Medicine
clock | September 28, 2009Follow me on Twitter to get these, and more, in something closer to Real Time:
Gordon Conference - Pineal Cell Biology: Mechanisms Of Circadian Rhythmicity And Melatonin Action
Nixon's prepared speech if Apollo 11 astronauts got stranded on the moon
Free-market idolatry: Government not the only power to resist - "we need to rethink the common belief that says government is always the problem"
500+ science types on Twitter
David Bradley's brilliant flow chart 'To Follow or Not To Follow' on Twitter
Why metaphors:Thinking literally
Understanding the Psychology of Twitter and More on the…
oracknows | September 28, 2009I promised last week in a post in which I described Bill Maher's latest pro-quackery remarks (this time, supporting cancer quackery), today is the day that I'm going to ask you, my readers, for some help. As I complained a while back, Bill Maher, who is anything but a rationalist or a booster of science (at least when it comes to medicine) is being awarded the Richard Dawkins Award by the Atheist Alliance International at its convention this weekend in Los Angeles.
As I said before, given that (1) the award lists "advocates increased scientific knowledge" as one of its criteria; (2) that…
sb admin | September 28, 2009by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure
A good story by the AP's Lauran Neergaard yesterday highlighted the need for better public health surveillance and the efforts being made to improve it so as to keep track of possible rare side effects from the swine flu vaccine. This is an issue we've talked about a lot here, most recently in the context of not being able to fully test any vaccine for rare adverse outcomes prior to deployment. There's more involved than that, but first here's Neergaard's lede:
The U.S. government is starting an unprecedented system to track possible side effects as…
revere | September 28, 2009A good story by the AP's Lauran Neergaard yesterday highlighted the need for better public health surveillance and the efforts being made to improve it so as to keep track of possible rare side effects from the swine flu vaccine. This is an issue we've talked about a lot here, most recently in the context of not being able to fully test any vaccine for rare adverse outcomes prior to deployment. There's more involved than that, but first here's Neergaard's lede:
The U.S. government is starting an unprecedented system to track possible side effects as mass swine flu vaccinations begin next…
oracknows | September 27, 2009Khhaaaaaannnn!
I mean, Arriiiaaaaannaaa!
Ever since its very inception, I've been--shall we say?--less than enthusiastic about the Huffington Post's medical blogging. Indeed, the level of anti-vaccine rhetoric there from the very beginning, back in 2005, astounded me. If anything, HuffPo's record has gotten even worse over the last four years, be it Deepak Chopra, or, in 2009, the addition of a variety of quacks to its roster, not to mention a brain-blisteringly stupid anti-vaccine rant by Fire Marshal Bill--I mean Jim Carrey--the promotion of "functional medicine" quackery by Mark Hyman, "…
palmd | September 27, 2009Warning: this post has a long, boring prologue. Proceed at your own risk.
I am an expert in the prevention and treatment of adult diseases. That's what I do from well before the sun rises until well after it sets every day of every week. To become an expert and retain this status is not a simple task. After college I completed four years of medical school, three years of residency in my specialty, and chose to become "board-certified". There are doctors who are not board certified in their specialties, and there's nothing nefarious about that---all that is required to practice medicine…
revere | September 27, 2009Flu season has started in earnest, even though it's not "officially" flu season until week 40 (first week in October this year). How do we know it's flu season if we don't test everyone and can't count flu? We use a surveillance system. The flu surveillance system has lots of moving parts and five or six components (or as many as nine, depending on how you count). None of them tell us exactly what we want and putting the different pieces together can sometimes be like the blind men and the elephant. But the system does work better than you'd think and it's undergoing modifications and…
revere | September 26, 2009I'm afraid I have to complain about crappy journalism again. AlterNet is an online newsmagazine I quite like. We've been linked by them numerous times and know their influence. Sometimes, though, some very smart writers write some very dumb things, even if they do it in a smart way. Alas, Joshua Holland has done it today on the front page of Alternet.org with a supremely wrongheaded story about why you don't have to be scared shitless about swine flu. We agree with that bottom line, but how he got there is the problem (that and the fact that he doesn't understand much about influenza).
Let's…
oracknows | September 23, 2009That Jake Crosby, he's a crazy mixed-up kid, but I kind of like him.
He seems like a nice enough and smart enough kid, but, sadly, he's fallen in with a bad crowd over at the anti-vaccine crank propaganda blog, Age of Autism, so much so that he's even blogging there, helping, whether he realizes it or not, to promote the message that vaccines cause autism and that various forms of biomedical quackery can somehow "cure" autism. I say "whether he realizes it or not" because he seems to have settled into the role of AoA's token young adult on the spectrum who promotes the party line. Indeed, he'…
clock | September 22, 2009There are 21 new articles in PLoS ONE today. 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:
Relationships of Cetacea (Artiodactyla) Among Mammals: Increased Taxon Sampling Alters Interpretations of Key Fossils and Character Evolution:
Integration of diverse data (molecules, fossils) provides the…
neurophilosophy | September 21, 2009THE vegetative and minimally conscious states are examples of what are referred to as disorders of consciousness. Patients in these conditions are more or less oblivious to goings-on in their surroundings - they exhibit few, if any, signs of conscious awareness, and are usually unable to communicate in any way. It is, therefore, extremely difficult to establish what these patients are experiencing, and the consciousness disorders are among the least understood, and most commonly misdiagnosed, conditions in medicine.
