medicine
oracknows | August 9, 2006As you probably remember, the case that first got me discussing the issue of children and minors opting for "alternative therapy" rather than conventional medicine was not Starchild Abraham Cherrix (Abraham's personal website). Rather, this is a topic that I first approached nine months ago, even before I moved over to ScienceBlogs. With the prominence of the Cherrix case, the Wernecke case has dropped off the map more or less. Basically, her parents won the right to refuse the recommended radiation therapy for her, a treatment with a good chance of rendering her disease-free, and instead…
oracknows | August 8, 2006Grand Rounds, vol. 2, no 46 has been posted at Mexico Medical Student. Enjoy!
moleculeoftheday | August 8, 2006Methylene blue is a well-known dye. It is useful as a biological stain, binds to DNA, and can turn your urine blue.. Incredibly, I'm opting to talk about how it's used in time-sensitive DVDs.
Awhile back, a DVD format called Flexplay was introduced. The idea here is that since DVDs are so relatively cheap to produce, there's no real reason to have the customer return them (except to avoid diluting the value of purchased DVDs). One ill-fated format, DIVX, came about a few years back, but it was unwieldy and essentially a pay-per-view system - special players had to be hooked up to a phone line…
j7uy5 | August 8, 2006Let us hope that this new article in Nature turns
out to be as important as it seems.
In a recent publication, scientists from Merck report on
title="Wikipedia link"
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platensimycin" rel="tag">platensimycin,
which is a previously unknown kind of antibiotic. It is
produced by Streptomyces platensis.
(There were a gazillion authors on the paper, so I did not
all include their names. The first authors, noted to have
contributed equally, were Jun Wang and Stephen M. Soisson)
href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v441/n7091/abs/nature04784.html…
clock | August 8, 2006New Depression Findings Could Alter Treatments.
Kids on antidepressants more likely to commit suicide? I have heard about this several times before, but I believe this is a first study directly asking this question:
"The researchers found no link between the antidepressant drugs and suicidal behavior in depressed patients 19 or older. But children and adolescents in the study who were taking antidepressants were about 50 percent more likely than those not on the drugs to try to kill themselves. And they were about 15 times as likely as those not on the medications to complete the act,…
oracknows | August 8, 2006Our Seed overlords beckon:
What movie do you think does something admirable (though not necessarily accurate) regarding science? Bonus points for answering whether the chosen movie is any good generally....
This one's a bit of a toughy. First off, I waited too long to answer it, which means that other ScienceBloggers have copped answers that I had thought of, movies such as Real Genius and Apollo 13. Those were definitely among the first movies that came to mind. Even though the science itself in Real Genius is downright silly, its celebration of the joys of being a science geek is infectious…
oracknows | August 7, 2006Via Advice Goddess, I find that the Atlanta Zoo is using psychics to predict whether their prize Panda is actually pregnant.
One of them predicted that the Panda is definitely pregnant and will bear a male cub before September 4. I'll give her credit for putting herself out there with a definite prediction. Of course, if she's wrong, it's likely that no one will remember. The other psychic was more cagey; she only estimated a 65% chance that the Panda is pregant. (I wonder how she came up with those odds?) Of course, if she's wrong, she can just say that she had only predicted a 2/3…
oracknows | August 7, 2006It occurred to me over the weekend that I hadn't updated my Medicine and Evolution series in a while. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a couple of clueless creationists who had wildly misinterpreted a recent paper about how the cornea prevents blood vessels from growing into it from the surrounding sclera as "evidence" against evolution, basing his conclusion on, in essence, a single sentence from the abstract of the paper. It turns out that my humble efforts attracted the attention of an editor for American Academy of Ophthalmology, who was kind enough to forward to me a fascinating…
j7uy5 | August 7, 2006When I was in medical school, back in the mid-80's, there was
a bit of a controversy about whether "tight" glucose regulation was a
good idea. Most people thought it was, but there was some concern that
attempts to control the glucose too tightly could lead to increased
risk of complications from getting the glucose too low.
If I recall correctly, the biggest concern was in patients who
had insulin-requiring diabetes, meaning that they either had type-I
diabetes, or that they had severe type-II diabetes.
