Medicine
oracknows | June 25, 2009Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported that the reason for Apple CEO Steve Job's five month medical leave of absence from Apple is that he needed a liver transplant, which, according to the story, he underwent a couple of months ago in Memphis. In my discussion, I assumed, for the most part, the most likely clinical scenario, namely that Steve Jobs' insulinoma had metastasized to his liver and that the liver transplant had been done for that indication, but, as some pointed out, it was possible that Jobs had somehow fried his liver without his tumor having metastasized. Unlikely,…
bioephemera | June 24, 2009
The "gastronomical cocktail" called "sex on a drip" is just one reason to hop a plane to Singapore and visit The Clinic, a theme restaurant that's probably not for the squeamish.
Their website boasts, "Clinic's unique alfresco is easily identified by its hospital whites, colourful pills, syringes, drips, test-tubes, and paraphernalia in all manner of the clinical, all in tribute to the tongue in cheek pop art of Damien Hirst." I don't know about Hirst - rotting, half-preserved sharks don't make me hungry - but their website is definitely fun in a trippy, pharma-chic way, complete with…
palmd | June 24, 2009Everyone who uses the internet leaves some sort of footprint, even if it's just a string of visited addresses. This presence is magnified if you've ever been in the news, been listed on a website (e.g., as faculty), or if you write a blog. Social networking sites such as facebook and Twitter add a whole new dimension of online presence. Everyone should be concerned about what their online presence says about them (if your public Amazon wish list is full of sex toys, for example...) but physicians should have special concerns which fall into some broad categories. First, we'll briefly…
oracknows | June 24, 2009At the risk of repeating myself (but, then, since when did such concerns ever stop me before?), I'll just start out by mentioning that, of all the non-herbal "alternative" medicine remedies out there, I used to give a bit of a pass to acupuncture. No, I never did buy any of that nonsense about how sticking thin needles into the skin at points along various "meridians" somehow "redirects the flow of qi," that mystical life force upon which so much woo, particularly woo based on Eastern mysticism and traditional Chinese medicine depends. However, because acupuncture involves an actual physical…
sa smith | June 23, 2009ERV does not have a monopoly on teh crazy.
Pal really reels them in with his chronic lyme disease posts, and now, evidently, chiro-woo.
I could not have made up this post from 'Dr. Howard Boos' if I had tried.
You tell me this asshole doesnt sound EXACTLY like a Creationist or HIV Denier!
1. Hates science
2. Uses title of 'Dr' in an attempt to gain unearned credibility
3. Personal expertise/experience trumps scientific community
4. Little/No interest in modern scientific findings, eg journal articles
5. Scientific community wants to hurt people
6. Science itself hurts people
7. Woo…
dgmacarthur | June 23, 2009Update: In the comments below, SNPedia co-founder Michael Cariaso notes that Duncan has already lost his crown to the anonymous European NA07022, recently sequenced by Complete Genomics, who weighs in with 5891 associations to Duncan's 5321. Records don't last long in the age of high-throughput genomics!
Author David Ewing Duncan now officially has the most annotated genome of any human being; but given that the majority of those annotations are wrong and most of the remainder only weakly predictive, he's also a powerful illustration of how far we still have to go before the era of personal…
oracknows | June 23, 2009Over the last month or so, I've written numerous posts about Daniel Hauser. Danny, as you recall, is the 13-year-old Minnesota boy who was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma back in February, underwent one round of chemotherapy for it, and then decided that he wanted to pursue quackery instead of more chemotherapy. His mother supported his decision and justified it by appealing to a faux Native American religion known as Nemenhah, which is, in reality, nothing more than an excuse for its originator, a wannabe who named himself Chief Cloudpiler, to sell quackery under the guise of "Native…
oracknows | June 22, 2009It's no secret that, when it comes to computers, my preferred axe has been the Apple Macintosh. Indeed, back in the 1983-1984 school year I was in college living in a house with five other guys, and one of my roommates was a a total Apple geek. He had, as one might expect, an Apple IIe, and I immediately decided that, when it came to computers, I definitely liked the Apple product better than the IBM PC that my other roommate had. Of course, at the time I was nowhere well off enough to be able to afford either, but these two roommates were both computer science majors. They had to have a…
revere | June 22, 2009If you don't want to smell, the FDA has a recommendation: use an over-the-counter cold remedy that contains an intranasal zinc solution. You won't smell. Possibly ever again:
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today advised consumers to stop using three products marketed over-the-counter as cold remedies because they are associated with the loss of sense of smell (anosmia). Anosmia may be long-lasting or permanent. (FDA Press Release)
Losing your sense of smell is no joke. It is intimately involved with your sense of taste and is a warning sense for dangerous gases. The role of zinc in…
palmd | June 19, 2009I've been a bit remiss in my coverage of the Simon Singh case, reviewed in detail by Phil Plait, among others. As many of my readers already know, respected science writer Simon Singh is being sued for libel in England by the British Chiroquacktic Association (BCA) because he described some of their treatments as "bogus". Despite the fact that he underplayed his hand, he is still getting his legal ass whooped over in the motherland, thanks to their idiotic libel laws.
