medicine
oracknows | June 11, 2009I know I've been very hard on Oprah Winfrey the last couple of weeks, taking her to task for her promotion on her show of medicine that is at best dubious and at worst quackery, as promoted by frequent guests like Suzanne Somers, Dr. Christiane Northrup, and the queen of the anti-vaccine movement, Jenny "I'm not anti-vaccine but would never, ever vaccinate" McCarthy. Not that Oprah cares. After all, she's Oprah, and I'm only a lowly blogger who, although having one of the top medical blogs out there, is as an ant to Oprah's elephant of a media empire. Still, NEWSWEEK did a fantastic expose of…
oracknows | June 10, 2009I never thought I'd see it, but I have. After an a decent article on the infiltration of quackademic medicine into American medical centers and a very good article on cancer quackery, Marilyn Marchione of the AP has done it again:
AP IMPACT: $2.5B spent, no alternative med cures
It almost seems as though Ms. Marchione is channeling Orac:
BETHESDA, Md. -- Ten years ago the government set out to test herbal and other alternative health remedies to find the ones that work. After spending $2.5 billion, the disappointing answer seems to be that almost none of them do.
Echinacea for colds. Ginkgo…
palmd | June 10, 2009The Huffington Post put up a good piece about vaccination. It's by Dr. Harvey Karp, and he does an especially nice job looking at some of the "scary numbers" used by the infectious disease promoters.
He's also getting swamped with wackaloon comments, so if you don't mind giving HuffPo your clicks, you might want to check it out.
BTW, JB Handley has written that Karp is, "a completely arrogant asshole with little grasp of the facts," so you know his creds are legit.
Addendum:
Holy Karp! My head re-asploded! Thanks to our alert reader below, I see that Karp only made a little sense. I…
jstemwedel | June 10, 2009Almost a month ago, I told you about a pair of new case studies released by The Global Campaign for Microbicides which examine why a pair of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) clinical trials looking at the effectiveness of antiretrovirals in preventing HIV infection were halted. In that post, I also proposed that we read and discuss these case studies as a sort of ethics book club.
Next Monday, June 15, we'll be kicking off our discussion of the first case study, "Research Rashomon: Lessons from the Cameroon Pre-exposure Prophylaxis Trial Site" (PDF).
The case study is on the long side (54…
oracknows | June 10, 2009"Empowerment."
What a grand word! After all, who doesn't want to be "empowered"? Certainly not me. Perhaps that's the reason why it's become the new buzzword in a movement known as "patient-centered" care. Old fart that I am, I'm a bit puzzled by exactly what that term means. After all, I've always thought I have been practicing patient-centered care, ever since my first days in medical school, but apparently these days it means something different, at least if this article from a few days ago in the New York Times is any indication. It's an interview with Dr. Donald Berwick, who advocates…
palmd | June 9, 2009One of the concepts we often discuss around here is "what is disease?" As we've seen in the discussion of Lyme disease and so-called Morgellons syndrome, this is not always an easy question to answer. Knowing what states are disease states does not always yield a black-or-white answer. The first step is usually to define what a disease is. The next problem is to decide who in fact has that disease. The first question is hard enough, especially in disease states that we don't understand too well. The second question can be equally tricky. To explore the scientific and philosophical…
oracknows | June 9, 2009Yesterday, I marveled at an article that appeared on the Associated Press new feed that basically said a lot of things about the infiltration of quackademic medicine into academic medical centers, how so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" 9CAM) is finding its way into the mainstream despite almost nonexistent evidence for the efficacy the vast majority of them, and how supplements are virtually unregulated. If the article had mentioned the extreme scientific and biological implausibility of nearly all of the non-herbal CAM therapies that are routinely promoted, it would have…
j7uy5 | June 9, 2009Market Folly writes of a new hedge fund strategy, and asks if there are
any more ideas
href="http://seekingalpha.com/article/141982-hedge-funds-latest-idea-investing-in-lawsuits">like
this:
We came across this interesting piece in Dealbook the other
day and thought it was very intriguing. Simply put: hedge funds are now
investing in lawsuits. The premise is pretty simple: they invest in one
side of the lawsuit and get a share of the winnings (if, of course,
they win the case)...
...If you think about it, it makes sense. These investors essentially
'bankroll' a litigation team, thus…
oracknows | June 8, 2009Vaccines have saved more lives and prevented more suffering than any medical invention ever conceived by humans. However, to be most effective, a large enough fraction of the population to produce herd immunity needs to be immunized. When the herd immunity threshold is reached, then the chances of anyone carrying a microorganism to cause disease drops, leaving no reservoir of infectious agent to facilitate disease spread. The end result is that the unvaccinated are also protected, which is important for children who can't be vaccinated because they are either too young, have a medical…
jstemwedel | June 8, 2009In a post a couple weeks ago, I commented on the ethical dimension of opting out of vaccination against serious contagious diseases:
Of course, parents are accountable to the kids they are raising. They have a duty to do what is best for them, as well as they can determine what that is. They probably also have a duty to put some effort into making a sensible determination of what's best for their kids (which may involve seeking out expert advice, and evaluating who has the expertise to be offering trustworthy advice).
But parents and kids are also part of a community, and arguably they are…
oracknows | June 8, 2009Here we go again.
