Medicine
j7uy5 | March 15, 2010At first, I was going to title this post WSJ: Incompetent Ranting. Then
I decided that was too strong. Then I read the article again, and
went back to the original title. Mind you, this is not intended
to be an ad hominem attack. The author,
href="http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/history/faculty/facultyprofiles/shorter.html">Edward
Shorter,
has been the Hannah Professor in the History of Medicine since 1991,
and in 1996 was cross-appointed as Professor of Psychiatry (at the
University of Toronto). He has written some good books, including
A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the…
oracknows | March 12, 2010My first big splash in the blogosphere will have occurred five years ago in June, when I first discovered the utter wingnuttery that is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. It was then that I wrote a little bit of that not-so-Respectful Insolence that you've come to know and love entitled Salon.com flushes its credibility down the toilet, a perfect description of an article by RFK, Jr. published in Salon.com and simultaneously in Rolling Stone entitled Deadly Immunity. As I look back, I realize that, as widely linked to and discussed as it was at the time, that post, arguably more than any other, was the…
terrasig | March 11, 2010This is a repost of my reflections on my father who passed away 13 years today. It took me 12 years to write the following eulogy and remembrance. While quite personal, I posted it here last year because I felt that my experiences were quite universal, shared by the families of the ten or twenty million alcoholics in the US and the hundreds of millions worldwide. Moreover, I wanted to provide a face for my colleagues who work in the area of substance abuse and a reminder for my clinical colleagues of the people behind those they may dismiss as drunks and junkies.
In becoming one my most most…
oracknows | March 11, 2010These days, I'm having a love-hate relationship with Elsevier. On the one hand, there are lots of reasons to hate Elsevier. For example, Elsevier took payments from Merck, Sharp & Dohme in order to publish in essence a fake journal designed to promote its products, and then got caught doing it again. On the other hand, Elsevier owns both The Lancet and NeuroToxicology. The former recently retracted Andrew Wakefield's original 1998 Lancet paper that launched the latest iteration of the anti-vaccine movement in the U.K., as well as a thousand quacks, to be followed by the latter, which…
tsaunders | March 8, 2010
Image by atomicjeep
I came across a very interesting article in the Ottawa Citizen this weekend, unpleasantly titled "For Canada's obese, exercise alone isn't going to cut it". The crux of the article is this - exercise will not help you lose weight. Every few months it seems that this issue pops up, including a cover article in TIME magazine last year, which Peter has previously dissected. This is a complicated issue, and given the sensational title, I wasn't expecting much from the Citizen article. But the article is actually very well written, and includes interviews with a number…
palmd | March 7, 2010I get all sorts of mail. I get mail from whining Scientologists, suffering patients, angry quacks---and I get lots of promotional material. I get letters from publishers wanting me to review books, letters from pseudo-bloggers wanting me to plug their advertiblog---really, just about anything you can imagine.
Most of the time I just hit "delete"; it's obvious that they've never read my blog and they're just casting a wide net for some link love. But a recent email from a PR firm piqued my interest: (it's a long letter, and I won't be offended if you simply reference it rather than read the…
tsaunders | March 7, 2010
Photo by Todd Huffman.
One of the great things about this site is that people often bring products or research to our attention that we otherwise might have missed. This occurred yesterday in the comments section of Peter's recent post on Acai berry scams, when one of our readers brought up the use of Human Chorionic Gonadotropin (HCG) in the treatment of obesity. The website that we were provided smacks of weight loss gimmickry - notably the promise of an obesity "cure" and "near 100% success rate", but we thought it best to review the evidence before making a judgement one way or…
tsaunders | March 7, 2010
Photo by pugetsoundphotowalks.
Regardless of your shape or size, physical activity has been shown to add years to your life, and life to your years. But believe it or not, the benefits of physical activity are not restricted to exercise performed in the gym. In fact, one of the easiest ways to improve your health may be through increasing the amount of low intensity physical activity you perform throughout the day. For example, simply increasing the number of steps that you take each day is very likely to reduce your risk for diseases like diabetes and cardiovascular disease. It's still…
razib | March 3, 2010I'm hearing about rumblings at 23andMe, and not in a good way. The company made a big splash a few years ago, and came highly recommended by friends (e.g., "They know their science, and have a bottomless pool of money"). This story at BNET got my attention though, and confirmed what many have been hinting at, or just telling me straight-up. Let's start the from the beginning. Back in late 2008 23andMe seemed absolutely untouchable. Here's Andrew Yates of Think Gene from then:
People, 23andMe isn't going anywhere. They are the Bill & Melinda Gates Sergey & Anne Brin Foundation,…
palmd | March 1, 2010Here in the U.S. our rich are very rich and all but our poorest live better than most Haitians. In this context it's easy to lose perspective and to be a bit naive about the survival needs of the people in post-quake Haiti.
Or maybe that's being too generous. How hard could it be for an adult to realize that finding food, water, shelter, and basic medical care for yourself and your family take precedence over any other needs? Does it really take being subjected to life-threatening conditions yourself to have such a basic level of empathy?
