Medicine
gregladen | November 12, 2010Over eleven thousand Haitians have been infected with cholera, and over 700 have died. The epidemic is worsening very quickly. Over 80 of the dead have died within the last 24 hours as of this writing. The resources needed to deal with this are not available, apparently because cholera in Haiti is not as interesting or sympathy garnering as an earthquake in Haiti.
From Medecines Sans Frontiers:
Over the past three days, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) medical teams supporting Haitian Ministry of Public Health facilities and working in their own independent medical structures in Haiti's…
jtoney | November 4, 2010
The past decade has been tumultuous for the pharmaceutical industry. The news media generally paints "Big Pharma" with a broad brush, an unflattering portrait of corporate greed more concerned with short-term profits than supporting public health through access to better, "smarter" medications. A recent Huffington Post article is a striking example of such caricature: in a list of "10 American Industries That Will Never Recover," pharmaceuticals is No. 4, flanked by realtors and newspapers.
Chief amongst the reasons for its putative demise are mergers, layoffs, patent expirations with a…
oracknows | November 4, 2010I may have taken a break yesterday, but that doesn't mean I've abandoned my mission to make this Vaccine Awareness Week (or, more properly, the Anti-vaccine Movement Awareness Week, dedicated to countering the lies of the anti-vaccine movement). Even though it was good to take a day off, the anti-vaccine movement rarely takes a day off, and yesterday was no exception. Indeed, one of the most belligerent anti-vaccinationists of all, the meanest, ugliest, nastiest one, the meanest anti-vaccine bull of all, decided to show up for the first time in a long time yesterday on his organization's…
pharyngula | October 30, 2010I had the Stewart/Colbert rally on in the background most of today. There were funny bits, there were entertaining bits, I'm sure everyone there had a good time. It was a pleasant afternoon of entertainment on the mall.
But in the end, I was disappointed. It was also an afternoon of false equivalence, of civility fetishism, of nothing but a cry about the national tone, of a plea for moderation. And you can guess what I think of moderation.
A thing moderately good is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.
Tom Paine…
oracknows | October 29, 2010If there's one thing that confounds advocates of so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), it's the placebo effect. That's because, whenever most such remedies are studied using rigorous clinical trial design using properly constituted placebo controls, they almost always end up showing effects no greater than placebo effects. That's the main reason why they frequently suggest that, you know, all those rigorous, carefully constructed randomized placebo-controlled clinical trials aren't really the best way to investigate their woo after all. To them, it's much better to do "…
lborkowski | October 28, 2010At the Millennium Development Goal summit last month, one of the sessions addressed the issue of the global healthcare workforce. We don't have enough healthcare workers to deliver needed care to the world's population, and until we address this problem it'll be next to impossible to meet the goals of reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, and combating diseases like AIDS and malaria.
One major challenge is simply that there aren't enough trained healthcare professionals, but the distribution of the existing healthcare workforce is also a pressing issue. At the global level,…
oracknows | October 21, 2010My alma mater has let me down.
As many of you know, I went to the University of Michigan for both my undergraduate degree and for medical school. I still have a fairly strong attachment to the school, which is why I can still be disappointed when its faculty let me down. Unfortunately, it's happened, and this time U. of M. has disappointed by inadvertently providing ammunition for the anti-vaccine movement. I'm referring to a poll released by the C.S. Mott Children's Hospital (which is where I did my pediatrics rotations when I was in medical school). The poll results are being trumpeted…
oracknows | October 19, 2010The Lorne Trottier Symposium is over, and it went quite well. Amazingly, even though I had to follow Michael Shermer's talk, people told me I didn't suck, which made me feel better. Oh, there was this issue of a guy who wanted to tout Royal Rife and his machine. He wouldn't have irritated me so much for doing that. What did irritate me was that he went on and on and on and wouldn't yield the microphone, to the point where I tried to interrupt him to ask him if he had a question and then ended up being perhaps too dismissive of his question. On the other hand, even Michael Shermer told him, "…
oracknows | October 15, 2010Every so often, real life intrudes on blogging, preventing the creation of fresh Insolence, at least Insolence of the quality that you've come to expect. This is one of those times. I happen to be sitting here in Palm Beach, Florida, but I'm not chilling at the beach or pool. Rather, I'm attending "leadership training." Yes, be very, very afraid! In any case, I never saw the point of having these sorts of training seminars at beautiful oceanfront locations if they're going to pack the entire day with, you know, actual training! Worse (for purposes of blogging), I really have to fine tune my…
oracknows | October 12, 2010I sometimes think I ought to send a thank you letter to Dr. Mark Hyman.
True, I don't owe him quite as much as I owe, for example, Mike Adams of NaturalNews.com, anyone on the blogging crew of the anti-vaccine crank propaganda blog Age of Autism, Dr. Jay Gordon, or several other pseudoscientists, quacks, or other assorted cranks who have provided me with blogging material over the last five years. However, whether he's mangling autism science, postulating dubious "personalized medicine" for Alzheimer's disease, championing that form of quackery known as "functional medicine," trying to…
sb admin | October 12, 2010
Back in June I launched a new blog, Genomes Unzipped, together with a group of colleagues and friends with expertise in various areas of genetics. At the time I made a rather cryptic comment about "planning much bigger things for the site over the next few months".
