medicine
oracknows | August 7, 2012One of the consistent themes I've maintained on this blog over the years is to combat in my own small way in my own small corner of the Internet, the influx into medical academia of medicine based not on science, but on prescientific notions of disease, vitalism, and magic, such as homeopathy (which is sympathetic magic), reiki (which is faith healing), and the like. In general, we expect professional societies to maintain and support the scientific basis of medicine. Unfortunately, increasingly, medical societies have been failing us.
Here's just a short reminder of yet another example. This…
oracknows | August 4, 2012I tell ya, sometimes I think you guys think I'm a journalist or a 24 hour news source. I'm not, of course. I'm just a humble blogger, and I do what I can within the constraints of my every day "real life." What? I have a real life? You mean I'm not really a supercomputer who can link with any other computer in the galaxy to mine all known data, all contained within a Plexiglass box of multicolored blinking lights? I'm not saying, but I am saying that I do need some down time.
Unfortunately, sometimes big things happen during those down times, stuff I really like to blog about. In the past, I…
oracknows | August 1, 2012Dying of cancer can be a horrible way to go, but as a cancer specialist I sometimes forget that there are diseases that are equally, if not more, horrible. One that always comes to mind is amyotropic lateral sclerosis (ALS), more commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease. It is a motor neuron disease whose clinical course is characterized by progressive weakness, muscle atrophy and spasticity, with ultimate progression to respiratory muscles leading to difficulty breathing and speaking (dysarthria) and to the muscles controlling swallowing. The rate of clinical course is variable, often…
oracknows | July 31, 2012I must admit. No matter how long I've been dealing with the antivaccine movement, in particular the pseudoscience, misinformation, and sometimes outright lies they use to demonize vaccines, I can never quite understand the profound persecution complex that so many of them have. After all, they lash out with so much vehemence and outright nastiness at their perceived enemies, trying to harass them at their jobs and get them fired, for instance, and launching Internet smear campaigns against them. That is why I find it disingenuous in the extreme when they then turn around and clutch at the…
oracknows | July 30, 2012C. difficile is an enormous clinical problem to which, unfortunately, we physicians can contribute, as ZDoggMD tells us in Dawn of the C. Diff:
You go to the doctor to talk ‘em in
To givin’ antibiotics for your coughin’ thing
They explain that the pain in your throat’s a virus
“Antibiotics are not desirous!”
But you ain’t hearing this, you get all in they face
“Why, this is malpractice, a total disgrace!
I’m not leaving this place without a script, my man!”
Frustrated and berated, doc throws up his hands
The result? Well, let this video tell the tale:
oracknows | July 25, 2012Medical therapies should be based upon science. That is a recurrent theme, indeed, the major theme, of this blog. Based on that simple thesis, I've spent the last decade examining "unconventional" treatments and evaluating the scientific basis (or, much more usually, the lack of a scientific basis) for various treatments. Yes, I've looked at other issues, including general skeptical issues, the occasional political rant, Holocaust denial, and, of course the odd self-indulgent bit of twaddle that every blogger engages in every now and then, but I always come back to the question of the…
dr. dolittle | July 12, 2012
Mesobuthus martensii; Image source: Wikimedia Commons, Ja
Scientists from Wuhan University in China have discovered compounds in scorpion venom that may be the next new treatment for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteria and potentially other antibiotic-resistant microbes. Specifically, the peptide BmKn2 was isolated from Mesobuthus martensii and modified into another peptide, Kn2-7 which increased the natural antibacterial properties of BmKn2 while at the same time reducing the risk for hemolysis (destruction of red blood cells).
The new peptide, Kn2-7 was…
oracknows | July 12, 2012I was thinking of doing a quickie post about the silliness that's erupted in the antivaccine cranksophere over the IACC hearing that I mentioned yesterday. (Of course, a "quickie" post for me is usually only 1,000 words long, as opposed to the usual 2,000.)
Then disaster struck!
My hardy, reliable MacBook Air, my main traveling companion for all trips in which I need to do work and/or give a talk died. It died hard (although not like the movies; there were no explosions or fires). It would not boot. Given the craziness at work with grants in the weeks leading up to TAM, I didn't have the talk…
oracknows | July 10, 2012About a week and a half ago, I took note of a rather unhinged rant by comedian Rob Schneider about vaccines in which he trotted out an antivaccine movement's greatest hits compendium of pseudoscience, misinformation, and logical fallacies, all in the service of opposing California Bill AB 2109. Antivaccine activists hate this piece of legislation in particular, the reason being that it would make it just a little more difficult for parents to obtain philosophical exemptions from school mandates. Right now in California, parents basically just have to sign a form, no questions asked, no other…
oracknows | July 8, 2012One major point I've tried to make over the last few years is that the so-called "individualization" or "personalization" of treatments claimed by practitioners of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) is not "individualization" at all, but rather a sham that appears superficially like individualization but in reality is not. I say that because the "individualization" promoted by CAM practitioners is not based on science and clinical trials. Another point I've been trying to make is that the true "individualization" of treatments will require science, and it will not be easy. In fact…
oracknows | July 1, 2012If there's a law that I view as a horrible, horrible, law, it's the Dietary Supplement Health Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA of 1994). It is a law that blog bud and former ScienceBlogs blogger Dr. Peter Lipson has rightly called a travesty of a mockery of a sham, and, quite frankly, I think he has been too easy on it. Clearly, if there is a single instance of a massive triumph of the forces of quackery in the U.S. that I could point to, the DSHEA of 1994 would be it. This particular misbegotten law in essence opened the floodgates for the sale of dubious supplements and turned a relatively…
dr. dolittle | June 29, 2012Scientists have been able to keep rabbits alive for up to 15 minutes after their windpipes had been blocked by injecting microparticles (yellow in the image below) containing oxygen into their bloodstream. These microparticles are able to deliver the life-saving oxygen directly to red blood cells allowing the animals to survive with normal blood pressure and heart rates in the absence of the ability to inhale. Moreover, there was no evidence of heart, lung or liver damage from oxygen deprivation.