As regular readers know, I've lamented long and loud the infiltration of unscientific "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM, or what Dr. RW dubbed "quackademic medicine, a term I very much like) into medical school curricula, academic medical centers, and postgraduate medical education. A while back, in particular, I got rather worked up over how the University of Maryland's respected Shock Trauma Center. But it wasn't just any woo. Rather, it was one of the absolute woo-iest of woos, namely reiki, which is nothing more than magical faith healing based on Eastern…
jstemwedel | June 7, 2009The New York Times has an article about a physician-scientist caught in scientific misconduct. The particular physician-scientist, Dr. Timothy R. Kuklo, was an Army surgeon working at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He is now (for the time being anyway) a professor of medicine at Washington University in St. Louis. Since the wrongdoing of which Kuklo was accused happened while he was at Walter Reed, the Army investigated.
That investigation "substantiated all the accusations against the physician."
The Kuklo case has lots of ethical issues we've seen before. The New York Times article…
palmd | June 7, 2009A "fan" on twitter sent me the crushing news that all I believed about the science of Lyme disease is wrong. Unlike many fans, he cited a source, a well-known New England publication. The New England Journal of Medicine? Nope. The Darien (CT) Times.
According to the headline, "surveys refute national Lyme disease findings." So they must at least be quoting a science publication. Right?
Actually, they are quoting the famous work of one Kent Haydock, chairman of the Deer Management Committee. How did he accomplish this astonishing first act in what will no doubt be a stunning scientific…
oracknows | June 7, 2009I'm busy working on a talk today, but there is a tidbit that lends itself to a brief (and hopefully amusing and educational) Sunday exercise. It comes, not surprisingly, from the anti-vaccine blog Age of Autism. It doesn't actually have anything to do with vaccines per se, but it is a perfect encapsulation of the sort of fallacious statements and arguments that pseudoscientists in general make. Indeed, this comment could easily have come from a creationist, religious, alternative medicine, New Age, or 9/11 Truther website, among others and fit right in.
Specifically, it is a comment that the…
oracknows | June 6, 2009Dr. Jay is back.
You remember Dr. Jay (namely Dr. Jay "I'm not anti-vaccine but I give vaccines only 'reluctantly' and am convinced that they cause autism" Gordon), pediatrician to Evan, Jenny McCarthy's son and frequent apologist for the antivaccine movement in the media. Specifically, he was most unhappy over my posts about Dr. Bob "too many too soon" Sears and about a child who died of Hib. If you peruse the comments in those two posts, you will see him once again disparaging science, touting his own personal clinical experience over the science failing to find a link between vaccines and…
oracknows | June 5, 2009SETTING: A NONDESCRIPT CLINIC IN AUSTIN, TEXAS
TIME: AFTER DARK
It had been a long, hard day at the clinic. The man trudged to the back of the building and plopped himself down on a large, cushy leather office chair, causing it to spin around. He was fiftyish, but still boyish in appearance, possessed of a seemingly unflappable self-confidence. Even so, he was not happy.
Damn, I hate being here. He thought. I'd much rather be back in London than stuck in this hick state. At least Austin is about as good as it gets here. I suppose it could be worse; I could be in Arkansas.
He sighed. "Damn…
palmd | June 4, 2009One of Oprah's favorite resources for women's health is Dr. Christiane Northrup, a gynecologist with bizarre ideas about health and disease. On the air, she has disputed the connection between HPV and cervical cancer, an uncontroversial scientific fact. Her un-belief in an important scientific fact is disturbing, but if you dig around her published writing a bit, it's even scarier. This doctor is to women's health what Dick Cheney is to human rights.
Northrup on fibroids
Uterine leiomyomas, better known as fibroid tumors, are common, non-cancerous tumors of the uterus. They can be…
oracknows | June 4, 2009
Back in May many of us in the skeptical blogosphere were alarmed to learn of what British law blogger Jack of Kent termed "an astonishingly illiberal ruling" by Sir David Eady against science writer Simon Singh. Eady was the judge presiding over another bit of legal thuggery by practitioners whose feelings were hurt when Simon Singh called them out in print for their 'promotion of chiropractic to treat all sorts of conditions for which it is utterly useless, referring to the British Chiropractic Association as promoting "bogus" remedies. When I wrote about this case nearly a month ago, I…
grrlscientist | June 4, 2009tags: NYC, New York City, Manhattan, swine flu, influenza, A/H1N1 Influenza, New York Academy of Sciences, NYAS
This is an overview of the NYAS symposium about Influenza A/H1N1 "swine flu" outbreak that I was invited to attend on 28 May 2009 in NYC.
Under the auspices of the New York Academy of Sciences' Emerging Infectious Diseases and Microbiology Discussion Group, vaccine experts, epidemiologists, and policymakers from around the United States met in New York City to discuss the current outbreak of Influenza A/H1N1 -- "swine flu." The program presented information about influenza…
oracknows | June 4, 2009I've warned time and time again what the price will be if the Jenny McCarthy and her fellow arrogantly ignorant band of vaccine "skeptics" continue to get more and more traction. So have many others. It is true that, for the moment, vaccination rates overall remain high in the U.S., but there are numerous troubling signs that the propaganda being spread by Generation Rescue and the anti-vaccine movement is having an effect, with outbreaks of vaccine-preventble diseases popping up in areas with high levels of "philosophical" exemptions. In such areas, vaccination rates can easily fall well…