medicine
purepedantry | July 5, 2006Anabolic steroid abusers get gingival overgrowth (that would be big gums), or so says this study in the Journal of Periodontology:
Researchers found that prolonged use of anabolic androgenic steroid (AAS) is closely associated with significant levels of gingival enlargement, according to a new study published in the Journal of Periodontology.
Gingival overgrowth is a condition in which the gingival tissues become swollen and grow over the teeth. Overgrown gums make it easier for bacteria found in plaque to accumulate and attack supporting structures of the teeth, potentially leading to severe…
oracknows | July 5, 2006PZ may have wasted his life preparing students for medical school, and Skeptico may have wished that he had thought of this first, but what about me, a real physician, who, if EoR is correct, has utterly wasted his life actually going to medical school?
Read this excerpt from EoR's Words to a Potential Medical Student and see what I mean:
Before you enroll for that medical course, consider carefully whether it's the best path for your life. Perhaps complementary medicine is actually a better way to go, with many clear advantages...
The course is shorter. Never mind years of study and…
clock | July 4, 2006
I got several e-mails yesterday about a new study about the molecular mechanism underlying circadian rhythms in mammals ("You gotta blog about this!"), so, thanks to Abel, I got the paper (PDF), printed it out, and, after coming back from the pool, sat down on the porch to read it.
After reading the press releases, I was in a mind-frame of a movie reviewer, looking for holes and weaknesses so I could pounce on it and write a highly critical post, but, even after a whole hour of careful reading of seven pages, I did not find anything deeply disturbing about the paper. Actually, more I read…
purepedantry | July 4, 2006When a man wakes up after a 20 year coma, you know that people are going to pay attention. Particularly after the Terry Schiavo business, I think it is important to add some facts to this debate as early as possible before it gets completely out of control.
So let's talk about this guy. In 1984, Terry Wallis has a car accident where he was thrown from his pickup. He goes into a coma. Despite his family's objections, it would appear he was misdiagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state rather than a minimally conscious state:
But improvements in the care of patients could be made…
purepedantry | July 4, 2006Neurodudes has an excellent article on software intended to reduce medical errors.
Just from my limited personal experience, I would say that such software would be useful if people understand that it is limited in scope. There are three general reasons I think that software is useful in medicine:
Standardization. There are many diseases for which there are clear standards of care. For example, chest pain has a very straightforward heuristic that we follow in diagnosing a patient, and for each possible diagnosis there is a clear set of treatments. In areas for which there is not a lot…
oracknows | July 4, 2006A special Fourth of July edition of Grand Rounds has been posted at RangelMD. This time around, given the holiday, Dr. Rangel has arranged the posts as a theme, namely a focus on the problems in the U.S. health care system and suggestions of ways to fix them. There's a lot of good analysis to ponder on this Fourth of July.
Tags: Grand Rounds, medicine
oracknows | July 3, 2006Hard as it is to believe, that time is almost upon us again. This Thursday, July 6, the latest Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle will appear yet again, as it does every two weeks. This time around, the host is LBBP at The Skeptic Rant. You still have a couple of days before the deadline Wednesday evening to get your best skeptical blogging to him for inclusion.
It's your patriotic duty on this Fourth of July weekend...
oracknows | July 3, 2006I used to like The Cancer Blog. I really did. It was one of the first medical blogs I discovered many months ago when I first dipped my toe into the blogosphere. Indeed, less than two months after I started blogging, one of The Cancer Blog's bloggers then, Dr. Leonardo Faoro, even invited me to join him as one of its bloggers. Although as a new blogger I was very flattered by the attention and offer, I nonetheless reluctantly turned the offer down because at the time I didn't know whether this whole blogging thing would work out and was afraid of being tied down and obligated to provide a…
oracknows | July 2, 2006The latest Pediatric Grand Rounds has been posted at Breath Spa for Kids. There are a lot of great links for your Sunday reading pleasure.
Enjoy!
oracknows | July 2, 2006The guys over at Medgaget are guys after my own heart. After commenting on a dubious-sounding device called the emWave Personal Stress Reliever, which, as its makers claim, is Scientifically Validated:
Stress creates incoherence in our heart rhythms. However, when we are in a state of high heart rhythm coherence the nervous system, heart, hormonal and immune systems are working efficiently and we feel good emotionally. emWave Personal Stress Reliever helps you reduce your emotional stress by displaying your level of heart rhythm coherence in real time. But emWave does more than just display…
clock | July 1, 2006
I did not find it surprising. If you have money, you can buy yourself time - to exercise, to eat a good meal at a nice restaurant or to fix healthy food at home, and to sleep as much as your body needs. As a result, you will be healthier overall. You can read about the study here (hat-tip:Sleepdoctor)
oracknows | July 1, 2006This just cracked me up this morning:
NEW YORK - Kevin Trudeau, the million-selling author, infomercial star and convicted felon, swears that his new health guide, "More Natural 'Cures' Revealed," is 100 percent true.
