Medicine
dgmacarthur | October 14, 2008From a geneticist's point of view, male pattern baldness - also known as androgenic alopecia - is a tempting target. Baldness is common in the general population, with a prevalence that increases sharply with age (as a rule of thumb, a male's percentage risk of baldness is approximately equal to his age, e.g. 50% at age 50, and 90% at age 90), so there are no shortage of cases to study. It's also a strongly heritable trait, with about 80% of the variation in risk being due to genetic factors. Finally, baldness has been reported to be associated with a wide range of diseases such as prostate…
sb admin | October 14, 2008(This one is cross-posted over at Science-Based Medicine. FYI. --PalMD)
If you've been a regular reader of SBM or denialism blog, you know that plausibility plays an important part in science-based medicine. If plausibility is discounted, clinical studies of improbable medical claims can show apparently positive results. But once pre-test probability is factored in, the truth is revealed---magic water can't treat disease, no matter what a particular study may say. So it was with great dismay that I read an email from a reader telling me about parents buying hyperbaric chambers for their…
oracknows | October 14, 2008OK, I give up.
I hadn't planned on blogging about this because I thought I had already taken care of this woo before. Well, not exactly this woo, but a related woo of which this new issue is just a warmed over more woo-ified version. Indeed, I had even considered it as a candidate to be the first "victim" of a new, improved, resurrected version of Your Friday Dose of Woo (yes, I still do intend to resurrect it but haven't managed to find the time to give it the justice it deserves), but decided against using this particular form of woo because, well, it's quackery that kills. And that's a…
purepedantry | October 13, 2008Neal Young, John Ioannidis, and Omar Al-Ubaydli have an article in PLoS suggesting that because the emphasis in scientific publishing is too much on the big positive results in the big journal, many results are going to be wrong. (Remember that Ioannidis published another paper saying that many results are going to be wrong on purely statistical grounds.) They borrow an idea from economics called the winner's curse.
Basically, the winner's curse is the idea than in some auctions with imperfect information, the winner will overpay. Applied to science, it means that when you have big…
revere | October 13, 2008Food poisoning can be a miserable experience and sometimes you feel like you want to die rather than endure another minute of the agony, but people rarely die from food poisoning. At least for most causes of food poisoning. The exceptions are the exceedingly rare cases of botulism and the much more common occurrence of listeriosis, infection with the organism Listeria monocytogenes. Listeria is a really nasty bug and serious cases are often fatal. The most at risk are the elderly, the immunocompromised, and pregnant women, biologically immune altered, and their fetuses and neonates. Listeria…
oracknows | October 9, 2008Well that didn't take long, did it?
Three days ago, I described a study that I had noticed in the October 1 issue of Cancer Research that described an animal study that strongly suggested that vitamin C administered at sufficiently high doses may interfere with the action of multiple chemotherapeutic agents. You can read the link for full details of the study as discussed by yours truly. In fact, although I only blog sporadically about the exaggerated claims of advocates of vitamin C as a cancer cure, but when I do I like to think I hit the mark, starting two and a half years ago when I wrote…
sb admin | October 7, 2008I've written quite a bit about diabetes here and at my old blog, and I've explained to you how controlling blood pressure and cholesterol in diabetics prevents macrovascular disease, such as heart attack and stroke. I've also explained how controlling blood sugar prevents microvascular disease such as kidney failure and blindness. In type II diabetics, controlling blood sugar prevents disability and sometimes death. In type I diabetics, controlling diabetes with insulin is the only way to prevent a swift and painful death. Most non-diabetics, however, don't know the details of how we…
sb admin | October 6, 2008Yes, I'm still migrating posts from the old blog, but don't worry, I'll run out eventually. --PalMD
So maybe homeopathy (the use of water to treat disease) isn't strong enough for you. Maybe isn't doesn't have that certain...je ne sais qois...um...that sizzle. I have the solution for you! Just add another oxygen molecule!
Water Pl+s!® is another miracle cure "they" don't want you to know about!
OK, I made that name up. Actually, it's just hydrogen peroxide (H2O2 to water's H2O). One of my residents clued me in to hydrogen peroxide woo. Apparently it's quite popular in altie circles…
sb admin | October 6, 2008Yesterday, we looked at how real science works; today, in a repost from my old blog, we look at some really bad science. --PalMD
I've been meaning to touch on "Morgellons disease" (a form of delusional parasitosis) for a while, but haven't figured out how to approach it. Thankfully, others have. In the first referenced discussion, a paper was cited. This paper was such a great example of how not to approach medical science that I just had to address it in detail, section by section...
Background
The authors argue for a newly described illness which they call "Morgellons". It resembles…
j7uy5 | October 6, 2008This is a peculiar article:
href="http://www.annals-general-psychiatry.com/content/7/1/16/abstract">Costs
and effects of paliperidone extended release compared with alternative
oral antipsychotic agents in patients with schizophrenia in Greece: A
cost effectiveness study. It's a
open-access article in the Annals of General Psychiatry, dated 28
August, 2008. (Annals of General Psychiatry 2008, 7:16
doi:10.1186/1744-859X-7-16)
Background To compare the costs
and effects of paliperidone extended release (ER), a new pharmaceutical
treatment for the management of schizophrenia, with the…
clock | October 4, 2008Female Medical Students Underestimate Their Abilities And Males Tend To Overestimate Theirs:
Despite performing equally to their male peers in the classroom and the clinic, female medical students consistently report decreased self-confidence and increased anxiety, particularly over issues related to their competency.
