medicine
oracknows | October 12, 2009No mà s! No mà s! I surrender!
I give up!
I tried. I really, really did try. I tried really, really hard not to look at the flaming idiocy of Bill Maher again, much less comment on it again. Here I am, in Chicago at the American College of Surgeons annual meeting, taking in all sorts of surgical goodness, trying to take a break from blogging. It's not so much to ask, is it? I didn't think so, anyway.
Then, exactly a week after he accepted the Richard Dawkins Award, Bill Maher couldn't help it but let his freak flag fly! In fact, he started out an interview with Bill Frist by asking:
"…
j7uy5 | October 11, 2009The topic of neural enhancement has created controversy. This
came to wide attention in late 2007, upon the publication of various
articles in Nature, as noted by
href="http://scienceblogs.com/retrospectacle/2007/12/cognitive_enhancers_in_academi.php">Shelley
Batts,
href="http://scienceblogs.com/ethicsandscience/2007/12/the_ethics_of_performance_enha.php">Janet
Stemwedel,
href="http://scienceblogs.com/neuronculture/2008/04/steroids_for_the_brain_nature.php">David
href="http://scienceblogs.com/neuronculture/2008/12/survey_the_slippery_slope_of_c.php">Dobbs,
href="http://…
palmd | October 11, 2009Swine flu is not any nastier than the usual seasonal flu but young people are particularly susceptible to it. The mortality rate is quite low----even at it's worst, flu mortality rarely goes about 1-2%, as it did in the 1918 pandemic. But this flu is attacking a very large number of people; 1% of a large number is still a large number. For a low mortality rate to reflect large numbers, a disease has to hit a lot of people. If you can lower that number significantly, the mortality rate remains the same, but fewer cases will be reflected in fewer deaths. Since this flu tends to hit the…
oracknows | October 11, 2009You know, whenever I'm at a meeting or on vacation, I still sometimes feel the tug of the blog. Yet, I tell myself, I need a break. Usually, I handle the problem by setting up several old posts from at least a couple of years a go to repeat, you know, to see how well or badly they've aged. Sometimes, however, material is given to me. For example, this e-mail from someone named John who happens to have a .au (Australia) e-mail address:
WHY ARE YOU SO AFRAID...
To put your real name to this Blog---
its probably because you are not a Real person and don't actually exist--
I have seen Direct…
palmd | October 11, 2009I was going to try to sleep in this morning but my kid couldn't find her femur---long story. So I figured I might as well brew up a pot of Pal's Special, put up some Irish steel cut oatmeal, and review this weeks insanity.
This has been a rough week for the public's health education. The flu pandemic is still on the rise, and if trends continue, we will hit a record number of cases quite soon. Currently the best primer on influenza is Joe Albietz's, which I encourage you to read. But rumors about the flu are spreading nearly as fast as the virus, and we need a nearly real-time response to…
ddobbs | October 11, 2009Charlie Houston, right, in 1936 with Pasang Kikuli (center) and British climbing legend Bill Tilman
I used to do a bit of climbing and a lot of climbing reading -- a deep and rich literature.
If you read much about American climbing history, you'll read about Charlie Houston, who made one of the most dramatic and tragic attempts at K2 in 1953, pioneered the modern study of high-altitude physiology, practiced and taught medicine for decades, and at one point ran the Peace Corp. Amazing man. He was one of many physicians and scientists who have loved climbing and made huge contributions in…
oracknows | October 10, 2009...Mark Crislip versus Doug Bremner.
Dr. Crislip calmly explains the evidence regarding flu vaccination and why it's safe and effective. Perhaps the most important point there is this:
So it's a suboptimal vaccine. And that's a problem. One, because it will make it more difficult to prove efficacy in clinical studies and two, there is a sub group of anti vaccine goofs who seem to require that vaccines either be perfect, with 100% efficacy and 100% safe, or they are not worth taking.
The influenza vaccine is not 100% efficacious in preventing disease, but it is as close to 100% safe, and much…
palmd | October 9, 2009Alternative medicine boosters promote bad health practices that hurt real people---that's been a theme in my writing for nearly three years. It's bad enough that they sell people fake cures and encourage them to avoid real medical care, but apparently, that's not enough anymore. It's getting to the point where they might as well line their victims up against a wall and shoot them. You see now, not satisfied with their current body count, they are suing the FDA to remove the current pandemic flu vaccine. This not only affects the members of their medical cults, but all of us.
According…
oracknows | October 9, 2009Surgeons, especially general surgeons, know that the middle of October is an important time of year. One thing that hospitals notice is that the surgery schedule in the O.R. often slows down considerably for several days. If you're the junior surgeon or otherwise the low man on the totem pole, you suddenly find that it's easy to get O.R. time, that you can book cases at times you normally couldn't before, and that you might even get the better rooms. The reason? Simple. The middle of October is the time when the American College of Surgeons Clinical Congress takes place, and that's where I'm…
j7uy5 | October 9, 2009This is from an open-access article in the Canadian Journal of
Psychiatry: an article featuring a debate about the relevance of
randomized, controlled trials to clinical practice. It is mostly
about research on psychotherapy, but with some treatment of
psychopharmacology.
href="http://publications.cpa-apc.org/browse/documents/468&xwm=true">Are
Randomized Controlled Trials Relevant to Clinical Practice?
Can J Psychiatry. 2009;54(9):637-643.
