medicine
oracknows | June 19, 2006Time flies when you're having fun.
Hard as it is to believe, it's been a year since RFK, Jr. first posted his ridiculous conspiracy-mongering piece on Salon.com. Ever since moving to ScienceBlogs back in February, I had planned on reposting this article on the anniversary of its original appearance. Unfortunately, for some reason I misremembered the date as being later last June than it really was, leading me to forget completely about reposting on the day it should have been reposted, namely last Saturday. Oh, well, better late than never. If you're curious about how I plunged head first…
purepedantry | June 19, 2006
A study by researcher David Holben in the latest Preventing Chronic Disease (never heard of it) shows that so-called "food insecure" Appalachians are more likely to be obese and have obesity-related disease.
This puzzling statement can be clarified somewhat by changing the phrase "food insecure" to "poor," in which case these results are not particularly surprising.
A total of 2,580 people participated in the Ohio University project, with 72.8 percent from food secure households and 27.2 percent from food insecure households that may or may not be experiencing hunger. That's higher than the…
purepedantry | June 19, 2006PLoS Medicine is reporting a paper that compares the declining suicide rate in the US to the increasing number of prozac prescriptions since the drug's introduction in 1988. They find that the two are very well correlated:
The steady decline in suicide rates for both men and women is associated with an increasing number of fluoxetine prescriptions from 2,469,000 in 1988 to 33,320,000 in 2002. A cross-correlation analysis of fluoxetine use and suicide rates in the period 1988-2002 shows a significant negative correlation: rs = â0.92, p < 0.001.
Granted (as many of you will likely point…
oracknows | June 19, 2006This weeks' Skeptics' Circle made a brief and mysterious appearance last week, only to disappear just as mysteriously back into the Bermuda Triangle. No doubt it will appear again as scheduled this week on Thursday, as always. If you want to take part, get your best skeptical blogging to Autism Diva at the this address by Wednesday evening. As usual, the guidelines are here.
You wouldn't want to disappoint the Diva, would you?
oracknows | June 19, 2006Clark posted the latest Pediatric Grand Rounds Friday. Unfortunately, I didn't get around to posting a plug until now. Go forth and read the best medblogging about pediatrics. Hopefully, I can give him a little late boost in traffic.
Enjoy.
clock | June 19, 2006
Melatonin is secreted in human mother's milk with a daily rhythm - high at night, undetectable during the day (see the figure under the fold):
It has been known for a long time that mother's melatonin entrains the circadian rhythms in the SCN (suprachiasmatic nucleus) of the embryos - thus they are born with a correct phase (time of day). However, a study in rats suggests that melatonin in mother's milk is unlikely to be able to entrain the pups circadian rhythms after they are born.
So, the appearance of melatonin in the milk of breastfeeding humans may either be:
a) just a by-product…
oracknows | June 19, 2006Almost two months ago, I posted a rather light-hearted skeptical takedown of a guy by the name of Don Lemmon, who billed himself on his website as The #1 Nutritionist Online. The main gimmicks of the post were twofold. First, I poked fun at his selling of dessicated animal glands, in which he harkened back to a 16th century alchemist and physician named Paracelsus to justify what appeared to me to be a variant of the quackery known as live cell therapy. The second part of my schtick was to feign envy at the success that he appeared to be having over it all, marrying a retired porn star,…
j7uy5 | June 18, 2006Back in 2004 I
href="http://trots.blogspot.com/2004/05/functional-neuroimagingintroduction.html">blogged
about a study of functional neuroimaging. That was one view:
the technical/scientific side of things.
Today, I got another view. On the blog Brian Kerr,
Brian wrote
about a project he and some others have started:
href="http://assistivemedia.org/">Assistive Media.
Their idea is to have volunteers read magazine articles, then
make the recordings available to blind persons (podcasts, MP3,
Realplayer). One of the articles came from the Ann
Arbor Observer.
href="http://…
oracknows | June 18, 2006Too bad I don't smoke. Well, actually, no it isn't, given the horrible health effects of smoking. Be that as it may, I wish I had a couple of these to have around the house for when relatives who smoke come over (photo below the fold):
Courtesy of the Singapore Cancer Society, and hat tip to Medgadget and Pharmagossip.
Of course, the Singapore Cancer Society also asks one of the stranger questions that I've ever heard:
Hmmm. I'd rather not answer that question, thank you very much.
j7uy5 | June 17, 2006The Sunday Times in the UK is reporting on efforts to being criminal
charges against a doctor who claimed that the MMR vaccine caused
autism. Millions of children went unvaccinated, and now the
UK has an outbreak of measles.
