palmd
Posts by this author
The state of Michigan is facing massive budget cuts which will further eviscerate the Medicaid program. If the legislature passes it's budget as planned, massive cuts to Medicaid will reduce federal matching funds further limiting access to health care for the state's many uninsured. It's not…
Here's how this is going to work. Thanks to a reader, I have a case for you, which I'll present in parts. I will try to make the information accessible to both professionals and lay-people. I'll start with the barest of information and rather than guess what's going on right away, I'd like to see…
Dr. Jerome Groopman, whose writing I generally enjoy, put out a book a couple of years ago called How Doctors Think. It examined, well, how doctors think, how they think they think, and what the future holds for diagnosing disease. It's a good book, but with some faulty assumptions. I'm not the…
Warning: this post has a long, boring prologue. Proceed at your own risk.
I am an expert in the prevention and treatment of adult diseases. That's what I do from well before the sun rises until well after it sets every day of every week. To become an expert and retain this status is not a…
The stupid truly burns brightly in this one. Dana Ullman, known to readers of Respectful Insolence, Science-based Medicine, and this blog as Hahnemann's cognitively impaired bulldog, has started blogging at the Huffington Post. It's certainly an appropriate venue for his brand of cult medicine…
I'm not a psychiatrist, and I won't guess what motivates someone like Doug Bremner. On his blog, he posted a picture showing the head of a cancer surgeon/researcher/blogger pasted onto a large beast. A little man is doing something to the beast.
An armchair psychiatrist might make silly…
It's like this: science requires a tolerance of failure. If your shiny, happy hypothesis fails to stand up to rigorous scrutiny, you drop it and move on. If instead of a true, disposable hypothesis, you have a fixed belief that will not change based on the data, you are delusional. Boosters of…
So the weight loss continues at a slow but steady pace. The exercise has been not so good; I was doing fine until I re-injured my back. Now it's just an excuse.
I've started getting up early to get PalKid to kindergarten. I suppose I could get up just a bit earlier and ride the bike. I'm not…
In case you didn't know, Science Blogs is owned by a company called Seed Media Group. They invite bloggers, host them, give them tech support, and use their blogs to post ad content. And that's it. Bloggers are offered small compensation based on blog hits, but for most bloggers, this ads up to…
Science-based medicine, my other blogging venue, is temporarily down. The posts are written by a stable of fantastic professionals, and they are always a good read---except for today. Recently, we migrated to a new server and shortly thereafter, the blog became buggy until it crashed completely.…
As my readers know, I take a very hard line on alternative medicine, not because I just don't like it, but because it harms, both actively with dangerous treatments, and passively by keeping people from effective science-based treatments. So what am I to think about a hospital in California that…
Within 72 hours of starting kindergarten, my daughter caught a cold, and within 72 hours of that, she gave it to me.
The common cold sucks. It affects millions of people every year causing misery and lost days of school and work. It's terribly hard to prevent, and there aren't really any…
There are so many things I want to blog about today, but the muse just isn't with me. But I have a deal with myself to at least put out a little something once or twice a day (and my diet updates don't count).
Things I'm happy about today:
I'm keeping to my diet very well.
My child is not only…
I started this little adventure on August 5th, and at the time my BMI was over 30 and I weighed about 212#. Today, it's 203#.
It's an interesting journey. For the first time, I've found what seems like a sustainable way to eat healthy. I feel like I'm actually a good role model for my daughter…
A recent piece of mine caused a bit of a "blogwar", if you will. It lead to a "rebuttal" on Dr. Bremner's blog, and an additional response from Dr. David Gorski. The discussion has been interesting (no, not Doug's incoherent response, but the comments and emails of others). One letter in…
There has been a murmur (albeit an insane one) at many of the anti-Obama and anti-health care reform rallies about the Nazi "T4" program, something most Americans have never heard of. The absurd analogy apparently goes like this: the Nazis euthanized undesirables, and the proposed health bill…
I got a little cranky earlier during a facebook discussion, then heard the voice of a friend in the back of my head saying, "Blog it! Blog that shit!"
And I was about to, when the hospital called with a minor crisis, and then I realized it was the probably one of the last nice days of they year,…
In the current debate over health care, the Right is pissing me off. They are whining about a "government takeover" that will lead to rationing and death panels, but also about runaway costs. Guess what?
You can't have it both ways.
I just got off the phone with a Major Private Insurance Company…
This morning I woke up early, showered, and dressed. Then my wife and I woke up our daughter, who seeing it was dark did protest loudly. But we got her out of bed, and a few minutes later she was her usual happy loquacious self at the breakfast table.
We got her dressed in a navy dress with…
In the latest conversation about placebos, Steve Silberman got a number of things just right, including these converse statements:
Anthracyclines don't require an oncologist with a genial bedside manner to slow the growth of tumors.
...the placebo response has limits. It can ease the discomfort…
I'm not gonna lie: the holiday weekend wasn't easy. Thankfully, I didn't lose ground---I'm still at 205#. But that puts me in a difficult position.
Obviously, my ratio of calories consumed to calories expended is still too high. I'm not doing great on the exercise---I just threw out my damned…
During our Labor Day fun fest, my kiddo lost her shit, leading my spouse to lose her shit. I was on one side of a crowded village green and got a phone call to come over and "deal with your daughter". She needed to be dealt with. She was not getting her way and letting everyone in town know how…
I didn't get my usual week up north on Lake Michigan this year, but the mild summer took some of the sting out of it. Now that Labor Day is here, we get into a whole other set of rituals.
One ritual which is sure to become popular is summer sledding. It turns out there's a park not to far from…
Doug Bremner has a blog. That blog sucks.
Bremner is an apparently well-regarded psychiatrist, and takes a refreshing look at the influence of industry not just on pharmaceuticals but on the conduct of science itself. His outspoken views have led to attempts to squelch his academic freedoms.…
Holiday weekends are supposed to be quiet around here. People head up north for the last long weekend of the summer, eat ripe cherries, melon, and peaches, go to street fairs. Apparently they also go to doctors. But I have a brief lull before the next onslaught of twisted ankles, hand-foot-mouth…
You really should be reading Zuska's pieces. As usual, she cuts through the crap to the meat of the issue. Go now and read.
I'm finding my "diet" remarkably tolerable. I'm still losing weight, albeit slowly, and enjoying what I eat. And aside from the weight loss, I'm eating better---lots of fruits and veggies, fewer simple carbohydrates. But I'm also noticing things that I hadn't before. I'm noticing just how much…
If I read one more crappy article about placebos, something's gotta give, and it's gonna be my head or my desk. Wired magazine has a new article entitled, "Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why." Frequent readers of skeptical and medical blogs will spot the…
Influenza kills somewhere around 36,000 Americans every year (and perhaps twice that number, depending on the estimate). The novel A H1N1 ("swine") flu circulating this year has found a world population with little natural immunity (at least those of us under 65---older folks may have some…