medicine
tqa | March 25, 2009
Yesterday, I went off a little on David Dobbs. He wrote an article on PTSD in Scientific American that I was somewhat less than impressed with, and I made my displeasure fairly clear. There were points raised by Dobbs that I do agree with, and which I think deserve much more discussion than they've received so far. One of the most important of these, I think concerns the extent of the psychiatric cost of war.
For many - possibly most - of you, I suspect that "PTSD" was the first thing to pop into mind when you read "psychiatric cost of war." It certainly seems to get the lion's share of…
oracknows | March 25, 2009I've at times been asked where I come up with my blogging material. Since I've become fairly popular, one major source has been readers sending me stories. I often don't have time to respond, and most of them don't interest me enough to be motivated to write, but there are enough that do that I consider my readers to be a major source of material. Then there are medical and surgical journals, as well as sources like EurekaAlert! Then there are my numerous RSS feeds that I peruse on a daily or every-other-day basis in the evening or early in the morning. Then, of course, there are the various…
j7uy5 | March 25, 2009I saw this article in a couple of places before it dawned on me what
the implication is:
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/21/health/research/21alcohol.html">Drinkers'
Red Face May Signal Cancer Risk
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR
Published: March 20, 2009
People whose faces turn red when they drink alcohol may be facing more
than embarrassment. The
href="http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/symptoms/skin-blushingflushing/overview.html?inline=nyt-classifier"
title="In-depth reference and news articles about Skin blushing/flushing.">flushing
may indicate an increased risk for a deadly…
oracknows | March 24, 2009Ha!
PZ isn't the only person who gets wingnut comments. I get 'em too, and yesterday I got a doozy from a guy named Keith Dunlop in response to my post about a homepath bringing his quackery to poor AIDS patients in Africa:
THE MAIN POST ABOVE IS FROM A DRUG COMPANY MASQUERADING AS CONCERNED SCIENCE. THIS IS NON OTHER THAN AN ATTEMPT BY THE DIRTY TRICKS DEPARTMENT OF A DRUGS COMPANY TO MINIMIZE RESEARCH INTO ALTERNATIVE WAYS OF TREATING THIS PHENOMENA FOR THE SAKE OF EVIL AND PURE PROFIT.
MR SHERR HAS BEEN HOUNDED, VILIFIED, THREATENED, FOLLOWED AND COWED BY THE BIG PHARMA FRONT PEOPLE WHO…
ddobbs | March 24, 2009Skip this post if you don't want to read a writer responding point by point to a self-indulgent, insubstantial attack by a major academic.
I should say right off that I've long admired the more measured critiques that J. Douglas Bremner, a PTSD researcher and professor of radiology and psychiatry at Emory University, has offered about the pharmaceutical industry's exploitation of the neurochemical model of depression. My regard for this work made his critique of attack on my article about PTSD, "The Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome," all the more disappointing.
I'm not disappointed because…
palmd | March 24, 2009The current insanity at JAMA has been well reported elsewhere (also see these links: here, here, here, and here). I'll give you a thumbnail sketch. A professor from a small university wrote to JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association) to let them know that an author of an antidepressant study appeared to have an undisclosed conflict of interest (COI). When he didn't hear back from JAMA he wrote to a more prestigious journal, the British Journal of Medicine (BMJ) who published his letter. This caused the editors at JAMA to completely lose their shit, threatening the letter…
oracknows | March 24, 2009About a month and a half ago, I happened to be fortunate enough to be able to swing the time to attend a symposium in which Brian Deer (whom anyone reading this blog lately is well familiar with) spoke. It was an opportune time, coming as it did around the time when he had just published his new blockbuster story about how Andrew Wakefield, architect of the MMR vaccine scare in the U.K., had apparently falsified data for his infamous 1998 Lancet paper that started it all. The symposium was entitled Science, the Media and Responsibility for Child Health: Lessons Learned from the MMR Vaccine,…
PTSD, Mental Health, and the Military: Problematic Reporting at Scientific American and ScienceBlogs
tqa | March 24, 2009
Author (and fellow ScienceBlogger) David Dobbs has an article on PTSD in the latest Scientific American, and has several related posts on his blog here at Sb. Dobbs' primary argument seems to be that PTSD is being widely overdiagnosed, in part because the condition itself is poorly defined, and in part as the result of various social and economic factors. At least a couple of other bloggers enjoyed his writing on the topic. Personally, I'm not so sure.
As many of you know, I've got some fairly significant ties to the US military. My wife has deployed twice, and has had close and personal…
tqa | March 23, 2009
Back in 2005 and 2006, I wrote a few posts about the insanely arbitrary decision making process that the FDA was pretending to use to justify its obviously pre-determined conclusion to restrict the availability of the Plan B "morning after" pill as much as they thought they could get away with. The FDA ultimately decided to deny applications to fully move Plan B to over-the-counter status, but finally accepted a request to waive the prescription requirement for patients 18 years old or older. That was in August of 2006, and that's been the status quo ever since. Until this morning.
