medicine
oracknows | August 16, 2006Sadly, Starchild Abraham Cherrix is almost certainly doomed:
ACCOMAC, Virginia (AP) -- A 16-year-old cancer patient's legal fight ended in victory Wednesday when his family's attorneys and social services officials reached an agreement that would allow him to forgo chemotherapy.
At the start of what was scheduled to be a two-day hearing, Circuit Judge Glen A. Tyler announced that both sides had reached a consent decree, which Tyler approved.
Under the decree, Starchild Abraham Cherrix, who is battling Hodgkin's disease, will be treated by an oncologist of his choice who is board-certified in…
clock | August 16, 2006Different strokes occur at different times
Different types of strokes occur most often at different times of day say scientists at Iwate Medical University in Iwate, Japan.
The team based their findings on data from 12,957 cases of first-ever stroke diagnosed by CT or MRI scans and drawn from the Iwate Stroke Registry between 1991 and 1996.The researchers chose patients who had experienced cerebral infarctions, or ischemic strokes, where cells die because blood flow to the brain is restricted, and two kinds of hemorrhagic strokes: intercerebral hemorrhages that occur within the brain, and…
oracknows | August 16, 2006I bet that this probably isn't applicable to too many women:
One Israeli woman has received an unexpected boost from her breast implants during the Lebanon war -- the silicone embeds saved her life during a Hezbollah rocket attack, a doctor said.
"This is an extraordinary case, but it's a fact that the silicone implants prevented her from a more serious and deeper wound," Jacky Govrin, of the hospital in Nahariya that treated the woman, told army radio Tuesday.
"The young woman went through surgery two years ago to have a larger chest," he said. "During the war she was wounded in the chest by…
oracknows | August 16, 2006Yesterday, on the way home, I was flipping through the AM dial. Yes, as embarrassed as I am to admit it, even now I still occasionally have a soft spot for conservative talk radio. At the risk of being shunned by my fellow ScienceBloggers (most of whom are--shall we say?--a bit to the left) and driving away half my traffic, I will even admit to having listened regularly to Rush Limbaugh for a period of several years back when I was in the lab fulltime. Say whatever you will about his views (which have tended to become more odious over the years), he was (and sometimes still is) a powerful and…
oracknows | August 15, 2006Mentioned in the comments on this post was this story:
MIAMI (Reuters) - The man who made the Statue of Liberty appear to vanish may soon claim to do the same for unsightly bags and wrinkles.
Master illusionist David Copperfield says he has found the "Fountain of Youth" in the southern Bahamas, amid a cluster of four tiny islands he recently bought for $50 million (26.4 million pounds).
One of his islands in the Exuma chain, Musha Cay, is a private resort that rents for up to $300,000 a week and the other islands serve as buffers to keep prying eyes away from celebrity guests on the white…
oracknows | August 15, 2006Grand Rounds, vol. 2, no. 46 has been posted at Hospital Impact, this time in the form of a letter to a new son.
oracknows | August 15, 2006Damn you PZ!
(Heh, I haven't gotten to say that since he shamed my profession by showing us an example of a certifiably loony young earth creationist physician running for Lt. Governor of South Carolina.)
This time around, I'm annoyed at PZ for pointing me in the direction of an article so absurd, so ridiculous, so full of postmodernistic appeals to other ways of knowing with respect to science that at first I thought that it had to be a parody of postmodernism in the form of, as PZ put it, suggesting that Foucault or Derrida should have as much value treating your cancer as evidence-based…
j7uy5 | August 14, 2006A few days ago I
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2006/08/changes_in_the_drugapproval_pr.php">made
note of an article in the NEJM, about proposed changes in the
process for FDA approval of new medication. (
href="http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/355/6/618"
rel="tag">A Proposal for Radical Changes in the
Drug-Approval Process, by Alastair J.J. Wood, M.D.)
At the time, it wasn't possble for me to do justice to the
paper. It still isn't but at least I will be able to make a
couple of points.
I've taken some shortcuts in this post, not explaining some of the…
oracknows | August 14, 2006Here's a feature I've been meaning to start almost since I started this blog, a series along the line of Dr. Bard Parker's Tales of the Trauma Service. Oddly enough, it only took me over a year and a half to get around to writing the first entry, for reasons that, quite frankly, I don't know. It just sort of got away from me. (And, believe it or not, there is at least one more series idea I've had floating around just as long.) It's not scientific, but it is medical, and in particular surgical.
