medicine
oracknows | January 31, 2010
Looks like I picked the wrong week to give up sniffing glue.
Well, not really. Maybe it looks more like I picked the wrong NIH grant cycle to be submitting an R01. After all, the deadline for my getting my grant to my university's grant's office coincided very closely with the announcement of the General Medical Council's ruling in the Andrew Wakefield case on Thursday. As I pointed out in a brief post yesterday, the complete 143-page ruling can be found here (if you want to avoid AoA or Generation Rescue) or here (if you want to annoy J.B. Handley by showing traffic coming from this blog…
palmd | January 31, 2010This is a special shout out to the doctors and scientists out there. Everything we do in our fields has repercussions, often unexpected ones. Because of this, we strive to practice ethically to help prevent or minimize negative repercussions.
This discussion comes up specifically as an epiphenomenon of the release of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (my full review can be found here.) How one reacts to this book would, I suppose, depend on your perspective. A neighbor of the Lacks's might react quite differently than a 22 year old doctoral student. And that's really the point.
This…
oracknows | January 31, 2010This may be a bit over the top, but it does rather point out what is in effect done when journalists lazily present "both sides" of issues that don't really have two sides, at least not two sides that are anywhere in the same universe as far as scientific validity:
I do rather think that they could have found a better example for "Western" versus "alternative" medicine. That part of the video was actually pretty dumb and, quite frankly, painfully unfunny. Come on! A Hulda Clark parody, where the alt-med practitioner claims that all cancer is caused by a liver fluke and that it can be cured…
oracknows | January 30, 2010Thanks to having been up all night Thursday night and most of the night a couple of days before that working on a grant, I know I haven't had a chance to write about the GMC's ruling on Andrew Wakefield's unethical conduct in conducting his "clinical research" that according to him linked the MMR vaccine to autism. That dubious and possibly even fraudulent research ultimately fueled the anti-vaccine movement in the U.K. and, aided and abetted by the sensationalistic and credulous U.K. media, Wakefield started an MMR scare that persists to this day, having led to vaccination uptake rates…
jstemwedel | January 29, 2010This, our first week of classes of the Spring semester, also marked the return of regular publication of the daily student newspaper. Since I'm not behind on grading yet (huzzah for the first week of classes!), I picked up yesterday's copy and read one of the front-page articles on my way to my office.
And dagnabbit if that article didn't angry up my blood.
The trouble is, I'm having a hard time figuring out where properly to direct that anger.
The article, which appeared below the fold, was titled "U.S. Health Secretary urges vaccinations". It drew from a January 26, 2010 conference call…
ddobbs | January 29, 2010Hits of the week:
Savage Minds (with a spiffy website redesign) asks Why is there no Anthropology Journalism?
Jerry Coyne takes sharp exception to both a paper and a SciAm Mind Matters article by Paul Andrews and Andy Thomson arguing that depression might be an evolutionary adaptation. Dr. Pangloss punches back. (NB: 1. I was founding editor of Mind Matters, but no longer edit it, did not edit the Andrews/Thomson piece, and don't know any of these people. 2. While my recent Atlantic article presented an argument for how a gene associated with depression (the so-called SERT gene) might be…
oracknows | January 28, 2010...is, sadly, this:
Boomtown Rats - Up All Nightby epb21
It's times like these that my surgical residency training comes in handy.
Yep. As I've alluded to, it's been grant time, and this was my night. But the R01 is finished. I'll have my lab people go over it one last time for errors and typos, and then it's off to the university grants office. I hope.
That reminds me. As all NIH rats know, the real deadline for R01 grant submissions is February 5. At least that's the date when the NIH wants them. However, our grants office requires us to get the electronic package to it a whole week…
milhayser | January 28, 2010
Recognizing the drawbacks of uranium reactors, Mike the Mad Biologist explains that using thorium for nuclear fuel would produce safer energy. Uranium was originally established as the element of choice "since it would yield plutonium which could be used to build nukes," but thorium reactions produce less waste, less radioactivity, and no leftovers for warheads. Because of its other properties, thorium also works in new reactor designs that are safe from the threat of meltdown. On Effect Measure, Revere shows us the result of an unsafe workplace at a Dupont chemical plant which suffered…
palmd | January 27, 2010"...It never was our guise
To slight the poor, or aught humane despise:
For Jove unfold our hospitable door,
'Tis Jove that sends the stranger and the poor..."
---Homer: The Odyssey, Translation by Alexander Pope
A few weeks ago, Drugmonkey wrote a piece about perceptions of drug users. Specifically, the study looked at how mental health providers perceive people with substance use disorders depending on whether the patients were referred to being a "substance abuser" vs. having "a substance use disorder." These data revealed something interesting. Among the mental health…
oracknows | January 27, 2010And now for something completely different.
