Bioethics
Respectful Insolence
Category archives for Bioethics
The costs and benefits of the latest, greatest cancer drugs
Posted by Orac on July 7, 2008 Last week, The New York Times started a rather unusual series in its medical section entitled, The Evidence Gap, described thusly: Articles in this series will explore medical treatments used despite scant proof they work and will consider steps toward medicine based on evidence. When I first saw the series, I was prepared for a…
Why would a woman withhold chemotherapy from her child with lymphoma?
Posted by Orac on July 3, 2008 One of the main issues that I’ve written about quite a bit is the issue of what the state should have the power to do when a child has cancer or another life-threatening disease and the parents choose quackery over scientific medicine when the disease is potentially (or even highly) treatable or curable with standard…
Doctors avoiding their duty to terminally ill patients
Posted by Orac on June 17, 2008 She was thin, white skin stretched over bones like worn parchment over old sticks being rhythmically blown in the wind as her chest rose and fell, each time with what seemed like a major effort. Incongruous with the rest of her body, her abdomen was distended, a balloon that looked dangerously close to popping, also…
Confidence, humility, and practicing science-based surgery
Posted by Orac on June 9, 2008 After having subjected my readers to all those posts about the antivaccination lunacy that was on display in Washington, D.C. last week, I think it’s time for a break from this topic, at least for a while if not longer. In the run-up to the “Green Our Vaccines” rally events on the antivaccinationism front were…
Some monkey business in autism research (or, why it is not a good idea to provoke Orac)
Posted by Orac on May 17, 2008 Believe it or not, even I, Orac, sometimes get tired of blogging about antivaccination idiocy. Indeed, this week was just such a time. I hope you can’t blame me. After all, the last few months have been so chock-full of some of the most bizarre and annoying antics of antivaccinationists at such a frequent clip…
They don’t call it “cheat-lation” for nothing
Posted by Orac on May 14, 2008 Regular readers here are probably most familiar with the so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” therapy known as chelation therapy in the context of its use, or, more specifically, its misuse in “treating” autistic children, a misuse that has resulted in at least one death, a five-year-old autistic boy named Abubakar Tariq Nadama. However, before the…
Blogging on vacation?
Posted by Orac on May 5, 2008 OK, I know it’s like the post calling the kettle black, but what the heck is PalMD doing blogging on vacation? And are his two most recent posts so good? This is what I mean: Why hospice matters Never say “hopeless” I recently had the unfortunate opportunity to visit a relative in hospice. I was…
Stuff I didn’t have time to blog about…
Posted by Orac on April 16, 2008 I’m not normally one to do link roundups or Instapundit-style one sentence “link and comment” posts. Sure, I do them occasionally, but I think the reason that I don’t is that to me blogging is a way to express my views, not just to point to the views at others (in other words, because I’m…
A question for Ben Stein: Why are you singling out Darwin and ignoring the true inspirations for the Holocaust, Pasteur and Koch?
Posted by Orac on March 29, 2008 Nasal drone Ben Stein, as you would be hard-pressed not to know if you are a regular reader of ScienceBlogs, is hosting what looks to be a truly execrable crap-fest called Expelled!: No Intelligence Allowed. The movie basically consists of two themes: (1) Whining about “intellectual oppression” by those evil “Darwinists” directed against any valiant…
Stem cell tourism: Stem cells as the new snake oil
Posted by Orac on March 20, 2008 There’s no doubt about it: Stem cells are hot. Yes indeed, they’re not only hot, but they’re hip, they’re happenin‘, they’re right now, baby. Scientists are falling all over themselves with excitement at the potential applications that could potentially come from stem cell technology. True, no validated therapies for embryonic stem cells have yet made…
Bad scientific arguments in the service of “animal rights” activism
Posted by Orac on March 17, 2008 One of the greatest threats to the preclinical research necessary for science-based medicine today is animal rights activism. The magnitude of the problem came to the forefront again last month with the news that animal rights terrorists tried to enter the home of a researcher at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) whose research…
Some placebos are more equal than others
Posted by Orac on March 5, 2008 Perusing the news early this morning, I noticed an article on ABC News about placebos. One thing I found interesting about it was that it was a story about a research letter to JAMA, not a full study. Heck, there isn’t even an abstract. Even so, the study was rather interesting and described thusly: The…
UCLA fights back against animal “rights” terrorists
Posted by Orac on February 21, 2008 Earlier this month, I was remiss in not noting an update to a story about which I had written before, a story of domestic terrorism carried out by so-called “animal rights” advocates who are utterly opposed to the use of animals in research. The series of attacks began with an intimidation campaign against a UCLA…
Quackademic medicine in the U.S.: The view from the U.K.
