medicine
oracknows | May 30, 2006Finally.
My week on call, including the entire holiday weekend, is over. It started out pretty bad and didn't get all that much better. I suppose I should be grateful that at least I was getting sleep again by this weekend. In any case, I thought that one particular day was almost worth of a 24-style treatment. OK, it's not as exciting as watching Jack Bauer kick terrorist butt, but, given that Jack isn't coming back until January, it'll have to do. So, without further ado, I present select episodes from:
24: The On Call Edition (a.k.a. a bad day in the life of an academic surgeon)
(Note:…
oracknows | May 29, 2006I'm a pretty big computer geek most of the time, and I do love gadgets. However, even I can sympathize with the consumers in this story:
OVERLAND PARK, Kan. - Nathan Bales represents a troubling trend for cellular phone carriers. The Kansas City-area countertop installer recently traded in a number of feature-laden phones for a stripped-down model. He said he didn't like using them to surf the Internet, rarely took pictures with them and couldn't stand scrolling through seemingly endless menus to get the functions to work.
"I want a phone that is tough and easy to use," said Bales, 30. "I don…
oracknows | May 26, 2006This is just too rich.
As you know a few months ago, I commented about a British report that found high levels of mercury and other heavy metals in Chinese herbal medicines sold in the U.K. Some contained as much as 11% mercury by weight! It turns out that a JAMA paper from 2004 did the same thing for Ayurvedic medicines and found some of them also contaminated with mercury and other heavy metals, concluding:
If taken as recommended by the manufacturers, each of these 14 could result in heavy metal intakes above published regulatory standards
Indeed, in the compounds that tested postive for…
oracknows | May 25, 2006You know, sometimes medicine sucks, particularly oncology. Oh, it's not so bad for surgeons, particularly breast surgeons, because we can cure many of the patients we operate on. But for solid tumor oncologists, who deal with diseases that current medicine can't cure but only palliate day in and day out can, if you don't get adequate rewards for it, be soul-crushing. (That's one reason that I ultimately went into surgical oncology rather than medical oncology; I found I just wasn't cut out to deal with the kinds of patients medical oncologists do.) Those of us in academics do it for a lot…
oracknows | May 24, 2006Here's a scary error, reported by Abel Pharmboy:
David Douglas of Reuters Health reported last Friday on the publication of a clinical trial revealing that a one-week trial of Benadryl (diphenhydramine HCl) was superior to Clarinex (desloratadine) in managing symptoms of moderate-to-severe allergic rhinitis, or hay fever. The article was published in the April 2006 issue of Annals of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology (2006;96:606-614)
You can read the results here but Douglas misprinted the Benadryl dose as 500 mg! three times daily. The actual dose, 50 mg, t.i.d., is already high enough to…
oracknows | May 24, 2006One annoying thing about the blogosphere for someone like me is that a lot of things that I want to write about pop up during the day, when I'm at work. Blogging is all about immediacy and time. Wait too long to write about a topic, and the moment's passed. For me, by the time I get home in the evening, even though someone may have e-mailed me an article that they thought I'd like to comment on, I often find myself refraining from jumping into the fray, simply because so many have already commented on it already. This problem is magnified (for me, at least) by belonging to ScienceBlogs,…
oracknows | May 23, 2006It seems a reasonable question to ask, given my propensity for it.
Unfortunately that's not what our Seed overlords asked this week. This week, they ask:
If you could shake the public and make them understand one scientific idea, what would it be?
Predictably, some ScienceBloggers answered: evolution and what it really means, not the parody of evolution presented by creationists or the simplistic version of it that is often taught in school or discussed in the mainstream media. I can't argue with that answer, but I'm a physician; so my answer will be different:
If I could get the public to…
oracknows | May 23, 2006Wow, I wish I had the balls to make this retort to prisoners that used to be brought to the E.R. when I was still a resident.
I just hope he had a security guard like the one we used to have at our county hospital when I was a resident. This guy was close to 7 feet tall and built like a tank. Whenever such patients got a bit frisky, we'd just have him stand in the doorway. It usually calmed them right down.
oracknows | May 23, 2006Grant crunch time again yesterday. That means it's the perfect time once again to dig up something from the archives of old blog and repost it here. This particular piece originally appeared on January 12, 2005, just shy of one month after I started blogging. I'm guessing once again that, because not many people were reading back then, most of you probably haven't seen this before, and that those of you who have probably don't remember it. Once again, I'd be interested in feedback from those who haven't seen this before now that my readership around 10-20 times what it was back then. The only…
oracknows | May 20, 2006The 35th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle is fast approaching. It will be published this Thursday, and the deadline is Wednesday evening.
The host this time is skeptical blogging stalwart Skeptico, and his instructions regarding the deadline and how to submit can be found here. Overall guidelines and the schedule of past and future Skeptics' Circles can be found here.
