medicine
palmd | November 30, 2009The struggle to promote the scientific practice of medicine and the fight against pseudo-science and quackery just got a big boost. The newly-announced (but long in the making) Institute for Science in Medicine was launched this morning with an inaugural press release calling attention to quackery in the current U.S. health reform bills.
Many of the folks involved in the Institute are familiar names, and represent an international effort to keep health care safe and effective.
So help spread the word, and keep an eye on this space and the ISM website for more updates and for ideas on how…
oracknows | November 30, 2009A couple of years ago, fellow ScienceBlogger Mark Hoofnagle over at Denialism Blog coined a most excellent term to describe all manners of pseuodscience, quackery, and crankery. The term, "crank magnetism," describes the tendency of cranks not to mind it when they see crankery in others. More specifically, it describes how cranks of one variety (for instance, HIV/AIDS denialists, will be attracted to another form of crankery (for instance, anti-vaccinationism or the 9/11 Truth movement) because, as Mark put it, cranks and pseudoscientists see themselves as iconoclasts, brave mavericks opposed…
palmd | November 28, 2009I have in front of me a weathered copy of Cecil's Textbook of Medicine from 1947. It belonged to my father, who graduated from medical school in the 1940s. Even then, it was known that pneumoccus, a common bacterium, can live harmlessly in the nose and throat and only sometimes causes disease. Pneumoccocal disease was and is still a leading cause of disease and death*, killing perhaps a million children per year. It causes ear and sinus infections, but also meningitis, and is the most common cause of pneumonia. In the past it was referred to as "the captain of the men of death" for it's…
oracknows | November 28, 2009The day before the Thanksgiving holiday, I wrote about a serious contender for the worst medical reporting of the year, if not the decade, specifically how credulous reporters had swarmed all over the case of a Belgian man named Rom Houben. If you don't remember or haven't heard about the details, feel free to peruse the link I just cited, but I'll give you the brief rundown. Basically, Rom Houben is an incredibly unfortunate man who was involved in a motor vehicle crash 23 years ago at age 23. As a result, he suffered a severe head injury and was diagnosed as being in a persistent…
palmd | November 27, 2009A news item this week profiles a northeast naturopath who is using thermal imaging to screen for breast cancers. This is a frightening development. The news about conflicting mammogram recommendations has women wondering what the right approach really is. The question in the new USPSTF recommendations is one of values. The science says that a lot of women in their 40s need to be screened and undergo invasive procedures to save one life. We are left to decide if that life is worth it. Or we can throw our hands in the air and start charging women for useless alternatives.
The technology…
oracknows | November 27, 2009I happen to be fortunate enough this year to have taken the Friday after Thanksgiving off, and it is a very good thing indeed. However, this morning, having indulged in the American tradition of stuffing myself full of turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes and various other most excellent and hearty foods, all accompanied by some hearty ale. What that means is that I'm still suffering some of the after effects of food coma. What that further means for the blog is that I don't feel up to tackling something that will require me to exercise my neurons too much. So, in my food-induced haze, I asked…
palmd | November 27, 2009I live about ten miles due north of "Canada's automotive capital". We often look across the straits to the medical system in Ontario, one in which all citizens have a provincial insurance card. We see how everyone has access to care---or at least some care. I've treated many Canadian patients who have access to American insurance and prefer to get their care on this side of the border, where there are fewer hassles. Of course if you have no insurance at all, hassles abound, and we'll leave a discussion of the merits and difficulties of the Canadian system to another day. But one move…
oracknows | November 25, 2009You know, I have three manuscripts in the hopper with two of them having recently been returned to me with reviewers' comments. Frustratingly, one of these is a manuscript that I've been trying to get published for nearly a year now. Given that I appear to have some work to do over the long holiday weekend coming up in order to answer reviewer criticisms and get the manuscripts ready for resubmission (you know what I'll be doing either Friday or Saturday--and it won't be shopping), I truly appreciate this bit of advice on how to deal with the wayward reviewer who doesn't appreciate the…
palmd | November 25, 2009We already know about the Huffington Post's war on science and its shameless publication of snake oil ads disguised as journalism. Now, Mark Hyman, an evangelist for the cult known as "functional medicine", is giving even more bad flu advice (and shilling for his books).
He begins his blathering, misleading sales pitch with this bit of mendacious drivel:
The main question my patients have been asking is whether they should get vaccinated against H1N1 or against the regular flu.
This is not a simple yes or no answer. The guiding principle of functional medicine is personalized care, not the…
oracknows | November 24, 2009Remember how I nominated a truly execrable local news report about Desiree Jennings as a serious contender for the worst reporting of the year, perhaps even of the decade? It had everything, and I seriously doubted that anything would challenge it for credulous supremacy any time soon.
How wrong I was. Check out this video:
Then read these stories:
'I screamed, but there was nothing to hear': Man trapped in 23-year 'coma' reveals horror of being unable to tell doctors he was conscious
Trapped 'coma' man: How was he misdiagnosed?
