Medicine
dgmacarthur | September 15, 2009Mark Henderson's interview with Anne Wojcicki, co-founder of personal genomics company 23andMe, is well worth a read. The big story is this: Wojcicki has floated the possibility of offering discounted genome scans to clinicians "to teach them to interpret genomic information that is now readily available to their patients".
Wojcicki explains:
"Clearly we need to engage with physicians to help them to understand this information," she said. "One of the things we've talked about is we'd love to get physicians comfortable with their own genomes first, have them understand what does it mean,…
oracknows | September 10, 2009Dr. Robert Sears (a.k.a. "Dr. Bob), author of The Vaccine Book: Making the Right Decision for Your Child, is definitely antivaccine. His mouth may say, "No, I'm not antivaccine," but his actions say, "Yes, yes, yes!"
There, I finally said it. I've been flirting with saying it that bluntly for some time now, but have been tending to avoid it. I really didn't want to conclude this about "Dr. Bob," but, sadly, he's left me no choice. What else can I conclude from his actions over the last three months, when he's clearly solidly allied himself with the worst elements of the anti-vaccine movement…
clock | September 9, 2009Tuesday, September 22, 2009
6:30-8:30 pm with discussion beginning at 7:00 followed by Q&A
Location: The Irregardless Café, 901 W. Morgan Street, Raleigh 833-8898
Memory problems have become increasingly common as our population ages. The fear of developing dementia is one of the greatest fears of most Americans. There can be memory changes as one grows older, but what determines if these changes are benign versus the beginning of a dementia process like Alzheimer's disease? We will discuss types of memory, the neurobiological basis of memory, and ways to tell normal aging from the…
gregladen | September 8, 2009I'm an anthropologist and a biologist, so really, I have no problem with the idea of a "placebo effect" in which people become convinced that they are being given an effective treatment and thus, because of that thought in their mind, improve.
Editorial Note: I'm classifying this post as a "falsehood" because it does fit nicely with that series, though this was not on the original list of falsehoods. Also note, this is a hastily dashed off first draft, so please be ruthless in your comments so I may move ever towards the unattainable perfection.
I doubt very much that this works for many…
palmd | September 6, 2009Doug Bremner has a blog. That blog sucks.
Bremner is an apparently well-regarded psychiatrist, and takes a refreshing look at the influence of industry not just on pharmaceuticals but on the conduct of science itself. His outspoken views have led to attempts to squelch his academic freedoms. But his sometimes-heroic record does not excuse dangerous idiocy.
I can understand how wading into the shit pool that is conflict of interest can leave one cynical. But cynicism and suspicion turned up to "11" is no longer bravery---it's crankery. It's not his snarkiness that burns---it's his…
oracknows | September 4, 2009So-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or, as it's now as frequently called, "integrative medicine" (IM) represents a hodge-podge of remedies that are mostly based on prescientific concepts about how the human body works and how disease attacks it. Homeopathy, through its concept of "like cures like" and law of contagion. The former in essence is a manifestation of the magical concept that "like produces like." Similarly, homeopathy's law of infinitesimals, in which serial dilutions to the point that there is unlikely to be a single molecule left of the substance thought to…
revere | September 4, 2009A meeting of critical care specialists who have treated severely ill swine flu patients this week in Winnipeg, Canada is producing dramatic reports of illness with a virus more like H5N1 (avian or bird flu) than seasonal flu. Since H5N1 is dramatically more virulent than any seasonal flu we know of, including the 1918 H1N1 variant, this sounds alarming. Before we hit the panic button (and we should never hit the panic button, anyway), let's consider the larger context.
Everyone agrees that swine flu H1N1 is not seasonal flu. Its epidemiology is quite different and there is very little natural…
palmd | September 3, 2009If I read one more crappy article about placebos, something's gotta give, and it's gonna be my head or my desk. Wired magazine has a new article entitled, "Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why." Frequent readers of skeptical and medical blogs will spot the first problem: the insanely nonsensical claim that "placebos are getting better". This not only "begs the question," but actually betrays a fundamental misapprehension of the concept. I've written several times about the nature and ethical implications of placebos, but it's time for a serious…
revere | September 3, 2009When I tell people I am an epidemiologist, most of them think it means I'm a skin doctor. I'm not (although the skin disease specialty is much more lucrative). Instead I study patterns of disease in populations and use what I see to try to figure out why the observed pattern rather than another. Since I'm a cancer epidemiologist I usually do large, highly systematic studies that often take years to execute and analyze, but some epidemiologists do much more immediate "shoe leather" epidemiology, investigating disease outbreaks. They are like disease detectives and we can often learn a…
ddobbs | September 2, 2009You can't make this stuff up. As PharmaGossip (among others, including the Times) reportst, a drug company pays $2.3 billion in fines to settle charges of unprecedented seriousness about practices that directly put patients at risk, and that came out of a four-year federal investigation. And some yahoo right-winger asserts this fine -- years in the works, unprecedented in scope, settling allegations rising from an investigation that started during the Bush Administration -- is really part of Obama's effort to "federalize" medicine and cut costs.
