medicine
oracknows | December 29, 2009Remember how I said that I was trying to take it easy this week? I still am, but there's something bugging me enough to draw me out of my grant-induced cocoon for a little while in order to pontificate on it in the not-so-Respectfully Insolent way that I am so often wont to do. True, it's something that's been annoying me for a time now, but it's becoming acute as the end of the year approaches. The reason is simple. The anti-vaccine crank blog Age of Autism is starting to announce its 2009 awards. Regular readers may remember when AoA announced its 2008 awards. Truly, that was a hoot,…
grrlscientist | December 29, 2009tags: dogs, pets, hospitals, organ transplants, comedy, humor, funny, fucking hilarious, television, streaming video
This video is the hilariously stupid dog scene from One Tree Hill, now with suitably awkward closing music.
palmd | December 28, 2009I've never understood food fads. Michael Pollan's maxim, "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants," has always seemed like reasonable, practical advice. Maybe it's a disease of plenty---we have so much food, we have to find new ways to conceptualize it. Unless you live in an inner city, you can go to any market and find large quantities of foodstuffs, both healthy and unhealthy. Food in this country is cheap and plentiful and, for the most part, safe. Self-"regulated" industrialized production has contributed to problems with bacterial contamination of meats and produce, but food- and…
terrasig | December 28, 2009
In discussing the Christmas birth of a son to ScienceBlogs launcher and science journalist Christopher Mims and his wife, I neglected to note another addition to our tribe of science, from a science blogger specifically.
ChemicalBiLOLogy blogger, Arlenna, gave birth on Christmas Eve to a beautiful girl, pictured here with Mr. Arlenna. In her brief post, "I had a baby!," Arlenna posited:
. . .whoever invented epidurals and started using them in childbirth should win the Nobel Prize.
Despite my lack of training in anesthesiology or obstetrics, I thought I might look into this a bit. I had…
oracknows | December 28, 2009NOTE: Orac is on semi-vacation this week, trying very hard to recharge his Tarial cells. Actually, although he is at home, he is spending much of his time in his Sanctum Sanctorum (i.e., his home office) working on an R01 for the February submission cycle. Given that the week between Christmas and New Years Day tends to be pretty boring, both from a blogging and blog traffic standpoint, he's scaling back the new, original stuff and mixing in some "best of" reruns, as well as some more recent stuff that appeared in a different form elsewhere, modified a bit to be more appropriate to this blog…
oracknows | December 26, 2009While I'm recovering fro Christmas this weekend and away a good chunk of tomorrow, here's a question to ponder as 2009 draws to its inevitable close. Val Jones has listed what she views to be the top five threats to science-based medicine that dominated 2009 and look likely to continue to threaten science in medicine during 2010. So, to complement my previous question regarding the worst pseudoscience of the decade, I'd point to Val's post on the top five threats to science-based medicine of 2009 and ask: What were the worst threats to science-based medicine, not just of 2009, but of the…
jstemwedel | December 25, 2009
Yeah, sure that plush Borrelia burgdorferi (the bacterium that causes Lyme disease) is playfully cuddling the plush penicillin now. But can their friendship last?
(Actually, in light of the fact that penicillin inhibits transpeptidase in gram-positive bacrteria, and of the fact that Borrelia burgdorferi is gram-negative, maybe those two love-sick kids can make it work.)
Uttered by Dr. Free-Ride's better half upon extracting the plush penicillin from the Christmas stocking: "I'm going to have to keep that away from my syphilis!"
palmd | December 25, 2009Do you know how many people have chlamydia? Syphilis? No?
Me either. But it's a lot. Depending on the group evaluated, chlamydia rates among young women range from 7-15%. And with STDs, there is always at least one other victim.
The holidays tend to be a time of seeing old friends and drinking with them. I see a lot of STDs after the holidays.
Both men and women can carry STDs without symptoms, but in women, these infections can ravage the reproductive organs leading to ectopic pregnancies, infertility, and other long-term health problems.
If infertility doesn't sound so bad, you…
oracknows | December 24, 2009If there's one thing that's irritated the crap out of me ever since I entered the medical field, it's celebrities with more fame than brains or sense touting various health remedies. Of late, three such celebrities have spread more misinformation and quackery than the rest of the second tier combined. Truly, together, they are the Unholy Trinity of Celebrity Quackery.
The first two of them, of course, are that not-so-dynamic duo of anti-vaccine morons, Jenny McCarthy and her much more famous and successful boyfriend Jim Carrey. Having apparently decided that selling "Indigo Child" woo was not…
palmd | December 23, 2009Wouldn't it be cool if after we died we didn't...die? Just like in the fairy tales, we could go to some place where we play harps on clouds and eat marshmallows for breakfast; we could play with our dead dogs, and somehow manage to live in harmony with all of our dead lovers. Unless we go to a place of flames and unending agony. Or maybe we become squid-like creatures in the oceans of Titan--all are equally (un)likely.
