medicine
j7uy5 | July 16, 2006There is controversy in Peru, of all places, about the experimental use
of a treatment for diarrhea in children. Diarrhea is a major
cause of mortality in underdeveloped nations, especially in children.
From the Wikipedia page on
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_mortality" rel="tag">infant
mortality:
Major causes of infant mortality in more developed
countries include congenital malformation, infection, and SIDS. The
most common cause of infant mortality of all children around the world
has traditionally been dehydration from diarrhea.
Because of the success of spreading…
purepedantry | July 15, 2006If you go in for a mammogram and they see something that looks suspicious, odds are you are going to have to undergo a procedure called ductal lavage. Ductal lavage uses a fine needle to rinse the ducts of the breast with saline, and then has a pathologist look at the cells that come off to see if they are abnormal -- thus helping to detect breast cancer. One of the reasons that we do this is because mammography does not always detect cancers, and we would like to make sure that you do not have cancer. Ductal lavage is also less invasive than the alternative -- which is breast biopsy…
purepedantry | July 15, 2006Surgeons are experimenting with ways to use cryogenics to aid in surgery. If you can put someone in suspended animation, it would make the process of surgery much easier. Here is a description from Wired Magazine about such an experiment in a porcine test subject:
"Make the injury," Alam says. Duggan nods and slips his hands into the gash, fingers probing through inches of fat and the rosy membranes holding the organs in place. He pushes aside the intestines, ovaries, and bladder, and with a quick scalpel stroke slices open the iliac artery. It's 10:30 am. Pig 78-6 loses a quarter of her…
j7uy5 | July 15, 2006The
Wellcome Trust Biomedical Image Awards for 2006 have been announced.
The winners can be seen
href="http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/en/bia/gallery.html">here.
This photograph shows nerve cells growing along synthetic silk fibers.
The tiny blue dots are
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwann_cell">Schwann
cells. Schwann cells are a type of glial cell that
form myelin sheaths.
The hope is that these fibers might enable us to guide the growth of
nerve cells, in order to repair damage. The technology is
described in
href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5172422.stm"…
oracknows | July 14, 2006From The Daily Mail:
British holidaymakers are putting their lives at risk by relying on homeopathy to protect them against malaria, doctors have warned.
The medical experts condemned the practice of prescribing pills and potions made from tree bark, swamp water and rotting plants as 'outrageous quackery' and 'dangerous nonsense'.
Their warning follows an undercover investigation which found that alternative medicine clinics readily sell travellers homeopathic protection against malaria, despite clear Government advice that there is no evidence such treatments work.
It also comes after a…
j7uy5 | July 14, 2006This subject is not really news anymore, but I am writing about it to
call attention to a review article,
href="http://www.nature.com/npp/journal/v31/n7/abs/1301082a.html">VNS
Therapy in Treatment-Resistant Depression: Clinical Evidence and
Putative Neurobiological Mechanisms. In this post,
I provide a little overview of VNS therapy, comment on some other
sources of information, and say a little bit about where I would like
the research to go next.
VNS Therapy in Treatment-Resistant
Depression: Clinical
Evidence and Putative Neurobiological Mechanisms
Charles B Nemeroff*,1,2,…
oracknows | July 13, 2006Sid Schwab has started blogging at Surgeonsblog.
One of his early posts is about a particularly difficult breast cancer patient that he had to deal with. He even shares my pet peeve about mammographers:
The radiologist who read my patient's current xray reported that there was a cluster of indeterminant calcifications in the previously treated breast which, in comparison to a prior xray, had increased in number. Biopsy, according to the radiologist, was recommended.
There are about a dozen difficulties here, not counting the verbal assault I'd received. First of all, I hate it when a…
oracknows | July 13, 2006Over the couple of days or so, a minor flurry of comments have hit the ol' blog. I hate to let commenters dictate the content of my blog, but it's strictly a coincidence that this happens to be a post I had been planning sometime this week anyway and it comes around the same time as the minor altie comment deluge hit the blog. Or maybe it's not such a coincidence, coming as it does in the wake of a court hearing relevant to the case of Starchild Abraham Cherrix. Recent commenters have castigated me, claiming that the Hoxsey treatment is not quackery; asserting that cancer is "not due to a…
oracknows | July 12, 2006The latest edition of Change of Shift, a blog carnival for nursing, has been posted at Emergiblog.
