medicine
oracknows | March 22, 2010Here we go again.
Every so often, it seems, the media has to recycle certain scare stories based on little or no science. Be it vaccines and whether they cause autism or not (the don't) or various environmental exposures supposedly linked to various cancers or other diseases in which the science is far more complex or tentative than represented, convincing people that some common thing to which we are routinely exposed is going to kill them seldom fails to bring in the readers. One of the favorite targets of this is the ubiquitous cell phone, and there have been two hunks o' burnin' stupid…
palmd | March 21, 2010Early in the prolonged economic crisis a patient who had lost his factory job came to see me. He no longer had insurance, but he had plenty of health problems. Our office normally doesn't see uninsured patients (we simply can't afford to) but from time to time we make exceptions. I changed his prescriptions to the cheapest possible effective medications and gave him an online resource for the meds that did not have inexpensive alternatives. I referred him to a clinic that has the resources to care for the uninsured and that may be able to help him get his diabetic supplies.
By doing this…
oracknows | March 19, 2010I'm envious of Steve Novella.
No, the reason isn't his vastly greater influence in the skeptical community than mine, his podcast The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, or the fact that he gets called a lot more for commentary when something involving quackery versus science-based medicine comes up. He's earned that, having been at this a lot longer than me and under his own name. No, what irritates me is that he somehow manages to get homeopaths to make videos like this trashing him:
"Homeopathy: The persecuted Jew of modern Nazi fascist medicine"? Isn't "Nazi fascist" a bit redundant? Maybe…
ddobbs | March 19, 2010
Cordyceps in glass, by glass artist Wesley Fleming -- a strange depiction of a rather horrid business. For more, do go to the source, the lovely Myrmecos Blog, which is all about bugs.
Now, the best of the week's gleanings. I'm going to categorize them from here out, and at least try to keep them from being from completely all over everywhere about everything.
Mind, brain, and body (including those gene things)
While reading Wolpert's review of Greenberg's book about depression (he didn't much like it), I found that the Guardian has a particularly rich trove of writings and resources on…
oracknows | March 19, 2010Remember how I had a little fun with Katie Wright's overheated rhetoric about Kathleen Sebelius' request to the press that they not give equal weight to anti-vaccine cranks when they report about issues of vaccines? Her exact words, if you will recall, were:
There are groups out there that insist that vaccines are responsible for a variety of problems, despite all scientific evidence to the contrary. We (the office of Secretary of Health and Human Services) have reached out to media outlets to try to get them not to give the views of these people equal weight in their reporting.
Nothing…
palmd | March 18, 2010
A physician friend asked me today if I had seen the survey in the New England Journal of Medicine that says nearly half of us will quit medicine if health care reform passes. My fried, a life-long Republican, found the numbers difficult to believe. So did I.
The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), one of medicine's most respected journals, did not publish such a poll. Apparently, in an earlier version of a web-based story posted on their jobs page, they reported the results of a poll conducted by a physician recruitment firm. Partisan bloggers and networks jumped on the story as…
oracknows | March 18, 2010It's been a while since I wrote about this topic, but I fear for the future of medicine.
Regular readers know what I'm talking about. The infiltration of various unscientific, pseudoscientific, and even anti-scientific "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) modalities into academic medicine seems increasingly to be endangering science-based medicine. Worse, this infiltration of quackery seems at least as bad, if not worse, in academic medicine, so much so that Dr. R.W. coined a most exquisite term for the increasing prevalence of pseudoscience in medical academia: Quackademic medicine…
oracknows | March 17, 2010Given the resurgence of the mercury militia over the last week or so in response to the Poul Thorsen case, I was amused to have found what looks to me to be the cure for autism.
The cure?
Well, if you're a member of the mercury militia and believe that thimerosal-containing vaccines cause autism, isn't the cure obvious? Come on! Think! You must know. Here's a hint: Similia similibus curentur.
That's right. We're talking a 30C dilution of homeopathic thimerosal, baby! Why didn't anyone think of it before?
Hey, given the vast amount of data refuting the idea that thimerosal in vaccines causes…
oracknows | March 17, 2010Kent Heckenlively shows us why AoA is "not anti-vaccine":
Bruesewitz v. Wyeth has the potential to move all that in a new direction. The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act simply states, "No vaccine manufacturer shall be liable . . . if the injury or death resulted from side-effect that were unavoidable even though the vaccine was properly prepared and was accompanied by proper directions and warnings."
