medicine
grrlscientist | April 10, 2006As many of you know, I read and comment here about avian influenza fairly often, and you also know that I like to review books as a way of staying in touch with the publishing world without resorting to a life of crime to support my book habit. So I was interested when the publicist at Thomas Dunne Books kindly offered to send a copy of their new book, The Bird Flu Pandemic: Can It Happen? Will It Happen? How to Protect Yourself and Your Family If It Does (Paperback) by Jeffrey Greene and Karen Moline (2006). I will not belabor my issues here because I truly dislike writing bad reviews, but I…
lee billings | April 10, 2006Gather 'round, dear readers, and let me regale you with the sad saga of the late, great Linus Pauling.
On second thought, calling it "sad" might be a bit excessive. Pauling was the only person to win two individual Nobels, after all (one for chemistry, one for peace). His great achievements are too numerous to fully list here; suffice to say he was a pioneer in molecular biology, genetics, immunology, the nature of chemical bonds and scientific activism. But by his death in 1994, many in the scientific community regarded him as an embarrassment, an out-of-touch quack at best and a dishonest…
oracknows | April 7, 2006Just a reminder that the Skeptics' Circle is fast approaching. This time, it's hosted once again by a guy who goes by the name of The Pooflinger, and it's set to be flung at the blogosphere next Thursday, April 13. Submissions are due sometime in the evening next Wednesday.
As you may recall, The Pooflinger did one of the more creative renderings of the Skeptics' Circle ever, turning it into a veritable Shakespearian drama of skepticism. I can't wait to see what he comes up with this time. However, he can't do it if you don't provide him with the raw material in the form of good skeptical…
oracknows | April 1, 2006Sadly, unlike my post a couple of hours ago, this is not an April Fools jest.
Evolgen previously reported on the success of the Specter-Harkin Amendment in the Senate to change a completely flat National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget containing actual real cuts to the budget of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to one with a modest increase in fiscal year 2007. Both the American Association of Cancer Research (AACR) and Genetics Society of America both weighed in when the budget was sent to the House in order to garner support in committee for adding an amendment similar to the Specter…
oracknows | April 1, 2006You know, after all these years as a scientist, physician, and skeptic, I've been wondering. Perhaps it's time to undergo a reassessment of my and philosophy. I've always been a bit of a curmudgeon, and it hasn't really gotten me anywhere. My words appear to have no impact on the credulous.
For example, perhaps I've been a bit harder than I should be on purveyors of dubious alternative medicine. Millions of people use it every day. Would they use it if there weren't anything to it? I think not. After all, look at all those testimonials for chelation therapy, Reiki therapy, Chinese energy…
lee billings | March 31, 2006While perusing press releases for this week's online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, I came across one with some unintentionally humorous phrasing.
The press release details how University of Washington/Albert Einstein College of Medicine researchers using a mouse model of multiple sclerosis (MS) appear to have discovered that the disease inhibits the brain's production of neuroprotective endocannabinoids, which results in greater brain damage. Then, to my great joy, the press release twists itself into a pretzel to avoid saying that smoking pot actually…
oracknows | March 30, 2006Yes, it's that time again, time for the most dedicated skeptics of the blogosphere to gather once again to try to apply critical thinking in an environment where credulity is usually the order of the day, and dubious stories can proliferate and spread around the world in mere hours. This time, Abel Pharmboy is your host for the 31st Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle over at Terra Sigillata. It's his first attempt in his young blogging career at hosting a blog carnival, and he's done himself proud, with an invocation and everything. Go check it out!
Next up is Matt (a.k.a. The Pooflinger) on…
oracknows | March 30, 2006Earlier this week, I wrote about how the principles of population evolution can be applied to premalignant lesions in order to predict which lesions would progress to cancer. This time around, I'd like to discuss how using evolutionary principles can provide insights to human disease that would not be as obvious or that would take much longer to discover without considering evolution. One of the beautiful things about evolution and applying it to medicine is that one can find connections in unexpected places that may actually shed light on the pathogenesis of human diseases and even suggest…
oracknows | March 29, 2006Another great edition of Tangled Bank has been posted at The Island of Doubt. (It's hard to believe that Tangled Bank has been around now for nearly two years. Time flies.)