The problem with injecting oxygen bubbles has been coalescence of the smaller bubbles into…
oracknows | June 29, 2012Remember California Bill AB 2109? I've written about it at least a couple of times before. In fact, for some reason, the comment section of this post on AB 2109 suddenly come alive again a couple of days ago, with antivaccinationists infiltrating it, much to the annoyance of my regular commenters. It turns out that the reason was that a couple of days ago AB 2109 came up for discussion in the California Senate Health Committee (and passed to be sent out to the full Senate for a vote), after having passed the California House a couple of months ago. I also now know why antivaccinationists…
oracknows | June 27, 2012And now for something completely different.
Except that it isn't really. I say that it isn't really different because, although this post will seem to be about politics, in reality it will be about a common topic on this blog: Anti-science. And where is this anti-science? Sadly, it's in the platform of a major party of one of the largest states in the country. It also meshes with the anti-science inherent in a lot of so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) and all comes together in one place: The proposed 2012 Platform of the Republican Party of Texas. It's all there, as you…
oracknows | June 26, 2012Remember Luc Montagnier? Sure, you do. He's the Nobel Laureate whose identification of the virus that causes AIDS garnered him plaudits, laurels, and, of course, the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Unfortunately, since winning the Nobel Prize, from a scientific standpoint, Montagnier's been on a downward spiral. Sadly, it didn't take long after his Nobel acceptance speech for disturbing signs of crankery and quackery to appear. For instance, Montagnier published a paper that implied that DNA could teleport, using this study, whose results were almost certainly the result of contaminants in…
oracknows | June 26, 2012No matter how you slice it, I've been at this blogging thing a long time. it's been over seven years now. It's been even longer than that, though, because before that cold gray Saturday afternoon in September when I started farting around with Blogger and ended giving birth to the first iteration of Respectful Insolence, I had been sparring with quacks, cranks, and various other promoters of pseudoscience for at least five years before. Even after all that time, however, it's humbling and amazing to contemplate that I haven't seen it all, no matter how much at times I might feel that I have.…
oracknows | June 24, 2012I wondered how long it would take for someone critical of current cancer care to capitalize on the recently reported health misfortune of a celebrity. The answer, unfortunately, is "not long at all." I will admit, however, that the source of that use and abuse of the misfortune of a celebrity was not the usual suspect; i.e., Mike Adams, whom I've taken to task on many occasions for gloating over celebrity deaths and illnesses, such as those of Tony Snow, Patrick Swayze, and Elizabeth Edwards, as "evidence" that conventional medicine either doesn't work or kills.
The celebrity to whom I am…
dr. dolittle | June 20, 2012
Left: Derrik Hilton, an asistant in the laboratory of Dr. Charles Ide (right) at Western Michigan University. Image from: Katie Selden / Kalamazoo Gazette
Dr. Charles Ide from Western Michigan University has become a leader in the fight against Multiple symptom atrophy, or MSA, all because of frogs. His research on how contaminants in the Kalamazoo River impacts the health of frogs lead to the discovery that frogs injected with PCBs developed Parkinson's disease like symptoms.
Dr. Ide describes MSA (aka: atypical Parkinson's Disease) as being a trio of disorders making it especially life-…
oracknows | June 20, 2012Oh, goody.
I don't know how I've missed this, given that it's been in existence now for over a month now, but I have. Regular readers (and even fairly recent readers, given that I write about this topic relatively frequently) know that I'm not a big fan of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). Just search this blog for "NCCAM" if you don't believe me. I've explained the reasons many times, but the CliffsNotes version is that NCCAM is an enormous waste of taxpayer money, dedicated as it is to the study of modalities that are at best highly implausible and at…
oracknows | June 17, 2012Here we go again.
Remember how last week I said I wouldn't write about the Miracle Mineral Solution (abbreviated MMS) again for a while? I lied.
Well, actually, I didn't. At the time I wrote that, I really did mean to give it a rest for a while, and for a while at least I was a good boy. I even managed to ignore Todd Drezner's excellent post on—of all places!—what is normally a wretched hive of scum and quackery, The Huffington Post, entitled The Curious Case of Autism and MMS. Then came this post by an MMS apologist that we've met before, a man named Adam Mr. Abraham who goes by the handle…