Medicine
oracknows | February 17, 2010I'm hearing this from multiple sources, who are forwarding me this message from the Yahoo! Thoughtful House Group:
Dr. Wakefield has resigned from Thoughtful House
The needs of the children we serve must always come first. All of us at Thoughtful House are grateful to Dr. Wakefield for the valuable work he has done here. We fully support his decision to leave Thoughtful House in order to make sure that the controversy surrounding the recent findings of the General Medical Council does not interfere with the important work that our dedicated team of clinicians and researchers is doing on…
oracknows | February 16, 2010Remember Mark and David Geier?
I wouldn't be surprised if regular readers may have forgotten about this father-son tag team of anti-vaccine lunacy and autism woo. After all, I haven't written about them since journalist Trine Tsouderos did her expose of their "Lupron protocol" for the Chicago Tribune nine months ago. Long time readers, however, will remember the Geiers. They were one of the very first autism-related topics I wrote about after joining ScienceBlogs four years ago, when I wrote about them in a little ditty I called Why not just castrate them? The reason that I gave my post the…
oracknows | February 11, 2010Well, that didn't take long, at least not once the trial ended.
It's good to see the jury act with such alacrity to find Anne Mitchell not guilty and send a strong message to the hapless Dr. Rolando Arafiles and his errand boy Sheriff Robert L. Roberts, who spent more effort tracking down a nurse doing her duty than I bet he spends tracking down thieves and murderers, as well as the equally clueless County Attorney Scott Tidwell. It's good to see that justice was finally done in the end, but it's absolutely horrifying that it took so many months for it to happen. This is a prosecution that…
tqa | February 10, 2010
The more I look at the circumstances that lead up to the criminal prosecution of a nurse in Texas for informing the State Medical Board of her concerns with a local physician, the more I wind up wondering just how things wound up where they are. It's easy - and far from inaccurate - to view this as a case of the good ol' boy network gone bad, or as an example of a quack doctor twisting the system to turn the accusers into the accused. The more I think about it, though, the more I'm starting to think that we've really been looking at part of the picture. We've been missing something that's…
clock | February 10, 2010Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Hope Leman to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?
Hope: I am 46 and Research Information…
mikethemadbiologist | February 9, 2010The success of a European MRSA surveillance network shows just how stupid, foolish, and short-sighted the Obama Administration's decision to cut CDC antimicrobial resistance surveillance is. But let's turn this frown upside down campers, and look at the really cool website the European Staphylococcal Reference Laboratory Working Group set up.
Each of the Google Map pins represents a different surveillance laboratory. If you click on the pin, it tells you how many Staphylococcus aureus ('staph') isolates have been typed. You can then click the "view spa types" link. spa is a highly…
oracknows | February 7, 2010About five months ago, I blogged about a true miscarriage of justice, the sort of thing that should never, ever happen. In brief, it was the story of two nurses who, disturbed at how a local doctor was peddling his dubious "herbal" concoctions in the emergency room of the local hospital when he came in to see patients, reported him to the authorities. Moreover, they had gone up the chain of command, first complaining to hospital authorities. After nothing happened for months, they decided to report the physician, Dr. Rolando Arafiles, Jr., to the Texas Medical Board because they honestly…
cortex | February 3, 2010Sharon Begley has an excellent Newsweek cover story on the rise and fall of anti-depressant medications, or how a class of drugs that were once hailed as medical miracles are now seen as barely better than placebos:
In just over half of the published and unpublished studies, Kirsch and colleagues reported in 2002, the drug alleviated depression no better than a placebo. "And the extra benefit of antidepressants was even less than we saw when we analyzed only published studies," Kirsch recalls. About 82 percent of the response to antidepressants--not the 75 percent he had calculated from…
oracknows | February 3, 2010
You know I'm a sucker for a heartfelt plea from an anti-vaccine activist. That's why, upon seeing Kim Stagliano write in Age of Autism:
Hi, I'd appreciate your comments over at HuffPo on my post, The Censorship of Autism Treatment" HERE.
I had to admit that I heartily agree. That's why I'm asking my readers to take Ms. Stagliano up on her offer and head on over to comment on her post! Who says Orac is not a kind and benevolent box of blinking colored lights?
Even more amusingly, Kim's post was entitled The Censorship of Autism Treatment, which makes what she says next even more rich in…
oracknows | February 3, 2010If I am wrong I will be a bad person because I will have raised this spectre.
Andrew Wakefield, March 3, 1998.
Interview in The Independent.
The martyrdom of brave maverick Saint Andy continues apace, it would appear.
