medicine
oracknows | April 8, 2009I really need to rein myself in sometimes.
Yesterday, all pleased as punch with myself for my mad Google skillz and for thinking I figured out just what "alternative" therapy it was that Farrah Fawcett had undergone that had resulted in what sounded for all the world like a rectus sheath hematoma, I wrote about how I thought that Fawcett had been undergoing galvanotherapy in Bad Weissee in southern Germany. Either my mad Google skillz failed me, or I was just too lazy to scroll through a sufficient number of screens to find additional information that would have brought the most likely answer…
palmd | April 7, 2009Remember last week when I told you about this guy over at HuffPo who was all excited about an experiment on spooky distance healing? Remember how the "study" used glorified Scientology E-meters and ginned up the negative data to make it look good? Remember how this guy abused the word quantum until it begged for mercy?
Well, they let him write again. Very sad. But at least this time his article has an appropriate title: Why Rational Thinking Is Not All It's Cracked Up To Be.
It's like this: if you have a car, but you've never learned to drive, and aren't even sure what a car is for, you…
ddobbs | April 7, 2009I've got a story about Helen Mayberg's work on depression circuits in the new Scientific American Mind. I first wrote about Mayberg in the Times Magazine three years ago, in an article about her experimental use of deep brain stimulation to treat depression, and I later profiled her for SciAm Mind. This new article looks at her effort to further refine the neurocircuitry associated with major depression.
Working with fellow imaging experts Heidi Johansen-Berg and Tim Behrens of the University of Oxford and others, Mayberg used DTI to produce detailed images of area 25's "tractography," the…
oracknows | April 7, 2009Note the followup post to this one, in which Orac admits error. You just have to read it, given how rarely Orac messes up when speculating...
Our cancer center has a large, open area interspersed with patient waiting areas, one of which is the clinic where I see patients, that I frequently must traverse to get to the elevators that will take me to my lab. In each patient area is a large-screen television to help patients pass the time during the inevitable wait to be seen by their doctors. As I happened to be wandering through that area on the way to my lab and office, I noticed on one of…
grrlscientist | April 6, 2009tags: Scientia Pro Publica, Science for the People, biology, evolution, medicine, earth science, behavioral ecology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, blog carnival
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
Since Tangled Bank has gone the way of the Dodo (Passenger Pigeon, Carolina Parakeet, Ivory-Billed Woodpecker -- insert the name of your favorite extinct species here) and will probably never be seen again, despite promises to the contrary, there is a huge hole in the science writing blogosphere. A hole…
palmd | April 6, 2009I don't know what it's like to be autistic. I don't know what it's like to raise an autistic child. For this knowledge, I have to rely on others, and there are plenty of talented bloggers out there who write about these experiences all the time. What I do know is that there is a cadre of autism "activists" out there who do a great disservice to people who do know something about these experiences.
One such example is Dr. Jerry Kartzinel, who co-wrote Jenny McCarthy's latest monument to her own idiocy. "Dr. Jerry" is infamous among many parents of autistic children for this quote:
Autism,…
oracknows | April 6, 2009
Embedded video from CNN Video
Over the weekend, a lot of readers sent me links to Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey's appearance on Larry King Live. (If you can't stand watching the embedded video of the segment, the transcript is here.) Fortunately for me (and, I hope, you), a "friend" of mine has written a comprehensive takedown of not just the nonsense spewed by Jenny and Jim, but of a new "study" released by Generation Rescue purporting to show that nations with low numbers of mandatory vaccines have low levels of autism. Of course, it shows nothing of the sort.
Find out why at Science-…
oracknows | April 6, 2009It just never ends.
Four years ago, I was one of the very first bloggers to notice that the then-new liberal blog The Huffington Post was from its very inception a hotbed of antivaccine lunacy. David Kirby, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Dr. Jay Gordon, Deirde Imus, all the luminaries of the antivaccine movement were there right from the very beginning, aided and abetted by Special Projects Editor Rachel Sklar. But HuffPo didn't limit itself to just antivaccine lunacy. Oh, no. It wasn't long before Woo-meister Supreme Deepak Chopra joined the woo crew there. About a week and a half ago, I noticed…
scientificactivist | April 5, 2009As mentioned here previously, the stimulus package passed in February includes funds to encourage evidence-based medicine. Some uninformed critics will claim that this is some big government conspiracy to exert socialized control over private medicine. But, truly, encouraging a firmer empirical basis in all aspects of medicine--through more studies, government guidelines, and just improved common practice--is a very desirable outcome.
A post by David Newman at The New York Time's Well blog lays out a variety of examples of why this is so (with links to original studies!). Also, Hugh Pickens…
oracknows | April 4, 2009One of the most common refrains from advocates of pseudoscientific and paranormal ideas is that critics are "close-minded," that they reject out of hand any idea that does not fit within their world view. Of course, this is a canard, given that science thrives on the open and free exchange of ideas, and it is not "close-mindedness" that (usually) leads to the rejection of dubious claims. Rather, it is the knowledge that, for many of such claims to be true, huge swaths of our current scientific understanding would have to be in error to such an extent that a major paradigm shift in various…
palmd | April 3, 2009Well, HuffPo does it again. No other mainstream news outlet brings the stupid on health news like Arianna. Take today's vapid article on vitamin supplementation.