The hordes of medical cultists descending on…
revere | February 28, 2010Rabies is one of those diseases that scares the crap out of me. Once clinical symptoms start, it is essentially a death sentence. "Essentially" because there are 6 cases of survival in the medial record, but 5 of the 6 had had rabies vaccination prior to illness. A single case of survival in an unvaccinated case is on record, but only after a long period in intensive care. Now CDC is reporting an unusual case they are calling "abortive rabies." The patient was a 17 year old girl who had multiple hospitalizations for a variety of neurologic symptoms, including severe headache, vomiting and…
oracknows | February 26, 2010I realize that there are two huge target-rich articles out there that my readers have been clamoring for me to comment on. First, there's a particularly silly and simplistic article by Nicholas Kristof about how it's supposedly the "toxins" causing autism (an article in which he apparently doesn't realize that Current Opinions in Pediatrics is not really a peer-reviewed journal but rather publishes review articles by invitation), and then there's a fawning TIME Magazine article bout Jenny McCarthy. When two such--shall we say?--target-rich articles appear on the same day, I'd be falling all…
tsmith | February 25, 2010Student guest post by Desiré Christensen
Human papillomaviruses (HPVs) are small DNA viruses that infect epithelial cells. There are well over 100 subtypes of HPV. The subtypes that infect cutaneous epithelia are termed beta-HPVs and those that infect the mucosal epithelia are termed alpha-HPVs. Some alpha-HPVs have received attention as strong risk factors for the development of cervical cancer. Less public awareness has been generated over the role of HPVs in the development of other cancers such as vulvar, vaginal, anal, head and neck, and penile cancers. Only recent research has…
tsmith | February 25, 2010Student guest post by Andrew Behan
Type I Diabetes Mellitus (T1DM) is a disease most affecting children (previously named juvenile-onset diabetes). However, adults can still develop this life-threatening illness. Research in the genetic arena has provided evidence this disease is partially due to inheritance, leaving a portion of causality yet to be determined. More specifically, a look at certain viruses which attack the beta cells of the pancreas, the cells responsible for producing insulin, have provided new information regarding etiology of T1DM. Some recent research aimed at…
pharyngula | February 24, 2010Janet Stemwedel was a participant in a panel discussion on the ethics of animal research. She got her reward: she is now featured on the web page of a deranged terrorist for animal rights, complete with her home address and phone number. These thugs are people who threaten children and carry out violence against researchers, and deserve to be treated as terrorists, fitting the definition perfectly: they use fear and intimidation and violence to compel people to meet their irrational demands.
They are also ignorant, and don't even want to understand the purpose of basic research. This…
palmd | February 23, 2010Several months ago, Dr. Val Jones wrote about a growing fad in the treatment of musculoskeletal disorders. The therapy, called platelet rich plasma (PRP) injection, involves taking a small amount of blood from a patient, spinning it down in a centrifuge, and then injecting the plasma component into...somewhere. This treatment is becoming increasingly popular, and can be very lucrative for doctors. But does it work?
Blood platelets are very biologically active particles and plasma is not a bland fluid. Platelets and plasma contain many biologically active molecules, some of which may be…
palmd | February 22, 2010Human beings are fundamentally narcissistic, and this narcissism can be antithetical to good science and good medicine. We place far too much confidence in our individual abilities to understand what happens to us, and we place far too much importance on our own experiences, inappropriately generalizing them. That's why science is so important in medicine---to avoid basing life-or-death decisions on something some guy thinks he might have heard once.
In my recent piece on medical marijuana in Forbes, commenters took me to task for what they perceived to be a host of errors in my reasoning…
terrasig | February 19, 2010Just a quick post on an article that caught my eye: Jazz Pharmaceuticals of Palo Alto, CA, has announced that the US FDA has accepted their new drug application (NDA) filing for JZP-6, or sodium oxybate, for the treatment of pain and fatigue associated with fibromyalgia.
The NDA was based on positive outcomes of two, Phase III clinical trials - those randomized, placebo-controlled double-blind trials that serve as the gold standard for drug efficacy. The company expects an approval decision from FDA by October 2010.
Jazz has already garnered approval for sodium oxybate under the brand name…
oracknows | February 18, 2010What is it with cranks and trying to shut down criticism?
I know, I know. I've written about this before, but this week has been a banner week for a phenomenon that I consider a sine qua non of a crank or a quack, namely an intolerance of criticism. Seemingly, whenever a quack or a crank encounters serious criticism, the first reaction is almost never to try to argue based on facts, reason, and science, but rather to try to silence the person doing the criticizing. The tactics are many and varied, but the end goal is always the same: Suppress the criticism by any means necessary. The very…
oracknows | February 18, 2010Last night, it came to light from a posting on the Thoughtful House Yahoo! discussion group that Andrew Wakefield has apparently resigned from Thoughtful House. I have yet to see confirmation anywhere, although Brian Deer has chimed in that this comes as no surprise to him and that he suspects that Dr. Arthur Krigsman, Anyssa Ryland, and Jane Johnson are behind Wakefield's ouster. However, more interesting is this comment from Liz Ditz. In it, she points out a couple of interesting bits of background.
Tidbit #1 from 2008:
In 2007 alone, Thoughtful House saw 1,500 new patient requests -- or…