medicine
oracknows | September 4, 2006Mark over at Good Math, Bad Math just posted a lovely fisking of a claim by Peter Duesberg that "all positive teenagers would have had to achieve an absurd 1000 contacts with a positive partner, or an even more absurd 250,000 sexual contacts with random Americans to acquire HIV by sexual transmission." He even gets in some jibes at one of Duesberg's defenders on this point.
It's utter poppycock, of course, and Mark does an excellent job of treating this silliness with all the respect that it deserves. It's well worth a read.
j7uy5 | September 2, 2006The August 31 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine has an
interesting article with policy implications. Unfortunately,
they did not make this one freely accessible.
The authors argue that the increased medical costs that we faced
between the years of 1960 to 2000 have been a good investment.
They point out that the life expectancy in that time frame
increased by 6.97 years. The increase in medical costs per
person, divided by the increased expenditures per person, yields a
cost-per-year-of-life-gained of $19,900.
The Value of Medical Spending in the United
States, 1960–2000
D…
moleculeoftheday | August 31, 2006Now with cyanide, it's Laetrile:
Which hydrolyzes to:
Please check out the laetrile entry on the old site. Various proponents of this bizzare cancer treatment (which liberates cyanide, of all things, upon hydrolysis) pop up occasionally. If anyone knows of any peer-reviewed studies on Laetrile, I'd love to see them (other than the cancer study noted below and on the old site, thanks!).
What's fascinating is that it's a structure we know liberates cyanide, and people still go crazy for it. It's not like it's some herb with hundreds or thousands of different molecules in there (although many…
clock | August 31, 2006Nicotine Up Sharply In Many Cigarettes:
The amount of nicotine in most cigarettes rose an average of almost 10 percent from 1998 to 2004, with brands most popular with young people and minorities registering the biggest increases and highest nicotine content, according to a new study. Nicotine is highly addictive, and while no one has studied the effect of the increases on smokers, the higher levels theoretically could make new smokers more easily addicted and make it harder for established smokers to quit.
oracknows | August 31, 2006Boy, oh, boy, I had to control myself on this one. Yes, dear reader, while I was away this last week and a half, many were the times that I wanted to let loose about this. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your point of view) lack of Internet access at some times and other vacation activities at other times interceded. Now that I'm back home (although not back to full blogging, as I'm still on vacation until Labor Day), it's time to weigh in.
As you know, I've written extensively (some might say too extensively) about the Abraham Cherrix case, the case of a 16 year old boy who won…
tfk | August 31, 2006Apparently not important to talk about:
A would-be health care debate was whittled down to basically a one-candidate question-and-answer session Tuesday at Lawrence Memorial Hospital.
Nancy Boyda, who is running for the Kansas 2nd District congressional seat, was the only candidate to show, disappointing dozens at the hospital hoping to hear health care perspectives from all four local congressional candidates.
Republican Rep. Jim Ryun, the 2nd District incumbent, and Chuck Ahner, Republican 3rd District candidate, couldn’t attend the event. …
Boyda was joined by state Sen. Marci Francisco, a…
oracknows | August 31, 2006Rapidly dwindling vacation or no vacation, I have to plug the Skeptic's Circle.
Some of you may have wondered where the host of this week's Skeptic's Circle has been. After all, a few of you commented that his blog hadn't been updated in three months, even with a notice for the Skeptics' Circle. Fear not! Our intrepid host had to overcome even more than you think (in his mind, that is). Let him tell the tale in this brief excerpt:
Welcome to the 42nd meeting of the skeptics circle. Many of you have wondered where I have been over the past months and what has exactly been going on down in the…
clock | August 30, 2006
Re-post from May 17, 2006, under the fold...
When teaching biology, one has to cut up the syllabus into edible and digestible chunks, and it makes sense to cover various subdisciplines in separate lectures. As you know, I strive to find ways to make connections to students so they don't leave with a sense that all those subdisciplines are disconnected from each other, almost like separate sciences.
