Medicine
revere | April 10, 2008First Tamiflu (oseltamivir), now Relenza (zanamivir):
Health officials [in Canada] are investigating whether Relenza - a drug provinces have stockpiled in case of a pandemic flu outbreak - can be linked to fatal reactions or abnormal behaviour in children.
[snip]
The investigation is a response to recently updated safety warnings issued by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or Relenza. In March, pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline updated Relenza's safety labels after children in Japan were reported to suffer from delirium, hallucinations. Some died after injuring themselves.
A…
oracknows | April 8, 2008I thought I might start developing chest pain when I read it, but to my shock NCCAM has actually funded some worthwhile research! Even more amazingly, NCCAM described it in a press release!
Too bad it supports the contention that acupuncture is nothing more than placebo and that the attention given by the practitioner is what really accounts for much of the perceived therapeutic effect that patients attribute to it.
I'll explain.
The press release to which I refer leads to a rather interesting study that examines the components of the placebo effect. The article, published online yesterday in…
sb admin | April 7, 2008As it turns out, in my own neck of the woods there is a small woo-factory. I came upon it when I saw an internet add extolling the virtues of salt, as long as it's expensive salt. The author of the article turns out to be a doctor in my very metropolitan area. There is so much woo here that it may take a few posts to get through it all.
The article is called "Salt Your Way to Health" and is featured on the website for a company that just happens to sell, well, fancy salt. There is a bit of a cage match going on with my internal writer and internal scientist. To properly deconstruct and…
mikethemadbiologist | April 7, 2008Last week, I attended a talk by Alan Krensky, who is the Director of the NIH Office of Portfolio Analysis and Strategic Initiatives (OPASI).
First, OPASI is a superb acronym (Krensky has OPASI--it works better if you actually say it). One of OPASI's tasks is to oversee the NIH Roadmap and other cross-institute initiatives (more about that in a bit). The other priority is to assess how effective various programs are and to use this information to determine what future priorities should be. That sounds dry, but re-read that sentence: when Krensky speaks, you should listen.
Much of his…
oracknows | April 7, 2008This story, first brought to my attention by Drugmonkey, is something that I've been meaning to blog about since I first saw it. The reason, of course, should be obvious, given that my career is an example of the end product that the medical school described is going to be designed to produce: that of a physician-scientist:
The Scripps Research Institute and Scripps Health are working to set up what they hope will be the nation's first medical school entirely geared to training physicians for dual careers in research and patient care.
[...]
The Scripps institute must raise $150 million in…
terrasig | April 4, 2008Actinomycin D was the first antitumor antibiotic isolated from Streptomyces parvallus cultures by the lab of 1952 Nobel laureate, Dr Selman Waksman, at Rutgers University. However, it took a young Chinese physician and the confidence in her by a future US Surgeon General for this natural product drug to positively impact the lives of children with cancer.
An unusually engaging Boston Globe obituary by Gloria Negri caught my attention this week that announced the death of pediatric oncology pioneer, Charlotte Tan (Hsu), MD, of pneumonia on 1 April in Brookline, MA. Dr Tan's 1959 paper in…
oracknows | April 4, 2008Woo has patterns. I've learned to see them, and, if you read Your Friday Dose of Woo on a regular basis, perhaps you're starting to see them too. Not that I had originally intended to become so well-versed in woo that I start to notice these things. What really happened is that I just sort of fell into it when one day I happened to come up with the idea for this little Friday feature. Truth be told, it seems to have grown and taken on a life of its own, such that on weeks when I don't do it (like last week), something about the blog just doesn't feel right. On the other hand, it sometimes…
bcohen | April 4, 2008Pt 1 | Pt 2 | Pt 3 | Pt 4
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Part 4 with Kelly Joyce, author of Magnetic Appeal: MRI and the Myth of Transparency, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-bloggers series can be found here.
WF: Is your story of MRI one that is common to medical technologies? Common to the commodification (in an economic sense) or routinization (in the sense of technical practice) of machines in daily medical practice? Common to a story about the consequences of health care practice in the 21st century? Anything?
KJ: The integration of MRI into medical practice is a story that shares issues…
bcohen | April 3, 2008Pt 1 | Pt 2 | Pt 3 | Pt 4
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Part 3 with Kelly Joyce, author of Magnetic Appeal: MRI and the Myth of Transparency, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-bloggers series can be found here.
WF: Let me risk a more blatantly social sciency question. Did you ever become part of the clinical work in your role as the social scientist? I don't mean intentionally, but by virtue of your presence and your kind of knowledge. I think this is a question about "going native" and if that was bad or if it happened.
KJ: Yes, I was clearly present, and at times I became part of the clinical…
oracknows | April 3, 2008Believe it or not, there was a time when I didn't consider acupuncture to be a form of woo.