Check it out.
oracknows | July 12, 2006Like most bloggers, I suspect, I like to know who's linking to me. Unfortunately, the majority of bloggers appear not to use TrackBacks, and even when they do for some reason the TrackBacks often don't register. Couple that with a level of comment spam that sometimes outnumbered my legitimate TrackBacks by at least 200:1, and you see that TrackBacks aren't a great way of knowing who's linking to you. Consequently, a couple of times a week, I do quick Technorati and Google Blog Searches on the URL of Respectful Insolence to see who happens to be linking to me.
That's how I found this brief…
oracknows | July 10, 2006I had tried to give the Dr. Mark Geier and his son David a rest for a while, as I suspected my readers may have been getting a little tired of my bashing them, no matter how deserved that bashing may have been. After all, they do shoddy science in the service of "proving" that mercury in vaccines causes autism. They concoct dubious IRBs riddled with conflicts of interest to "approve" their research. When the evidence that this is not the case becomes more and more compelling, they add a twist of a claim that many autistic children suffer from "precocious" puberty," which requires treatment…
purepedantry | July 9, 2006"Why would I ever care about heart attack screening, Jake?" This is a reasonable question so let me put it this way:
The ACS [American Cancer Society] recommends the following screening ages: 20 for breast cancer with mammography from age 40 (at least annually), 21 for cervical cancer (Pap test), 50 for colorectal cancer (several options), and 50 for prostate cancer (prostate-specific antigen test and digital rectal examination annually).
What do we recommend for heart attacks? Well, basically we recommend that, unless you have some very serious risk factors, you wait until you have a heart…
purepedantry | July 9, 2006That's not good:
A new analysis that compares two common inhalers for patients suffering from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) finds that one reduces respiratory-related hospitalizations and respiratory deaths, but the other -- which is prescribed in the majority of cases -- increases respiratory deaths.
The Cornell and Stanford universities' statistical analysis of 22 trials with 15,276 participants found that common bronchodilators known as anticholinergics (generically named tiotropium and ipratropium) reduced severe respiratory events by 33 percent and respiratory-related…
purepedantry | July 9, 2006The American Journal of Psychiatry has this very interesting case, but first you should know some background. There is a pathway in the brain that is commonly referred to as the reward pathway. It is referred to as the reward pathway because if I were to -- for instance -- implant an electrode into parts of it and train a rat to press a lever to zap himself there, he would do so more or less in perpetuity. This ability to very rapidly train self-stimulatory behavior (keep your mind out of the gutter) suggests that these areas of the brain are involved in learning reward.
Here is a diagram…
purepedantry | July 7, 2006Prosopagnosia is a rare disorder that can result from strokes where the individual is unable to recognize faces but maintains the ability to recognize other non-face objects. Disorders like prosopagnosia suggest to neuroscientists that the machinery for processing faces in the brain is in part special and segregated from the machinery for processing other objects.
It turns out that there is also a wildly underreported and surprisingly prevalent form of hereditary prosopagnosia (HPA), as shown in a new paper in American Journal of Medical Genetics. HPA has a prevalence of almost 2.5% and…
oracknows | July 7, 2006When I originally conceived of doing a weekly feature entitled "Your Friday Dose of Woo," I did it almost on a whim. Now that I've reached the second week, I've realized that this is going to be harder than I thought. No, it's not that it's hard to find suitable targets. Quite the opposite, in fact. There's just too much woo out there, that it's really hard to choose a suitable subject. I had a hellacious time trying to pick one particular instance of woo that tickled my fancy enough to dedicate a blog post to it.
Of course, I did think about doing a followup to last week's Friday Dose of Woo…
j7uy5 | July 6, 2006There has been some blogosphere and mediasphere activity regarding the
following article (
href="http://archpedi.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/160/7/739">Age
at Drinking Onset and Alcohol Dependence) in Archives of
Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. The New York
Times picked it up (
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/04/health/04teen.html?ex=1309665600&en=64fcb20497217e6c&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss">permalink),
and Jake
href="http://scienceblogs.com/purepedantry/2006/07/on_the_merits_of_postponing_yo.php#more">posted
about it at Pure Pedantry.
There'…
oracknows | July 6, 2006The mercury militia and MMR scaremongers aren't going to like this, not one bit.
What should greet my in box upon my arrival at work after a long Fourth of July weekend, but an alert of a new study of a large population of children in Canada that utterly failed to find an epidemiological link between thimerosal or MMR vaccination and autistic spectrum disorders. It's the latest in a continuous line of epidemiological studies and, to my knowledge, the most comprehensive epidemiological study to look at exposure to both MMR and thimerosal-containing vaccines. (The MMR vaccine, being a live…