One obvious way to do it is to place everything heavily into an evolutionary context. Another way - and the two go hand-in-hand - is to find really cool diseases, like malaria, in which findings…
oracknows | August 30, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts.) These will appear at least twice a day while I'm gone (and that will probably leave some leftover for Christmas vacation, even). Enjoy, and please feel free to comment. I will be checking in from time to time when I have Internet access to see if the reaction…
ddobbs | August 28, 2006In his recent New Yorker article, "The Risk Pool," as well as a blog post, Malcolm Gladwell has drawn attention to yet another reason to move to a single-payer health insurance system: the punishing competitive disadvantage that American companies and industries suffer when they provide health insurance, especially health insurance for their retirees and pensioners. Gladwell's piece is mainly about retirement benefits, both pensions and health-care; he focuses on the "dependency ratio," which is the ratio, within a company, an industry, or a country, of working wage-earners to nonworking…
oracknows | August 28, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts.) These will appear at least twice a day while I'm gone (and that will probably leave some leftover for Christmas vacation, even). Enjoy, and please feel free to comment. I will be checking in from time to time when I have Internet access to see if the reaction…
clock | August 28, 2006
You probably realize by now that my expertise is in clocks and calendars of birds, but blogging audience forces me to occasionally look into human clocks from a medical perspective. Reprinted below the fold are three old Circadiana posts about the connection between circadian clocks and the bipolar disorder, the third one being the longest and most involved. Here are the links to the original posts if you want to check the comments (especially the first comment on the third post):
January 18, 2005: Clocks and Bipolar Disorder
August 16, 2005: Bipolar? Avoid night shift
February 19, 2006:…
j7uy5 | August 28, 2006The
href="http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060821/UPDATE/608210400">Michigan
Civil Rights Commission ruled recently that small insurance
companies that cover prescription drugs must also cover the cost of
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_contraceptives"
rel="tag">oral contraceptives.
Firms with more than 15 employees are already under the jurisdiction of
federal law, so the ruling affects only small companies. But
the ruling will have a wide impact: 60% of firms in Michigan are
affected.
This ruling is consistent with recommendations from major…
oracknows | August 28, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts.) These will appear at least twice a day while I'm gone (and that will probably leave some leftover for Christmas vacation, even). Enjoy, and please feel free to comment. I will be checking in from time to time when I have Internet access to see if the reaction…
oracknows | August 27, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts.) These will appear at least twice a day while I'm gone (and that will probably leave some leftover for Christmas vacation, even). Enjoy, and please feel free to comment. I will be checking in from time to time when I have Internet access to see if the reaction…
j7uy5 | August 26, 2006The New
England Journal of Medicine has two
freely-accessible articles this week. As is usually the case,
their free articles are about important topics at the intersection of
medicine and social policy, and are worth reading. However,
this time, both articles rub me the wrong way. (Hat tip:
href="http://psychmatters.blogspot.com/2006/08/colossal-collection-of-wandering-eye.html">Psych
Matters)
The first,
href="http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/355/8/753">Imposing
Personal Responsibility for Health, by Robert
Steinbrook, M.D., is an opinion piece about the the concept of…
clock | August 26, 2006The third edition of Radiology Grand Rounds, the carnival of medical imaging, is up on Sumer's Radiology Site.
j7uy5 | August 25, 2006Years ago, I read a paper in which the authors proposed a model, in
which the immune system was conceptualized as a sensory organ for the
central nervous system. They did not think of it as the
primary purpose of the immune system, but they wanted to highlight the
fact that immune system activity does provide information to the brain,
and that information is, to some extent, perceptible of a conscious
level.
I have to get ready for work, so I am not going to try to find the
reference. At least right now. I might get curious
enough to go looking for it later.
Now, we hear of another…
oracknows | August 25, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts.) These will appear at least twice a day while I'm gone (and that will probably leave some leftover for Christmas vacation, even). Enjoy, and please feel free to comment. I will be checking in from time to time when I have Internet access to see if the reaction…
scientificactivist | August 24, 2006Shelley of Retrospectacle asks fellow ScienceBloggers:
"Are you for or against the death penalty, or (if its conditional), in what cases? Furthermore, do you believe that societies that sanction war are hypocritical for opposing the death penalty?"
I'm against the death penalty, and I would agree that if a society uses war as a tool of foreign policy, it would be hypocritical to oppose the death penalty. Fortunately (or, rather, unfortunately) for the US, that doesn't seem to be an issue. In addition to the usual arguments against the death penalty (not a deterrent, risk of executing the…