Medicine
oracknows | August 15, 2008I don't know who Kent Sepkowitz is other than that he he's an infectious disease specialist in New York and that he writes for Slate. I also know he's written about penis enlargement, his dislike of magazines' "best doctor" lists (a sentiment with which I can agree, actually), and that he has suggested that Americans should "eat more excrement." What I didn't know is that he was capable of slinging said excrement around (at least, the excrement left over after Americans eat more of it, I suppose), specifically slinging excrement about so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM)…
oracknows | August 14, 2008It's been quite a while since I wrote about this topic, but, quite frankly, I didn't think anything new was likely to come up that would interest me sufficiently to take it on again. I was almost right; it's been well over two years since the last time I discussed the issue of whether or not vitamin C has any role in treating cancer.
When last I left the topic, two studies had been released that were being widely cited as a "vindication" of Linus Pauling. As you may recall, Pauling was the Nobel Laureate who succumbed to what's sometimes called the "Nobel disease" in that he turned into a…
bushwells | August 13, 2008After coping with an immediate family member's severe illness (thankfully resolved; better living through chemistry pays off) and discovering that my talents do not lie in management within a very large company, I stepped back from my almost 20 year career in discovery research several months ago. I gleefully wallowed around the home front, decompressing from an especially stressful time in my life and just generally vegetating. But I kept my foot in the door of the Dark Tower of Pharma-dur by taking a class in drug development in a regulatory affairs program at a (sort of) local…
oracknows | August 13, 2008THWOMP!
THWOMP! THWOMP!
TWHOMP! THWOMP! TWHOMP!
That's the sound of me hitting my head against the table. Hard.
What provoked this reaction in me is Medscape, specifically an article that my blog bud PalMD turned me on to. That the article, entitled HPV Vaccine Deemed Safe and Effective, Despite Reports of Adverse Events, seems to have been written in response to criticism of its previous article on the HPV vaccine Gardasil, both by me and others, criticism that led Medscape to quietly pull the old article, makes the resultant article seem even worse, particularly in wake of a truly dumb poll…
terrasig | August 13, 2008Most people know of methadone as a long-term substitution therapy for people addicted to heroin, morphine, or other similar drugs called opiates or opioids. A good, free full-text description of methadone maintenance therapy (MMT) can be found in the 15 June 2001 issue of American Family Physician.
Now, in the 1 August 2008 issue of Cancer Research, Claudia Friesen and colleagues at the University of Ulm report that methadone can kill leukemia cells in culture and reverse acquired resistance to other drugs like doxorubicin (Adriamycin). Press reports to this effect appeared at the beginning…
oracknows | August 12, 2008It's been a long time, been a long time,
Been a long lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time.
- Led Zeppelin
Not nearly long enough.
- Orac
Some rats never die, it would appear.
You may recall last year, when I spend a considerable amount of verbiage writing about a promising cancer drug called dichloroacetate (DCA). There were many reasons. One reason was that the drug was being represented as a "cure" for cancer that big pharma wouldn't fund because it was outside of its patent. There was also plenty of fascinating cancer biology there to…
pzminion | August 11, 2008Monday morning, PST: time for some science with a side of controversy, Danio-style
There's a Department of Health and Human Services document circulating that's got the pro-choice lobby up in arms. Afarensis and The Questionable Authority weighed in on the sociopolitical impact of such a policy last week, but in addition to the significant threat to reproductive rights that it presents, this proposal is yet another example of the complete lack of scientific expertise informing decisions about public health.
At issue is the determination of a time point that marks the beginning of pregnancy…
oracknows | August 11, 2008While I was away over the weekend, a reader made me aware of a new development in the world of "alternative"--excuse me, "complementary and alternative"--medicine (a.k.a. CAM). I suppose I should have seen this coming. In retrospect, given the proliferation of wikis of seemingly every shape and for seemingly every purpose, it was inevitable that someone, somewhere would put together a wiki for CAM, known as the Wiki4CAM: Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) Encyclopedia.
My first thought was that maybe I should register. Certainly I could edit some articles, although, despite what…
revere | August 11, 2008Questions about the FBI's case against popping up like mushrooms after a rain. There are too many to address in just one post. Meryl Nass's site has cataloged a number of them and Glenn Greenwald's latest installment others. We've weighed in a couple of times (here and here) and now want to add some additional thoughts about the official version of how the alleged anthrax attacker, Dr. Bruce Ivins, died.
Dr. Ivins was found unconscious at his home and taken to a hospital, where he died three days later. We don't know if he ever regained consciousness. Let's assume he didn't. There was no…
sb admin | August 10, 2008To wear the mantle of Galileo, it is not enough to be persecuted: you must also be right.
--Robert Park
I used to spend a lot of time on the websites of Joe Mercola and Gary Null, the most influential medical cranks of the internets (to call them "quacks" would imply that they are real doctors, but bad ones---I will no longer dignify them with the title of "quack"). I've kept away from them for a while in the interest of preserving my sanity. Unfortunately, Orac reminded me this week of the level searingly stupid and dangerous idiocy presented by these woo-meisters.