As you recall, last week, after an interminable proceeding that stretched out over two and a half years, the General Medical Council in the U.K. finally ruled on the question of whether Andrew Wakefield, the man whose incompetently performed, trial lawyer-backed study published in the Lancet in 1998, acted unethically. The answer, not surprisingly, was a resounding yes, or,…
clock | February 2, 2010Just checking in on a few of the new PLoS titles.... As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Why We Conform:
What makes us human, what sets us apart from other animal species, and which traits do we share with our closest living relatives? Ever since Darwin introduced the notion of…
j7uy5 | February 1, 2010
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src="http://www.researchblogging.org/public/citation_icons/rb2_large_gray.png"
style="border: 0pt none ;">Objective diagnosis is in some
ways the holy grail of medicine. It has been maddeningly elusive
in psychiatry. Now comes a paper in which the authors suggest
that they may have found this treasure.
The paper details a method of using magnetoencephalography to assess
human brain function. They claim that, in a select population, it
can correctly identify patients with PTSD with 90% accuracy.
href="http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/1741-…
revere | January 31, 2010I'm coming up for air during my grant writing (so far this weekend I've spent in excess of ten hours yesterday and today just writing; all the rest of the time I spent obsessing about what I wrote and what I still needed to write), but you know I'm desperate when I start posting stuff like this:
UF [University of Florida] researchers reviewed 96 cases that had complete medical records from more than 4,000 entries in the International Shark Attack File, a record maintained by UF's Florida Museum of Natural History. Assigning scores to clinical findings such as blood pressure, location and…
ddobbs | January 26, 2010Neuroskeptic ponders the growing evidence that antidepressants significantly best placebo only in the more (or most) depressed patients. His take is that:
antidepressants treat classical clinical depression, of the kind that psychiatrists in 1960 would have recognized. This is the kind of depression that they were originally used for, after all, because the first antidepressants arrived in 1953, and modern antidepressants like Prozac target the same neurotransmitter systems.
Yet in recent years "clinical depression" has become a much broader term. Many peopleattribute this to marketing on…
revere | January 26, 2010[Previous installments: here, here, here, here, here, here]
Last installment was the first examination of what "randomized" means in a randomized controlled trial (RCT). We finish up here by calling attention to what randomization does and doesn't do and under what circumstances. The notion of probability here is the conventional frequentist one, since that's how most RCTs are interpreted by users. Before we launch into the details, let's stop for a minute to see where we've been and why.
We began with a challenge to you, our readers. In the first post of this series we described an…
revere | January 25, 2010While I work on my monster grant proposal -- I and my colleagues have been working on it for 9 months, but with the deadline only 3 months away it is time to turn the volume up to 11 -- blogging may be light or brief. But posting something is an excuse to take a break and surf the web a bit, so that's what you'll be getting for the next 3 months. After that I'll probably check into an institution with no internet access to be sedated.
Yesterday I read on Medgadget that AccuWeather is selling an iPhone app to alert users of weather-associated health events in 16 locations:
Do you suffer from…
palmd | January 20, 2010There has been much written about the doctor-patient relationship, and specifically how to best maintain a clinical distance while at the same time being empathic and compassionate. This is something individual doctors work on throughout their careers, but something else interests me here.
Most physicians derive enjoyment from helping people. Altruism (a topic way too complex for me to pretend to understand in depth) feels good both from the act itself and from the response one gets from the object of the altruism. This last bit has comes with potential pitfalls.
My job is to help people…
terrasig | January 19, 2010This past weekend's international science communication conference, ScienceOnline2010, also saw the first, final hardback copies of Rebecca Skloot's long-awaited book make it into the hands of the science and journalism consuming public. Moreover, an excerpt of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks has just appeared in the new issue of Oprah Winfrey's O Magazine. And already, those online science communicators who left the conference with Skloot's book are registering their praise via this Twitter feed that was so active it was a trending topic at the science aggregator, SciencePond.
The story…
oracknows | January 18, 2010The double standard of the anti-vaccine "autism biomed" movement never ceases to amaze me.
Imagine if you will, that a pharmaceutical company examined a chemical used for industrial purposes. Imagine further that the chemical this pharmaceutical company decided to look at originated as an industrial chelator designed to separate heavy metals from polluted soil and mining drainage. Imagine still further that that pharmaceutical company wanted to use that chemical as a treatment for autism, a chelator to be given to children. Finally, imagine that the drug company was giving this chemical to…
palmd | January 13, 2010Two recent posts raised some ethical questions about the practice of a very public doctor who has proclaimed himself (on the front page of his website) to be an expert on testosterone replacement therapy.
Leading TRT expert Dr. Crisler is now available for consultations, lectures, advanced physician training, conference hosting, interviews, and more.
Well, Dr Crisler was apparently not happy with my critique. He was kind enough to drop by and leave several comments explaining why, the first and longest I will reprint here. He has also sent me a great deal of traffic from his own message…