I've been on a bit of a tear the last few days beating on Mike Adams, someone who arguably deserves the title of Woo--meister Supreme, but it's important to remember that defending science-based medicine is more than just having a little fun every now and then slapping down quacks. It's also about turning the same skeptical eyes that recognize the woo that people like Adams, Mercola, and the anti-vaccine movement promote onto scientific medicine when appropriate. That's because, at its best, science-based medicine is always trying to improve…
grrlscientist | January 27, 2010tags: health, medicine, TEDMED,health care, medical records, GPS, geography, geomedicine, Bill Davenhall, TEDTalks, streaming video
Where you live: It impacts your health as much as diet and genes do, but it's not part of your medical records. At TEDMED, Bill Davenhall shows how overlooked government geo-data (from local heart-attack rates to toxic dumpsite info) can mesh with mobile GPS apps to keep doctors in the loop. Call it "geo-medicine."
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the…
ddobbs | January 26, 2010Neuroskeptic ponders the growing evidence that antidepressants significantly best placebo only in the more (or most) depressed patients. His take is that:
antidepressants treat classical clinical depression, of the kind that psychiatrists in 1960 would have recognized. This is the kind of depression that they were originally used for, after all, because the first antidepressants arrived in 1953, and modern antidepressants like Prozac target the same neurotransmitter systems.
Yet in recent years "clinical depression" has become a much broader term. Many peopleattribute this to marketing on…
oracknows | January 26, 2010Almost two years ago, I discovered something that disturbed me greatly. Basically, I learned the story of an Air Force officer named Col. Richard Niemtzow, MD, PhD. Col. Niemtzow is a radiation oncologist who has over the last decade fallen deeply into woo. Specifically, he has become known for a technique that he has dubbed "battlefield acupuncture," a technique that he has promoted energetically (word choice intentional) and ceaselessly, to the point where, sadly, the military is starting to take it seriously even though the evidence Col Niemtzow has presented in favor of the technique is…
palmd | January 25, 2010Salmonella is lots of fun. Human infection usually involves fever, abdominal cramping, and diarrhea, which is often bloody. Salmonella infections are reasonably common, especially food-borne outbreaks. It's unknown exactly how many people in the U.S. suffer from salmonellosis each year since many probably never seek medical care or never have a stool culture done. The CDC gets approximately 40K reports of salmonella in the U.S. each year with about 400 deaths (the real case number is estimated to be closer to 1.4 million). Most of these cases are preventable.
There are two large…
clock | January 25, 2010The current forum discussion on PRI/BBC The World is Tackling the Global Organ Shortage. This week's guest is Dr. Mustafa Al-Mousawi, past president of the Middle East Society for Organ Transplantation. Listen to the podcast and ask Dr. Al-Mousawi questions in the forum. He'll be checking in and responding throughout the week:
Worldwide, there is a dire shortage of organs for transplantation.
In the United States alone, more than 100,000 people are waiting for new hearts, lungs and kidneys. Many of these patients will die waiting.
Frustrated, some patients turn to a global black market in…
oracknows | January 25, 2010It's amazing how fast two weeks can slide by, but the 129th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle is fast approaching and will be landing Thursday, January 28 at The SkeptVet Blog. Blog-specific instructions for submitting your best skeptical blogging can be found here, while general guidelines can be found here.
This is the first time we've had a skeptical veterinarian host; so let's try to get him some great material to help him do a bang-up job. And if you have some good woo related to veterinary or animals to send in, so much the better.
oracknows | January 25, 2010
It's amazing how these "natural" medicine mavens reveal their true nature when faced with a little adversity. As you may recall, Mike Adams was eliminated from the running for a Shorty Award in Health, thanks to the cluelessness of his fans and followers. He immediately erupted into tirades full of conspiracy-mongering, as well as a hilariously off-base, spittle-flecked attack on "skeptics" that was so full of straw men that his adopted Central American home will probably have to import straw for its farm animals for the foreseeable future. As a result of his being eliminated, Mike Adams…
j7uy5 | January 25, 2010I saw this headline on Google Fast Flip, and had to read it. I'm
always game for an anti-big-pharma story: even though I appreciate
their efforts to relieve suffering, I do like to take notice of their
shadier practices.
href="http://business.theatlantic.com/2010/01/is_glaxos_charity_really_theft.php">Is
Glaxo's Charity Really Theft?
Jan 20 2010, 5:30 pm
by Daniel Indiviglio
Is there a fine line? Corporations have a duty to shareholders to
maximize profits. But when they donate to charity -- which is regularly
done these days, often through foundations -- this takes money out of…
oracknows | January 24, 2010Mike Adams is confused.
I know, I know. Such a statement is akin to saying that water is wet (and that it doesn't have memory, at least not the mystical magical memories ascribed to it by homeopaths), that the sun rises in the East, or that writing an NIH R01 grant is hard, but there you go. Speaking of writing an NIH R01, that's exactly what I'm doing now, hence the decreased blogorrhea over the last few days, but sometimes trying to cram a five year project into the 13 pages (one page for specific aims and twelve to describe the project) makes my head hurt so much that reading and…
palmd | January 24, 2010In The Checklist Manifesto (Amazon, Borders, b&n), Dr. Atul Gawande expands on his previous writing about the work of Dr. Peter Pronovost. Pronovost developed a system to help reduce complications of hospital care, such as infected venous catheters. This system has been very successful. It is based on the idea that some tasks are simply too complex to be error-free. Medical care has become very successful, but also very complex, to the point where one person cannot possibly remember every step in some processes, even simple steps such as scrubbing in.
The simple and successful…