What does that mean in plain English? The example I've always heard used in reference to such a standard is dynamite. Now we all know what dynamite does. It blows up. So, if you light…
palmd | March 17, 2010(This piece appears today at Science-Based Medicine and is re-posted here today because I like it and I'm lazy. --PalMD)
A couple of years ago, a number of us raised concerns about an "investigative reporter" at a Detroit television station. Â At the time I noted that investigative reporters serve an important role in a democracy, but that they can also do great harm, as when Channel 7's Steve Wilson parroted the talking points of the anti-vaccine movement. Â Wilson has since been canned but apparently, not much has changed. Â While performing my evening ablutions, I stumbled upon the latest…
oracknows | March 17, 2010
It's rare that I encounter a bit of nonsense that allows me to deploy two of my favorite rhetorical devices. First, it lets me pull out one of my favorite clips from one of my favorite movies, in which the immortal line, "Help! Help! I'm being repressed!" was first uttered. Second, it lets me repeat once again yet another variation of Inigo Montoya's immortal words. It's a two-fer! Not surprisingly, it's courtesy of the anti-vaccine crank blog we've all come to know and love (well, I love it because it has provided me such a target-rich environment for taking on quackery and woo, although I…
ddobbs | March 17, 2010Neither plane crashes nor anti-aircraft fire could kill my namesake uncle, but MRSA did, and it wasn't pretty. Accordingly I take a particular in this nasty bacteria, and am looking forward to reading Maryn McKenna's new book, Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA, which I just ordered from Amazon, and which comes out next week.
While you're waiting to order yours, you can see hear from McKenna about MRSA, and the new strain's emergence in the daughter of a Dutch pig farmer, in this short video clip:
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oracknows | March 16, 2010Apparently someone at a British hospital thought that this was a good idea.
I beg to differ. Words fail me. It's rare, I know, but occasionally it does happen.
ddobbs | March 16, 2010
The Science of Reading is the Harvard library's nice new site about reading. Lots of great old texts and some history of reading science.
BBC News - Man assaulted female police officer with penis. The court heard he had been drinking heavily and could not remember committing the offence at his home in Aberdeen
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Indiana Jones & the Ants - The New York Review of Books
In her review of Harvard entomologist E.O. Wilson's first novel, Anthill, in the April 8 issue of The New York Review, Margaret Atwood encourages anyone interested in ants to "take a look at the daring eco-…
oracknows | March 16, 2010I realize that I've said many times before that there is no such thing as "alternative" medicine. There is medicine that has been shown to work through science, medicine that has not yet been shown to work, and medicine that has been shown not to work. "Alternative" medicine that is shown to work through science ceases to be "alternative" and becomes simply medicine.
There are times when I think I might need to change that opinion.
Well, not exactly. However, promoters of various forms of alternative medicine, stymied when they try to show that their woo works through science, seem to think…
grrlscientist | March 16, 2010tags: perception, The Magic of the Placebo, placebos, medicine, magic, Eric Mead, TEDTalks, streaming video
Sugar pills, injections of nothing -- studies show that, more often than you'd expect, placebos really work. At TEDMED, magician Eric Mead does a trick to prove that, even when you know something's not real, you can still react as powerfully as if it is. (Warning: This talk is not suitable for viewers who are disturbed by needles or blood.)
What's your opinion? It looked rather contrived to me: The placebo discussion was only remotely related, and seemed only an excuse to perform someï…
palmd | March 15, 2010The work up of "fever of unknown origin" (FUO) is a classic exercise in internal medicine. Originally defined as a temperature greater than 38.3°C (101°F) on several occasions for more than three weeks with no diagnosis after one week of inpatient study, the definition has shifted. This reflects the dramatic increase in the sophistication of outpatient work ups in the fifty or so years since the term was formally defined. About a third of cases turn out to be infection, another third cancer, a smaller percentage so-called collagen vascular diseases such as lupus. A significant percentage…
oracknows | March 15, 2010While I'm crashing idiotic Internet polls, I might as well see if I can send some tactical air support over to Steve Salzberg, who wrote an excellent blog post about the Autism Omnibus ruling that I just wrote about earlier today.
Steve's blog post is entitled Vaccine Court Ruling: Thimerosal Does Not Cause Autism, and the Generation Rescue contingent of the anti-vaccine movement has already descended in force, including J.B. Handley and Anne Dachel, who are regurgitating the usual river of flaming stupid in the form of anti-vaccine talking points. Looks like a job for some Orac-style…
oracknows | March 15, 2010Perhaps you've heard of the case of Poul Thorsen. Perhaps not. Either way, that anti-vaccine movement was making a huge deal over this Danish psychiatrist and researcher for two reasons. First, he has become embroiled in some sort of scandal involving research funds at his former place of employment, Aarhus University, leading the ever-hyperbolic Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to post a characteristic bit of conspiracy mongering nonsense to that font of anti-vaccine nonsense, The Huffington Post, in an article entitled Central figure in CDC Vaccine Cover-Up Absconds with $2M. The second reason is…
razib | March 15, 2010Randomized trial of vitamin D supplementation to prevent seasonal influenza A in schoolchildren:
Design: From December 2008 through March 2009, we conducted a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial comparing vitamin D3 supplements (1200 IU/d) with placebo in schoolchildren. The primary outcome was the incidence of influenza A, diagnosed with influenza antigen testing with a nasopharyngeal swab specimen.
Results: Influenza A occurred in 18 of 167 (10.8%) children in the vitamin D3 group compared with 31 of 167 (18.6%) children in the placebo group [relative risk (RR), 0.58; 95% CI…