medicine
jstemwedel | September 24, 2009I ended up spending a significant portion of the last several days down with something flu-like. (It included a fever and the attendant aches, chills, and sweats, as well as the upper respiratory drowning-in-my-own-mucus symptoms.)
I did not drag my ailing butt out of bed to go to the doctor and have my flu-like thing characterized. (In part, this is because I knew it would pass in a few days. In part, it was because I managed to tweak a muscle in my right side by sneezing hard and thus was unable to straighten up or be as mobile as I normally am. Someday, I swear, I am going to figure…
oracknows | September 24, 2009Yesterday, I wrote about Jake Crosby, the token college kid on the spectrum over at the happy home for wandering anti-vaccine zealots, Age of Autism. Specifically, I felt sorry for him because of his rather tortured bit of conspiracy mongering that postulated deep, dark connections between Adam Bly, the founder of Seed Media Group, the company he founded, ScienceBlogs, and multiple big pharma countries, all tied together with a breathtakingly tenuous connections all wrapped up into a big fat ball of nonsense.
Ooops. He did it again, with part 2 of Part II Seed Media's "Science"Blogs: A 180…
j7uy5 | September 24, 2009A recent report refers to
the increasing number of Alzheimer patient an "emergency." Yet,
despite an enormous amount of research, and a handful of drugs, we are
not particularly close to having a robust intervention for this
condition.
Perhaps the reason is that we have been looking in the wrong
place. Traditionally, brain disease tend to be thought of a
neuronal diseases, with many interventions aimed at neurotransmitters,
the chemical messengers that convey information from one neuron to
another. But there is a lot more to the brain than neurons and
transmitters.
One researcher is…
oracknows | September 23, 2009Hurt, but not defeated, the humongous giant clam....
Wait. Wrong story. Actually Science-Based Medicine is back. Finally. Go. Read. Enjoy. Particularly a bit about crank conferences.
oracknows | September 23, 2009Jake's hit pieces against Seed and me reminded me of something. They reminded me of just what it is that the anti-vaccine movement promotes, and the damage that I wish Jake would wake up and realize that the organization he has associated himself with causes a great deal of harm. Part of that harm derives from its antivaccine activities, which are custom-designed to discourage parents from vaccinating with unfounded fears of vaccines causing autism. However, there is another harm that the "vaccines cause autism" movement causes that is not related to the promotion of infectious disease that…
palmd | September 23, 2009Two-Oh-Friggin-Three! Yippee!
(woulda been better without the damned brisket)
oracknows | September 23, 2009That Jake Crosby, he's a crazy mixed-up kid, but I kind of like him.
He seems like a nice enough and smart enough kid, but, sadly, he's fallen in with a bad crowd over at the anti-vaccine crank propaganda blog, Age of Autism, so much so that he's even blogging there, helping, whether he realizes it or not, to promote the message that vaccines cause autism and that various forms of biomedical quackery can somehow "cure" autism. I say "whether he realizes it or not" because he seems to have settled into the role of AoA's token young adult on the spectrum who promotes the party line. Indeed, he'…
palmd | September 23, 2009In case you didn't know, Science Blogs is owned by a company called Seed Media Group. They invite bloggers, host them, give them tech support, and use their blogs to post ad content. And that's it. Bloggers are offered small compensation based on blog hits, but for most bloggers, this ads up to very little. Blog content is independent in every way but one: blogging is by invitation only. Once you're here, you can write whatever you want.
But conspiracy theorists are likely to be unimpressed by this. Seed's ads are everything from major corporate sponsors to google adsense garbage that…
grrlscientist | September 23, 2009tags: healthcare, medical insurance, politics, satire, Will Ferrell, streaming video
It's a rotten job, but someone has got to do it: in this video ad, Will Ferrell stands up for the real victims in this health care debate: health insurance providers themselves!
Protect Insurance Companies PSA from Will Ferrell
oracknows | September 22, 2009Science-based Medicine, a place where sometimes a "friend" of mine pontificates, is temporarily down. Recently, the SBM crew moved the blog to a new server. Beginning over the last two or three weeks, the blog became buggy. Very buggy. Response times became painfully slow, and then last Friday SBM went down and stayed down nearly an entire day. Valiant efforts and arguing with the hosting company got it up and running again over the weekend, although it remained painfully slow to browse. I thought I had harkened back to those days of yore when I used to use a 9600 baud modem. Then, sometime…
ddobbs | September 22, 2009
The swine flu triage tent at Dell's Children's Medical Center, in Austin, Texasphoto: Ralph Barerra, Austin American-Statesman
I can't keep up with the flu news. (If you want to, best single bet -- the wide net -- is Avian Flu Diary.) But as the World Health Organisation meets in Hong-Kong to discuss, among other things, swine flu, here are a couple that make good follow-ups to my Slate piece on how adjuvants gobble up vaccine antigen supply:
WHO pushes for worldwide swine flu vaccinations (hoping to vaccinate 3 billion) -- despite that overall supply will fall short .
