Medicine
oracknows | January 17, 2011Something amazing happened on Friday. Unfortunately, I didn't get to blog it as soon as I would have liked because (1) it happened on Canadian TV and the video wasn't available to anyone outside of Canada until it showed up on YouTube and (2) Craig Willougby's changing his mind about Andrew Wakefield really did gobsmack me to the point that I had to blog about it, so rare is it for someone who used to accept pseudoscience to have the courage and intellectual honesty to admit publicly that he is changing his mind. Still, even though it's three days later, I didn't want to let this pass,…
oracknows | January 11, 2011One of the favorite attacks favored by advocates of pseudoscience, particularly advocates of the sort of pseudoscience favored by proponents of "alternative" medicine, particularly the more militant ones who really, really detest conventional, science-based medicine, is to poison the well with a pre-emptive ad hominem attack that implies that defenders of science-based medicine are somehow interested in nothing but money. The first favored attack is to point out that the pharmaceutical industry is interested in nothing but money. That's partially true (they are, after all, for profit…
jtoney | January 5, 2011
Predicted Median Life Expectancy by Age and Gait Speed
(Studenski, S. et al. JAMA 2011;305:50-58).
Staying active, along with a balanced health diet, is probably the best way to age gracefully. An elegantly simple study was just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association that clearly demonstrates the relationship between longevity and walking speed. Researchers studied close to 35,000 people aged 65 years or above (a mean of 74 years) with data taken from six to 21 years.
I love studies such as this - ask a simple question, propose a clear experimental design, and…
pharyngula | December 30, 2010People keep sending me this link to an article by Jonah Lehrer in the New Yorker: The Decline Effect and the Scientific Method, which has the subheadings of "The Truth Wears Off" and "Is there something wrong with the scientific method?" Some of my correspondents sound rather distraught, like they're concerned that science is breaking down and collapsing; a few, creationists mainly, are crowing over it and telling me they knew we couldn't know anything all along (but then, how did they know…no, let's not dive down that rabbit hole).
I read it. I was unimpressed with the overselling of the…
oracknows | December 30, 2010Part 1 is here.
Part 2 is here.
Part 3 is here.
I realize I say these things again and again and again, but they bear repeating because together they are a message that needs to be spread in as clear and unambiguous a form as possible. First, whenever you hear someone say, "I'm not anti-vaccine," there's always a "but" after it, and that "but" almost always demonstrates that the person is anti-vaccine after all. Second, for antivaccine loons, it's always about the vaccines. Always. It's not primarily about autism advocacy; it's primarily about the vaccines and blaming them for autism. Autism…
oracknows | December 23, 2010In discussing "alternative" medicine it's impossible not to discuss, at least briefly, placebo effects. Indeed, one of the most common complaints I (and others) voice about clinical trials of alternative medicine is lack of adequate placebo controls. Just type "acupuncture" in the search box in the upper left hand corner of the blog, and you'll pull up a number of discussions of acupuncture clinical trials that I've done over the years. If you check some of these posts, you'll find that in nearly every case I discuss whether the placebo or sham control is adequate, noting that, the better the…
oracknows | December 21, 2010When it comes to "alternative" medical practices from Asia (or from anywhere else, for that matter), I've ceased to be surprised by anything I hear. After all, if somehow, some way, people can justify just about any strange health that can be imagined. If you don't believe me, I have two words for you: Coffee enemas. If you still don't believe me, I have two more words for you: black salve (i.e., burning skin lesions off). Still don't believe me? I have three more words for you:
Vaginal steam baths.
Yep. I learned about it in a news story in the L.A. Times yesterday entitled Vaginal steam…
oracknows | December 20, 2010During the six years of its existence, one frequent complaint I've had on this blog, it's been about how the press covers various health issues. In particular, it's depressing to see how often dubious and even outright false health claims, such as the claim that vaccines cause autism, that cell phones or powerlines cause cancer, or that various questionable or even quack remedies work for various diseases are reported credulously. Often this takes the form of a journalistic convention that is more appropriate for politics and other issues but not so appropriate for scientific and medical…
tfk | December 19, 2010Michael Egnor is still upset. Earlier, he penned an inaccurate, misleading, and ⦠well ⦠egnorant defense of his views on abortion, responding to my critique of his claim that personhood is easy to define.
His earlier reply repeatedly and incorrectly attempted to associate the content of this blog with my employer. As the sidebar on every page makes clear, the opinions expressed here are not those of NCSE. People who try to tag content here as reflecting NCSE policy or views instantly lose a lot of credit in my accounting of their literacy.
Egnor continues that trend in his latest…
oracknows | December 15, 2010It's times like these that I'm glad I'm a clinician-scientist:
Or maybe not.
The reason is that the same conversation in a clinician-scientist's review would be asking why he's only produced X number of RVUs last year and suggesting pointedly that he needs to double his RVU output. Oh, and, by the way, he needs to get grants, publish clinical trials, and teach residents and medical students, too, all while taking more call. And don't forget that it's the very rare clinician-scientist who can bring in more money to a department in indirect costs from federal grants than he or she could bring…
oracknows | December 14, 2010If you need some woo, and you need it fast, who ya gonna call? HuffPo!
