medicine
oracknows | April 21, 2013Heidi Stevenson amuses me. I know, I know, I've started a previous post with exactly this sentence a mere month ago, but it's so damned appropriate that I can't help but try it again.
A homeopath (which means that she's reality-challenged to begin with), she's produced some of the most hilariously off-base, pseudoscientific, and downright antiscientific articles I've ever seen. Examples include the times when she launched a truly nonsensical attack on Stephen Barrett of Quackwatch, lectured scientists about anecdotal evidence, or, most hilariously of all, utterly misunderstood the concept of…
dr. dolittle | April 21, 2013
The Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology section held their Scholander Poster competition for young comparative physiologists today! It was exciting to see all of the students present their work.
Here are some of the highlights:
Raffaele Pilla, Dominic P, D'Agostino, Carol S. Landon, and Jay B. Dean from Molecular Pharmacology and Physiology, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL. These researchers demonstrated that a ketone body, often thought of as waste products resulting from the use of fats for energy, can have protective effects against seizures caused by exposure to hyperbaric…
dr. dolittle | April 20, 2013
As always, the opening ceremony for the American Physiological Society at the Experimental Biology meeting was awesome! The food was probably the best I have had at these meetings, which along with the fun band, probably explains why it was jam-packed with Physiologists eager to kick-start this meeting.
I am looking forward to the Scholander poster session tomorrow. This poster session is sponsored by the Comparative and Evolutionary Physiology section of The American Physiological Society. It is a competition in which trainees present their research in the hopes of receiving a travel award…
oracknows | April 19, 2013If there is one aspect of cranks that is almost universal (besides the aforementioned tendency to want to prove themselves through things like "live televised debates"), it's a tendency to want to shut down the criticism of its opposition. True, such a tendency is a human trait as well and used far too often by, say, corporations, but it's one that seems to be cranked up to 11 and beyond, as they say, in cranks.
We've seen it time and time again. Most often, it takes the form of some sort of legal bullying, such as when the British Chiropractic Association bit off more than it could chew by…
oracknows | April 17, 2013I want to thank Dan Olmsted, the editor of Age of Autism. I think.
Why do I say this? After all, Olmsted is the managing editor of perhaps the most wretched hive of antivaccine scum and quackery that I am aware of. However, he's actually done me a favor. You see, the other day, the instigator of the U.K. anti-MMR wing of the antivaccine movement, Andrew Wakefield, posted a video to YouTube because he's really feeling some serious butthurt right now:
Basically, it's Andrew Wakefield complaining about being blamed for an ongoing measles outbreak in South Wales. Of course, given that, if there…
oracknows | April 16, 2013I've been writing about the antivaccine movement for a long time. The reasons are many, but they boil down to a handful. First of all, it interests me. It interests me as an example of pseudoscience and quackery, how it spreads, and how antiscience cranks attack science. More importantly, it's dangerous. The antivaccine movement is a threat to public health, which is why it's important to study its origins, the methods its members use to attack vaccines, the misinformation it spreads, and how it spreads that misinformation. As a result, I've been consistently vilified and attacked by…
sa smith | April 14, 2013Craig Venter gets it.
He gets it.
I wish I had 5 minutes to talk to him. I dont. But we do have this ~21 min vid where he talks about some of the innovative things he and his crew are working on (phage therapy, faster ways to make influenza vaccines).
True Revolution in Medicine
(Im dissertation writing, posts will be sparse for the next couple of months- but to those of you sending me emails with 'hey, what about ___?' I will make sure to get to those!)
dr. dolittle | April 10, 2013 3D image of a brain made transparent using the CLARITY technique. Image from: Deisseroth Lab as posted in The NY Times
I have to admit I love the science section of The New York Times. The topic today: Dr. Karl Deisseroth and colleagues at Stanford University have developed a technique called CLARITY that uses hydrogel to make the brain look like it is made of Jell-O. They have successfully applied this technique to a whole mouse brain as well as part of a human brain. Using CLARITY, they are able to observe neuronal networks three dimensionally while still maintaining the biochemistry of…
oracknows | April 9, 2013If there's one thing that a certain subset of people who view themselves as reasonable and science-based don't like, it's harshness: Harshness in criticism, harshness in discussion, or—horror of horrors!—anything they view as "incivility." That's all well and good as far as it goes, but the problem is that sometimes there are things that demand a harsh response because they are just that bad. For instance, when the government spends $30 million on a clinical trial to test a wildly implausible treatment that is not without risks for no good scientific reason and no real reason other than that…
denialism | April 8, 2013I was extremely disturbed to see in the NYT's letters a veterinarian's defense of the practice of overuse of antibiotics in animals that suggested transmission of resistant organisms does not occur. Nonsense! It is abundantly clear that antibiotic use in animals results in resistant strains that then colonize humans. They are being recognized as the newest reservoir for strains of MRSA.