Steven D Hollon, Bruce E Wampold
There is no abstract. Click on the title to go to the journal
page, then click on the title there to download…
oracknows | October 8, 2009Orac's anti-stupidity circuits just took a serious beating. It's kind of like Star Trek, when the Enterprise is being battered by multiple Klingon warships. After multiple phaser and photon torpedo hits, its shields are down to 10% and in danger of failing.
Orac is feeling sort of like that right now, except that it was a single massive photon torpedo of stupid that hit his logic circuits, courtesy of someone named Jeffrey, who commented:
Orac forgot to mention, in his attempt to character assassinate Dawn, to compensate for body weight compensation for, lets say a 6 lb baby.
A baby gets the…
ejohnson | October 8, 2009In the use of immunopharmacotherapy to treat drug abuse, antigenic molecules are hitched to molecules of the drug to stimulate a future immune response against the drug itself; as DrugMonkey reported this week, a recently published paper offers hopeful evidence that it could be a potentially effective treatment against cocaine addiction, though he cautioned, "It is quite obviously not a silver bullet solution at present. And when you think about it a bit, it never will be." Later on, DrugMonkey looked at another study that tracked the contents of street ecstasy to determine how much actual…
oracknows | October 8, 2009Quackademic medicine has struck again. Worse, it's struck at one of my old stomping grounds. OK, not exactly, but rather close to a past home.
Let me back up a minute.
I know someone who attended nursing school at UMDNJ. It's actually a very good nursing school, but, alas, it has a serious woo streak in it. Yesterday, because of that connection, I was shown a pamphlet that had arrived in the mail. It was a the Continuing Education Catalog for the UMDNJ School of Nursing. At first glance, it looked pretty unremarkable. There were the usual courses in subjects like trauma nursing, clinical…
oracknows | October 7, 2009
Watch CBS News Videos Online
A number of you sent me this link. It's to a video (above) of Sharyl Attkisson, CBS News' resident anti-vaccine propagandist, putting on a nauseating display of sucking up to Andrew Wakefield over his recent monkey study, the one that I deconstructed yesterday to show it for the lousy science that it is. Attkisson is a true believer. She's done this sort of thing before, occasionally to unintentionally hilarious effect; she's especially enamored of writing hit pieces on Paul Offit. Even worse, Attkisson is in bed with Generation Rescue and Age of Autism,…
palmd | October 7, 2009One of my bibles of clinical medicine is Fitzpatrick's Color Atlas and Synopsis of Clinical Dermatology. It's basically a field guide to skin, with hundreds of pictures matched up with brief summaries. The introduction states, "We have endeavored to include information relevant to gender dermatology and a large number of images showing skin disease in different ethnic populations." The book devotes a section on each disease to racial differences. For example, the section on superficial spreading melanoma (p. 312) states that "white-skinned persons overwelmingly predominate. Only 2% [of…
palmd | October 7, 2009Even with cable, there isn't much on TV before six in the morning. On the stationary bike today I was flipping through the channels and I just had to watch the infomercial for No Evil Oil. According to the testimonials, this stuff not only keeps out the Devil, but gets rid of shingles and makes you rich. The smiling preacher with the mullet will send it to you for free (but there are plenty of donation buttons).
You may be asking yourself, "How dumb/desperate/gullible do you have to be to use the No Evil Oil?" Even my most credulous readers would agree that this stuff is snake oil.…
palmd | October 7, 2009I weighed in today at 202#. I'm quite happy about that, given certain dietary indiscretions. I'm finding that as my diet improves overall, these indiscretions don't have quite the negative impact I might expect.
As for exercise, well, a wind storm kept me up last night so I got up and rode the stationary bike. I guess I can keep doing that.
Oh, and I experimented in the kitchen last night. I picked up some fresh fish and veggies to experiment with some ideas. I fried up a couple of chopped up slices of bacon and tossed in the beet greens with some salt, pepper, hot sauce, and a pinch…
oracknows | October 7, 2009As you may have noticed, I've fallen into a groove (or, depending on your point of view, a rut) writing about anti-vaccine lunacy. The reason is simple. While I was busy going nuts over Bill Maher's receiving the Richard Dawkins Award, the anti-vaccine movement has been busy, and there are some things I need to address that had backed up while I was distracted. There's one more thing I need to address before I move on to other topics.
Over the last couple of months, I've noticed something about the anti-vaccine movement. Specifically, I've noticed that the mavens of pseudoscience that make up…
ejohnson | October 6, 2009Announcement of the 2009 Nobel Prize winners began Monday morning with the prize in Physiology or Medicine. The prize was shared between two American and one Australian-American researchers who identified a vital mechanism in genetic operations of cells--Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider, and Jack Szostak. The trio was honored for their discovery of the protective relationship between telomeres and chromosomes, and the role of the enzyme telomerase. The Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry, literature, and the Nobel Peace Prize will be announced later this week, while the economics award will…
oracknows | October 6, 2009Alright, I think I got the whole Maher/Dawkins thing out of my system for now. True, given the highly annoying reaction of one reader, I was half-tempted to write yet another post on the whole fiasco just out of spite, but I decided that spite in and of itself was not a good reason to write a blog post. Well, in this case it isn't, anyway, but if it were someone like Vox Day, or J.B. Handley, or a hapless quack or creationist, well, a wee bit of spite can make for some mighty fine blogging that's really fun to write. True, spite should never be the be-all and end-all of a blog, but certainly…