medicine
scientificactivist | November 11, 2009Yesterday, the influential AMA (American Medical Association) announced that it would cease its opposition to the concept of medical marijuana and instead advocate for a change in federal classification of the drug. From the LA Times:
The American Medical Assn. on Tuesday urged the federal government to reconsider its classification of marijuana as a dangerous drug with no accepted medical use, a significant shift that puts the prestigious group behind calls for more research.
The nation's largest physicians organization, with about 250,000 member doctors, the AMA has maintained since 1997…
palmd | November 11, 2009In medicine, theater can go a long way. The seemingly simple acts of laying hands on a patient, leaning in to listen to them, and giving them instructions to follow can be therapeutic. Sometimes this is labelled as part of the so-called placebo effect, but whatever we call it, physicians (and priests) have been doing it for thousands of years. But how far should we push it? As medicine becomes more science-based, relying on actual evidence to guide practice, where does theater fit in?
One argument is that since this difficult-to-quantify intervention can clearly do something, we should…
oracknows | November 11, 2009It's been more than 24 hours since I received my H1N1 vaccine, and so far the only problem I've had is a bit of a sore arm. (Maybe I shouldn't have had the nurse use the left arm again, as that's where I got my seasonal flu vaccine, too. On the other hand, I am right-handed.)
Sadly, I have not become autistic, despite having had all that mercury, formaldehyde, and witches brew of "toxins" injected "directly into by bloodstream." I guess it's just not to be.
I did notice one "side effect," though. Shortly after I received my vaccine yesterday morning, I received an urgent call to the clinic…
palmd | November 10, 2009According to a Pew survey, 61% of Americans are getting health information online. The internet is now the third leading resource for health information after doctors and family/friends. At a recent session hosted by USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, I learned this and many other things while chatting with journalists and other bloggers. It turns out (and I don't have the data in my hands yet) that some of the "sub-trends" are pretty interesting. For example, moms and other women seem to prefer facebook to other social networking sites. I've noticed this anecdotally…
oracknows | November 10, 2009Here we go again.
I see that the kerfuffle over screening for cancer has erupted again to the point where it's found its way out of the rarified air of specialty journals to general medical journals and hence into the mainstream press. This is something that seems to pop up every so often, much to the consternation of lay people and primary care doctors alike, often trumpeted with breathless headlines along the lines of "What if everything you knew about screening was wrong?
It isn't, but some of it may be. The problem is the shaking out process. I'll try to explain.
Over the last couple of…
oracknows | November 9, 2009Woo-hoo!
I just found out late yesterday that finally--finally--our cancer center has enough H1N1 vaccine to start vaccinating its employees involved in patient care. I thought the vaccine would never get here in sufficient quantity. Later this morning I'll be right there, getting mine.
You know, I think I'll ask the nurse for extra thimerosal. After all, I got vaccinated for seasonal flu about a month and a half ago, and I'm not autistic yet. Rather disappointing, actually. Maybe another good shot of killed influenza, formaldehyde, mercury, and all sorts of other "toxins" will fix that.
Damn…
palmd | November 9, 2009I had a nice dinner last night with a group of medical bloggers and journalists (I don't recommend the scallops). One journalist, a veteran of many years, asked me, "is your goal to convince people, or are you preaching to the choir?"
It's a simple question, one that I probably should ask myself daily but don't. Rather than extracting an answer from my behind, I decided to think about it for a while.
The answer, I think, is both and neither. It's hard to judge given that the percentage of readers who comment is low, but the question wasn't "are your readers convinced", but "do you intend…
oracknows | November 9, 2009
This project is behind schedule. The reasons, I hope, are forgivable. First off, there was just too much other stuff going on last week, to the point where, even though I've read several chapters of Suzanne Somers' new book (if you can call it that) Knockout: Interviews with Doctors Who Are Curing Cancer--And How to Prevent Getting It in the First Place (Random House website), I couldn't force myself to sit down in front of the computer, copy of Knockout in front of me in order to pick choice brain-necrosing quotes from. Besides, the whole issue of Desiree Jennings came up, as well as a…
clock | November 8, 2009You can listen to the Friday episode of Skeptically Speaking here. I am at the beginning, first 10 minutes or so, explaining what ScienceOnline2010 is all about. But the rest of the show with Paul Ingraham is very interesting as well.
oracknows | November 8, 2009In a nod to fellow ScienceBlogger Ed Brayton, with his hilarious Dumbass Quote of the Day, I hereby inaugurate the "Idiotic Comment of the Week," culled from this very blog. I don't guarantee that I'll do it every week, but when I see neuron-necrosing idiocy below and beyond the usual call of pseudoscientists and quackery boosters who occasionally like to try to match their "wits" (such as they are) with my reality- and science-based commenters, usually to hilarious effect, I'll give it the "honor" it deserves. This week, despite highly intense competition (thanks to a recent infestation of…
palmd | November 7, 2009I'm told that mathematicians and physicists get a lot of mail from folks with "big discoveries". These discoveries are often of the "Einstein was wrong and I figured out the Theory of Everything" variety. Many of us refer to these folks as "cranks", a catch-all, derogatory term for people who, through their own arrogance and ignorance, think they have, despite little education or work, disproved ideas that have taken lifetimes to assemble.
