medicine
jstemwedel | July 21, 2009There are days when I imagine that I'll run out of news reports of scientists caught behaving badly to blog about. Then, I check my inbox.
Today, my inbox featured a news item in The Scientist about two medical researchers caught fabricating data:
Two researchers conducting animal studies on immunosuppression lied about experimental methodologies and falsified data in 16 papers and several grants produced over the past 8 years, according to the Office of Research Integrity (ORI). The scientists, Judith Thomas and Juan Contreras, formerly at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB),…
oracknows | July 21, 2009If there's one characteristic of the anti-vaccine movement that helps define them as true cranks, it's a streak of conspiracy theory mania. It's not too much of an exaggeration when I wonder if they think that the Lizard Men have taken over the government, the CDC, and the American Academy of Pediatrics in order to use vaccines in a New World Order plot to make all of our children autistic. Or something. I'm never quite sure. Knowing this particular aspect of the anti-vaccine movement, the only thing that surprises me is that they haven't joined the forces arrayed against President Obama's…
oracknows | July 20, 2009I've had a lot of fun over the last couple of years deconstructing the black holes of woo that a certain advocate of "natural" remedies likes to lay down on a regular basis. Yes, I'm referring to a guy named Mike Adams, who runs a website called NaturalNews.com. Indeed, Adams has made NaturalNews.com a bastion of quackery and outright wingnuttery.
Apparently that isn't enough.
I don't know how long it's been around, but apparently Mike Adams is branching out. Now he's decided that he wants to do a wiki about "natural" living. He's calling it, appropriately enough, Naturalpedia:
Welcome to…
palmd | July 20, 2009In 1994, Congress enacted the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA). This act allows for the marketing and sales of "dietary supplements" with little or no regulation. This act is the work of folks like Tom Harkin (who took large contributions from Herbalife) and Orrin Hatch, whose state of Utah is home to many supplement companies.
DSHEA has a couple of very important consequences (aside from filling the pockets of supplement makers).
What does the FDA require of "supplements"?
Under the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA), the dietary supplement…
oracknows | July 20, 2009Screening for disease, especially cancer, is a real bitch.
I was reminded of this by the publication of a study in BMJ the very day of the Science-Based Medicine Conference a week and a half ago. Unfortunately, between The Amaz!ng Meeting and other activities, I was too busy to give this study the attention it deserved last Monday. Given the media coverage of the study, which in essence tried to paint mammography screening for breast cancer as being either useless or doing more harm than good, I thought it was imperative for me still to write about it. Better late than never, and I was…
grrlscientist | July 20, 2009tags: TEDTalks, medicine, infections, new technology, alpha-gal aptomer, antibiotics, Kary Mullis, streaming video
Drug-resistant bacteria kills, even in top hospitals. But now tough infections like staph and anthrax may be in for a surprise. In this video, Nobel-winning chemist Kary Mullis, who watched a friend die when powerful antibiotics failed, unveils a radical new cure that shows extraordinary promise [4:42]
TEDTalks shares the best ideas from the TED Conference with the world, for free: trusted voices and convention-breaking mavericks, icons and geniuses, all giving the talk of…
grrlscientist | July 18, 2009tags: TEDTalks, medicine, bone marrow, new technology, Marrow Miner, Daniel Kraft, streaming video
Daniel Kraft demonstrates his Marrow Miner -- a new device that quickly harvests life-saving bone marrow with minimal pain to the donor. He emphasizes that the adult stem cells found in bone marrow can be used to treat many terminal conditions, from Parkinson's to heart disease [4:42]
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes.
oracknows | July 17, 2009I realize that this week in practically every new post I've been mentioning TAM7. It hasn't exactly been intentional, believe it or not, at least aside from my recap a on Tuesday and my request for photos from those of you who attended. Oddly enough, although I mentioned how proud I was to be part of the Anti-Anti-Vax Panel discussion, where I joined Joe Albietz, Steve Novella, Mike Goudeau (skeptic, juggler, entertainer, producer, and writer who has an autistic child), Harriet Hall, and Derek Bartholomaus, I didn't really discuss some of the thoughts that the panel's discussion inspired in…
palmd | July 16, 2009An old medical joke goes like this:
An oncologist goes to check on his patient, a 90 year-old man with Alzheimer's disease and metastatic pancreatic cancer. The doc is about to start him on a new round of chemo, but when he goes to the patient's room, he's not there.
He demands of the nurse, "Where's my patient?"
"He took a turn for the worse and was transferred to the ICU. He looks like he's reached the end."
"My patients don't just die!" he says as he picks up the bag of chemo and marches to the ICU. When he gets there, he asks the charge nurse where he can find his patient.