Except to those so mired in thanatophobia and fantasy that they can no longer reason properly. It's not like this is a new problem, but my eyes were bleeding after…
palmd | December 23, 2009Human beings are an interesting mix of fragility and hardiness, and we have a tendency to overestimate both traits. We also tend to be somewhat over-confident in our own ability to make sense of patterns. This combination of traits often blinds us to the real magnitude of risks we encounter every day---we're often scared of airplanes, but very few people have cigarette phobias. And when we really do get sick, in our desperation our faults often become magnified. As patients we often cast blindly for hope; as doctors we look to give hope, but the hope we give must be qualified by reality…
oracknows | December 23, 2009It's a really tough competition, but if I had to choose the most ridiculous form of quackery out there, I'd have to choose homeopathy. Although it's common for so-called "alternative" medicines to be so utterly implausible from a scientific standpoint that it is not unreasonable, barring very compelling positive evidence, to provisionally reject them as impossible, homeopathy goes one further than most forms of alt-med. In fact, it goes many further than nearly any form of alt-med. First, it combines the principle of "like cures like," a principle based far more on ancient concepts of…
oracknows | December 22, 2009Ha! So true, although in academia we aren't so much concerned with getting products into consumers' hands; so the exact times may be different:
Via xkcd, of course!
ddobbs | December 22, 2009via Wall Street Journal Health Blog:
For a while now, the FDA and other regulators have been looking at safety risks associated with a few drugs patients sometimes take before getting MRI scans.
While it's common for new risks to crop up with established drugs, the Times of London this weekend highlighted an interesting twist in this case: GE has filed a libel suit in Britain against a Danish radiologist who gave a talk about the risks associated with Omniscan, a GE drug that's one of the medicines regulators have been looking at.
The doctor, Henrik Thomsen, gave a presentation to about 30…
oracknows | December 22, 2009(NOTE ADDED 12/7/2010: Kim Tinkham has died of what was almost certainly metastatic breast cancer.)
If there's been one theme running through this blog every since the very beginning, it's the unreliability of testimonials as "evidence" for the success of a cancer treatment. Indeed, if you go back to one of the very first "Orac-length" posts was about that very topic. Indeed, almost exactly five years ago, I analyzed a common type of testimonial for "alternative" cancer therapies and explained why it sounds so convincing to lay people who don't understand cancer biology and treatment. It's a…
j7uy5 | December 22, 2009One of the more enlightening and worrisome articles I read recently was
href="http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2008/11/24/081124ta_talk_surowiecki">The
Perils of Efficiency, by James Surowiecki. The article
was a discussion of the practical effects of the mathematical concept,
that you can only optimize one variable in an complex system. So
if you optimize for lowest cost per unit of production, you have to
sacrifice something else. One of the things you sacrifice, is
resilience.
Most managers of systems with a supply chain have adopted what is
called just-in-time supply. …
palmd | December 21, 2009Multiple sclerosis (MS) is fascinating illness that can range from mild annoyance to debilitating nightmare. The frightening nature and unclear cause of the disease makes it a magnet for questionable medical therapies (i.e. quackery). A piece published last week in (surprise!) the Huffington Post helps fuel the fires of suspicion and paranoia while failing to shed any light on the future of MS research.
Multiple sclerosis is a disease of the nervous system. Its victims develop symptoms based on what part of the nervous system is affected. For example, if MS attacks the optic nerve, a…
oracknows | December 21, 2009It's the end, the end of the '70s
It's the end, the end of the century.
Joey Ramone, 1979
As amazing as it is to me, the first decade of the 21st century is fast approaching its end. It seems like only yesterday that my wife and I were waiting for the dawn of the new millennium with the fear that civilization would go kablooey because of the Y2K bug. (Remember that?) Obviously, civilization didn't end. Given the rise of pseudoscience over the last several years, it only seems that way sometimes. However, even though it's an entirely arbitrary construct and a human imposition of our own wishes…
oracknows | December 20, 2009If there's one thing that irritates me about the anti-vaccine movement, it's the utter disingenuousness of the movement. How often do we hear the claim from anti-vaccine loons that "we're not 'anti-vaccine'; we're 'pro-safe vaccine'"? I've tried to pin such people down time and time again to answer just what it would take in terms of scientific studies and evidence or in terms of what "toxins" would have to be removed to convince them that vaccines are sufficiently safe that they will have their children vaccinated? Inevitably, the answer involves levels of evidence that are beyond what can…
razib | December 17, 2009Increased Prevalence of Myopia in the United States Between 1971-1972 and 1999-2004:
Results
Using the 1971-1972 method, the estimated prevalence of myopia in persons aged 12 to 54 years was significantly higher in 1999-2004 than in 1971-1972 (41.6% vs 25.0%, respectively; P < .001). Prevalence estimates were higher in 1999-2004 than in 1971-1972 for black individuals (33.5% vs 13.0%, respectively; P < .001) and white individuals (43.0% vs 26.3%, respectively; P < .001) and for all levels of myopia severity (>-2.0 diopters [D]: 17.5% vs 13.4%, respectively [P < .001]; -2.0 to…