Today I announced what I meant by that: from today, all of the 12 members of Genomes Unzipped - including my wife and I - will be releasing their own results from a variety of genetic tests, online, for anyone to access. Initially those results consist of data from one company (23andMe) for all 12 members; deCODEme for one…
dgmacarthur | October 12, 2010
Back in June I launched a new blog, Genomes Unzipped, together with a group of colleagues and friends with expertise in various areas of genetics. At the time I made a rather cryptic comment about "planning much bigger things for the site over the next few months".
Today I announced what I meant by that: from today, all of the 12 members of Genomes Unzipped - including my wife and I - will be releasing their own results from a variety of genetic tests, online, for anyone to access. Initially those results consist of data from one company (23andMe) for all 12 members; deCODEme for one…
oracknows | October 7, 2010Last week blew by me in a blur. Because I was in full grant writing frenzy to get an R01 in the can by Friday, pretty much anything that wasn't totally urgent got shoved aside, at least after Wednesday. Of course, it was last Wednesday that yet another mammography study was being touted as a "landmark" study. I had just enough time to look it over briefly and decide that I really should blog about it, particularly given that it came hot on the heels of a Norwegian study less than a week before that found the benefits of mammography to be less than previously believed and even more…
oracknows | October 5, 2010One of the favorite fallacious arguments favored by pseudoscientists and denialists of science is the ever infamous "science was wrong before" gambit, wherein it is argued that, because science is not perfect or because scientists are not perfect, then science is not to be trusted. We've seen it many times before. Indeed, we saw it just yesterday, when promoters of quackery and anti-vaccine cranks leapt all over the revelation that American scientists had intentionally infected Guatemalan prisoners with syphilis without their consent as part of an experiment in the 1940s. They didn't attack…
oracknows | September 23, 2010Naturopathy is a strange beast in the "alternative medicine" world. From what I've been able to tell, it's a wastebasket specialty with no overarching philosophical underpinnings, as traditional Chinese medicine underpins acupuncture or sympathetic magic underpins homeopathy. Basically, if it's woo, naturopaths will use it. Acupuncture, TCM, homeopathy, herbalism, nutritional woo, detox, it doesn't matter. To naturopaths, it's all good, as long as it isn't "conventional medicine." Wait. Not quite. After all naturopaths have been fighting for (and in some cases getting) prescribing authority…
jgoldman | September 19, 2010
Another week, another new blog network. Go say hello to the bloggers at Wired Science. Five of the six should look familiar, if you've been around Scienceblogs for a while: Brian Switek, David Dobbs, Daniel Macarthur, Maryn McKenna, Rhett Allain and Brian Romans, joined Jonah Lehrer, who had already been there a few weeks.
Science
Melody Dye and I discussed psychology on the Bloggingheads Science Saturday program yesterday.
The second edition of the Carnal Carnival is up at Carin Bondar's place, and the theme is vomit!
Christie Wilcox tells us that, apparently, the most highly cited academic…
lborkowski | September 17, 2010Earlier this week, FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg presented Frances Kelsey with the first in what will be a series of awards bearing Kelsey's name. Fifty years ago, as a new medical officer with the FDA, Kelsey refused to approve US sale of Kevadon, a drug widely recognized by its generic name, thalidomide. The drug was widely used as a sleep aid and anti-morning-sickness drug in Europe, but Kelsey questioned its safety.
While thousands of children were being born in Europe with missing limbs and other thalidomide-induced birth defects, the US avoided such widespread tragedy. In 1962,…
oracknows | September 6, 2010After chilling out for part of the weekend, yesterday I became so engrossed in writing my part of a training grant for my postdoc that, before I knew it, it was way too late to provide you with the Insolence you crave. Oh, well. Tomorrow for sure. In the meantime, I'll post a couple of bits of "classic" (if you can call it that) Insolence. This particular bit of insolence dates back nearly four years, all the way back to November 2006. Remember, if you haven't been reading at least four years, it's new to you! Besides, it's always fun (or disturbing) to me to see how well some of my older…
lborkowski | September 3, 2010When I first started to get interested in public health several years ago, I thought of it mostly as dealing with things like vaccines and handwashing. From one of my friends who enrolled in a Master of Public Health program, I learned that it actually covers a whole range of issues that affect the population's health and quality of life - things like workplace and highway safety and smoking cessation, in addition to control of infectious diseases.
The word "population" is key to understanding public health. Healthcare providers focus on individual patients; public health workers focus on…
oracknows | September 2, 2010Nearly a month ago, I expressed my dismay and displeasure at the infiltration fo quackademic medicine into what is arguably the premier medical journal in the world, The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) in the form of a highly credulous review on the use of acupuncture for low back pain that brought eternal shame on the hallowed pages of a once-great journal. As Mark Crislip put it, trust, once damaged or lost, is very hard to restore, and I definitely lost a lot of trust for the NEJM compared to what I had for it a month ago. Since then, I've been keeping my eyes out for other examples…