Medicine
j7uy5 | June 20, 2006Sometimes, 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
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rozerem" rel="tag">ramelteon
(
href="http://www.rozerem.com/home_c.aspx" rel="tag">Rozerem)
and
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modafinil" rel="tag">modafinil
(
href="http://www.provigil.com/" rel="tag">Provigil).
Usually, I end with a disclaimer: "but some people will abuse
anything."
Despite that universal disclaimer, I really never…
mikethemadbiologist | June 20, 2006...when it comes to funding and resources. And this will have serious ramifications for your health. In talking to a hospital clinical microbiologist today, he told me that microbiology labs in hospitals and states are suffering from two problems.
The first problem is that, unlike the Chemistry and Hematology laboratories which have been able to cut their personnel due to technological advances, most of the work done in microbiology laboratories is still labor intensive. Most microbiological diagnoses require isolating strains to pure cultures, and there's no rapid or cheap way to do this…
mementomori | June 20, 2006"Science is all metaphor." -Timothy Leary
I like to use analogies when counseling my patients. By phrasing medical situations or goals in language that creates a vivid picture I believe it helps patients to understand what exactly is happening to them, or what is the goal of treatment. Picturesque metaphors in my opinion are excellent teaching tools that leave a lasting impression whether it be on patients, family members or students.
Lately for some reason I've been handing out analogies like a slot machine with three 7s showing on it. Divine afflatus seems to have temporarily left the…
evolgen | June 19, 2006The Physicians and Surgeons for Scientific Integrity [sic] (aka, Doctors Doubting Darwin) are planning to Resolve the Conflict between Darwin and Design. Something tells me the conflict will not be resolved using rational discourse, but rather apologetics and obfuscation. I have reproduced a list of physicians and surgeons to avoid below the fold.
(Via Red State Rabble.)
This list is updated at least monthly and was last updated on June 15, 2006. Members are listed
alphabetically.
Name Medical Practice City and State
Dr. Katherine A. Anderegg Pathology Sullivan's Island, South Carolina
Dr.…
retrospectacle | June 16, 2006Hat tip to Abel Pharmboy for this fascinating story! A recent US government study has found that:
a) Black adults hear better than white adults
b) Women hear better than men
c) Average hearing thresholds are the same in the US as they were 35 years ago (despite the much-maligned iPod and Walkman!)
(More under the fold....)
The large-sample-size study (5,000 people) was conducted by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, and mirrors the results of smaller, previous studies. This study examined hearing tests collected from 1999 to 2004 as part of a comprehensive federal…
oracknows | June 15, 2006Leave it to Dr. Charles to remind me of something that happened recently, albeit in a bit of a roundabout way. It's something I would rather have forgotten, but, when you dedicate your life to battling the beast that cancer, it is something that is inevitable and something a doctor has to learn to deal with in his cancer patients.
Fear of the beast's return.
Paradoxically, it was not anything sad at all that Dr. Charles wrote about, but rather the triumphs that we can have over breast cancer that can give a survivor her life back and how a woman who has undergone a mastectomy to beat her…
bushwells | June 14, 2006Doc Bushwell here, pharmaceutical bogeyperson of the fast food-pharma-medical establishments' collusion against the fundamentalist fat activists (FFAs). Yes, that's right. We bench monkey pharma researchers lie awake at night, tossing, turning and vigorously scratching our nether regions, while we plot new ways of wresting money and adipose tissue from these hapless souls.
Truth be told, many large pharmaceutical companies have major obesity research programs which have fed, and intend to feed, the pipeline with compounds as clinical candidate hopefuls in the war against obesity. Some, like…
oracknows | June 12, 2006When it rains it pours, eh?
While I happen to be on the topic of vaccines and autism again today, here's a surprising story:
Andrew Wakefield, the doctor behind the scare over a potential link between the MMR jab and autism in children, is to face four charges relating to unprofessional conduct at the General Medical Council, it is reported today.
Mr Wakefield, a surgeon who became a gut specialist, could be struck off the medical register and debarred from practising in the UK if the GMC finds him guilty of serious professional misconduct.
Following the publication of a research paper in the…
mixingmemory | June 12, 2006Last time I asked for requests, a couple readers suggested that I write about the theory-theory. I always have mixed feelings about writing about theory-theory. On the one hand, I'm a big theory-theory fan, so I like to spread the good word, but on the other hand, theory-theory is notoriously difficult to describe, so I'm also a little reticent. So it's taken me a while to get to it. The theory-theory began as a theory of concepts, loosely (or at least opaquely) described in a paper by Greg Murphy and Doug Medin titled "The Role of Theories in Conceptual Coherence"1. Bot the gist of and…
oracknows | June 12, 2006Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that it's been a while since I've written a substantive post on the fear mongering and bad science that are used by activists to support the claim that mercury in the thimerosal used as preservatives in vaccines is the cause of an "autism epidemic." The closest I've come is using Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s credulous reporting and conspiracy-mongering, in which he uncritically parroted the claims of the worst of the mercury militia and arguing that his recent article in Rolling Stone uses the same sort of dubious and fallacious techniques, showing…
scientificactivist | June 12, 2006It looks like it's going to be a pretty busy day for me, so here's a post from the archives. I picked this one because it's still very timely (the Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006 is still in committee in the Senate) and it's related to my recent post on open peer review.