Posted by Orac on February 18, 2008 David Colquhoun, eminent scientist and maintainer of the excellent blog DC’s Improbable Science, has recently returned home to the U.K. after a trip across the pond to the U.S. and Canada, where, among other things, he gave a lecture at the University of Toronto, as well as the Riker Memorial Lecture at the Oregon Health…
The American Academy of Pediatrics versus antivaccinationist hypocrisy
Posted by Orac on February 18, 2008 Three weeks ago, I wrote about some truly irresponsible antivaccination propaganda masquerading as entertainment that aired in the form of a television show called Eli Stone. This show, which portrayed its hero taking on the case of an autistic boy whose mother blamed his autism on thimerosal (going under the fictional name “mercuritol”) in vaccines…
When human subjects protection stifles innovation
Posted by Orac on January 3, 2008 The other day, I happened across an Op-Ed article in the New York Times that left me scratching my head at the seeming insanity of the incident it described. The article, written by Dr. Atul Gawande, author of Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science and Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, described what…
Enough straw man attacks on evidence-based medicine to defoliate Kansas
Posted by Orac on December 20, 2007 Evidence-based medicine is not perfect. There, I’ve said it. Like anything else humans do in science or any other endeavor, evidence-based medicine (EBM) has its strengths and its weaknesses. On the whole, I consider it to be potentially vastly superior to the way that medicine was practiced in the past, bringing a systematic, scientific rigor…
Making lab rats out one’s children: Do-it-yourself cancer cures hit the media again
Posted by Orac on December 18, 2007 Several months ago, i wrote quite a few posts about a new anticancer drug that had not yet passed through clinical trials but had demonstrated efficacy against tumors in rat models of cancer. The drug, called dichloroacetate (DCA), is a small molecule that targeted a phenomenon common in cancer cells known as the Warburg effect.…
Quoth Dr. Rashid Buttar: “The medical board is a ‘rabid dog’”
Posted by Orac on December 10, 2007 Dr. Rashid Buttar is a quack. There, I’ve said it. It’s my opinion, and there’s lots of evidence to support that opinion. As you know, I seldom actually invoke the “q-word.” Indeed, for the longest time after I started blogging I tended to go out of my way to avoid using it, even to the…
The ethics of therapeutic touch
Posted by Orac on December 5, 2007 Lest I forget to mention this one, Randy Cohen, a.k.a. The Ethicist, answers a question. Here’s the question: I work at a hospital where several nurses practice therapies like healing touch and therapeutic touch, said to adjust a patient’s energy field and thereby decrease pain and improve healing, although there is no significant evidence for…
One last comment on the Dennis Lindberg case
Posted by Orac on December 3, 2007 I’ve been spending a bit of time discussing the sad case of Dennis Lindberg, a 14-year-old youth with leukemia who died because of his refusal to accept a blood transfusion when his hematocrit fell to life-threateningly low levels apparently during chemotherapy. My position is that, while competent adults have the right to refuse transfusion for…
Reacting to Jehovah’s Witnesses’ refusal to accept blood transfusions
Posted by Orac on December 1, 2007 Yesterday, I wrote about the overwhelmingly sad case of Dennis Lindberg, the 14-year old Jehovah’s Witness who died because of his misguided adherence to the twisted interpretation of a 3,000 year old Biblical text and the court’s acquiescence to this lunacy. So did P. Z. Myers. In response to the post on Pharyngula, I saw…
Would you die for your religion? part 2: What about the children?
Posted by Orac on November 30, 2007 It looks as though the Jehovah’s Witnesses have claimed another life. This time, though, it wasn’t an adult, as it was recently. This time, though, through the indoctrination inherent in the Jehovah’s Witness religion and, incredibly and inexcusably, the acquiescence of our legal system to their irrational and dubious interpretation of a text written thousands…
Doctors as drug reps
Posted by Orac on November 26, 2007 Fellow ScienceBlogger Abel Pharmboy over at Terra Sig pointed me in the direction of a rather fascinating and disturbing article about physicians being recruited as “thought leaders” by pharmaceutical companies. Abel’s discussion is well worth reading for yourself, but I thought I’d chime in my two cents, as always. From a surgeon’s perspective, these sorts…
Justice rolls along in the case of Dr. Roy Kerry, negligent chelation killer
Posted by Orac on November 16, 2007 It may take a long time, but sometimes justice does eventually move to act against a wrong: A Butler County doctor will stand trial on charges he caused the death of a 5-year-old autistic boy by negligently ordering a controversial treatment, a district judge ordered Thursday. Dr. Roy Kerry of Portersville ordered chelation therapy –…