Enter the anti-vaccination cranks. Immunoprophylaxis---the manipulation of the immune system to prevent disease---is centuries old, and over those…
oracknows | November 7, 2009...back when they believed that humors were responsible for your health. Oh, yes, I know it's now "politically or medically incorrect" now to practice medicine the way they did in the days of our Founding Fathers, but that's because the socialist libero-Nazis took that away from us. After all, remember who else didn't answer medical questions.
That's right. Hitler!
We must take back our country and the medicine of the Founding Fathers, lest our organs organize against us and the government be given the power to remove your appendix and eat it in front of you and your children!
Genius!
oracknows | November 6, 2009Remember how I promised that I'd do my next installment of my blogging Suzanne Somers' pile of idiocy, namely her own book, before the end of the week?
Plans change, and neurons melt, which they did in response to reading the first several chapters of Suzanne Somers' book.
Don't worry, though. I'll definitely try to get back on track with my--shall we say?--extended multipart review by Monday. Sometimes, though, when you're blogging, news drives what you do, and news is driving my decision to forego the pleasure and pain of the next installment of my "fun with Suzanne Somers" series, at least…
oracknows | November 5, 2009riley'smom is very unhappy with Amy Wallace:
I wrote Ms. Wallace a private email. I intentionally wrote it directly to her private email and DID NOT post it in the comments section of Wired Mag. I asked her about her one sided-biased interview with Mr Offit and asked if she planned to NOW do a fair and balanced report as many were questioning her porfessional reasoning. I also asked her how it felt to be one of Offit's whores...that perhaps she and Amanda Peet should get together and compare notes on how Ms Peets career was doing since she joined the Offit band wagon.
I received an email back…
palmd | November 5, 2009Some were surprised to read that after a pro basketball player swatted a bat out of the air, he had to have rabies vaccinations.
This is not a surprise to many medical folks who have had to give rabies prophylaxis after bat exposures. Most of the few human rabies cases in the U.S. are transmitted by bats, although raccoons are more often diagnosed with the disease. Because rabies is fairly easy to transmit and nearly always fatal to humans, we are very aggressive about prevention. Rabid wild animals can have unusually aggressive behavior and can transmit rabies to humans and to their…
oracknows | November 5, 2009Over the last week or so, I've been confronted full bore with cranks, staring down the barrel, if you will, of a crank shotgun, one barrel being the anti-vaccine movement in general (with J.B. Handley and his misogyny being the buckshot, so to speak) and the other being Suzanne Somers and her despicable cancer quackery. Indeed, over the last five years, I've subjected myself to some of the most outrageous bits of unreason, conspiracy mongering, and pseudoscience. Be it the anti-vaccine movement, quacks, 9/11 Truthers, Holocaust deniers, creationists, or any of a variety of other bits of…
oracknows | November 4, 2009The other day, I wrote about an unfortunate young woman named Desiree Jennings, who claimed to have had a rare neurological disorder known as dystonia as a complication of being vaccinated for seasonal flu, when it appears that her condition is likely to have at least a strong psychogenic component and is unlikely to be due to the vaccine. Despicably, the anti-vaccine group Generation Rescue tripped over itself to exploit Jennings' case and use it as "proof" that vaccines are dangerous and, by extension, that their fantastical claims that vaccines cause autism are plausible. Even after…
jstemwedel | November 4, 2009At Bioephemera, Jessica Palmer notes a disturbing double standard:
[T]here's a huge double standard in the media, and in society in general, when it comes to drug abuse treatment. I spent two years as a AAAS Fellow at the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and it was both depressing and inspiring: I was deeply impressed with the dedication of the staff, and horrified by the immensity of the problem of addiction in this country. That's why it upsets me that while research to help smokers quit is generally portrayed as necessary and important, increasingly, I'm seeing politicians complain that…
palmd | November 4, 2009No matter how you feel about incarceration, it's a dangerous business. Inmates have high rates of serious transmissible diseases which aren't turned into the warden when they are released. Around 2.5 million people are held in American correctional facilities. HIV rates for imprisoned men 1.6% and for women is 2.4% (compared to about 0.4% among Americans as a whole). About 4.5% of inmates reported sexual victimization. Of the facilities that provide hepatitis B vaccination, 65% target "high risk" groups only. Tuberculosis rates are also very high. This is just a sampling of the horrifying…
palmd | November 4, 2009As I've written before, the placebo effect is a rather messy phenomenon. It usually refers to the difference in outcomes in a study that are not due to the intervention but to multiple other variables associated with being in a study. More colloquially, "placebo" often means a positive effect seen from the administration of a biologically inert substance. There's a bit of a buzz brewing about a recent brief communication in Science. The report used fMRI to look for physiologic correlates to pain responses that were attenuated by an inert substance. (For the purposes of this discussion, I'…