Medicine
oracknows | May 15, 2006NOTE: I had been thinking about how to migrate my old posts from the old blog over to ScienceBlogs, and came up with an idea. Whenever "real life" intrudes on my blogging--as it has now, thanks to two different grant applications that ate up my entire weekend that prevented me from coming up with the more involved piece about science or pseudoscience analysis that I usually like to start the week off with--I'll repost one or more of my favorite "classic posts" from the old blog. Given that there is well over a year of material there, there's lots of stuff that I want to transfer over to…
tsmith | May 9, 2006Welcome to Grand Rounds at Aetiology! Grab a cup of joe, take a seat, and enjoy the best of this week's medical blogging. Just make sure to wash your hands when you're done...you never know what's lying around here, between the kids, the dog, and the lab...
First, a programming note. Just a few weeks back, our Grand Rounds host was The Fat Doctor. Since then, she has suffered several strokes. As of the time I'm writing this, there hasn't been an update since Friday, but it seems like things are going OK. Check out her blog and please send along your well wishes; though it appears she…
grrlscientist | May 6, 2006The weather has been very warm and reasonably dry these past few days in NYC. However, things have been difficult because I made the unpleasant discovery, once again, that I am allergic to airborne pollutants. If you are familiar with NYC air quality, you will realize that the air quality here is poor on a good day but, thanks to the influx of tree pollens, it has been worse than poor these past few days.
It turns out that, due to the sudden shift to breezy, warm and dry weather, the pollen count went beserk over the past couple days. It went past 20,000 yesterday, which was the worst that…
oracknows | May 5, 2006Continuing on a theme, physicians can be really clueless sometimes; case in point, what happened at my medical school a couple of days ago.
The university that I work at is pretty large. It has three campuses several hundred, if not over a thousand, faculty members spread out between the campuses. Like many large universities, it has multiple mailing lists which are used to distribute information and make announcements. There are mailing lists for the basic science faculty, for graduate students, for medical students, for the residents of various departments, for staff members, and for…
apalazzo | May 4, 2006From a peice in the latest issue of Nature:
But this year, as three years of flat budgets begin to bite, Zerhouni's tenure at the NIH is being openly attacked by some scientists. The focus of their ire is his 'Roadmap', a set of activities that run across different NIH institutes and attempt to implement Zerhouni's vision for the agency. The critics say that the Roadmap isn't working and is diverting resources and attention from basic scientific research.
As the article states, it's hard to become the head of the NIH after such a rapid financial expansion. Harold Varmus was a tough act to…
evolgen | May 3, 2006
Carl Zimmer (one of the best general audience science writers) has a post on his blog on how the human immune system differs from that of other primates and even other apes. It's a good example of why biomedical researchers need to understand evolutionary biology (and why dumb shits like this should not be trusted with the lives of their patients). That said, I've got a little nit to pick with Carl. He wrote:
The scientists decided to compare human T cells directly to those of apes. It turns out that unlike humans apes produce a lot of Siglecs on their T cells.
C'mon, Carl, you know…
ksharpe | May 3, 2006Hay fever, as those of you who have it know, can be a most remarkable feeling.
Your eyes itch, and your joints ache. You feel as though you were coming down with the flu.
Time itself can seem distended, warped. Your hands feel like balls of dough, and you're sleepy...so sleepy.
You feel preternaturally calm on the one hand; on the other, you can't focus (your mind, or heck, sometimes even your eyes) to save your life. You start to wonder whether this is what it feels like to have ADD.
I'm dizzy today. I feel as though someone had wrapped my head in several layers of cotton wool. There's a…
oracknows | April 21, 2006Via an incoming link, over at The White Coat Rack, I've found a rather amusing description of the twelve types of medical students one is likely to encounter in medical school. Looking at the description, I realize that I probably was the Overly Academic, the one who "came into med school with plenty of research experience, but hardly any clinical experience."
I do have a little quibble with Joshua, though, about his description of the Gunner. At my medical school in the 1980's, no gunner was complete without the multi-colored pen that allows him or her to pick different color pens by…
oracknows | April 17, 2006In 1907, Adolf Hitler's mother Klara died of breast cancer at age 47, when Hitler was only 18. The young Hitler was devastated by her death. Indeed, in Mein Kampf, Hitler described her death thusly:
These were the happiest days of my life and seemed to me almost a dream; and a mere dream it was to remain. Two years later, the death of my mother put a sudden end to all my highflown plans.
It was the conclusion of a long and painful illness which from the beginning left little hope of recovery. Yet it was a dreadful blow, particularly for me. I had honored my father, but my mother I had loved.…
pharyngula | April 14, 2006Science asks awkward questions, doesn't it? I got a link to a recent paper in the BMJ (thanks, SEF!) that asks one of those questions—can fetuses feel pain?—and then takes it apart clinically, coming up with an answer that will make some adults feel pain: that answer is no.