So hurry up and get your best skeptical blogging to Richard by Wednesday evening and then join him on Thursday for the best examples of skepticism and critical thinking that the blogosphere has to offer.
oracknows | May 19, 2006Damn if PZ didn't beat me to this one:
A federal panel concluded yesterday that there is not enough evidence to recommend for or against use of multivitamins and minerals -- the popular dietary supplements taken by more than half of American adults in the hope of preventing heart disease, cancer and other chronic illnesses.
Americans spend an estimated $23 billion annually on various multivitamins and multi-mineral supplements, the 13-member panel found. One of the latest federally funded national surveys showed that 52 percent of adults reported taking multivitamins. Slightly more than a…
oracknows | May 18, 2006I'm a couple of days late with this, but yesterday I finally got around to checking some of my usual medblogs when I came across some bad news. Medblogging stalward Dr. Sydney Smith (the nom de blog of Medpundit) is hanging up her blogging keyboard for good. She's been at it since 2002 and in that time had become as close to a fixture in the medical blogosphere as anyone can be. By comparison, I started blogging nearly three years after Dr. Smith, in December 2004, and, although I'm not yet considered an old-timer blogger yet (either that, or I'm deluding myself), I'm rapidly approaching that…
grrlscientist | May 18, 2006A vaccine that triggers immunity against those viruses that cause most cervical cancers was found to be safe and effective and should be approved soon, a federal panel recommended today. The pharmaceutical company that developed this vaccine, Merck, said the vaccine could reduce global deaths from the second leading cause of cancer in young women by more than two-thirds.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory committee voted 13-0 on five separate occasions to endorse the Merck vaccine, Gardasil. The FDA rarely ignores its panels' recommendations when making its final decisions. The…
oracknows | May 17, 2006Because I'm lame, I'm posting plugs for these carnivals one to two days late:
1. Grand Rounds, vol. 2, no. 34
2. History Carnival #31
3. RINO Sightings: The 39th Birthday Blues Edition
grrlscientist | May 17, 2006I just learned that new federal guidelines recommend that all human female Americans between their first menstrual period and menopause should be treated as pre-pregnant, regardless of their future reproductive plans.
Does this sound rather like .. er, The Handmaid's Tale to you?
It certainly does to me!
According to this Washington Post article, what does it mean to be a member of the pre-pregnant? This means that, among other things, all "pre-pregnant" women should take folic acid supplements, refrain from smoking and using alcohol, avoid contact with cat feces and lead-based paint,…
oracknows | May 16, 2006Once again, our overlords at Seed demand that we answer a question.
No, not "What is your favorite color?" or "What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow"? (To which, of course, everyone knows the answer is "African or European?")
This question:
"Will the "human" race be around in 100 years?"
My answer:
Yes, but sadly I won't.
Next question, please. (Grant writing forces me to be more succinct than usual.)
joshua braun | May 16, 2006My introduction to bioethics came with the issue of in vitro fertilization. I was a student at UC Santa Barbara, designing my own major in science journalism, talking with scientists, reading every science-related news item I could find, and just beginning to gain a conceptual grasp of where the cutting edge was in different fields of science and medicine. One thing was clear--an area that was moving faster than most was reproductive and regenerative medicine. And, if you were paying attention, you realized that cloning, embryonic stem cell research, preimplantation genetic diagnosis,…
oracknows | May 15, 2006NOTE: I had been thinking about how to migrate my old posts from the old blog over to ScienceBlogs, and came up with an idea. Whenever "real life" intrudes on my blogging--as it has now, thanks to two different grant applications that ate up my entire weekend that prevented me from coming up with the more involved piece about science or pseudoscience analysis that I usually like to start the week off with--I'll repost one or more of my favorite "classic posts" from the old blog. Given that there is well over a year of material there, there's lots of stuff that I want to transfer over to…
oracknows | May 12, 2006Tara's post yesterday about Mercury and Mythology about how mercury in vaccines does not cause autism and about a recent story demonstrating tht mercury as used in dental amalgams is safe, coupled with Phil Plait's discussion of an article in TIME about autism that seemed a bit too credulous about facilitated communication reminded me that I haven't blogged about autism in a while. Basically, not much has happened that I feel qualified to comment on since Paul Shattuck's article concluding that claims of an "autism epidemic" based on analyses of the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (…
oracknows | May 11, 2006This time around, the latest meeting of the Skeptics' Circle comes to us from down under. EoR, who, despite being "rather sad and boggy," always perks up when it's time to debunk the claims of pseudoscience or New Age woo, brings us the 34th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle via the Wonderful World of Crystals:
Eor surveys the Wonderful World of Crystals, and receives some interesting etheric vibrations as a result. By applying the higher vibrational properties of these gems to his chakras he received contact with various arcane and occult information previously only held in the Akashic…