In light of this, it…
greengabbro | August 8, 2008Gentle Reader, how long do I have to go without blogging before you start sending me solicitous letters of concern for my health, my Internet connection, and the distribution of my assets after death, huh???
I've got a backlog of stuff to write about, which summer lassitude will mostly doom to obscurity... but here are a few of the gender and science things:
Someone's started a geek feminism wiki. The entries are still pretty sketchy - the "women in science" article is just an empty link - but what a great concept!
I've always assumed that the reason no one has ever marketed a male hormonal…
oracknows | August 7, 2008I don't much like Mike Adams of NaturalNews.com (formerly NewsTarget.com). Indeed, I haven't yet been able to find a more blatant purveyor of the worst kind of quackery and paranoid anti-physician and anti-medicine conspiracy theories anywhere on the Internet, with the possible exception of Whale.to. However, Whale.to is so utterly, outrageously, incoherently full of not just quackery but paranoid New World Order conspiracy theories and other paranormal silliness that any but the most deluded can easily see it for what it is with just a cursory reading of a few of its many, many pages. It's…
j7uy5 | August 5, 2008I chose three articles from this month's edition of Archives
of General Psychiatry, upon which to comment. For
those not familiar with it, Arch Gen Psychiatry is
an AMA journal, like JAMA, but for psychiatrists. It's an
influential journal.
1.
href="http://archpsyc.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/65/8/870">Selecting
Among Second-Step Antidepressant Medication Monotherapies.
This is their one open-access article, so I will mention it
first. A little background: We've known for a long time that
all antidepressants work for some people, but nothing works for
everyone. A lot of effort…
purepedantry | August 5, 2008It has been a rough month here at Pure Pedantry.
At one point last week, I think I trained rats for 8 straight hours. (My job in the lab is training rats.) And let me just tell you, that is not particularly interesting. Visualize getting a repetitive stress injury moving around an pissed off animal with a limited attention span but to whom your entire future is chained. Anyway, in order to entertain myself, I have been playing every episode of South Park in order in the background. (Yes, I know...very, very sad.) Sufficeth to say, this has resulted in me having South Park on the brain…
sb admin | August 3, 2008The discussion we've had since Friday regarding the Bush administration's latest foray into theocracy brought up some interesting points. We discussed implications of the draft regulations including likely limitations on access to safe and effective birth control. But there is another issue here that disturbs me greatly.
Last week we talked a little bit about medical ethics. I'm not an Ethicist (Mike! Are you reading?), but I am a "practical ethicist", as are all health care providers. How do ethics inform the discussion of what care we can or cannot provide?
First, let's take the…
catdynamics | August 2, 2008"...a fire was started on the porch of a faculty member's home. Injuries were sustained as the faculty member and his wife and children escaped the residence."
Attack comes after pamphlets were found threatening faculty claimed to use animals in research.
Fires were set at two faculty residences, car in the driveway of one house, and on the porch of another's house.
"Injuries were sustained as the faculty member and his wife and children escaped the residence."
UPDATE: Injury was incurred during escape down a fire ladder, researcher whose house was firebombed identified as Prof Feldheim -…
neurophilosophy | August 2, 2008
A team of researchers from Harvard and Columbia University Medical Center have reprogrammed skin cells from an 82-year-old woman suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis to generate first stem cells and then motor neurons. This is a significant advance which could aid in the development of drug treatments and cell replacement therapies for the condition and related neurodegenerative disorders.
The study, due to be published in the journal Science, demonstrates that skin cells from a chronically diseased elderly patient can be induced to de-differentiate into stem cells and then re-…
revere | August 2, 2008A new article in the British scientific journal, The Lancet, suggests that seasonal influenza vaccines may not be effective in preventing community acquired pneumonia in people 65 years old and older. This is the group specially targeted by CDC for vaccination each year and, not coincidentally, an age group that includes me. So I have both a scientific and personal interest in the subject. This isn't new news. We've previously discussed the evidence that shows seasonal vaccines are less effective in the elderly a number of times (see here and here) over the last few years, but the proposition…
clock | July 30, 2008Best time to appreciate Open Access? When you're really sick and want to learn more about what you have.:
* Complete OA still a long way off. One thing I re-learned during this was that it is incredibly frustrating to see how much of the biomedical literature is still not freely available online. Shame on Elsevier and all the others who are still hoarding this important information.
* Thanks to those providing OA. Related to the above issue, I came to appreciate was the societies and publishers have decided to go the OA route. I spent a lot of time reading material from ASM, BMC, PLoS…
sb admin | July 30, 2008Every once in a while I like to do a piece on how real science works. The New England Journal of Medicine was kind enough to serve up a nice example for us this week.
Real science is hard. It's time-consuming, expensive, and leads down many blind alleys. That's one of the reasons pseudoscience is so alluring---anyone can do it. It doesn't require an education, an R01 grant, or really even a grasp of reality.
So on to the current article. Heart disease is a big killer. Over half-a-million people yearly have the worst type of heart attack, called an ST-segment elevation myocardial…