medicine & health the science of healing, from lab to clinic
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May 14, 2008
Mike the Mad Biologist
Amanda: "I Love Vaccines" Anti-vax selfishness and arrongance: heckuva combination.
Page 3.14
An Interview with PalMD Readers of denialism blog have long enjoyed the Hoofnagle brothers' determined war against the evils of denialism. Their new co-blogger Dr. Peter Lipson, also known as PalMD, joins them in the fight for scientific truth. Page 3.14 interviewed him and...
Pure Pedantry
Depression declines after leaving college, leaving home Well that is reassuring: A new University of Alberta study of almost 600 of its graduates (ages 20-29 years old) tracked mental health symptoms in participants for seven years post-graduation and looked at how key events like leaving home and...
The Loom
Wha..? or, Making Sense of Inscrutable Reviews The New York Sun has a positive review of Microcosm today, and part of me just wants to point you in its direction, let you read about the book's "ecstatically reflective moments," and leave it at that. But there's one...
Respectful Insolence
They don't call it "cheat-lation" for nothing A $30 million dollar unethical boondoggle of a clinical trial is in progress now funded by your tax dollars. It won't resolve anything.
May 13, 2008
Neurophilosophy
Prehistoric Inca neurosurgery The procedure known as trepanation, in which a hole is scraped or drilled in the skull, is an ancient form of neurosurgery that has been performed since the late Stone Age. Exactly why ancient peoples performed trepanation has remained...
Greg Laden's Blog
Stigma and Mental Illness There is an interesting and important follow up related to a TED Talk that a lot of readers of this blog found interesting (Sherwin Nuland: A history of electroshock therapy) at The Corpus Callosum: Grappling With Stigma: Influence of Social Media A while back, Gred...
Effect Measure
"Doctor, I think I have a code." "It's just some bug ." Getting debugged in Second Life.
denialism blog
Medicine is fun! Well, I'm back from a great vacation, and buried under an avalanche of work. Just to give you a hint of what an internist actually does... My office schedule is full---really full. Everybody needs to see me, plus the various...
Terra Sigillata
Buddhist mindfulness to combat eating disorders Not entirely a revolutionary concept but if you pay close attention to the eating experience, you may be able to overcome mindless addiction to food.
DrugMonkey
Repost: MDMA Case Reports A recent post of Zuska's discusses the pejorative use of "anecdote" to dismiss personal accounts of gender bias. The generic argument will be well familiar to many scientists who are used to sneering at sources of insight that are limited...
Mike the Mad Biologist
Influenza and Money By this metric, the euro is probably doing as poorly as the dollar.
Respectful Insolence
Barriers to the adoption of new surgical procedures There's adopting surgical procedures too fast, before there is good evidence to support their efficacy, and then there's adopting surgical therapies too slow, long after there's good evidence for their efficacy. How do we get it right?
May 12, 2008
Respectful Insolence
Bill Clinton brings the stupid home on autism Not you too, Bill!
A Blog Around The Clock
New and Exciting in PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine The Case of Deborah Rice: Who Is the Environmental Protection Agency Protecting?: For researchers who operate at the intersection of basic biology and toxicology, following the data where they take you--as any good scientist would--carries the risk that you will...
The Loom
Boston and Chicago: Taking Microcosm on the Road I'm heading to Boston on Friday to speak at the Harvard Book Store about Microcosm. It's at 7 pm, and it's free. Information is here. Then it's on to Chicago, where I'll be talking at the Field Museum on Saturday...
Dr. Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refuge
OKC's weight-loss campaign, and ironic uses of "irony" Three months ago, I mentioned that the mayor of perennially zaftig Oklahoma City, having lost 38 pounds in 10 months himself, had launched an initiative aimed at getting locals to shed excess weight. By late April, over 17,700 official participants...
Respectful Insolence
Antivaccinationists: Pot. Kettle. Black. And scary, too. Hypocrisy and violent rhetoric from antivaccinationists? Who'd have thought it?
denialism blog
About that crank So on the blog birthday we asked our dear readers what they've learned over the last year, and as a test we gave them this crank who attacks the bisphosphonate anti-osteoporosis drugs in his article "the delusion of bone drugs"....
Greg Laden's Blog
Paul Ewald: Can we domesticate germs? Evolutionary biologist Paul Ewald drags us into the sewer to discuss germs. Why are some more harmful than others? How could we make the harmful ones benign? Searching for answers, he examines a disgusting, fascinating case: diarrhea....
Signout
Formidable and noisy Presuming that my lung exam doesn't stink, how is it possible that Dr. Mallet heard such different breath sounds than I did?
Respectful Insolence
A high tech form of the same old "detoxification" woo "Detoxification." Whenever I hear that term, I'm at least 90% certain that I'm dealing with seriously unscientific woo. The reason should be obvious to longtime readers of this blog or to anyone who has followed "alternative medicine" for a while,...
A Good Poop
This is why they post all of those warnings on roller coaster line entrance signs Thakur D, Pocha M. Pneumothorax after a roller coaster ride. Arch Dis Child. 2006 May;91(5):421. No abstract available. So riding a roller coaster can potentially cause your lung to deflate like a balloon. Now that's a ride! --- Roldan-Valadez E,...
May 11, 2008
Effect Measure
Now keeping us safe is illegal, too Protecting the cattle industry, one Bush appointment at a time.
Dr. Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refuge
Florida, vanity, and lying healthcare dispensers If there's one part of the country that may be as obsessed with its collective personal appearance as Los Angeles, it's Florida -- specifically its larger cities and metropolitan areas, especially those in the state's southern coastal areas: Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West...
“Don't you realize that in order to lose weight you must not eat anything AT ALL? Everyone knows fit, thin people simply harness energy directly from the sun.” Saint Gasoline on OKC's weight-loss campaign, and ironic uses of "irony"