I know, I know, it's hard to believe, given the sorts of posts I've done recently on acupuncture, but it's true. Certainly, I didn't believe the whole rigamarole about needles somehow "restoring the flow of qi" or anything like that, but I did wonder if maybe there was some physiologic mechanism at work behind acupuncture that produced real benefits in terms of pain relief above that of placebo. Sure, I may have dismissed homeopathy as the pure magical thinking that it was, but acupuncture I wasn't so…
mikethemadbiologist | April 2, 2008Over at denialism blog, PalMD has two posts which, to me anyway, are related. The first has describes how sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) are actually treated with antibiotics:
After hours, we see walk-ins, and that's where the STD fun really begins. For whatever reason, I see STDs daily at the walk-in clinic, but almost never in my private practice. Most commonly, we see only one partner, and, at least in my state, treatment of the absent partner is prohibited. Basically, we only get one shot at folks, and we don't have access to rapid tests. So what do we do? We order a lot of "…
sporte | April 2, 2008A few months ago I posed some questions about the regulations that might oversee personal genomics companies (Who's your Daddy? and Step right up, get your very own DNA profile).
Why?
Because I am biased. At Geospiza, where I work, we make software products that help our customers, who do DNA testing, meet FDA and CLIA regulations. Since some of our customers do DNA testing for diagnostics and clinical studies, we are well aware of the regulatory issues that concern DNA sequencing and DNA sequence data. Most DNA diagnostics labs are regulated by CLIA, the Clinical Laboratory Improvement…
bcohen | April 2, 2008Pt 1 | Pt 2 | Pt 3 | Pt 4
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Part 2 with Kelly Joyce, author of Magnetic Appeal: MRI and the Myth of Transparency, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-bloggers series can be found here.
WF: You also discuss the importance of the users of technologies in the development and identity of those technologies (like MRI), right?
KJ: Right. In studies of science and technology, scholars can and do study how users of a technology actively contribute to its design, creatively negotiate design limitations (e.g., how old people put tennis balls on a walker's legs to create traction), or…
terrasig | April 2, 2008One of the drawbacks to writing under a pseudonym is that when people around you do well, it's sort of dodgy how you can use the blog to congratulate them publicly. In fact, dear readers might ask: "Why bother putting this up on the blog?" Well, I'm just proud - like a parent - like an anonymous, proud parent.
In my various iterations of adjunct professorship, I get to interact with some really tremendous students in the health sciences - some I even convince to come do some lab work or some literature projects in the name of our national medical research agency. Some do both - and a…
mikethemadbiologist | April 1, 2008One of the things I didn't get a chance to talk about at the Boston Skeptics meeting is how we use evolutionary biology to understand the human microbiome--those microorganisms that live on and in us.
Here's an example from a paper about Crohn's disease (italics mine):
It is hypothesized that IBD [inflammatory bowel disease] results from an aberrant immune response against intestinal bacteria that results in inflammatory damage to intestinal tissues. Many clinical and experimental observations strongly implicate intestinal bacteria in the pathogenesis of IBD. However... neither the…
sb admin | March 29, 2008Urinary tract infections (UTIs) are a very common problem, especially in women. The link provided offers some very good information, but briefly, women's urethrae (the tube the urine comes out of), are closer to the rectum than those of men (who have a built-in "spacer"). This allows bacteria from the colon to creep over to the urinary tract and cause burning, pelvic pain, frequent urination, etc. I treat UTIs daily. Most are uncomplicated, but some are quite serious (usually in the elderly and chronically ill). As medical problems go, I love UTIs. When a healthy, young woman comes in with…
gregladen | March 28, 2008
Welcome to Gene Genie #24: with a heavy emphasis on Personal Genetics
The previous Gene Genie was hosted at DNAdirect Talk and it is still fresh, so go have a look if you have not already. The next Gene Genie will be hosted at My Biotech Life. By the way, the Gene Genie logo was created by Ricardo at My Biotech Life -- see the other award winning artwork here.
If you wish to submit a post for the next Gene Genie, you may use the handy-dandy submission form.
And, now, on with the show:
Did you ever wonder How many knocked out genes in Knock Out mice? at molecular B(io)LOG(y)
One would…
mikethemadbiologist | March 27, 2008Because of bureaucratic infighting, a valuable repository of microbiological specimens spanning over twenty years of collection was destroyed. Researchers, including the Mad Biologist, want to know why (italics mine); you can sign the petition here:
Scientists Call for Inquiry into Destruction of Microbes in VA Special Pathogens Laboratory
233 scientists and physician researchers from 27 countries have collectively expressed outrage over the destruction of an irreplaceable collection of microbes numbering in the thousands. The collection included Legionella bacteria (the cause of…
sb admin | March 27, 2008I was thinking about poor Orac and his death crud, so I thought I'd do a little research for him.
I did a quick google search for holistic healing (call a doctor? Are you kidding?) and immediately found my answer--Pranic Healing.
First, I gotta tell you, it's a deal--a steal, really--because you get knowledge, and no one can take that away from you. I mean, penicillin, you take it, you're cured, and that's it--nothing left, just "wham bam thank you ma'am".
The Level One class is under $400.00. Compared to the expense of a doctors visit (about $80.00), and some online research from…
purepedantry | March 25, 2008Virginia Postrel has this fascinating piece in the Atlantic about why hospitals should be designed to be more attractive -- not just the drab taupe to which we have become accustomed:
Thank God for intravenous Benadryl, which knocks me out in just a few minutes. The cancer treatment is state-of-the-art, but the decor is decidedly behind the times.
Over the past decade, most public places have gotten noticeably better looking. We've gone from a world in which Starbucks set a cutting-edge standard for mass-market design to a world in which Starbucks establishes the bare minimum. If your…