What a compelling story! Or is it? Let's find out by first…
palmd | November 24, 2009One of the most frightening symptoms of advanced cancer is "cachexia", or severe, unintentional weight-loss and wasting. It's a terrible prognostic sign, and the only truly effective treatment is removal of the cancer. Treatment of this syndrome has the potential to improve quality of life in patients with advanced cancers. Various types of medications, including antidepressants, hormones, and cannabis derivatives have been tried with little effect. Treating the symptoms of incurable cancers is difficult and although we're pretty good at it, we sometimes fail. Cannabis seems a plausible…
oracknows | November 24, 2009As hard as I find it to believe, the fifth anniversary of this blog is fast approaching. When I started this whole endeavor, it was more or less on a whim that struck me on a cold, dreary, gray Saturday in December, and I had no idea that five years later I'd still be at it, much less that I'd have this many readers. One thing that trying to apply a skeptical and scientific world view to various pseudoscience has allowed me to do, more than just the occasional fit of depression at looking at pseudoscience now, comparing it to pseudoscience then and back in my Usenet days in the late 1990s and…
palmd | November 23, 2009Today over at Science-Based Medicine, Dr. Novella has a review of the so-called "biomed" movement in autism treatment. Anyone should be able to understand the desperation of parents with sick kids, but grief can lead to very bad decisions. As physicians, one of our jobs is to guide people away from these decisions and not to give false hope. Telling people what they want to hear might make you as a caregiver feel good, but as physicians, our goal is not to make ourselves feel good but to help others.
It pained me to read this story about a mom who gets her autistic son stoned. As a father…
oracknows | November 23, 2009I hate to revisit this case again. However, some of my readers have sent me links to something that compels me to dig up the rotting corpse of Generation Rescue's despicable attempt to use the suffering of a troubled young woman to push the idea that vaccines are harmful. I'm referring, of course, to the Desiree Jennings case. As you recall, Desiree Jennings is a 25-year-old woman who claimed to have developed dystonia after receiving the seasonal flu vaccine back in August. Based on the disconnect between her symptoms and what real cases of dystonia look like, discovery of what was very…
oracknows | November 22, 2009There are times when I look back, and I can't believe I've been at it this long. It's not just the blogging, the fifth anniversary of which is rapidly approaching for me. Hard as it is to believe, not only have I become a "venerable" medical and skeptical blogger, but there are actually a lot of people who like to read what I regularly lay down. It's not false humility when I say I'm still shocked when I contemplate that. However, when you add to the blogging my time on that Internet wilderness known as Usenet, I've been fighting the good fight against pseudoscience for close to 12 years now…
terrasig | November 22, 2009It's Sunday morning on the US East Coast and I really need to put the computer down to get out for a hike in the crisp, autumn air. Sunday morning is a great time to catch up on long-form writing but I won't be the one providing it for you.
Instead, I encourage you to take 15 minutes this morning to read an "old" (2005) article in Fortune magazine entitled, The Law of Unintended Consequences, by Clifton Leaf in Fortune magazine.
This article details the impact of a 1980 amendment to US patent and trademark law put forth by Senator Bob Dole and the senior Senator Bayh, Birch. The Bayh-Dole…
oracknows | November 21, 2009Before I try to leave this topic for a while (which, like so may topics in the past, has temporarily taken over the blog for the last few days), one of the comments I've kept hearing since I started blogging about the new USPSTF mammography guidelines is something along the lines of, "Well, if the government runs health care, naturally politics will impact any attempts at science-based guidelines. That may be true, but in fact excessive politicization has always been a problem in that area, particularly for breast cancer. There's a good interview with to Dr. Barron Lerner, associate professor…
oracknows | November 21, 2009A lesson that's worth learning. Of course, I only wish people ignored vaccine denialists; unfortunately, enough people don't that vaccines are a frequent blog topic for me:
palmd | November 21, 2009Opponents of science-based medicine like to accuse the rest of us of failing to be "holisitc", of failing to see the whole individual who comes to us for health care. I've argued many times that this is not only wrong, but that so-called alternative docs, by recommending unproven treatments and giving false hope are actually harming their patients. The new USPSTF mammogram recommendations are likely to fuel this debate as well as the one regarding health care reform and rationing. There's already been a great deal of debate new mammogram recommendations, most of it good. For a comprehensive…
oracknows | November 20, 2009As I discussed in detail when I analyzed them, the new USPSTF recommendations for screening mammography for breast cancer have sparked a debate that has degenerated from a scientific and public policy debate into pure emotional rhetoric. When last I visited this topic, yesterday, I had intended it to be my last post for a while, perhaps ever. However, the amount of idiocy that I was dealing with became so overwhelming and the post grew to even huger than Orac-ian proportions. So I decided to split the post into two parts, because the particular argument I'm about to discuss deserves its very…