abel and Tara have already ably commented on it, I can't help but jump in because the article echoes one of the common threads of this blog since the very beginning. Besides, as I've said before, just because everyone else has already commented on an article or issue never stopped me from jumping in before (well, almost never, anyway).
The article in question, Ignoring the failures of alternative medicine, is remarkable (to me, at least) because I can't recall any major media outlet like MSNBC daring to…
oracknows | October 25, 2006This one's for you, Afarensis (all in good fun, of course--well, for the most part, anyway):
Here's Jeff Suppan, pitcher for the Cardinals (who, it just so happens, will be starting game four of the World Series tonight) appearing prominently along with Patricia Heaton, Jim Caviezel, and other celebrities in a predictably lame "response" ad to the ad that Michael J. Fox made supporting the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate Claire McCaskill. Fox made the original ad because McCaskill supports removing the ban on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research that destroys embryos to…
purepedantry | October 25, 2006Virtual colonoscopy is more comfortable. Just thought you should know:
Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center researchers have found that "virtual" colonoscopy using a computer tomography (CT) scanner is considerably more expensive than the traditional procedure due to the detection of suspicious images outside of the colon.
"Virtual colonoscopy will certainly play a role in the future of colon cancer screening," said gastroenterologist Richard S. Bloomfeld, M.S., M.D., assistant professor of medicine at Wake Forest Baptist and a member of the research team. "It is important to…
oracknows | October 25, 2006One problem with getting old is that you start to see bands that you admired in your youth start to betray what you perceived as their ideals. The Baby Boomers were the first to start experiencing the disillusionment that comes with that, and songs from the rock gods of the 1960's have become ubiquitous in ads for everything from clothes to Cadillacs. Of course, bands that I idolized when I was in high school and college are no different. Sometimes, however, something happens to members of such a band that is just plain bizarre.
For example, could you believe that a member of The Clash is now…
j7uy5 | October 25, 2006Now, there is another element in the controversy. What
happens if a corporation essentially buys an undue degree of influence
in the formulation of treatment guidelines?
Treatment guidelines have always promoted controversy in medical
practice. Most physicians like the idea of a concise
guideline that is based upon empirical data and expert consensus.
But some resist the idea, thinking that a cookbook approach
is counterintuitive or contrary to their notions of the need to place
an emphasis on the quality of the physician-patient relationship.
Undue corporate influence is the subject of…
oracknows | October 24, 2006Yesterday, I wrote about a rather disgusting and ignorant tirade by Rush Limbaugh about Michael J. Fox, in which Limbaugh accused Fox of either faking Parkinsons's symptoms or purposely not taking his medications before taping an ad in which he supported a Democratic candidate because she supports stem cell research.
Advice Goddess gives us more perspective with an excerpt from Fox's autobiography that explains how difficult it is to balance the symptoms of Parkinson's Disease with the side effects from the medications necessary to treat it. Fox describes this as a "constant vexation for the…
j7uy5 | October 24, 2006Nature News reports on a preliminary study
href="http://www.chestnet.org/about/press/chest2006/briefing.php">presented
at the annual
meeting of the American College of Chest Physicians.
The study indicates that the cholesterol-lowering drugs in
the statin family may protect against lung damage caused by cigarette
smoking.
The study, presented by Walid G. Younis, MD, consisted of data analysis
of results from a survey done on 485 smokers and ex-smokers.
They found that those who took statins had much
less lung damage.
They compared medical tests of the patients' lung
health with those…
ddobbs | October 24, 2006
Stroke damage in a human brain
_____________________________________________
Horrors: I've forgotten to post several articles I wrote about findings presented at the Society for Neuroscience conference last week. I'll work my way backwards, I suppose, so here's the latest, about a University of Milan discovery that blocking a certain cell-wall gate in the hour after stroke (in a lab rat) could prevent almost all damage.
Check it out at Scientific American.
j7uy5 | October 24, 2006That's the title of
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/24/health/24cons.html?ex=1319342400&en=e370af46c3a1c13b&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss">an
article in the New York times. It is about clusters
of illness that are discovered by people posting on the Internet.
The concern is that some of these might by "psychosomatic,"
more properly known as
href="http://psyweb.com/Mdisord/jsp/somatd.jsp">somatoform
disorders. In the article, they describe a group of
persons who believe they have
rel="tag">Morgellons Disease.
Personally, I would be skeptical of…
oracknows | October 24, 2006I'm with Kevin, M.D. on this one. Not giving required vaccinations is akin to child neglect:
CHICAGO - State laws that make it easy for children to skip school-required vaccinations may be contributing to whooping cough outbreaks around the country, a study suggests.
All states allow children to be exempted from school immunization requirements for medical reasons -- because they might have a bad reaction, for example, or have weak immune systems -- and 48 states allow exemptions for personal or religious beliefs.
To get non-medical exemptions, some states require documentation, notarized…
oracknows | October 23, 2006Having been out of town a lot the last couple of weeks, I haven't read the New York Times Magazine the last couple of Sundays. It's a magazine that I either read cover to cover or toss aside having read only The Ethicist, something that usually happens when it delves into some annoying hipster topic or lets the fashion and food stuff expand to fill too much of the magazine. This week, I came across an article that made me think: What should be the penalty for academic misconduct in science? Consider the case of Dr. Eric Poehlman:
On a rainy afternoon in June, Eric Poehlman stood before a…
j7uy5 | October 23, 2006More headline comparisons:
href="http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/living/health/15823690.htm"
id="r-1_0">College kids add on pounds past 1st year
San
Jose Mercury News, USA - 15
hours ago
AP.
BOSTON - The "Freshman 15" is more like 5 to 7, but it is followed by
the "Sophomore 2 or 3," say researchers who led two of ...
id="r-5_0">Freshman 15: Weighty Issues
Earthtimes.org -
1 hour ago
Although
the proverbial 'freshman 15' may be a slight exaggeration, researchers
have warned that this could be followed by a 'sophomore 2 or 3'
signaling a ...…
clock | October 21, 2006A brief history of antibiotics and the resistance to them, resistant TB and resistance to Triclosan (antibacterial soap).