medicine
palmd | June 3, 2009We've been hearing a lot about the new H1N1 ("swine") flu which is moving quickly around the globe. It's reasonably likely to be declared "pandemic" in the next few days. Here on the ground, it's almost like having a second flu season. Normally by this time of year, seasonal flu is sporadic to absent and at the walk-in clinic we see the usual assortment of colds, strep throats, poison ivy, and ankle sprains. Instead, we've had all of that layered on top of a steady trickle of flu.
Each colored line represents flu-like illnesses reported to the CDC. The blue and green lines (last season…
oracknows | June 3, 2009What should a drug company do if it spends millions of dollars on a compound and it doesn't do anything? Easy:
(Click on the panel to see the whole cartoon.)
In fact, I'm surprised more pharmaceutical companies don't do this...
ejohnson | June 3, 2009
Though Liberia's 14-year civil war ended in 2003, wartime effects are still evident in the country's horrific incidence of sexual violence; between January and April of this year, Doctors Without Borders treated over 275 new cases of sexual abuse in Liberia, 61% involving children under the age of 12. During the month of June, ScienceBlogger Isis the Scientist, in collaboration with Sheril Kirshenbaum of The Intersection, will lead a fund-raising and awareness campaign against the rape and abuse of girls in Liberia, titled Silence is the Enemy. Earnings from several ScienceBloggers' blogs—…
tqa | June 3, 2009
James Kirchick has an op-ed up in today's Wall Street Journal that addresses the reaction to the murder of Dr. George Tiller. Or so he might want to believe. In actuality, Kirchick is responding to the portion of the reaction that he wants to see, and not to the range of opinion that is out there.
There is no appreciable number of people in this country, religious Christians or otherwise, who support the murder of abortion doctors. The same cannot be said of Muslims who support suicide bombings in the name of their religion.
Not only has Kirchick clearly missed the moral munchkins…
oracknows | June 3, 2009Yesterday, I wrote a post about what fellow ScienceBlogger Isis would term "hot, hot science." As much as I love science like that, writing such posts is a lot of work and takes considerably longer than my run-of-the-mill bit of insolent brilliance. Often, after writing an analysis of a peer-reviewed paper like that, I need a bit of a break. No, not a break in writing, but a break in difficulty. To that end, I had seen David Kirby's latest bit of disingenuous goalpost shifting over on The Huffington Post, but damn if Steve Novella didn't beat me to it. I had thought of taking sloppy seconds,…
grrlscientist | June 2, 2009tags: Post-Traumatic Embitterment Disorder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Adaptation disorder, stress reaction, Adjustment disorder, Negative life events, psychology, behavior, psychiatry, peer-reviewed paper
[larger view]
In this economy, nearly everyone has experienced unemployment, bankruptcy, foreclosure, divorce, or some combination thereof. But roughly 1-2% of these people become so stressed out by these losses that "they can barely function other than to ruminate about their circumstances," according to Dr. Michael Linden, the German psychiatrist who described and named Post-…
oracknows | June 2, 2009Three years ago, I wrote about what I considered to be a fascinating and promising approach to understanding tumor biology. This method involved understanding that tumors are in general made up of a heterogeneous collection of cells. Using this knowledge, it is possible to apply evolutionary principles to cancer, treating a tumor as, in essence, an ecosystem. Indeed, that is exactly what Maley et al did three years ago. They applied evolutionary principles to the precancerous lesion in the distal esophagus known as Barrett's esophagus by examining various measures of population diversity in…
palmd | June 1, 2009I don't even know how to write about this. I drives me toward silence, which is the wrong direction. Sheril Kirshenbaum at The Intersection says it better than I ever could. She reaches out with her own personal tale of sexual assault. Imagine her story, but millions of times over---women, girls, infants; some raped, some raped and murdered, many raped and mutilated; many infected with HIV, and too afraid to seek treatment. Just this year, the UNHCR reported that fewer than half of Liberian women who are diagnosed with HIV seek out care. The stigma of HIV is thought to be much higher in…
ejohnson | June 1, 2009
The anti-vaccine movement has infiltrated society so thoroughly that correcting the trend of misinformation might verge on the impossible, argues Liza Gross in a PLoS Biology paper published last Tuesday. The public's lack of trust in the authority and motivations of doctors and of governmental health organizations is one factor cited in the article, as well as the frequent media portrayal of the vaccine-antivaccine debate as a balanced fight. ScienceBloggers Janet Stemwedel, Orac, and Peter Lipson weighed in on two questions raised by the paper and the responses it garnered—as Janet asks, "…
tqa | June 1, 2009
It's easy, as Nicholas Kristof points out, to think and talk about international affairs in abstract terms. Most of us are living comfortable lives in comfortable countries. We have the luxury of being able to afford to think about things that are happening beyond our own borders, even when they're unlikely to affect us directly. We can talk and think about what's happened or what is happening in Bosnia, in Darfur, in Cambodia, in the Sudan. We can think and talk about things we can do to make things better in those places, and sometimes we can carry through with our plans.
