medicine
oracknows | September 18, 2009Somehow I don't think any cosmetics company today could get away with doing an experiment like this to prove how well its cold cream cleans the most dirt and makeup residue from a model's skin.
I'd also really love a copy of the "Atomic Test Booklet" that people could mail the company to request. You'd never guess from the title that it's about makeup. Also, I have to wonder. Some 50 or 60 years later:
Is the model in this commercial still alive?
How many skin cancers did she have removed from her face?
Inquiring minds wnat to know!
oracknows | September 18, 2009I just found out via one of the mailing lists I'm on of a very disturbing case in Kermit, Texas. Two nurses who were dismayed and disturbed by a physician peddling all manner of herbal supplements reported him to the authorities. Now, they are facing jail:
In a stunning display of good ol' boy idiocy and abuse of prosecutorial discretion, two West Texas nurses have been fired from their jobs and indicted with a third-degree felony carrying potential penalties of two-to-ten years' imprisonment and a maximum fine of $10,000. Why? Because they exercised a basic tenet of the nurse's Code of…
ddobbs | September 17, 2009
My latest piece for Slate examines the unsettling consequences of the United States' choice of swine flu vaccines.
The good news about these vaccines is that, to judge by the first vaccine trial results, published last week, they appear to work fast, safely â and at about a half to a quarter of the doses that the CDC expected. This means we effectively have about two to four times as many vaccines as we had figured we would. Since we ordered 195 million doses, we could vaccinate damn near the whole country.
If the fast-tracking efforts continue to work and the flu peaks closer to Christmas…
oracknows | September 17, 2009Even with the H1N1 pandemic flu going around you should still be vaccinated against the seasonal flu. revere has the details.
I guess that means Dr. Doug Bremner must think that revere is an idiot. After all, Bremner tells us that the flu vaccine is all a plot for big pharma to make money, don't you know? Subtlety and weighing of risk-benefit ratios in a manner that doesn't turn into an anti-big pharma rant is beyond him. Fortunately it is not beyond revere:
The truth is this. No one knows what's going to happen. We're all guessing. But in my estimation, the risk-benefit calculation for…
terrasig | September 17, 2009
From today's article by the always-interesting Sarah Avery at the News & Observer:
After several failed attempts to extract the item, Manley was referred to another doctor, who suggested removing the entire left lung. "I said, no, I wouldn't be doing that," Manley says.
That's when he decided to seek a second opinion at Duke University Medical Center.
We've heard of "hot tub lung" and "popcorn lung" but my chest hurts just thinking about "jagged, fast-food implement lung."
If this case does not make it into the New England Journal of Medicine, I will be disappointed.
Photo credit: Duke…
oracknows | September 17, 2009Pity poor Nick Gonzalez.
Sorry, I couldn't resist. After having used the same line when discussing the hugely enjoyable humiliation of the Godfather of HIV/AIDS denialism, Peter Duesberg, I couldn't resist using the same line to introduce my response to Dr. Gonzalez's woo-ful whine in response to the publication of the disastrous (for him and any patient unfortunate enough to be in the arm receiving his protocol) clinical trial that demonstrated about as unequivocally as it is possible to demonstrate that his "protocol" to treat pancreatic cancer is nothing more than as steaming and stinking…
oracknows | September 16, 2009It looks like my prediction about Patrick Swayze came true. Not that it was a stretch to foresee that the Woo-meister Supreme Mike Adams of NaturalNews.com would waste no time in violating the corpse of Patrick Swayze before he was even cold by using Swayze's death as an excuse to repeat once again his oft-repeated misinformation and lies about chemotherapy and "natural" therapies. After all, he did it before for Tony Snow, so why not Patrick Swayze? In fact, I strongly suspect that Adams had this rant written months ago, ready and waiting for Patrick Swayze's death. All he had to do then was…
palmd | September 16, 2009I started this little adventure on August 5th, and at the time my BMI was over 30 and I weighed about 212#. Today, it's 203#.
It's an interesting journey. For the first time, I've found what seems like a sustainable way to eat healthy. I feel like I'm actually a good role model for my daughter and my patients. I've also eaten several acres of lettuce.
In the beginning I stated that if you're not hungry, you're doing it wrong, and was taken to task by many educated readers. And while I don't always feel hungry, I do wonder about certain phenotypic differences between individuals. "…
palmd | September 15, 2009A recent piece of mine caused a bit of a "blogwar", if you will. It lead to a "rebuttal" on Dr. Bremner's blog, and an additional response from Dr. David Gorski. The discussion has been interesting (no, not Doug's incoherent response, but the comments and emails of others). One letter in particular helps sum up the ideologic rift between science-based medicine and "everything else".
The following was written by a physician:
I would ask Drs Gorski and Lipson if an iconoclast like Dr Bremner might be serving a valuable role as gadfly to an entrenched failing status quo in bio-medicine who…
oracknows | September 15, 2009Pity poor Peter Duesberg.