Although technologies such as functional neuorimaging have enabled…
oracknows | September 21, 2009I've asked at least three times on this blog, "Is Bill Maher that ignorant?"
The first time was four and a half years ago, when, in a fit of germ theory denialism, Maher proclaimed erroneously that Louis Pasteur had "recanted" on his deathbed, while spewing nonsense hither and yon about how disease isn't primarily caused by microbes but by "aggregate toxicity," whatever that means in woo-speak. The second time I asked the question occurred in 2008, when Maher lectured David Letterman about "toxins" and and suggested that he consider giving up his heart drugs and pursue "natural" therapies.…
revere | September 20, 2009I suppose under the theory that when dog bites man it's not news but when man bites dog it is, CDC's publication Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports (MMWR) recently ran an outbreak report about people getting baked by brownies:
On April 8, 2009, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) notified officials from the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health (DPH) in California about a group of preschool teachers with nausea, dizziness, headache, and numbness and tingling of fingertips after consumption of brownies purchased 3 days before from a sidewalk vendor.
[snip]
On the morning of…
clock | September 20, 2009Totally copying Chris' idea, let me do this experiment - put here the choice links that I posted on Twitter over the past week. Does not include links I "Liked" on FriendFeed or Facebook, just links I tweeted or retweeted over the last seven days, roughly in chronological order:
Michelle Malkin and the anatomy of the 2 million protester lie
Blogs & Clouds -- The Real-time Web Takes Another Step Forward
What Is Socialism in 2009?
Defying Gravity (but not the unforgiving reality of the television market)
Book Review: Islands in the Cosmos
In a Shark's Tooth, a New Family Tree
One Injury, 10…
grrlscientist | September 18, 2009tags: Manu, Peru, travel, birding, eco-tourism, vaccinations, Kolibri Expeditions
I was contacted by Gunnar Engblom (Kolibri Expeditions), whom I've been casually acquainted with online for years, asking me if I'd like to be the "official blogger" for a birding trip to Peru. Yeow, would I?!? This unexpected offer surprised me, to say the least, but it didn't take too long for excitement to set in after I realized this was a serious offer: I would get to observe and photograph wild parrots!
Unfortunately, I have recently been preoccupied with several seemingly insurmountable tasks, including…
oracknows | September 18, 2009I just found out via one of the mailing lists I'm on of a very disturbing case in Kermit, Texas. Two nurses who were dismayed and disturbed by a physician peddling all manner of herbal supplements reported him to the authorities. Now, they are facing jail:
In a stunning display of good ol' boy idiocy and abuse of prosecutorial discretion, two West Texas nurses have been fired from their jobs and indicted with a third-degree felony carrying potential penalties of two-to-ten years' imprisonment and a maximum fine of $10,000. Why? Because they exercised a basic tenet of the nurse's Code of…
sb admin | September 17, 2009by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure
I just got my seasonal flu shot. It was free and my medical center is encouraging everyone to get one. I wouldn't be telling the truth if I said I didn't feel it at all, but in all honesty, I hardly felt it. They must be using smaller needles these days. Anyway, given that most circulating flu virus is pandemic swine flu H1N1, for which a vaccine is not yet available (coming soon to a clinic near you, we're told), you might wonder why I -- or anyone --would bother. I'll do my best to explain my reasoning, but I'll grant at the outset I may have…
oracknows | September 17, 2009Pity poor Nick Gonzalez.
Sorry, I couldn't resist. After having used the same line when discussing the hugely enjoyable humiliation of the Godfather of HIV/AIDS denialism, Peter Duesberg, I couldn't resist using the same line to introduce my response to Dr. Gonzalez's woo-ful whine in response to the publication of the disastrous (for him and any patient unfortunate enough to be in the arm receiving his protocol) clinical trial that demonstrated about as unequivocally as it is possible to demonstrate that his "protocol" to treat pancreatic cancer is nothing more than as steaming and stinking…
revere | September 17, 2009I just got my seasonal flu shot. It was free and my medical center is encouraging everyone to get one. I wouldn't be telling the truth if I said I didn't feel it at all, but in all honesty, I hardly felt it. They must be using smaller needles these days. Anyway, given that most circulating flu virus is pandemic swine flu H1N1, for which a vaccine is not yet available (coming soon to a clinic near you, we're told), you might wonder why I -- or anyone --would bother. I'll do my best to explain my reasoning, but I'll grant at the outset I may have missed some good reasons or have reasons that…
oracknows | September 16, 2009It looks like my prediction about Patrick Swayze came true. Not that it was a stretch to foresee that the Woo-meister Supreme Mike Adams of NaturalNews.com would waste no time in violating the corpse of Patrick Swayze before he was even cold by using Swayze's death as an excuse to repeat once again his oft-repeated misinformation and lies about chemotherapy and "natural" therapies. After all, he did it before for Tony Snow, so why not Patrick Swayze? In fact, I strongly suspect that Adams had this rant written months ago, ready and waiting for Patrick Swayze's death. All he had to do then was…