Make that 100 percent true "in essence."`
"My point is I don't want to be caught in what is true, what isn't true, what is opinion, what is an idea," Trudeau, whose self-published "Natural Cures 'They' Don't Want You to Know About," thrived despite his criminal past and other legal run-ins, said.
"More Natural Cures," released in May and also self-published, is a sequel to "…
j7uy5 | June 30, 2006There's a
href="http://www.medpagetoday.com/Neurology/Migraines/tb/3663">brief
article on Medpage Today, about a small study that suggests
that improving sleep can improve the course of a particular type of
headache. (A nicety to the article is that it provides 0.25
CME's.)
They write specifically about
href="http://www.achenet.org/articles/purdy.php" rel="tag">transformed
migraine, which is a kind of headache that occurs
daily, with the daily headaches developing after a
person has had some episodic migraines.
...The study included 43 women with transformed
migraine treated at…
oracknows | June 30, 2006I sort of expected some attacks when I posted yesterday yesterday about how physicians' incomes have been steadily falling. After all, whenever Kevin, M.D. does similar posts, people with--shall we say?--issues regarding physicians often come out in droves to post nasty comments, just as they tend to do whenever he posts about how out of control the malpractice system in this country is. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised when there were so few such comments.
But et tu, Radagast?
Actually, I never really asked anyone to have a lot of sympathy for us doctors. As I've said many times, I make a…
oracknows | June 30, 2006While thinking about ways to make the blog better, I wondered if I should emulate some of my colleagues, many of whom have regular features every week, often on Friday. And, since I usually get a little less serious on Fridays anyway (and, because traffic seems to fall off 50% or more anyway regardless of what I post, on the weekends, too), it seemed like a good idea. But I couldn't think of something that ties together the common themes of this blog, yet maintains a suitably Friday-blogging light-hearted feel to it. And then I came across this article:
L. R. Milgrom (2006). Towards a New…
clock | June 29, 2006This week, it took me quite a while to figure out how to answer the Ask a ScienceBlogger question: "What are some unsung successes that have occurred as a result of using science to guide policy?"
As a relative newcomer to the United States, and even more a newcomer to American politics, I was not around long enough to pay attention to various science-driven policies of the past. Most of what I know are far from "unsung" successes - from Manhattan Project, through Clean Air and Clean Water acts, to the EWndangered Species Act, to the international Kyoto Protocol. Dealing with DDT, DES,…
clock | June 29, 2006This is in the bread-mold Neurospora crassa. It is unlikely to be universal. I expect to see the connection in some protists and fungi, perhaps in some animals. I am not so sure about plants, and I am pretty sure it is not like this in Cyanobacteria in which the cycle of cell division is independent from circadian timing:
Novel connection found between biological clock and cancer
Hanover, NH--Dartmouth Medical School geneticists have discovered that DNA damage resets the cellular circadian clock, suggesting links among circadian timing, the cycle of cell division, and the propensity for…
oracknows | June 29, 2006A new study suggests that, adjusted for inflation, physicians' incomes are, by and large, falling:
Doctors may be well off compared with the bulk oftheir patients, but a new study says fees physicians get from the government and private insurers aren't keeping up with inflation.
Last week, the Center for Studying Health System Change said net incomes for physicians fell from an average of $180,930 in 1995 to $168,122 in 2003, a decline of about 7 percent, when adjusted for inflation.
Medicalspecialists fared better, the study said. Their in comes slip ped an average of 2.1 percent, from $178,…
j7uy5 | June 29, 2006I'm getting ready for work, so I won't take the time to write about
this at length. It is just one of those things that is a bit
startling and I often like to post such things. This is from
Medscape (free registration required):
href="http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/537495">Could Dogs
Pose a Risk Factor For Breast Cancer?
Zosia Chustecka
June 27, 2006 — Breast cancer patients were twice as likely
to have kept a dog as a pet in the past 10 years than age-matched
controls in a small study conducted by researchers at the University of
Munich, Germany. They suggest that dogs may…
oracknows | June 29, 2006Earlier this week, I was in Washington to attend my first ever NIH study section as an actual reviewer. It was definitely an illuminating experience, and overall I left with, believe it or not, more faith in the system the NIH uses to determine how grant money is doled out. Maybe I'll become more cynical after I've attended a few, but this session was full of very fair but tough-minded reviewers who really wanted to score everything high but couldn't. Perhaps I'll write in more detail about it after I've had a chance to absorb the experience; given the confidentiality of the meeting (we had…