Back in the 1980s, he was on the top of the world, scientifically speaking. A brilliant virologist with an impressive record of accomplishment, publication, and funding, he seemed to be on a short track to an eventual Nobel Prize. Then something happened. The AIDS epidemic happened. Something about the AIDS epidemic led this excellent scientist in the late 1980s to fall directly into pseudoscience and crankery by latching onto and promoting the idea that HIV does not cause AIDS. Of course, at the time scientists didn't yet know a lot about the virus and how it slowly…
grrlscientist | September 15, 2009tags: CIGNA, health insurance, medical care, health care, Edward Hanway, denial of care, health care rationing, streaming video
CIGNA Chairman and CEO, Edward Hanway, spends his holidays in a $13 million beach house in New Jersey. Meanwhile, regular Americans are routinely denied coverage for the care they need when they need it most.
Welcome to the American health insurance industry. Instead of helping policyholders attain the health security they need for their families, big insurance companies get rich by denying coverage to patients. Now theyre sending lobbyists to Washington, DC to twist…
oracknows | September 14, 2009
I just learned that earlier today Patrick Swayze finally died of his pancreatic cancer after having survived far longer (20 months) than the average patient diagnosed with stage IV disease (less than 6 months). All I can say is: Rest in peace, Patrick. Not only did Swayze deal with his terminal illness with courage, humor, and panache, but he was awesome when he slapped down the quacks offering bogus cancer cures:
If anybody had that cure out there, like so many people swear they do, you'd be two things. You'd be very rich, and you'd be very famous. Otherwise, shut up.
The recent…
palmd | September 14, 2009There has been a murmur (albeit an insane one) at many of the anti-Obama and anti-health care reform rallies about the Nazi "T4" program, something most Americans have never heard of. The absurd analogy apparently goes like this: the Nazis euthanized undesirables, and the proposed health bill would effectively do the same thing, therefore Obama is Hitler.
Let's back up a bit. Aktion T4 was Hitler's personal pet program of tasking the medical community to identify and murder those considered "incurable". In practice, this meant the murder of the mentally ill and cognitively disabled---the…
ddobbs | September 14, 2009I regret I can't treat at more, um, length, the following weighty matters:
Size Matters; So Do Lies Nate Silver finds that Matt Kibbe, the president of FreedomWorks, speaking of the 9/12 tea party rally in DC, " did the equivalent of telling people that his penis is 53 inches long."
Dr. Nobody Again Questions JAMA Disclosure Policies in which Philip Dawdy and Jonathan Leo, a dangerous combination, butt heads with JAMA
Self-Destruct Button, Activiated! Baucus and Conrad decide maybe Joe Wilson had a point after all. Swine Flu Mystery in Healthy Young Puts Focus on Genetics, Deep Inhaling (…
j7uy5 | September 14, 2009The SEIU website makes an
href="http://www.seiu.org/2009/09/domestic-violence-victims-have-a-pre-existing-condition.php">astonishing
claim:
But, in DC and nine other states, including Arkansas,
Idaho, Mississippi, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South
Carolina, South Dakota, and Wyoming, insurance companies have gone too
far, claiming that "domestic violence victim" is also a pre-existing
condition.
Words cannot describe the sheer inhumanity of this claim. It serves as
yet further proof that our insurance system is broken, destroyed by the
profit-mongering of the very companies…
oracknows | September 14, 2009The silence is deafening.
Yes, I know it's a cliche, but it's really true this time. Last month, a major study whose results had been anticipated by the alt-med community, as well as those of us who consider it to be highly unethical pseudoscience, were reported. However, they were reported without fanfare, without press releases, without any sort of publicity whatsoever. Only a handful of bloggers who have paid attention to the issue (myself included) even noticed, and even I wouldn't have noticed if someone hadn't forwarded the journal article to me and asked me what I thought of it. So…
palmd | September 14, 2009I got a little cranky earlier during a facebook discussion, then heard the voice of a friend in the back of my head saying, "Blog it! Blog that shit!"
And I was about to, when the hospital called with a minor crisis, and then I realized it was the probably one of the last nice days of they year, so I went to the pool with the family, then my wife made a yummy dinner...you get the idea. Anyway, here's the deal. I was reading this piece in the Times about a woman with a complex disease who died at least in part because of our Byzantine health care system. It was a familiar story.
And it's…
oracknows | September 13, 2009We all know that Mike Adams, a.k.a. the "Health Ranger," is anti-vaccine to the core. He's known for NaturalNews.com, a repository of quackery, anti-vaccine craziness, and conspiracy theories that rivals Whale.to but in a much slicker fashion. Now, unfortunately, I learn that he's going multimedia. Worse, Mike Rangers, who is about as white bread and un-hip-hop a guy as I can imagine, thinks he can rap:
The song is called "Don't Inject Me (The Swine Flu Vaccine Song)."
The common lies about the swine flu are all there: The claim that flu vaccines don't work; the paranoid delusion that the "…
oracknows | September 12, 2009Three weeks ago or so, I expressed dismay at what I perceived as an autism quackfest being held at the University of Toronto. Worse, that quackfest had been partially funded by a grant from a very prestigious children's charity, The SickKids Foundation, which in response to complaints about its sponsoring the autism quackfest known as AutismOne/Autism Canada 2009 Conference, wrote a limp and pusillanimous form e-mail that it sent to everyone who complained. It was truly disappointing to see that an organization that should be supporting science-based research into the treatment of children's…
ddobbs | September 12, 2009
via youtube.com
As Gooznews (h/t) put it, "This says it all."
My own rant will come later.
Posted via web from David Dobbs's Somatic Marker