medicine
oracknows | September 28, 2006If you think I'm hardcore when it comes to my disgust at antivaccination advocates like Dawn Winkler, you should check out House, M.D.:
[House walks away. Cut to the clinic and House is in an exam room with a young mother and her baby.]
Young Mother: No formula, just mommy's healthy natural breast milk.
House: Yummy.
Young Mother: Her whole face just got swollen like this overnight.
House: Mmhmm. No fever, glands normal, missing her vaccination dates.
Young Mother: We're not vaccinating.
Young Mother: [Takes a toy frog and starts to make frog sounds] Gribbit, gribbit, gribbit. [Giggles]
[Baby…
oracknows | September 28, 2006It was a late night in the O.R. last night; so I didn't get to spend my usual quality blogging time. However, it occurred to me. In honor of being called a "pharma moron" on Whale.to, coupled with all the antivaccination lunacy that's been infesting the comments of this blog, only to be tirelessly countered by certain regulars here, I thought I'd repost a blast from the past that I somehow missed reposting when I was on vacation last month. Yes, it's my piece about the "pharma shill" gambit. It appeared originally on August 11, 2005. I think its reappearance now is particularly appropriate,…
purepedantry | September 27, 2006Have you ever seen a cyst fly?
A team of French doctors planned to slice a cyst off a man's arm Wednesday in the world's first zero-gravity surgery, operating aboard an airplane soaring and diving in and out of weightlessness.
The experiment is part of a broader effort to develop robots for surgeries from a distance, in space or on Earth, the doctors said. The surgeons will be strapped to the walls of the Airbus 300 Zero-G for the three-hour operation.
The plane was scheduled to take off Wednesday midmorning from the Institute for Aeronautic Maintenance in Merignac, adjacent to Bordeaux in…
oracknows | September 26, 2006First, it was HIV/AIDS "skeptic" Celia Farber referring to me as "low rent riff-raff." I was so honored by that particular accolade that I had a smile on my face the rest of the day after I discovered it.
Fortunately for me, that's not the end of the accolades.
Thanks to my posts about Dawn Winkler, the antivaccination activist who is running for Governor of Colorado, I've been mentioned on Whale.to as "the pharma moron"!
It's really good to know that my work here is not going unrewarded. I'll have to be careful, or I might get a swelled head. OK, as a surgeon, by definition I already have a…
oracknows | September 25, 2006I wrote last week about the Tripoli Six, six health care workers who were jailed by Libya on trumped up charges of infecting patients at a hospital they worked at with HIV. Since then, many other have chimed in, and the most recent count of blog posts about this case is well over 100. According to Nature, this attention is starting to have an effect:
Bloggers have rallied around a call from a humanitarian lawyers' organization for greater international pressure to free six medical workers who risk execution by firing squad in Libya on charges of deliberately infecting over 400 children with…
j7uy5 | September 25, 2006One of the nutty aspects of the Medicare prescription drug program is
the so-called "
href="http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/09/21/the_face_on_the_doughnut_hole.php">doughnut
hole." The doughnut hole occurs once the
beneficiary reaches a certain spending limit. This is
described in a recent
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/24/AR2006092400957.html">Washington
Post article:
Under the standard plan, however, the government
picks up the bulk of
drug costs only until the beneficiary and the government together have
spent $2,250 for the year. At…
oracknows | September 25, 2006After the three posts that I recently did about vaccination have garnered well over 250 comments between the three of them (and still counting), I thought it might be time to switch topics. As important as they are, I don't want this blog to become all vaccines all the time. (After all, look what happened to the blog SupportVaccination.org. It's a long story that I'll have to tell you sometime; but suffice it to say that the blog no longer exists.) Quite frankly, seeing the same old fallacies being repeated over and over again by antivaxers does get tiresome after a while. After all, how many…
oracknows | September 23, 2006Holy crap.
I suspected that my two posts about Dawn Winkler, the antivaccination activist running for Governor of Colorado on the Libertarian ticket, might generate some comments and attract some of Dawn's fellow antivaxers to the comments. Little did I suspect just how many, or how hysterical they would become. Because yesterday was a travel day for me, I didn't see many of them until just now, and, even having had a fair amount of experience with the irrationality of many antivaxers, even I was a bit taken aback.
I suppose I shouldn't have been.