It's not as…
clock | June 1, 2009If you read this blog even superficially, you are probably aware of everyONE, the community blog of PLoS ONE. The blog has been so successful, that our colleagues at PLoS Medicine have decided to follow our example and start their own community blog.
And, today they are ready to reveal - Speaking of Medicine. Go check it out - click on all the tabs on top for all the additional information. Bookmark and subscribed. Spread the word about it. And come back often and use it - and post comments.
oracknows | June 1, 2009Last week I wrote a bit about what I've been tempted to call Oprah's War on Science but settled for the title of a documentary called The Oprah Effect. The reason, as I have mentioned before, is that arguably there is no single person who does more to promote pseudoscientific and dubious health practices than does Oprah Winfrey. I was happy to learn that more people are questioning Oprah's promotion of outright quackery than I recall ever having seen before.
It wasn't always so. Oprah Winfrey is an extremely powerful media figure, having been the host of the highest rated syndicated talk show…
tqa | May 31, 2009
As you might have guessed from my earlier post, I was angered and saddened when I learned of the death of Kansas doctor George Tiller earlier today. Dr. Tiller was gunned down while serving as an usher at his church while services were underway. As I mentioned earlier, the suspect arrested in the case - reportedly a 51 year old named Scott Roeder - was apparently an almost stereotypical far-right-wing extremist nutjob, with a long history of radical and potentially violent behavior.
I'm a member of a large Catholic family, and I spent 13 years in Catholic schools. I know many people who…
jstemwedel | May 31, 2009Sunday morning, Dr. George Tiller of Wichita, Kansas, was murdered on his way into the church where he worships. Dr. Tiller was targeted because he was one of the few doctors in the U.S. who performed late-term abortions.
Late-term abortions make up a tiny fraction of the abortions performed in the U.S., and are nearly always done because the fetus has been found to have defect incompatible with life, or has already died, or because the life of the mother is in danger if the pregnancy is not terminated.
For the audacity of offering this vital medical service, Dr. Tiller and his clinic had…
oracknows | May 31, 2009Want to know how Jenny McCarthy, J.B. Handley, other anti-vaccine advocates, creationists, quacks, 9/11 Truthers, and cranks and pseudoscientists of all stripes manage to be heard when they have no science, evidence, reason, logic, or facts on their side?
Sadly, The Onion knows: Oh, No! It's Making Well-Reasoned Arguments Backed With Facts! Run!
At first, it looks as though the forces of reason can win:
Goddamn it, nothing's working! It's trapped us in our own unsubstantiated claims! We need to switch fundamentally unsound tactics. Hurry, throw up the straw man! Look, I think it's going for…
tqa | May 31, 2009
Wichita NBC affiliate KSHB-TV is reporting that the suspect being held in the assassination of Dr. George Tiller is a man named Scott Roeder. Posters in the forums at the DemocraticUnderground have identified at least one posting at Operation Rescue's website (currently down, link to Google cache here) that's written by a Scott Roeder and refers to Dr. Tiller.
There is also information that indicates that a suspected Freeman named Scott Roeder was arrested in Topeka in 1996 for parole violations related to his having bomb making materials in his car trunk. At that time, he was identified…
palmd | May 31, 2009One of the hardest things about practicing medicine is being compassionate and dispassionate at the same time; acknowledging a person's pain, but standing aside enough to view the problem with a degree of objectivity. This is one of the easiest mis-steps to make in medicine, and is the root of the problem of many so-called alternative medicine practitioners. Take a look at this email from a fan:
I find it interesting and short sighted that you (and many medical providers) require published research in order to be convinced that a new medical condition exists. Have you ever considered that…
oracknows | May 30, 2009One reason I (and most people involved in cancer research) don't like the frequently used term "cure for cancer." The reason is simple. Embedded within this term is the assumption that cancer is just one disease, when it is most definitely not. Rather, it is many diseases affecting many organs, each with its own mechanism of pathogenesis and each often requiring different treatments. For example, for "liquid" tumors arising from hematopoietic organs, the treatment usually consists primarily of chemotherapy, sometimes with radiation therapy in the case of lymphomas, while "solid" tumors often…
oracknows | May 29, 2009I don't much like Oprah Winfrey.
I know, I know, it's a huge surprise to anyone who reads this blog, but there you go. Over the last four years, I've had numerous reasons to be unhappy with her, mainly because, as savvy a media celebrity and businesswoman as she is, she has about as close to no critical thinking skills when it comes to science and medicine as I've ever seen. Arguably there is no single person in the world with more influence pushing woo than Oprah. Indeed, she puts Prince Charles to shame, and Kevin Trudeau's is a mere ant compared to the juggernaught that is Oprah's media…
jstemwedel | May 28, 2009There's an interesting piece in the Chicago Tribune on the "Oprah effect". The upshot is that products or people who Oprah deigns to grace with airtime tend to find enormous public acceptance.
While this is well and good if the product is a novel or the person is a television chef, it's less clear that the Oprah effect is benign in the case of people without medical expertise offering medical advice.
From the article:
In May, Winfrey, whose contract for "The Oprah Winfrey Show" expires in 2011, struck a deal with actress, author and Chicago native Jenny McCarthy, who emerged as an autism…