medicine
palmd | August 27, 2009I sometimes feel that if I don't crank out two posts a day, I must have "lost it", whatever "it" is. But I've got the shpilkes and I have to write something.
The end of the week is hard. Wednesday and Thursday are long days for me, and after I put my kiddo to bed Tuesday night, I often don't see her again until Friday night. This isn't cool at all. She start kindergarten in a few weeks, and I'm trying to arrange my schedule so that most mornings I can get her up and get her to school before I go to work. That'll mean getting up earlier and fighting with a cranky kid, but it'll…
oracknows | August 27, 2009Want to know what will start my teeth grinding when I read it in a newspaper? That's easy. It's headlines like this one, which appeared two days ago in The Telegraph:
Scientists two years from developing 'potential cure' for breast cancer
The subtitle was even worse:
British scientists could be just two years away from developing a drug that may be a "potential cure" for breast cancer, it has been claimed.
Hear that grating? It's the sound of my teeth grinding together. The reason is simple. It's just plain silly to make claims like this about a basic science paper given that, as I have…
j7uy5 | August 27, 2009The health care reform process is getting extremely ugly.
href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/healthcare/la-na-healthcare-insurers24-2009aug24,0,6925890.story">
href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/healthcare/la-na-healthcare-insurers24-2009aug24,0,6925890.story">Healthcare
insurers get upper hand
Obama's overhaul fight is being won by the industry, experts say. The
end result may be a financial 'bonanza.'
LA Times
By Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger
August 24, 2009
href="http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090823_this_isnt_reform_its_robbery/">…
oracknows | August 26, 2009I realize that I've gotten into one of those runs where it seems that all I blog about is anti-vaccinationist loons, but, before trying once again to take a break from the madness, I had to go to the well one more time because this looks a bit frightening:
NBC News' Matt Lauer will take an unprecedented look at the emotional debate surrounding vaccines and the suggested link to autism on Sunday, August 30 at 7 p.m. ET with "Dose of Controversy." In the one-hour Dateline, Lauer speaks exclusively with Dr. Andrew Wakefield, whose 1998 medical study was the first in the world to suggest a…
oracknows | August 26, 2009I realize that I'm possibly stepping into proverbial lion's den with this one, but a man's got to do what a man's got to do. As you may recall, former ScienceBlogs bloggers Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum (and current Discover Magazine bloggers) recently released a book called Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future. As you may also recall, the arguments and assertions that Chris and Sheril made in their book ruffled more than a few feathers around ScienceBlogs, chief among them the big macher of atheism around here, P.Z. Myers, who really, really didn't like…
palmd | August 26, 2009So, I ate a big meal last night and I'm at 206 today. I think I've gotten a little out of hand with the "cheating". I'm going to have to be more attentive to what I'm shoving down my gullet. Ugh. Well, back to work, then.
ejohnson | August 25, 2009
Though reported Swine Flu cases have dwindled over the summer months, the Centers for Disease Control warns that a full-blown pandemic is on the horizon as fall inaugurates the 2009-2010 Flu Season, mirroring the progression of the 1918 Spanish Influenza. Now, with the advent of vaccines and medical technologies, as well as improved personal and public hygiene, communities are better equipped to control the spread of infectious disease. As the nation waits for the release of the H1N1 vaccine, ScienceBloggers weigh in on the implications, applications, and ethics of preventing, tracking, and…
palmd | August 25, 2009The Right is desperate---desperate to derail any sort of health care reform. Notably absent from their diatribes is any debate on the merits of one plan or another. They know that the only way to convince Americans to keep the terrible system we have now is to make them think that any reform would be worse. And so they are blowing their dog whistles, talking about "culture of life" and "culture of death", and along the way encouraging ignorance about one of the most important aspects of medical care.
Any rational person knows that there are no proposed "death panels"---it's a blatant lie…
oracknows | August 25, 2009Geez, I wonder if Larry Moran knows about this. If he doesn't, I'm going to make sure that he does. I'm also guessing that he won't be pleased. He doesn't like pseudoscience at all. He detests "intelligent design" creationists. Based on that, I'm guessing that he won't like it at all to learn that the Canadian version of the autism "biomedical" antivaccine quackfest known as Autism One is metastasizing from its usual location in Chicago every Memorial Day to held at the University of Toronto in October, as this advertisement shows:
If you live in Canada, the Northeastern United States, the…
oracknows | August 24, 2009The anti-vaccine movement is nothing if not plastic. It "evolves" very rapidly in response to selective pressures applied to it in the form of science refuting its key beliefs. For instance, when multiple studies looking at the MMR vaccine and autism failed to confirm the myth that the MMR causes autism or "autistic enterocolitis," most recently late last year, it was not a problem to the anti-vaccine movement. Neither was it a major problem to the movement when multiple studies similarly failed to find a link between mercury in the preservative thimerosal that used to be in most childhood…
palmd | August 24, 2009No, I haven't given up on my diet lifestyle change. I've done a little bit of sinning, especially Friday night at Skeptics in the Pub---beer, burgers, nachos...you name it.