Yes, as I've pointed out since its very inception, if there's one thing The Huffington Post is good at doing, it's butchering medical science and serving up regular heapin' helpings of the purest woo. Be it the anti-vaccine pseudoscience that has dominated its pages from the very beginning (including posts by our old friend Dr. Jay Gordon), the quantum woo favored by Deepak Chopra, or the rank quackery that's been showing up on HuffPo's pages more and more frequently over the last two years or so, there's no "respectable"…
oracknows | December 9, 2010I was originally going to switch it up and blog about something other than cancer. In fact, there is a particularly juicy bit of anti-vaccine nonsense that I wanted to write about because it shows the utter mendacity of a certain anti-vaccine website that, believe it or not, is not Age of Autism. I know, I know, it's hard to believe, but there actually is an anti-vaccine group that is giving Generation Rescue a run for its money when it comes to sheer crazy. It'll keep, though, until next week. In the meantime, I have even worse crazy to deal with. In the meantime, I have even more despicable…
mikethemadbiologist | December 1, 2010I guess. Over at the Motley Fool, Brian Orelli asks, "Which Is a Better Buy: Complete Genomics or Pacific Biosciences?" While I agree that PacBio is probably the better bet (and bet is the operative word), I don't think the reasoning is right. Orelli:
If you're interested in trying to catch the boom and get out before the bust, both Complete Genomics and PacBio look like a good choice to benefit from an exponential increase in DNA sequencing.
It's too early to make a definitive call, but of the two, I like PacBio better because I'm not fond of the low-cost, high-volume business model. Sure…
kbonham | November 30, 2010Cancer sucks. I'm sure I don't have to tell you that - it's one of the leading causes of death in developed countries, and our treatment options are pretty thin. Basically, it amounts to cutting out the tumors that can be seen, and then giving a controlled administration of poison in the hopes that the cancer cells die before you do. Don't get me wrong - advances in oncology have saved many lives, but it's no surprise that there's a lot of research happening to find better options.
One promising avenue of study is augmenting the immune system to fight cancer directly. It's known that the…
jdupuis | November 29, 2010Via Bora Zivkovic, I see that there's a new blog in town -- this one devoted to the joys of scientists blogging to advance their work.
It's called Science of Blogging and it's by Peter Janiszewski and Travis Saunders who blog at Obesity Panacea.
I'll let them explain their mission:
Social media provides a tremendous outlet by which to translate and promote scientific knowledge and engage the public discourse. All scientists, researchers, clinicians, government and not-for-profit organizations have much to gain by adopting an effective and viable social media strategy.
Science of Blogging will…
illconsidered | November 29, 2010Consensus is a dirty word when it comes to climate change experts, but put in just about any other context, expert consensus is what we all would want. This Marc Roberts cartoon casts that issue in the best light:
Just imagine getting medical assistance from Lord Cristopher Monckton... Oh look! We don't have to imagine.
I began to think that Viscount Monckton might be a formidable opponent during the debate. Then he told me that he has discovered a new drug that is a complete cure for two-thirds of known diseases - and that he expects it to go into clinical trials soon. I asked him…
oracknows | November 23, 2010They call it the Nobel disease.
Linus Pauling is the prototypical example. A brilliant chemist who won two Nobel Prizes, one for chemistry and the Nobel Peace Prize, in his later years Pauling became convinced that high dose vitamin C was a highly effective treatment for cancer and the common cold and, expanding upon that, came to believe in the quackery that is orthomolecular medicine. As a result, Pauling's reputation was tainted for all time, and he became known more for his crankery than his successes. Since his death, Pauling's successors have continued to chase his dream with minimal…
oracknows | November 18, 2010In terms of promoting woo and quackery, there is one person who stands head and shoulders above all the rest. True, she doesn't just promote woo and quackery, but she does have a long list of dubious achievements in that realm, including but not limited to unleashing Jenny McCarthy and her anti-vaccine crusade plus Suzanne Somers and her "bioidentical hormone" and cancer quackeries on an unsuspecting American public. She's also subjected us to both Dr. Phil and Dr. Oz to the point of actually launching them on their own shows, promoting the mystcial mumbo-jumbo wish fulfillment that is The…
tsmith | November 18, 2010The second edition of the Rock Stars of Science is now out online, and in the November 23rd ("Men of the Year") edition of GQ magazine. As Chris Mooney notes, this is a campaign funded by the Geoffery Beene Foundation, working to raise recognition of scientists' work (and scientists, period, since roughly half of the American population can't name a single living scientist). Part of the campaign is to make science noticeable and "cool;" I'll quote from the press release:
ROCK S.O.S⢠aims to bridge a serious recognition gap for science, observes journalist Chris Mooney, co-author of the…
pharyngula | November 17, 2010Do you detect the little scientific and logical problem in this press release about a new prayer study?
A ground-breaking online study was recently initiated to discover if Americans believe prayer has a place in medicine. Shannon Pierotti, a graduate student at USciences, is using a social networking basis for recruiting participants in a National survey to assess attitudes regarding the inclusion of spirituality and prayer in medical practice.
What's "ground-breaking" about that? She's simply using an online poll, advertised on religious sites, to ask if respondents believe that magical…