Corpus Callosum is written by a psychiatrist at a small community hospital somewhere in midwestern USA. Email to cc.scienceblogger at gmail dot com.
June 30, 2006
Category: Medicine
There's a brief article on Medpage Today, about a small study that suggests that improving sleep can improve the course of a particular type of headache. (A nicety to the article is that it provides 0.25 CME's.) They write specifically...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 10:44 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Social Issues
This is a response to this week's Ask-A-ScienceBlogger question. I must say, it took a while to come up with a reasonable answer. I finally settled on environmental policy. The Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1970, mostly in response...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 7:31 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 29, 2006
Category: Medicine
I'm getting ready for work, so I won't take the time to write about this at length. It is just one of those things that is a bit startling and I often like to post such things. This is from...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 7:57 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 27, 2006
Category: Medicine
Sarah Berga, et. al. presented a paper at the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology conference in Prague, about the use of cognitive-behavioral therapy for treatment of infertility. It this post, I elaborate on some of the details...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 5:25 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Social Commentary
Fresh from a bout with the Press regarding disclosures of spying on financial institutions, Vice-president Cheney has taken up a new cause. The Reuters news agency has revealed operational details of yet another spy plot: Scientists seek to spy on...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 12:42 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 26, 2006
Category: Politics
I used to blog about this kind of thing fairly often. I do it less, now, partly because so many other people are ding a fine job themselves. This time, I am not writing in order to make a significant...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 9:12 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Social Commentary
Project Mohole got underway in 1961, with undersea drilling off the Pacific coast of Mexico. The idea was to get geological core samples from a bore hole, to learn about the nature of the Mohorovicic Discontinuity (the boundary between the earth's...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 8:44 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 25, 2006
Category: Psychiatry
I got an email that I almost deleted without reading, thinking for a moment that it would be spam. It turned out not to be. Since the author appears to be well-intentioned, I'll go ahead and post it here. He...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 10:45 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 23, 2006
Category: Psychiatry
The Washington Post has a mildly interesting article
about Douglas M. Duncan, who just dropped out of the gubernatorial race
in Maryland. Reportedly, he was diagnosed as having depression earlier
in the week, then decided to withdraw...
I am somewhat hopeful that high-profile disclosures such as Duncan's
will help in this regard.
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 11:46 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Social Commentary
On tonight's edition of the PBS show, On Faith & Reason, Bill Moyers said: Religion is the continuation of politics by other means." This was in the course of a discussion with Salman Rushdie Of course, he was not referring...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 11:08 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Armchair Musings
What makes a good science teacher? That is the new ask-a-scienceblogger question. I am sure that there has been a lot of research into this, none of which I have read. That is why this post is categorized as an...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 9:44 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 22, 2006
Category: Medicine
I've written about this before, but now there is some new information. Gaboxadol (THIP; 4,5,6,7-tetrahydroisoxazolo- [5,4-c] pyridin-3-ol) is an investigational drug being developed by Lundbeck in conjunction with Merck. gaboxadol structure (image from ChemBank) At the 2006 Associated Professional Sleep Societies...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 10:33 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Medicine
Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) currently is being investigated as a treatment for major depression. (See Psychiatry's Shocking New Tools in IEEE Spectrum.) Now, there is a report that it also may be useful for migraine headache. ...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 9:12 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 21, 2006
Category: Neuroscience
The title of this post is taken from the title of a USC press release, about a topic in neuroscience. A guy at USC named Irving Biederman is studying the role of opioid (enkephalin) activity in visual perception. Actually, the...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 8:51 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 20, 2006
Category: Bioethics
I'm sitting here, wondering why in the world I wrote so much about a topic that is of no more than passing interest to me. Perhaps if I keep writing, I will figure it out. Note: this will not make...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 11:21 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Medicine
Sometimes, when I write about new psychotropic medication coming to market, I include a comment on the abuse potential. For example, I've commented before on the relative lack of abuse potential for ramelteon (Rozerem) and modafinil (Provigil). Usually, I end with a disclaimer: "but some people will abuse anything." Despite that universal disclaimer, I really never thought I would hear of anyone abusing tamoxifen.
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 4:53 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 18, 2006
Category: Medicine
It's an account of a guy who enrolls in the functional neuroimaging study, as a normal control. Despite the title, it is not overly sarcastic or critical. He more or less describes what happened, and what he thought about it.