(4 May 2006) As society slowly shifts toward more participatory forms of democracy, science policy will increasingly be subject to the will of the general population. The creation of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine via voter-initiated Proposition 71 in 2004 stands as a significant example of…
j7uy5 | June 8, 2006A 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
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermittent_Explosive_Disorder"
rel="tag">Intermittent Explosive Disorder.
One
example is
href="http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-rage06.html">here,
in the Chicago Sun-Times. This generated
a lot of blogging:
href="http://www.blogpulse.com/search?query=intermittent+explosive+disorder&offset=50&operator=and&start_date=&end_date=&sort=date&max_results=10">…
oracknows | June 7, 2006I really have to turn off my Google Alerts for this topic. I'm going to pull out my hair if I don't.
As you may recall, I've been posting about two young victims of the siren call of quackery who will most likely pay with their lives for their trust in quacks. The first, Katie Wernecke, rejected conventional medicine in Texas several months ago and is now at an undisclosed location receiving "secret" treatments, her father claiming that he can't reveal what treatment she is receiving or the doctors will stop treating her. The second, Abraham Cherrix, has gotten permission to leave Virginia to…
oracknows | June 3, 2006Compared to the usual topics discussed during the week, I normally like to try to keep the weekend fare on the ol' blog relatively light and fluffy (mainly because traffic usually falls around 50% and I like to post my serious material on skepticism and science on days when I tend to have the most readers), but to me this can't wait until Monday. As you may recall, a couple of days ago, I wrote about Abraham Starchild Cherrix, a 15-year old who, with his father, has rejected conventional therapy for his Hodgkin's Lymphoma. It now looks as though he will get to go to Mexico:
ACCOMAC, Va. (AP…
oracknows | June 1, 2006About six months back, I wrote about Katie Wernecke, a 13-year-old girl diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma last year, whose parents fought with Texas courts to let them take her to Kansas to receive high dose vitamin C therapy rather than the chemotherapy and radiation therapy that she needed to have a chance of beating her cancer. Events have suggested to me that an update is in order. It turns out that Katie is still alive, although it is unclear how she is doing. Her family has apparently taken her to an undisclosed cancer treatment center out of state, where she is getting more altie "…
oracknows | May 31, 2006Our Seed overlords demand a response:
Since they're funded by taxpayer dollars (through the NIH, NSF, and so on), should scientists have to justify their research agendas to the public, rather than just grant-making bodies?
Ooh, boy. That's a loaded question that depends a lot on how you interpret it.
My first reaction was similar to that of Razib, PZ, Dave, John, and GrrlScientist; i.e., no way, because the public doesn't have a clue what constitutes good scientific research. Ah, heck, my second reaction was the same, too, and it led me to ramble on way longer than the 300 words that our…
oracknows | May 26, 2006This is just too rich.
As you know a few months ago, I commented about a British report that found high levels of mercury and other heavy metals in Chinese herbal medicines sold in the U.K. Some contained as much as 11% mercury by weight! It turns out that a JAMA paper from 2004 did the same thing for Ayurvedic medicines and found some of them also contaminated with mercury and other heavy metals, concluding:
If taken as recommended by the manufacturers, each of these 14 could result in heavy metal intakes above published regulatory standards
Indeed, in the compounds that tested postive for…
oracknows | May 23, 2006Grant crunch time again yesterday. That means it's the perfect time once again to dig up something from the archives of old blog and repost it here. This particular piece originally appeared on January 12, 2005, just shy of one month after I started blogging. I'm guessing once again that, because not many people were reading back then, most of you probably haven't seen this before, and that those of you who have probably don't remember it. Once again, I'd be interested in feedback from those who haven't seen this before now that my readership around 10-20 times what it was back then. The only…
tsmith | May 20, 2006Yesterday's Science had a letter to the editor regarding an editorial I mentioned previously (and that was touched on in the comments here as well):
Medicine might benefit most from embracing evolution theory's recognition of individual variation within populations of organisms, a property that Ernst Mayr has called "the cornerstone of Darwin's theory of natural selection". This "population thinking," as Mayr calls it, helped to undo typological thinking in biology, and it can help to dismantle typological notions of disease by highlighting individual differences in disease susceptibility…
oracknows | May 19, 2006Damn if PZ didn't beat me to this one:
A federal panel concluded yesterday that there is not enough evidence to recommend for or against use of multivitamins and minerals -- the popular dietary supplements taken by more than half of American adults in the hope of preventing heart disease, cancer and other chronic illnesses.
Americans spend an estimated $23 billion annually on various multivitamins and multi-mineral supplements, the 13-member panel found. One of the latest federally funded national surveys showed that 52 percent of adults reported taking multivitamins. Slightly more than a…