One statement, I think, embodies the main…
moleculeoftheday | September 22, 2006Inspired by the comments yesterday, here is a compound that was used in early human genetics: phenylthiocarbamide, or PTC:
PTC is one of those molecules with the puzzling properties of tasting bitter to some, and like nothing at all to others. This page gives a good overview:
To some people the chemical substance phenylthiocarbamide tastes intensely bitter while to others it is almost tasteless. The ability to taste this and a number of other chemically related substances is inherited. There are two genes, T for tasting and t for non-tasting. T is dominant in expression over t. This system…
purepedantry | September 22, 2006Walmart is cutting prices on generic drugs in Florida as a test program:
- Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world's largest retailer, said on Thursday it would cut the prices of nearly 300 generic drugs to $4 per prescription starting in the retirement haven of Tampa, Florida.
Target Inc., which has faced increasingly stiff competition from Wal-Mart, said it would immediately match the drug prices in the Tampa Bay area as part of a long-standing practice of remaining price competitive with its larger rival.
Wal-Mart characterized the program as "part of its ongoing commitment to provide affordable…
oracknows | September 22, 2006With all the vaccination "skeptics" who've crawled out of the woodwork over the last couple of days in response to my two posts about Dawn Winkler, the Libertarian candidate for the Governor of Colorado who happens to be a rabid antivaccination activist, not to mention totally clueless and nasty about autistic children (and who even showed up to play the faux amusement bit on my blog), I briefly contemplated antivaccination woo as this week's topic. It would have fit well thematically and flowed naturally from previous posts and dicussion on the matter. After all, there is an incredible…
clock | September 21, 2006Change of Shift, the nursing carnival, has ventured out to a new host. The 7th edition is now up on kt.
clock | September 20, 2006Five Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor have been wrongfully charged and are awaiting execution by firing squad in Libya for allegedly infecting children with HIV. They were tortured and forced to sign "confessions" written in Arabic they did not understand. In fact, the poor hygiene and bad practices in the hospital are to blame.
You can get more information in Nature (free access) editorial and news report and even more detail in an official report (pdf) and a letter (pdf) to Qaddafi.
What can you do?
First, ask your congresscritters what are they going to do about this - are…
oracknows | September 20, 2006Declan Butler of Nature has issued a call for help from the scientific and medical blogosphere in protesting and raising awareness about an utter travesty of justice, a vile and utterly vicious miscarriage of justice. This is one that I can't help but throw the paltry weight of my own blog behind. Here's the story:
Lawyers defending six medical workers who risk execution by firing squad in Libya have called for the international scientific community to support a bid to prove the medics' innocence. The six are charged with deliberately infecting more than 400 children with HIV at the al-Fateh…
purepedantry | September 20, 2006This is absolutely unacceptable. 6 medical workers are on trial in Libya under the accusation of infecting children with HIV, and if convicted they could be executed. While expert testimony and scientific evidence was presented at the trial, this evidence was thrown out from a combination of miscommunication and what appears to be political bias.
Declan Butler from Nature reports:
Lawyers defending six medical workers who risk execution by firing squad in Libya have called for the international scientific community to support a bid to prove the medics' innocence. The six are charged with…
clock | September 20, 2006Over 1.6 Million Americans Use Alternative Medicine For Insomnia Or Trouble Sleeping:
A recent analysis of national survey data reveals that over 1.6 million American adults use some form of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) to treat insomnia or trouble sleeping according to scientists at the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), part of the National Institutes of Health.
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Those using CAM to treat insomnia or trouble sleeping were more likely to use biologically based therapies (nearly 65 percent), such as herbal…
oracknows | September 20, 2006Yesterday's post on Dawn Winkler, the antivaccination activist who is presently running for the Governor of Colorado on the Libertarian ticket, provoked this comment, which linked to an amusing e-mail exchange that Australian skeptic Peter Bowditch had with her regarding vaccines a couple of years ago. After reading that exchange, I now think that I was probably a bit more easy on Ms. Winkler than she deserved. Perhaps I gave her too much of the benefit of the doubt because of the death of her first child of SIDS. I realize more strongly now that personal tragedy does not immunize her from…
purepedantry | September 19, 2006I feel really bad for this guy:
Surgeons in China who said they performed the first successful penis transplant had to remove the donated organ because of the severe psychological problems it caused to the recipient and his wife.
Dr Weilie Hu and surgeons at Guangzhou General Hospital in China performed the complex 15-hour surgery on a 44-year old man whose penis had been damaged in a traumatic accident.
The microsurgery to attach the penis, which had been donated by the parents of a 22-year-old brain-dead man, was successful but Hu and his team removed it two weeks later.
"Because of a…