Interestingly, it turns out that it's more uncomfortable for me to overeat than it used to be. I'm not sure why that is (but don't throw around the "shrinking stomach" myth around here). I used to be able to scarf down a large pizza without a thought. Now, I can still do it (and still might) but I feel like shit afterward.
I wasn't too good about exercise last week, and I didn't get around to riding the bike this…
palmd | August 24, 2009People who support our current abominable health care system like to cite Canada's supposed failures as an example of what could happen to us. The argument is a non-starter---it's a straw man designed to scare people. We are a very different country, with a different economy and different needs. Even with a single-payer system, we are unlikely to have the exact same successes and failures as the Canadians. Still, the Right has latched on to any lie they can to try to scare us. That's why a recent article from my hometown newspaper is so upsetting.
Any of us who have practiced medicine…
palmd | August 24, 2009OK, it's time for another science-y post. Usually, I take on something very relevant to my specialty---it's a helluva lot easier to write about stuff I already know. But some basics are just really cool, and worth exploring, even though I'll have to step a bit outside my comfort zone. In this case, it's the heart. Because I'm venturing a bit on the wild side, I consulted an expert, whose hot, hot science helped illuminate this topic.
If you've taken a basic biology course, you probably have some idea of how the human heart works, but understanding can be a bit deeper if we look at the heart…
oracknows | August 23, 2009I must admit that I've never heard of Margerite Kelly. Apparently she's some sort of advice columnist for the Washington Post. Apparently she's also fairly clueless, if her column from last Friday is any indication. At least, she's clueless about autism. In her column Diagnosing Autism Is Never an Easy Process, she betrays a whole lot of ignorance about autism, autism treatments, and the quackery that is being sold to parents as a "cure" for autism.
A parent writes to Ms. Kelly about her two-year-old nephew, who is throwing tantrums and showing signs that concern her that he may be autistic.…
palmd | August 23, 2009My friend Janet has a piece up about what qualifies one to be a philosopher, a piece which is remarkably brief but says much. She points out that get a position at a university, there are certain requirements, but that one can be "off the books". Anyone can call themselves a philosopher, and if enough of us assent to their claim, well, then they're a philosopher, no matter how muddled their thinking may or may not be.
In medicine, we have a similar problem---the problem of assent. To become a primary care doctor (a category which includes internists and family physicians) the "official"…
palmd | August 23, 2009I'm really trying to understand this. Really. Why is the outcry against health care reform so much louder than the call for reform? I have a very hard time believing that a majority of people are against some sort of improvement in our system. Around here, people are losing their insurance right and left. But they sometimes seem more scared of reform than of remaining uninsured.
Those of us in favor of a single payer system are shut out of this one. "Medicare for all" is uttered only quietly among well-known co-conspirators. When people who oppose this plan, or even just oppose the…
oracknows | August 22, 2009I know this one's been floating around the blogosphere for a while, but it finally made its way to me at a time when I needed something lighthearted and amusing:
Best quotes:
"Well, science doesn't know everything." Well, science knows it doesn't know anything, otherwise it would stop ... But just because science doesn't know everything doesn't mean you can fill in the gaps with whatever fairytale most appeals to you."
..."nutritionist" isn't a protected term. Anyone can call themselves a nutritionist. "Dietitician" is the legally protected term. "Dietician" is like dentist, and "…
jstemwedel | August 21, 2009This week the New York Times reported on the problem of drug company-sponsored ghostwriting of articles in the scientific literature:
A growing body of evidence suggests that doctors at some of the nation's top medical schools have been attaching their names and lending their reputations to scientific papers that were drafted by ghostwriters working for drug companies -- articles that were carefully calibrated to help the manufacturers sell more products.
Experts in medical ethics condemn this practice as a breach of the public trust. Yet many universities have been slow to recognize the…
oracknows | August 21, 2009If there's one form of pseudoscientific health care (if you can call it that) that rests on the most risibly implausible tenets, I'd have to say that it's homeopathy. Either that, or homeopathy and various "energy medicine" modalities would have to fight it out in a no woo barred cage match to the death for the title of most scientifically ridiculous medical "therapy." Unfortunately, because of its history, where in the 1800s it was often actually as good or better than the "scientific" medicine of the time (mainly because homeopathy is nothing more than water--in essence doing nothing--and…