Earlier…
grrlscientist | March 23, 2009And there's plenty of power outlets (not in the waiting room, but in the emergency room -- ER -- itself) to plug my laptop into.
Who would have thought?
I am sitting in the ER right now seeking follow-up care on my fractured wrist, which I should have done last week. Basically, they need to remove this cast, remove the stitches and take x-rays to make sure that everything is where it is supposed to be, and then put on another cast, which I am stuck wearing for another 4 weeks. Since I don't have a doctor, I cannot get a referral to see someone (on short notice) unless I clog up the ER with…
oracknows | March 23, 2009Has it really been that long?
More than two years ago, I wrote a post entitled Death by Alternative Medicine: Who's to Blame? The topic of the post was a case report that I had heard while visiting the tumor board of an affiliate of my former cancer center describing a young woman who had rejected conventional therapy for an eminently treatable breast cancer and then returned two or three years later with a large, nasty tumor that was much more difficult to treat and possibly metastatic to the bone, which, if ture, would have made it no longer even possibly curable. My discussion centered on…
amillikan | March 22, 2009Pope Benedict XVI provoked outrage amongst health officials last week when he stated that condoms were not the answer to Africa's fight against HIV and Aids, and could even worsen the problem. His comments came during the Pope's first visit to Africa, highlighting the Catholic Church's controversial stance which places a strong emphasis on sexual abstinence and fidelity to prevent the spread of disease. Professor Susan Wood, co-chair of the advisory committee for women's health, has indicated that the Obama administration is likely to reverse many of the Bush-era policies requiring…
tqa | March 22, 2009
Reeve 078948-36, originally uploaded by otisarchives1.
Another picture from the Walter Reed collection. This one comes from a series of really cheesy military issue anti-VD posters.
amillikan | March 21, 2009
ScienceBloggers Peter Lipson, AKA Dr. Pal from White Coat Underground, and Janet Stemwedel, AKA Dr. Free-Ride from Adventures in Ethics and Science, return for another episode of BhTV's Science Saturday this week. They discuss Senator Tom Harkin's worrisome crusade to "validate" alternative medicine, debate whether scientists should bother to rigorously investigate popular junk science, explain why doctors should exhibit humility in the face of disease, and issue a call for scientists to get political.
Related ScienceBlogs Posts:
Peter on Tom Harkin's war on science
Janet on conventional…
jstemwedel | March 21, 2009This week at Bloggingheads.tv, PalMD and I have a chat about science, ethics, and alternative medicine. Plus, we have a little disagreement about what constitutes paternalism.
Go watch!
palmd | March 21, 2009Janet and I have another bloggingheads discussion up. We talk about ethics, alternative medicine, and her prostate. Go and watch.
ddobbs | March 20, 2009A few weeks ago, Matt Stevens, the National Guard captain and medic who served in Iraq and whom I mentioned in my Scientific American article, "The Post-Traumatic Stress Trap, wrote me an email about the social unease he often encountered when he showed any behavior that might remind people he had served in Iraq -- a greater seriousness, an impatience with petty concerns or inefficiency, or even just talking about the place.
I have begun to think of military PTSD as to some extent a civilian problem rather than a soldier problem. To expand slightly here; civilians/politicians send soldiers…
palmd | March 20, 2009My recent post on head trauma got me thinking. The practice of trepanation (the drilling of holes in the head) is thousands of years old. While looking up information on the practice I came upon this woodcut.
The engraving is, I believe, from 16th century England. Over at wikipedia, editors were discussing whether or not this diagram actually showed trepanation, or some other surgical procedure (neither of which I would wish to undergo). Either way, the picture is quite revealing. According to the good folks at wikipedia, the original caption states:
This instrumente is for to worke…
oracknows | March 20, 2009Oh, goody! Vox Day wants to play.
You remember Vox "Hey, it worked for Hitler" Day," don't you? It's been a long time. In fact, I had to do a search to find the last time I had a run-in with him, and it appears that it's been about a year since I last noted him mindlessly parroting antivaccinationist myths and spouting his usual misogyny. Alas, Vox has been a regular irritant to this blog since very early on, when he didn't like my likening his views towards women to the Taliban for his arguing that women shouldn't be allowed to vote because they are "fascists at heart." Since then, every so…
oracknows | March 19, 2009I've been on a bit of a tear criticizing the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM). One of the reasons is because, as I've said time and time again, there is no logical organizational or scientific reason why the potpourri of disparate, often unrelated, and often mutually contradictory therapies that fall under the rubric of CAM should have its own Center at the National Institutes of Health.
Yesterday, blog bud Abel Pharmboy posted a very good explanation on why. Money quote:
CAM is a terrible term. It is NOT medicine. Modalities proven to work are medicine.…