I'm not an endocrinologist, so someone jump in and tell me if
I'm wrong, but my…
oracknows | August 5, 2006Here are a few links that I didn't get around to mentioning during the week that are, in this blogger's humble opinion, worth a read by my readers:
This week saw the 25th anniversary of MTV. Terra Sigillata has two posts on his favorite MTV memories (with the latter link showing a 17-year-old Pharmboy jamming out), and Stereogum has the playlist for the first 24 hours of MTV, plus a YouTube of the first few minutes, in which the VJs were introduced.
Should I get wooden knobs for my stereo system? The manufacturers claim that they will greatly improve sound quality, and they're a bargain at $…
clock | August 4, 2006Oversimplified, but much believed idea: Many cancer drugs target cells during cell division. Healthy cells divide at a particular time of day (exact timing may differ between cell types). Cancer cells are not under the control of the circadian clock so they divide at all times of the day (and they divide more often anyway). Thus, incorrect timing of chemotherapy - given during the time most healthy cells divide as well as some cancer cells - will kill more healthy than cancerous cells, leading to early termination of treatment and worse prognosis. Correct timing - during the time when…
oracknows | August 4, 2006After the last couple of weeks of Your Friday Dose of Woo, I was in a bind. You see, people were telling me that they really enjoyed the last couple of weeks, particularly last week. For some reason, they were amused by my discussion of various liver cleansing regimens, hot on the heals of having discussed colon cleansing regimens. (Must be the bathroom humor; it gets 'em every time.) Some of you were surprised at the real obsession that alties have with "purifying" their insides from various "poisons" or "toxins." As I discussed, some of these folks seem to believe that their insides are…
oracknows | August 3, 2006Today, the Skeptics' Circle turns 40. Well, not exactly, but it is the 40th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle, and this time around it's being held at Daylight Atheism. Once again, it's time for an antidote for the rampant credulity in the blogosphere, where dubious stories travel around the world far faster than skeptics can apply critical thinking skills to them, this time by entering the Daylight Atheism Museum of Superstition and Pseudoscience:
The doors of the Observatory are closed, and an eager crowd has gathered before them, milling about anxiously to await the unveiling of the newest…
clock | August 3, 2006A number of media outlets are reporting on the new Duke University study on the effects of time-of-day on the outcome of surgery:
Patients who undergo surgery late in the afternoon are more likely to experience unexpected adverse events related to their anesthesia than are patients whose operations begin in the morning, a new analysis by Duke University Medical Center researchers suggests.
-------------------snip-----------------------
In addition to spotting problems related to anesthesia, Wright and her colleagues also found that surgery patients experienced a significant increase in "…
purepedantry | August 3, 2006It is like sweat and balls hot out, so I have a little personal story -- or rather my Dad's personal story -- to tell about heat waves. My Dad is an Emergency Room doctor, and he has been working in CA this summer for reasons that are not relevant. Anyway, one day about a week ago he had two patients come in from one nursing home with heat stroke, one with a temperature of about 104 and one with like 112. At this point I was asking, "Can that even happen?" To which he responded, "Not if you plan to survive it." Unfortunately, that patient did not survive.
My father, being suspicious that…
oracknows | August 3, 2006...while driving to work at 6:30 AM you notice the thermometer in your car already registers the outside temperature as 83 degrees Farehnheit.
Ack.
oracknows | August 2, 2006Here's something so obvious that it should have been done years ago:
WASHINGTON -- Unlike prescription drugmakers, manufacturers of vitamins, minerals and herbal remedies have no obligation to tell the Food and Drug Administration if consumers suffer serious side effects after taking their products.
That may soon change.
Legislation headed for a vote in the Senate would mandate for the first time that makers of dietary supplements and over-the-counter drugs inform the FDA when they learn of any serious adverse event linked to their products.
"The current reporting system is voluntary. It's…
clock | August 2, 2006When I saw this article in SEED Maagazine, I had only one thought - Mokie-Koke!
Readers of science fiction know what I am talking about. I was reminded of "The Merchant's War", the 1984 sequel to the 1952 brilliant dystopia "The Space Merchants", the book that beat "1984" and "Brave New World" in its accuracy of prediction. The initial novel - one of the all-time-greats of the genre, was written by Frederick Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth. The sequel, 32 years later, was written by Pohl alone.
It's been at least 15 years since I last read The Merchants' War, but if I remember correctly, each…