Unlike the GMO nonsense, this is a clear public health issue with a plausible (and demonstrated) mechanism of transmitted risk to humans. The author of the letter, Charles Hofacre, says two, wildly…
oracknows | April 8, 2013One of the more depressing things about getting much more interested in the debate over how we should screen for common cancers, particularly breast and prostate cancer, is my increasing realization of just how little physicians themselves understand about the complexities involved in weighing the value of such tests. It's become increasingly apparent to me that most physicians believe that early detection is always good and that it always saves lives, having little or no conception of lead time or length bias. A couple of weeks ago, I saw another example of just this phenomenon in the form…
oracknows | April 6, 2013It's very clear that many antivaccinationists hate autistic children. The language they use to describe them makes that very clear. Such children are "damaged" (by vaccines, of course); the parents' real children were "stolen" from them (by vaccines); they are "toxic" (from vaccines); the "light left their eyes" (due to vaccines). Autism is an "epidemic," a "tsunami," even a "holocaust," with "denial" of that "holocaust" being equivalent to Holocaust denial. All of this likens autism to a horror on par with these calamities, and paints vaccines as the instrument of annihilation of…
oracknows | April 3, 2013Every so often I come across a news story relevant to the subject matter usually encompassed by this blog that makes me shake my head in disbelief at the sheer stupidity. OK, every day, if you count the antivaccine movement and its attacks on papers like the one I wrote about Monday and yesterday. True, the constant barrage of pseudoscience, quackery, and generalized scientific ignorance that the antivaccine movement floods me with constantly threatens to drown out everything else, even from other areas of medicine. This one, however, caught my attention. It was about a joke done by two…
denialism | April 1, 2013Crazy ranting about impending socialism/fascism aside, there are legitimate critiques to be made of Obamacare. One policy in particular that raises my ire is penalizing hospitals over performance metrics and penalizing readmissions in particular. The way it works is, patients are admitted to the hospital, treated, and eventually discharged, but a indicator of failure of adequate care is if that patient then bounces back, and is readmitted shortly after their hospitalization:
Under the new federal regulations, hospitals face hefty penalties for readmitting patients they have already treated…
oracknows | April 1, 2013This is just a quick announcement. I've been informed by Steve Novella that the Science-Based Medicine blog is currently down. It's been down for several hours now. Steve's crack team of techies is working on the problem right now. More information as updates come in.
oracknows | March 27, 2013When I wrote about the Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy (TACT) trial last week, little did I suspect that I would be revisiting the topic again so soon. For those of you not familiar with TACT, it was a trial designed to test a favorite quack treatment for cardiovascular disease, chelation therapy. It is, as I have described many times in the past, an incredibly implausible therapy based on a hugely simplistic concept that because calcium accumulates in atherosclerotic lesions, then using chelation therapy could remove the calcium and reduce the lesions. Chelation therapy is a favorite…
oracknows | March 27, 2013It's been a while since I've written about Brian Berman. We first met him when he somehow managed to insinuate a "case report" of chronic low back pain into The New England Journal of Medicine in which he recommended acupuncture for this patient. Dr. Berman also happens to be a founder of quackademic medicine on par with Andrew Weil. True, he's not as famous to a lay audience as Weil is, but his influence on quackademic medicine over the last couple of decades has been enormous. It's not for nothing that David Freedman picked Berman as the main subject of his pro-"integrative medicine"…
oracknows | March 26, 2013Here we go again.
Every time I think I can get away from this topic for a while, I get sucked back in. Indeed, it seems that hardly a week can go by when I don't find myself pulled inexorably back to this horrible, horrible clinic and what I consider to be the abuses of science and clinical trials that go on there on a daily basis. Whether it be the patients who are offered false hope at the cost of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in the form of a chemotherapeutic drug known as antineoplastons that, contrary to what it is claimed, is not "non-toxic," "natural," or even particularly…
oracknows | March 24, 2013There are many fallacies that undergird alternative medicine, which evolved into "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), and for which the preferred term among its advocates is now "integrative medicine," meant to imply the "best of both worlds." If I had to pick one fallacy that rules above all among proponents of CAM/IM, it would have to be either the naturalistic fallacy (i.e., that if it's natural—whatever that means—it must be better) or the fallacy of antiquity (i.e., that if it's really old, it must be better). Of course, the two fallacies are not unrelated. In the minds of CAM…
oracknows | March 21, 2013I don't always blog about stories or studies that interest me right away. Part of the reason is something I've learned over the last eight years of blogging, namely that, while it's great to be the firstest with the mostest, I'd rather be the blogger with the mostest than the firstest. I've learned this from occasionally painful experience, although I'd be lying if I didn't admit that in part this is a rationalization for the fact that I have a demanding day job that keeps me from jumping all over stories and studies of interest in the way that some bloggers can. There's also the simple fact…