Direct Recording Shows Brain Signal Persists Even In Dreamless Sleep:
Neuroscientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have taken one of the first direct looks at one of the human brain's most fundamental "foundations": a brain signal that never switches…
sb admin | October 4, 2008In my earlier post about HIV therapy (a post I strongly recommend), I wrote, "After entering a cell (never mind how for now), HIV needs to find a way to makes copies of itself, which requires DNA." Because of some recently released data, it's time to look at how HIV enters the cell, and to expand a bit on the biology of HIV infection (but this is really a "Part II" so please refer to the above-linked post, even though this should stand on its own). This will also allow us another glimpse into how real science works. proceeding from observation, though hypothesis, and hypothesis testing.…
oracknows | October 3, 2008You can tell I'm really busy when I fall behind my reading of the scientific literature to the point where I miss an article highly relevant to topics I'm interested in, be they my laboratory research, clinical interests, or just general interests, such as translational research. As you know, I like to think of myself as a translational researcher. Translational research is research that (or so we try to do) spans both basic science and clinical science; i.e., bridges the gap between basic and clinical science. Now don't get me wrong; I don't devalue basic science, and I've said so many times…
revere | October 3, 2008I went to medical school at a time when it was still affordable. Even though it was a private Ivy League university, tuition was only $1200/yr at the start and I had a half scholarship. Room was $33/month. Still, it was a long time ago and that was still real money for some of us, so I ate dinner in the cafeteria and often made lunch by heating up a 19 cent can of Spaghetti-O's on a hot plate in my room across from the hospital. Medical school classes didn't allow much time for part time jobs, so I supplemented my income working as a guinea pig and blood donor. Whenever open heart surgery was…
oracknows | October 2, 2008After having posted about Jenny McCarthy, my brain hurt so much from the neuron-apoptosing idiocy that she always delivers that I decided I needed to move on to something that wouldn't assault my reason and quite so much. So I headed on over to that uber-repository of quackery and paranoid conspiracy theories, Mike Adam's Natural News.
It's true. Jenny is so dumb that Mike Adams looks intelligent by comparison, and that's saying a lot. Well, not really. In actuality, they're both black holes of negative intelligence, sucking all knowledge and science out of whatever environment self they land…
jstemwedel | October 2, 2008One of the reasons non-scientists see science as at all valuable is that scientific research may result in useful medical treatments. And one of the aspects of science that seems elusive to non-scientists is just how long it can take scientific research to bring those useful medical treatments about.
In the 5 September 2008 issue of Science, Despina G. Contopoulos-Ioannidis, George A. Alexiou, Theodore C. Gouvias, and John P. A. Ioannidis [1] present research that examines just how long it has taken to get from initial discoveries to medical interventions.
Contopoulos-Ioannidis et al.…
choofnagle | September 30, 2008The Times is running a series of articles today that cover the basics on woo, wooish thought, and one of my favorite subjects, pre-pure-food regulation impure food. Not much new here for Sciencebloggers, but these are good resources to help individuals think through the bogus claims we see so often in the marketing of woo.
William Broad discusses the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine at NIH, which is charged with bringing better standards to situations like this:
...a 2004 Harvard study identified 181 research papers on yoga therapy reporting that it could be used to…
oracknows | September 30, 2008Yesterday's post was a result of the feeling that I had been getting too snarky for too long a time without doing some serious science or medical blogging. Not that there's anything wrong with being snarky, but a continuous diet of snark eventually gets dull--and not just to readers. However, science blogging is hard. Posts like that take a lot of work (which is why I have a propensity to write such posts over the weekend and post them on Monday). After I do a serious, thoughtful post like that, sometimes I just need a diversion. Sometimes I need to examine something that allows me to deliver…
sb admin | September 27, 2008I'm off to the west coast (of Michigan) for a few days, and if I don't blog, I shall die...or something. So I have a few posts from my old blog to share with you.
Sure, we all have our biases about food and health. I think chicken soup is great when you're sick---but not because of any proven biologic benefit. It just tastes and feels good, which is about the best you can expect in treating a cold.
But food claims are becoming more and more fanciful. There is a lot we do and don't know about nutrition. Many of these fanciful claims seem to be centered on "immunity". This is a word…
gregladen | September 26, 2008The file drawer effect works like this: Numerous studies are done and the results are random. But because they are random, a small number have, randomly, strong effects that are interesting and that in isolation support some interesting hypothesis. All the results that fail to confirm the interesting (or fund able) expectation are filed away .... in the file drawer. Only the results that seem to show what the researchers want to show are made public.
In areas where research is cheap and often done as part of undergraduate and graduate training, (like certain areas of psychology and…