Continue below the fold...
href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2230936,00.html">Focus:
How a spurious health scare brought an old killer back
The Sunday Times
June 18, 2006
Brian Deer
As health chiefs last week reported the worst outbreaks of measles
across Britain in 20 years, slow progress was being made in bringing to
justice the…
clock | June 17, 2006The very first edition of Mendel's Garden, the carnival of genetics, is up on The Force That Through....
Pediatric Grand Rounds, Volume 1 Edition 5, is up on Unintelligent Design.
j7uy5 | June 16, 2006This is pretty sickening:
href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/medicine/story/0,,1799772,00.html">Drugs
firm blocks cheap blindness cure
Company will only seek licence for medicine that costs
100
times more
Sarah Boseley, health editor
Saturday June 17, 2006
A major drug company is blocking access to a medicine that is cheaply
and effectively saving thousands of people from going blind because it
wants to launch a more expensive product on the market.
Ophthalmologists around the world, on their own initiative, are
injecting tiny quantities of a colon cancer drug called
title…
oracknows | June 16, 2006In Petaluma, California (the Bay area), as reported by ABC 7:
June 14 - KGO - More former clients of a North Bay chiropractor are coming forward, echoing what we reported a month-and-a-half ago -- that Daniel Marsh is making money off some bizarre treatments.
State investigators are looking into Dr. Marsh, his treatments and his billing practices. They're checking out information uncovered by the I-Team. And now we've received new complaints about the Petaluma chiropractor.
Marianne Whitfield went to Petaluma chiropractor Daniel Marsh for her severe heartburn, or acid reflux. He had an…
j7uy5 | June 15, 2006The mission of ScienceBlogs is to have the
href="http://72.14.207.104/search?q=cache:u_aOpFk1_6IJ:www.seedmediagroup.com/press/releases/SMG_01.25.06.pdf+web+largest+conversation+about+science&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1&client=firefox-a">Web's
largest conversation about science. I've been
posting here for a week. During that time, I've been trying
to decipher the
href="http://faculty.ircc.edu/faculty/jlett/Article%20on%20Emics%20and%20Etics.htm">emics
and etics of the community and its conversation.
It is apparent that, within this culture, it is important and…
oracknows | June 15, 2006Leave it to Dr. Charles to remind me of something that happened recently, albeit in a bit of a roundabout way. It's something I would rather have forgotten, but, when you dedicate your life to battling the beast that cancer, it is something that is inevitable and something a doctor has to learn to deal with in his cancer patients.
Fear of the beast's return.
Paradoxically, it was not anything sad at all that Dr. Charles wrote about, but rather the triumphs that we can have over breast cancer that can give a survivor her life back and how a woman who has undergone a mastectomy to beat her…
oracknows | June 14, 2006From our Seed overlords at the ScienceBlogs collective:
Assuming that time and money were not obstacles, what area of scientific research, outside of your own discipline, would you most like to explore? Why?
While I'm not as down on this question as PZ is, I'm not quite sure how to answer. There are lots of other fascinating areas of science that I regret that I'll never get to know in depth.
My first instinct was to say that I'd become a paleontologist or archaeologist. However, there's one problem. I like comfort too much. As much as I love reading about the fruits of paleontology and…
oracknows | June 14, 2006I've heard of physicians using themselves as guinea pigs for their own research before, but this is ridiculous.
Yesterday, my copy of General Surgery News arrived at my office. As I was whiffling through it to see if there were any articles worth reading, I came across a tale of a Japanese doctor who was truly dedicated to his research, so much so that that I had to hand it to him. Well, sort of.
Yes, on p. 22 of the June issue of General Surgery News (sadly, not yet online as of this writing, so you'll have to take my word for this--or check up on me in a couple of weeks when they'll…
purepedantry | June 13, 2006Researchers report that drinking coffee cuts the risk of cirrhosis of the liver from alcohol -- by 22 percent per cup each day -- but they stopped short of saying doctors should prescribe coffee for that reason.
The report from the Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program in Oakland, California, was based on a look at data from 125,580 people.
"These data support the hypothesis that there is an ingredient in coffee that protects against cirrhosis, especially alcoholic cirrhosis," concluded the report published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
You will be fine if you are an alcoholic; just…
terrasig | June 13, 2006From USA Today, some interesting and sad news:
When a teenager in Jan Sigerson's office mentioned a "pharm party" in February, Sigerson thought the youth was talking about a keg party out on a farm.
"Pharm," it turned out, was short for pharmaceuticals, such as the powerful painkillers Vicodin and OxyContin. Sigerson, program director for Journeys, a teen drug treatment program in Omaha, soon learned that area youths were organizing parties to down fistfuls of prescription drugs.
I am now officially old. I thought I'd never say, "I remember when..."
Well, I remember when drinking PBR as a…