What are you waiting for?
oracknows | March 28, 2006A week ago, I wrote about my wife and my visiting Body Worlds at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.
Well, it looks as though another physician Dr. Charles has visited it as well and has some ideas comments about the exhibit.
oracknows | March 27, 2006It's that time again. In less than three days, the latest Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle will be posted at Terra Sigillata (who, by the way, wrote an excellent post while I was away at my meeting on why we should continue to study rare cancers). You have until Wednesday evening to submit to him your best skeptical blogging.
It's his first attempt as a new blogger at hosting a blog carnival; so do me a solid and help him out by giving him some great raw material to work with.
oracknows | March 27, 2006Last week, I inaugurated a new series on this blog entitled Medicine and Evolution. I even wrote what was to be the second post in the series, a post that (I hoped) would illustrate the utility of applying approaches used to study evolution to human disease. That post is essentially complete, other than requiring the addition of some links. That's what I was going to do last night, until Stranger Fruit turned me on to this study:
In a study published online today in Nature Genetics, Carlo Maley, Ph.D., a researcher at The Wistar Institute, and his colleagues report that precancerous tumors…
oracknows | March 26, 2006My wife would say yes.
But, because all the other ScienceBloggers appear to be doing it, I had to take this test to find out:
18.75 %
My weblog owns 18.75 % of me.Does your weblog own you?
It's actually not as bad as I had feared. It would actually only be 12.5% if I hadn't been forced to answer "yes" to "Do you get paid for blogging?" Given that the pay is pretty nominal and given for something that I would be doing anyway, maybe I should consider myself 12.5% owned...
oracknows | March 25, 2006If I were one of the cops facing this guy, I'd be seriously tempted to put my gun aside and say, "You win. Go ahead and leave."
At least no one other than the perpetrator was hurt.
oracknows | March 23, 2006Longtime readers of this blog may have noticed that, since my move to ScienceBlogs six weeks ago, I haven't written nearly as much about evolution or intelligent design as I used to on the old blog.. There are probably at least several reasons for this. For one thing, lots of other topics have forced their way to the forefront of my attention, including more autism quackery by the Geiers, a politically oriented medical journal that is anything but scientific, the fire at The Holocaust History Project, applying science to green tea, and a variety of other things. Also, in light of the Dover…
oracknows | March 21, 2006evolgen reports that that Specter-Harken amendment to restore some of the cuts to the NIH budget and provide a modest increase necessary to prevent the our biomedical research effort from slowly eroding. Support was broad, and it was bipartisan. (No doubt it doesn't hurt that this is an election year.)
However, this is just the first step. The House still has to vote on the Department of Health and Human Services budget, and then there will be a House-Senate conference committee. To preserve the progress made, we'll have to turn our attention to the House. I'll keep an eye out for when this…
oracknows | March 20, 2006You may have noticed that I haven't been paying as close attention to the ol' blog as usual over the last three days, leading to a bit of hyperbole in the comments section of at least one post without my responding until today. Indeed, here's a secret: Most of the posts that have appeared since Friday were written Thursday or earlier and scheduled.
My wife happened to have some time off; so I took a rare three-day weekend off work. We took a road trip to Philadelphia to check out an exhibit at the Franklin Institute that we both had wanted to see before it left Philadelphia: Gunther von…
oracknows | March 17, 2006EoR reports that in Australia, legislation has been passed that allows people other than doctors to issue medical certificates for absences from work, including pharmacists, nurses, acupuncturists, and physiotherapists.
Quite naturally, he wonders when the "the reikiists, the homeopathists and the therapeutic touch" practitioners will want the same privileges and imagines the sorts of letters they will produce:
This is to certify that Joe Bloggs is suffering from
Stagnant qi
Liver toxins
Mercury poisoning
He will be unfit for work for two weeks while he strengthens his immune system.
Heh. I…