"I'm sorry,…
j7uy5 | July 16, 2009A friend sent me a link to an article about the upcoming fifth edition
of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual. The article speaks of flaws in the process, and warning
of dire "unintended consequences."
href="http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/print/article/10168/1425378?printable=true">
href="http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/print/article/10168/1425378?printable=true">A
Warning Sign on the Road to DSM-V: Beware of Its Unintended Consequences
Allen Frances, MD
June 26, 2009
Psychiatric Times
...I believe that the work on DSM-V has displayed the most…
oracknows | July 16, 2009If there was one thing about going to TAM7 last week, it was the opportunity to contemplate among a thousand fellow skeptics just what critical thinking and reason mean. If there's one thing about woo, pseudoscience, and conspiracy theories in all their forms, it's not just a lack of critical thinking and a plethora of logical fallacies. More importantly, it's the question, "How do we know what we know?" Certainly science is the primary means by which we explore the natural world and make conclusions about how it works, however imperfect they may be, but not everyone uses science, reason, and…
palmd | July 15, 2009I've frequently written that alternative medicine beliefs are much like religion, and often cult-like. When reading about alternative medicine, you'll often encounter charismatic leaders, faith in the unknowable, and conversion experiences. A fine example of the latter is currently up at the Huffington Post. It's written by "Dr" Patricia Fitzgerald, HuffPo's "wellness editor". Just to remind you of her credentials, she is a "Licensed Acupuncturist, Cert. Clinical Nutritionist, Homeopath, [and] Author." In other words, she's not a doctor in any well-recognized sense of the word.
Her…
palmd | July 15, 2009Influenza is a fascinating virus. When it undergoes antigenic shift, as the novel H1N1 ("swine") flu did, it efficiently evades most people's immune systems. Non-novel flu strains are bad enough, but antigenically novel strains can have a ridiculously high attack rate. John Barry's book, The Great Influenza, is a (usually*) terrific read, and describes very clearly what can happen when a novel influenza virus encounters a naive population. In the case of the 1918 pandemic, the circulating virus had not only a very high attack rate, but was also violently virulent, killing a large…
oracknows | July 15, 2009I tell ya, I'm gone for a few days, and the woo-meisters take over the store!
Seriously, I was really, really tempted to blog this over the weekend, even though I was at The Amazing Meeting and even though I had promised myself that I would not blog during the meeting. It was that tempting. Now it's a few days after I first learned about it, and I wondered it it was still worth blogging.
It is.
The story begins with, seemingly innocently enough, a press release by the Lymphoma Association:
We are delighted to announce the appointment of our new Chief Executive, Sally Penrose.
Sally joined us…
oracknows | July 14, 2009Before I close the book on the Science-Based Medicine Conference and TAM7 for 2009, I have a quick request of you, my readers. Specifically, I'd really appreciate it if any of you who were at the SBM Conference and/or TAM7 and took pictures, to send me copies, preferably full resolution. As you might guess, at the SBM Conference I didn't have time to take more than a handful of pictures myself, and obviously I couldn't take pictures of the Anti-Anti-Vax Conference at TAM7 because, well, I was participating in it. The e-mail address is orac@scienceblogs.com.
And thanks to everyone who reads my…
oracknows | July 14, 2009First, Mitchell and Webb took on homeopathy. This week, it's bogus (word choice intentional) "nutritionists":
palmd | July 14, 2009I've got a lot of patients who are worried about health care reform. Most of it is expressed in right-wing radio talking points. They quite literally believe that they will no longer be able to choose their doctor, or that other doom and gloom events are imminent.
Have they no experience with government? Health care reform isn't going to happen quickly. When it does, it will likely have an American character. While socialized medicine works very well in some other countries, Americans just aren't into it, even if it were to work. Whatever I may think about it, it's a non-starter.…
oracknows | July 14, 2009Rerun time is over.
Very early Monday morning, a plane touched down, a car drove along a dark and deserted freeway, and my wife and I found ourselves finally back at home. True, we did have a late night diversion to Denny's because we were starving, but by 2 AM or so we were back home. Time to go to bed. Time to go back to work. No more Las Vegas. No more The Amaz!ng Meeting.
Now what?
I probably should have written this yesterday, or on the plane. It's really amazing how fast impressions become memory and memory morphs and fades. But I was simply too tired. I used to be able to adjust to a…
palmd | July 13, 2009By now, we all know that the Huffington Post represents the zombification of medical news---interesting ideas are taken, eviscerated of any real meaning, their innards replaced with pablum, and the reanimated creature set loose on the world.
Reanimation of the undead is, it would seem, a rather addictive behavior, because HuffPo just keeps at it. Another one of their fake experts is "Dr" John Neustadt. The scare quotes indicate that John is not a doctor in any recognized sense: he's a "naturopathic doctor", representing a fringe, vitalistic health cult. But that fact isn't made clear.…
oracknows | July 13, 2009I just returned from Las Vegas after having attended The Amazing Meeting. Believe it or not, I was even on a panel! However, my flight was scheduled to arrive very late Sunday night, and I'm still recovering. Consequently, for one more day I'll be reposting some Classic Insolence from the month of July in years past. (After all, if you haven't been following this blog at least a year, it'll be new to you. And if you have I hope you enjoy it again.) This particular post first appeared in July 2007.
The other day, Sid Schwab, surgeon blogger extraordinaire, brought up a question that, I'm…