I don't recall if I have mentioned this before on the blog, but for about two and a half years when…
oracknows | August 13, 2006Pediatric Grand Rounds vol. 1, no. 9 has been posted at Unintelligent Design. This time it's in the form of a test. Do you think you're ready for...the Pediatric Grand Rounds Review and Education Program (PGRREP)?
clock | August 13, 2006Pediatric Grand Rounds Vol.1, No.9, is now up on Unintelligent Design. You have to do a quiz. Multiple choice only.
oracknows | August 12, 2006Thanks to those who sent me a copy of the article I requested. Sadly, the library at my university has some rather large holes in its online collection. Even some fairly common journals are not represented. I'll have to read it this weekend. You'll all get personal e-mails from me later today, after I finish rounding on our service.
As for finding the paper online at the author's website, personally, I find that to be a very uncommon situation, although I have had some luck in the past e-mailing corresponding authors. This is much the same as in the old days, when we old geezers would…
j7uy5 | August 11, 2006I was just thinking about the topic, not with regard to myself, but the
issue in general, because of a good interview on Ira Flatow's
href="http://www.sciencefriday.com/">Science Friday.
There is no permalink, yet, but it's the show for 8/11/2006,
second hour. They discuss the progress, or lack thereof, in
finding a vaccine.
To what extent do you worry about AIDS, either with
respect to yourself, your children, or the world at large?...
I don't worry about it for myself or my family at all, except in the
same abstract way that I worry about pancreatic cancer or something
like that…
clock | August 11, 2006Seed ScienceBlogs are liveblogging the 16th International AIDS Conference in Toronto from August 13th-18th.
Two special correspondents on the ground, and our own Tara Smith of Aetiology will post daily commentary on a blog specially dsigned for this occasion - AIDS at 25.
Quite fittingly, the AskTheScienceBlogger question of the week is also about AIDS, and I am sure that a number of my SciBlings will write about the topic in addition to just answering the question, so you will have plenty of opportunity to be informed and educated about AIDS over the next several days. And, if you have not…
oracknows | August 11, 2006Here's a humble request of my readers. I'm looking for an article in a journal to which my university library does not offer online access. I'm interested in reading it, but not so interested that I'm wililng to pay the $40 to download it. If necessary, I can get it via interlibrary loan, but they'll just send me a poorly photocopied hard copy, possibly even a FAX. The article on evolution and cancer; so you can see why I might be interested. This is the article:
B. J. Crespi and Summers, K. Positive selection in the evolution of cancer. Biol Rev Camb Philos Soc. 81(3):407-24 (2006).
Would…
oracknows | August 11, 2006It's time for a change of pace on Your Friday Dose of Woo.
I'm getting the feeling that you my readers may have gotten tired of the theme I've been doing the last three weeks. I can relate somewhat but I think it served a purpose (other than giving me free rein to indulge in a lot of bathroom humor, that is). First, I subjected you to a rather disgusting foray into the bowels (if you'll excuse the term) of colon cleansing, complete with links to some truly disgusting websites where people not only enthusiastically discuss their poop, but take pictures and post them on the web. Next, I moved…
j7uy5 | August 10, 2006I know, it is a lame excuse. But I just found this article,
and am too tired to blog about it. It should be a fertile
inspirational source for someone, though, if someone else wants to get
to it before me.
From the August 10, 2006 New England Journal of Medicine:
A
Proposal for Radical Changes in the Drug-Approval Process, by
Alastair J.J. Wood, M.D.
Sometimes, articles of particular interest to public policy are made
available on an open-access basis. This is one of them.
Usually, such articles are worth reading.
oracknows | August 10, 2006The latest Change of Shift, the blog carnival for nursing, has been posted at It's a nursing thing.
j7uy5 | August 10, 2006This is no big surprise, although I did not expect the magnitude of the
effect:
href="http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-08/bsj-vaw080806.php">Violence
at work significantly boosts clinical depression risk
Work-related violence and threats and the risk of
depression and stress disorders
Employees subjected to real or threatened violence at work run a major
risk of becoming clinically depressed, indicates research in the
Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
The magnitude of the risk was in direct proportion to the amount of
workplace violence experienced, the…
oracknows | August 9, 2006I got this request the other day and finally decided to take the survey that it asked me to. It was relatively painless and it might gather useful information (although obviously it's not a scientific survey); so I thought I'd help publicize it. If you're a health care/ medical blogger, this survey is looking for you.
This poll is co-produced by Envision Solutions and The Medical Blog Network (TMBN).
WHY WE ARE CONDUCTING THIS SURVEY
Over the past few years, the healthcare blogosphere has grown in size and importance. This means that more people are blogging about medical issues, healthcare…