Be that as it may, the BCA wasn't complaining about Singh being wrong, but about him being mean. You see, "bogus" seemed to…
goodmath | June 19, 2009 This is an edited repost of something I wrote nearly three years ago. You can
see the original post and comments here.
Over at Dr. Isis's blog, there's a post answering a reader's question about whether to tell her
postdoc advisor about her troubles with clinical depression. I agree with Isis's advice - without
knowing the advisor really well, you can't be sure of how they'll react. If the postdoc
had become ill due to something like a diabetic episode, where the change in schedule and
environment caused by taking a new job messed up the PDs control of their blood sugar - well, there
wouldn…
oracknows | June 17, 2009Will wonders never cease? A recent story about how "homeopathic" Zicam managed to slide through a loophole in which the FDA doesn't require evidence of efficacy or safety for medicines labeled as homeopathic has been percolating through the blogosphere based on a recent warning that the FDA issued. It turns out that the zinc in Zicam can mess up your sense of smell, causing a loss of the sense called anosmia. Steve Novella has already done an excellent job of discussing the issues involved with this loophole, which is big enough to pilot the proverbial Death Star through.
However, a followup…
jstemwedel | June 16, 2009A day later than promised, let's kick off our discussion of "Research Rashomon: Lessons from the Cameroon Pre-exposure Prophylaxis Trial Site" (PDF). The case study concerns a clinical trial of whether tenofovir, an antiretroviral drug, could prevent HIV infection. Before it was halted in the face of concerns raised by activists and the media, the particular clinical trial discussed in this case was conducted in Cameroon. Indeed, one of the big questions the activists raised about the trial was whether it was ethical to site it in Cameroon.
From the case study:
Tenofovir was first…
dgmacarthur | June 16, 2009I've stumbled rather late across a very promising new blog on the experience of a consumer genomics customer, Fantastic Voyage. The blog is primarily written by Grant Wood, the senior IT strategist for a clinical genetics institute in Salt Lake City; the premise of the blog is that Wood will discuss his own experience of consumer genetic testing (via a 23andMe genome scan), while receiving input from two advisors: Marc Williams, a medical geneticist, and Janet Williams, a genetic counsellor.
In the two posts so far the highlights have been the insights from Marc Williams. For instance, on his…
razib | June 16, 2009Alcohol's Good for You? Some Scientists Doubt It:
For some scientists, the question will not go away. No study, these critics say, has ever proved a causal relationship between moderate drinking and lower risk of death -- only that the two often go together. It may be that moderate drinking is just something healthy people tend to do, not something that makes people healthy.
"The moderate drinkers tend to do everything right -- they exercise, they don't smoke, they eat right and they drink moderately," said Kaye Middleton Fillmore, a retired sociologist from the University of California, San…
palmd | June 15, 2009It's just disgusting. Autism spectrum disorders are an important health problem (although not the "epidemic" claimed by some). While real scientists and clinicians (and parents) are looking for causes and treatments based on evidence, fake experts are pulling "answers" out of their backsides. Studies of families with autism have shown specific genetic defects associated with autism, and while this applies only to a small percentage of cases, it is an example of a good lead. Even if a minority of people with autism have similar genetic defects, these findings can lead to more generalizable…
oracknows | June 15, 2009On Friday, I expressed my irritation at the misunderstanding of science by NEWSWEEK's science columnist Sharon Begley, in which she opines that it is those nasty basic scientists who insist on learning new science and new physiological mechanisms of disease that are devaluing translational and clinical research, in effect ghettoizing them in low impact journals, and, as I sarcastically put it, "keeping teh curez from sick babiez!!!!!"
It turns out that both Steve Novella, Mike the Mad Biologist, and Tim Kreider have also weighed in. All are worth reading.
I also thought of another thing…
oracknows | June 14, 2009Last month, a frequent topic of this blog was the case of Daniel Hauser, the 13-year-old boy from Minnesota with Hodgkin's lymphoma who made the national news for his refusal (and his mother's support of that refusal) to undergo a second round of chemotherapy. Instead, he wanted to pursue "natural" therapy, including what sounded like alkalinization quackery. What was especially disturbing about this case was that he had a highly treatable form of cancer with close to a 90% expectation of long term survival with conventional treatment with chemotherapy and radiation. As with the cases of…
revere | June 13, 2009The easiest way for public officials to scare the crap out of people is to tell them "not to panic." A variant on this is, "It's not time to panic," implying that there will be such a time or that there is ever such a time. The first to panic are usually public officials because they feel powerless at a time when people are expecting them to do something. So what they do is incite panic by telling people not to panic. Public anxiety -- often well founded -- is not the same as panic. If parents are keeping their kids out of school from fear it is a flu incubator, that's not panic. That's a…
dgmacarthur | June 12, 2009Harvard biostatistician Peter Kraft (co-author of an excellent recent article on genetic risk prediction in the New England Journal of Medicine) has just added an interesting comment on his experience of this week's Consumer Genetics Show:
I just wanted to share what for me were two stand-out moments at the
CGS. First was Zak Kohane's discussion of the "Incidentalome"--a great
turn of phrase that captures something I've been mulling over myself.
(A less eloquent statement of this idea made it into the recent Nick
Wade NYT article on genetic risk prediction). Basically, the idea is
that even…