The U.S. (and some…
oracknows | September 22, 2009I've often discussed how potentially misleading anecdotal evidence and experience can be. Indeed, I've managed to get into quite a few--shall we say?--heated discussions with a certain woo-friendly pediatrician, who, so confident in his own clinical judgment, just can't accept that his own personal clinical observations could be wrong or even horribly mislead him. Sadly, I've never managed to persuade him just how easy it is for us humans to be deceived or even to deceive ourselves.
However, just because anecdotal evidence can deceive us does not mean that it is worthless. Contrary to the…
ddobbs | September 22, 2009
"One in six patients 'wrongly diagnosed by NHS doctors'," shouts the Daily Mail (via EvidenceMatters. This should not surprise us: Autopsies have been finding a similar percentage of misdiagnosis among the dead for decades. Doctors will always miss some diagnoses. Progress is a matter of ever narrowing the list of things doctors miss -- so the other problems can be diagnosed and treated, letting the patients live longer (till they did of something incurable -- or something we still haven't learned to diagnose. Learn to properly diagnose, say, appendicitis, and you can save the life of a10-…
palmd | September 21, 2009As my readers know, I take a very hard line on alternative medicine, not because I just don't like it, but because it harms, both actively with dangerous treatments, and passively by keeping people from effective science-based treatments. So what am I to think about a hospital in California that is now allowing Hmong shamans to perform healing rituals on patients?
There is a long history of religious and quasi-religious beliefs interfering with good health care. This interference comes in many forms.
"Mainstream" Religions
Religion obviously has a strong influence on people's health…
oracknows | September 21, 2009Given how many of you read this blog and Science-Based Medicine, I thought I should make an announcement. Sometime this morning or early this afternoon, the Science-Based Medicine blog went down, returning only a cryptic message saying that the site has been "suspended." This is the second time it's gone completely down, the first being Friday for most of the day, and the performance of the site has been painfully slow all weekend, with interminable waits for page loads, etc.
The SBM team is aware of the problem. All I can say is that the problem is being worked on, but the technical guys are…
oracknows | September 21, 2009I've asked at least three times on this blog, "Is Bill Maher that ignorant?"
The first time was four and a half years ago, when, in a fit of germ theory denialism, Maher proclaimed erroneously that Louis Pasteur had "recanted" on his deathbed, while spewing nonsense hither and yon about how disease isn't primarily caused by microbes but by "aggregate toxicity," whatever that means in woo-speak. The second time I asked the question occurred in 2008, when Maher lectured David Letterman about "toxins" and and suggested that he consider giving up his heart drugs and pursue "natural" therapies.…
jstemwedel | September 19, 2009The other day, while surfing the web, my better half came upon this semi-official looking symbol for psychohazards:
The verbiage underneath the symbol seem to indicate conditions that might have serious consequences for one's picture of the world and its contents, or for one's ability to come to knowledge about the world. A philosopher who was so inclined could go to town on this.
However, while this particular icon was new to me, this isn't the first time I've seen the term "psychohazard" in use.
A long time ago, I was an undergraduate with an internship working in a cancer pharmacology…
oracknows | September 19, 2009The other day, I ripped a certain woo-meister whom regular readers all know and most, if not all, regular readers mostly despise, Mike Adams of NaturalNews.com. As you may recall, a few days ago he slimed Patrick Swayze the day he died from pancreatic cancer, posting an article saying that Swayze was killed by chemotherapy and that he'd still be alive and Dirty Dancing today if he had only eschewed that horrible, evil Devil's brew of chemotherapy and gone with all "natural" cures. It was simply a followup of an article he wrote back in January saying in essence the same thing, although Adams…
grrlscientist | September 18, 2009tags: Manu, Peru, travel, birding, eco-tourism, vaccinations, Kolibri Expeditions
I was contacted by Gunnar Engblom (Kolibri Expeditions), whom I've been casually acquainted with online for years, asking me if I'd like to be the "official blogger" for a birding trip to Peru. Yeow, would I?!? This unexpected offer surprised me, to say the least, but it didn't take too long for excitement to set in after I realized this was a serious offer: I would get to observe and photograph wild parrots!
Unfortunately, I have recently been preoccupied with several seemingly insurmountable tasks, including…
palmd | September 18, 2009Within 72 hours of starting kindergarten, my daughter caught a cold, and within 72 hours of that, she gave it to me.
The common cold sucks. It affects millions of people every year causing misery and lost days of school and work. It's terribly hard to prevent, and there aren't really any effective treatments. Vitamin C, Echinacea, zinc---all useless. Newer, more expensive antihistamines and steroid nasal sprays, both of which are great for allergies, don't seem to help either. I find myself dispensing lots of grandmotherly advice this time of year. Thankfully, tonight is Rosh Hashanna…