The first step is to work out when the machinery of the nervous system is first present, and when it is simply possible for the fetus to detect unpleasant stimuli. The nervous system has its beginnings early in development, with neurulation at around 3 weeks after fertilization, but it is initially little more than a…
jstemwedel | April 10, 2006Stochastic, the Seed Blog has an interesting post this morning about Linus Pauling's "golden years" as a scientist. It's a good read, to which I only have a few thoughts to add.
First, to bring you up to speed on the story, here's an excerpt from the Stochastic post:
[Pauling] proposed that "megadoses" of vitamin C could effectively treat several illnesses, most notably cancer and the common cold, and published a few books to popularize these ideas. In 1973, he formed the Linus Pauling Institute of Medicine, where he performed multiple experiments to verify his claims.
The real trouble…
apalazzo | April 4, 2006Plagued with scandals and other baggage, today DeLay announced that he's giving up.
Usually I've steered clear of pure political talk on my blog, although those of you who know me personally know that I've been politically active. Well with DeLay's announcement I have a story to tell - and it's connected to science, or to be precise NIH funding.
Back during the "Contract with America" years the NIH was in desperate need of funding. The Republicans, in full starve the beast mode, campaigned to slash government spending on frivolous spending items such as Government sponsored research. Numerous…
tsmith | April 3, 2006Occasionally when discussing HIV and folks like Duesberg, etc., I'll get a question along the lines of, "do these people deny the entire germ theory of disease?" Certainly Duesberg has written that he doesn't believe HPV causes cervical cancer, or prions cause kuru, for example, and many of the arguments they make (expecting 100% attack rate in people who are HIV-positive, meeting Koch's postulates as initially outlined, even though no infectious agent does, etc.) would, if applied universally, not allow us to attribute causation to any infectious agent, not just HIV. A recent paper by…
joshua braun | March 31, 2006I saw this article today in the New York Times, "Long-Awaited Medical Study Questions the Power of Prayer." It recounts the findings of a study in the American Heart Journal, which attempted to measure the effect of prayer by strangers on the outcome of coronary bypass surgery in over 1,800 patients.
It was an incredibly ambitious study. The problem, of course, is that this is impossible to test. I'm not arguing for or against the efficacy of intercessory prayer here, lest people from either camp jump on my case. But seriously, doesn't rigorous scientific testing defeat the very idea of…
loom | March 31, 2006A couple weeks ago I wrote about the 98,000 viruses that have permanently pasted their genes into our genome over the past 60 million years. What makes these viruses doubly fascinating is that scientists are making new discoveries about them all the time. Over at the open-access journal PLOS Pathogens, two new papers add some pieces to the puzzle of how these viruses get into our genomes, and how they affect our health along the way.
The first paper offers a striking portrait of a virus hopping species. Researchers at the Cleveland Clinic stumbled across the virus as they were studying…
oracknows | March 30, 2006Earlier this week, I wrote about how the principles of population evolution can be applied to premalignant lesions in order to predict which lesions would progress to cancer. This time around, I'd like to discuss how using evolutionary principles can provide insights to human disease that would not be as obvious or that would take much longer to discover without considering evolution. One of the beautiful things about evolution and applying it to medicine is that one can find connections in unexpected places that may actually shed light on the pathogenesis of human diseases and even suggest…
oracknows | March 29, 2006I don't normally read the Financial Times. "What?" you say. "I thought that all doctors read the FT."
Ah, but you forget that I'm an academic physician. Don't get me wrong; I make a comfortable living, more money than I've made in my entire life, but I could almost certainly increase my earnings by 50-100% by going into private practice. I'd probably work roughly the same hours with the exception that I'd be called in more often for emergencies and that I'd spend all of my time either in the clinic or in the O.R., in contrast to the situation now where I spend half my time begging for money…
oracknows | March 27, 2006Last week, I inaugurated a new series on this blog entitled Medicine and Evolution. I even wrote what was to be the second post in the series, a post that (I hoped) would illustrate the utility of applying approaches used to study evolution to human disease. That post is essentially complete, other than requiring the addition of some links. That's what I was going to do last night, until Stranger Fruit turned me on to this study:
In a study published online today in Nature Genetics, Carlo Maley, Ph.D., a researcher at The Wistar Institute, and his colleagues report that precancerous tumors…
oracknows | March 23, 2006Longtime readers of this blog may have noticed that, since my move to ScienceBlogs six weeks ago, I haven't written nearly as much about evolution or intelligent design as I used to on the old blog.. There are probably at least several reasons for this. For one thing, lots of other topics have forced their way to the forefront of my attention, including more autism quackery by the Geiers, a politically oriented medical journal that is anything but scientific, the fire at The Holocaust History Project, applying science to green tea, and a variety of other things. Also, in light of the Dover…
oracknows | March 8, 2006Today's regularly scheduled post has been delayed due to an important and tragic development.
Something bad happened a couple of days ago, something that cuts rather close to home.
Arsonists targeted the offices used as a mailing address for the Holocaust History Project (THHP). (Video here, but only if you have IE and Active X installed, unfortunately.) The fire caused considerable damage to a warehouse complex and caused smoke damage to nearby businesses. Although the perpetrators have not been identified, there is good reason to suspect that it was not the business that was targeted, but…