Let me remind all of you amateur biologists that vitamins, discovered over a hundred years ago, were found to be "vital" to health. What made them different from macronutrients such as fats, proteins, sugars, etc., is that they were only required in very small quantities. There has always been a fascination with vitamins, and even during this time of nutritional excess, people like their supplements.
Thankfully there are…
oracknows | April 3, 2009Let me say right up front that I'm not entirely sure that the victim--I mean target; no, I mean subject--of this week's little excursion into the deepest darkest depths of woo is not a parody. That's the beauty of it. I've never heard of it before, but a little Googling brought me evidence that it may not be a parody, that the guy purveying it may actually believe it. I'll leave you to judge for yourself, or, if you've heard of this guy before, to chime in and let me know the deal. I'll also point out that parts of this website are not entirely safe for work. Actually, a couple of the pages…
oracknows | April 2, 2009Time and time again, I've complained about the infiltration of woo into medical school and medical education, so much so that I've echoed Dr. R. W.'s term for it: Quackademic medicine. One tool advocates of "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) use to try to "get 'em while they're young," so to speak, is to promote themselves among student groups. I've complained about the American Medical Student Association (AMSA) before, but AMSA is not the only culprit. Beware the student-run interest group in "cross-cultural and integrative medicine," especially when it hooks up with a CAM…
clock | April 2, 2009
Look what came in the mail yesterday! The Art and Politics of Science by Harold Varmus and, since he is in some way my boss, with a very nice personal inscription inside the cover. I am excited and already started reading it.
And speaking o Varmus, he seems to be everywhere. See this article in TimesOnline:
A major investment in fighting tropical infections and chronic conditions like heart disease and diabetes in poor countries would transform international perceptions of the US, according to Harold Varmus, who co-chairs the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology.
In an…
clock | April 2, 2009Nicholas Kristof from the New York Times has written a blog entry about pneumonia being under recognized on the global health agenda, in the media and by people in industrialized countries. Many people don't know that pneumonia kills more children than malaria, measles and AIDS combined:
It's been remarkable to watch how malaria has become, over the last five years, a "cool" disease. After decades in which it received little funding or attention (that's partly our fault in the media), malaria is now a major cause, with funding pouring into everything from bednets to vaccines to research into…
palmd | April 2, 2009We're being far to easy on our medical students. In the old days, when giants walked the Earth, medical students wore sackcloth and lived in the anatomy lab with the cadavers. They didn't have time to do something as frivolous as writing.
Well, they are doing just that. Some rather clever med students are finding time to become blogospheric bros. I would point you to Tim Kreider, one of my co-bloggers at Science-Based Medicine. He's written some terrific stuff, and I think I can promise you some truly stimulating pieces to come.
We also have Beyond the Short Coat, which, despite it's…
palmd | April 2, 2009"You know the moon landings were ginned up on a Hollywood sound stage, right?"
"Hey, how come it's so hard to get the Truth out there about the 9/11 attacks being staged by the CIA/Mossad?"
"I don't know why they think I'm crazy; the aliens really did probe my anus."
We hear crap like this all the time, but these wackos never get ink in major media outlets because, well, they are so clearly paranoid and deranged. So why do we see a similarly paranoid, deranged person like Jenny McCarthy on the pages of Time magazine? Is it because she's more photogenic than most alien abductees? Is it…
oracknows | April 2, 2009While I'm trying to hammer my grant application into good enough shape to show my collaborator and given that it's been nearly a year since I did this last, now seems as good a time as any to have an open thread. Say your piece.
Oh, and by the way, I see that HIV/AIDS denialists have infested Tara's brief post about Christine Maggiore. While you're waiting for more pearls of insolence from the fevered mind of Orac, you might want to give her some tactical air support.
oracknows | April 2, 2009Yesterday was long and rough, with the day spent desperately trying to finish a grant application and the evening spent in obedience training with our new dog Bailey, who, let's face it, needs more than a bit of doggie discipline. By the time I got home, had dinner, and was checking e-mail, it was pretty late and--gasp!--I didn't really feel like blogging. Yes I'm aware of that study that claims to link vinyl floors to autism that everyone's been sending me; perhaps I'll get to it tomorrow. Last night it was just too late and I was too tired to try to tackle reading a research paper and…
scientificactivist | April 2, 2009Through the results of widespread experimentation of the... well... let's say "non-scientific" variety, it's pretty well known that marijuana has the side effect of making the user very hungry. This is one of the many physiological effects of the active ingredient THC (Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol). More relevantly, however, THC and other cannabinoids are actively being investigated for various useful clinical purposes, including the treatment of cancer through the inhibition of tumor growth.
A new study by Salazar et al. in The Journal of Clinical Investigation demonstrates that THC causes…