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 11:23 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Armchair Musings
Sometimes I am talking to people about how they feel about taking psychiatric medication. Commonly, they say something like this: "I would rather be able to do it myself," or, "I don't like being dependent on something."
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 7:13 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Medicine
The Sunday Times in the UK is reporting on efforts to being criminal charges against a doctor who claimed that the MMR vaccine caused autism. Millions of children went unvaccinated, and now the UK has an outbreak of measles. Continue...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 3:17 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 17, 2006
Category: Social Commentary
Give a man a fish, and he will eat for a day. Teach a fish to write, and humans will eat forever. This tuna is said to have a verse from the Koran on its side: "Wallahu khayru razikiyna"...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 7:34 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Personal
We've never heard of you, either....
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 10:39 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Medicine
This is pretty sickening: Drugs firm blocks cheap blindness cure Company will only seek licence for medicine that costs 100 times more Sarah Boseley, health editor Saturday June 17, 2006 A major drug company is blocking access to a medicine...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 12:55 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 16, 2006
Category: Psychiatry
What Ever Happened to Psychotherapy? Or rather, what is happening to psychotherapy? Here, I am picking up on a comment thread at Mad Melancholic Feminista, under the post that Aspazia did about my post on pharmacotherapy of Anorexia Nervosa. ...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 11:31 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Social Commentary
ScienceBlogs visitors prefer Firefox. If you lump together all the open-source browsers, they account for over 50% of the page views here. Highly-educated users use Firefox....
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 9:57 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Social Issues
The mission of ScienceBlogs is to have the Web's largest conversation about science. I've been posting here for a week. During that time, I've been trying to decipher the emics and etics of the community and its conversation. It...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 12:12 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 15, 2006
Category: Armchair Musings
This week's question: How is it that all the PIs (Tara, PZ, Orac et al.), various grad students, post-docs, etc. find time to fulfill their primary objectives (day jobs) and blog so prolifically? There are a few things to say...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 10:16 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Social Commentary
President Bush got a lot of credit for designating the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands a national monument. The description in the New York Times was especially glowing. Reading it, you would have no clue that it was not his idea in...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 9:49 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Armchair Musings
While doing background research for my next post, I learned that this is National Men's Health Week. The National Men's Health Week is an official government activity in accordance with Senate Joint Resolution 179 of 1994, introduced by Senator...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 7:53 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Psychiatry
I used to work in an eating disorders treatment program. From time to time, I give talks on the subject. When I get to the part about the use of psychiatric medication, I always start with something like this: "frankly,...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 12:21 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 14, 2006
Category: Social Issues
I've been working on a longish post that I am not yet happy with. In the meantime, I am going to post this, just to call attention to somebody else's work. I guess it also adds a little local flavor to this blog.
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 12:48 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 12, 2006
Category: Psychiatry
This post is not interesting to specialists, but may be of some use to others. I'm writing it mostly because the matter has been reported in the mainstream press, and I think some clarification is in order. Wellbutrin XL...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 9:26 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 11, 2006
Category: Science News
In 2004, a company called Allerca started taking $250 deposits for cats that it intended to produce. It said that the cats would not provoke allergies in humans. In a CNN article: Cat allergies are caused by a potent protein...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 8:09 PM • 27 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Medicine
UCSF has issued a press release describing their trial of a vaccine, NicVAX® (Nicotine Conjugate Vaccine) , for treatment of nicotine addiction. The product is made by attaching a nicotine derivative to a carrier protein. This is necessary because nicotine...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 4:15 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Psychiatry
No, it's not a new concept car from Detroit. It is a website that is designed to collect suggestions for the next edition of the Diagnostical and Statistical Manual (DSM-V). It occurred to me to mention it here, after reading...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 3:36 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Armchair Musings
Memoirs are a big thing in the popular-book publishing arena these days. It is a fad that is sure to pass. I intend to hasten its passing with a micro-memoir of my own....
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 1:18 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 9, 2006
Category: Social Issues
The ask-a-scienceblogger question for this week was submitted by a reader, Jake Bryan, who comments on Science Blogs as "chezjake." "Assuming that time and money were not obstacles, what area of scientific research, outside of your own discipline, would you...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 10:16 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 8, 2006
Category: Science in the Media
A news item that was displayed prominently on Google News for a couple of days, which was picked up by hundreds of news outlets, was an item about Intermittent Explosive Disorder. One example is here, in the Chicago Sun-Times. This...
Posted by Joseph j7uy5 at 3:54 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