Here's the video of the DOJ's press conference…
dgmacarthur | September 2, 2009The NY Times has an article entitled "Buyer beware of home DNA tests" that adopts the paternalistic party line of the medical establishment: taking DNA tests without a doctor's advice is hazardous to your health.
Remarkably, the article acknowledges that qualified genetic counsellors are few and far between and that "most practicing physicians lack the knowledge and training in genetics to interpret [DNA tests] properly", and yet still suggests that customers should "take the findings to a qualified expert".
Begging the question: which qualified expert should customers be taking their test…
revere | September 2, 2009Yesterday one of the questions we asked was whether swine H1N1 would replace seasonal viruses this season. In previous pandemics one subtype completely replaced its seasonal predecessor: in 1957 H2N2 replaced the H1N1 that had been coming back annually at least since 1918; only 11 years later, in 1968, a pandemic with H3N2 replaced the H2N2. H2N2 is no longer circulating but in 1977 an H1N1 returned and has been co-circulating with H3N2 since then. This was a new situation. We could ask why this hadn't happened before with H2N2 and H1N1 or H2N2 and H3N2 or all three together; or we could ask…
sb admin | September 1, 2009by revere, cross-posted from Effect Measure
It's not Labor Day yet, but I guess the Reveres have to consider their vacation over. We're all back at our respective home stations. We admit that not watching flu evolve daily was a relief, although we did sneak peeks when we weren't supposed to. But it also proved to be like the stock market. The daily ups and downs sometimes obscure the bigger picture. So what does it look like now?
We have two contradictory impressions. One is that the pandemic has continued to develop in a very robust fashion. So it's a dynamic picture of change. The second…
revere | September 1, 2009It's not Labor Day yet, but I guess the Reveres have to consider their vacation over. We're all back at our respective home stations. We admit that not watching flu evolve daily was a relief, although we did sneak peeks when we weren't supposed to. But it also proved to be like the stock market. The daily ups and downs sometimes obscure the bigger picture. So what does it look like now?
We have two contradictory impressions. One is that the pandemic has continued to develop in a very robust fashion. So it's a dynamic picture of change. The second is that it looks like a normal pandemic, just…
oracknows | August 31, 2009Last Thursday, I expressed dismay about an upcoming NBC news special, A Dose of Controversy, which is about a man who arguably caused more damage to public health than just about anyone in the last decade, namely Andrew Wakefield. Anyone who's a regular reader of this blog knows just what I think of Andrew Wakefield. I've made no secret of it; I have little but contempt for the man, whom I view as incompetent, dishonest, and a quack. Andrew Wakefield, as you may recall, is the British gastroenterologist who in 1998 published a study in The Lancet that claimed to find a link between the MMR…
gregladen | August 28, 2009Trials are staring on a new cancer vaccine.
The melanoma trial is being conducted at New York University Medical Center, while the ovarian cancer vaccine trial is at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, N.Y. The trials are assessing the safety and the anti-tumor immune response of the so-called NY-ESO-1 recombinant protein cancer vaccine alone and in combination with other agents, according to the Cancer Research Institute (CRI), an organization that has recently given $450,000 to Cornell to support vaccine production at the Bioproduction Facility. The facility is a partnership…
oracknows | August 27, 2009Want to know what will start my teeth grinding when I read it in a newspaper? That's easy. It's headlines like this one, which appeared two days ago in The Telegraph:
Scientists two years from developing 'potential cure' for breast cancer
The subtitle was even worse:
British scientists could be just two years away from developing a drug that may be a "potential cure" for breast cancer, it has been claimed.
Hear that grating? It's the sound of my teeth grinding together. The reason is simple. It's just plain silly to make claims like this about a basic science paper given that, as I have…
oracknows | August 26, 2009I realize that I've gotten into one of those runs where it seems that all I blog about is anti-vaccinationist loons, but, before trying once again to take a break from the madness, I had to go to the well one more time because this looks a bit frightening:
NBC News' Matt Lauer will take an unprecedented look at the emotional debate surrounding vaccines and the suggested link to autism on Sunday, August 30 at 7 p.m. ET with "Dose of Controversy." In the one-hour Dateline, Lauer speaks exclusively with Dr. Andrew Wakefield, whose 1998 medical study was the first in the world to suggest a…
sb admin | August 21, 2009Three physicians and researchers from the Capital University of Medical Sciences (Beijing, China) have published a case report in the European Respiratory Journal describing severe lung disease in seven female workers employed at a shop where they applied polyacrylic coatings to polystyrene boards. The lung disease is just one part of the story---two of the women died (ages 19 and 29)---the other part is that pathology samples from the workers' lungs identified 30 nm (nanometer) in diameter particles. Further investigation found that the coatings used by the workers contained nano…
palmd | August 20, 2009I was one of those crazy folks who loved medical school---not just the clinical years, but the pre-clinical sciences as well. The transition from pre-clinical to clinical can be rather unnerving (picture learning how to do a pelvic exam on paid models). One of my first clinical experiences was in our physical exam class. Much of this was done on each other (not the pelvics), but we were also paired with attending physicians who would take us to see---gasp!---actual patients.
The guy I was paired with was old---impossibly old. I wondered to myself if he still had a jar of leeches in his…