Medicine
oracknows | March 25, 2008The annoying death crud that has gripped me continues apace. Fortunately, I happen to have a rather interesting guest blog post that I've had lying around a while, and now seems like the perfect time to use it. It comes from Dr. Arnon Krongrad, an expert in prostate cancer and minimally invasive surgery. I'm publishing it because he has a rather interesting observation about the use of supplements and how it may contribute to the development of aggressive prostate cancer. Here is Dr. Krongrad's contribution:
What would you pay to have erections? Would you pay with your life? A report from…
sb admin | March 25, 2008
Once again, I'm migrating more popular posts from the old blog. If this is a repeat for you, sorry. --PalMD Wow. I mean, wow. I was googling some flu information, and one of the first hits was so fundamentally wrong about all matters medical that I actually felt ill. The dangerous title is "Building a Child's Immunity the Natural Way". It's wasn't clear to me what this meant, so I had to read the damned thing. It starts out pretty bad:
New Jersey's Public Health Council gave its citizens a Christmas present that will not please the health-conscious, as it became the first state in the…
tsmith | March 24, 2008 As I mentioned Friday, the good folks from Google were part of the crowd at this year's ICEID. This included a talk by Larry Brilliant, described on his wikipedia page as "...medical doctor, epidemiologist, technologist, author and philanthropist, and the director of Google's philanthropic arm Google.org." His talk discussed not only stopping outbreaks in their tracks--as current outbreak investigations seek to do, and Brilliant himself as worked on, as part of his background in vaccination campaigns for polio and smallpox--but to pay attention to "the left of the epidemic curve" as part…
j7uy5 | March 24, 2008GrrlScientist wrote
href="http://scienceblogs.com/grrlscientist/2008/02/diagnosing_bipolar_disorder_wi.php">a
post last month about a potential genetic test for bipolar
disorder. Read that first to get some background.
Now, it turns out that a company is selling a testing kit that you can
use yourself, in the privacy of your own home, to see if you have genes
that increase the risk of bipolar disorder.
href="http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/03/23/health/main3960929.shtml">At-Home
Psychiatric Gene Tests Stir Debate
New Methods Of Testing Patients' Risk May Lead To More…
sb admin | March 24, 2008Teaching facts is easy. Medical students eat facts like Cheetos, and regurgitate them like...well, use your imagination. Ask them the details of the Krebs cycle, they deliver. Ask them the attachments of the extensor pollicis brevis, and they're likely to describe the entire hand to you. Facts, and the learning of them, has traditionally been the focus of the first two years of medical school. The second two years deals with putting facts into action. Teaching medical students and residents is very different from being a school teacher, something with which I have first-hand knowledge…
denialism | March 24, 2008One of the problems with medical education is that while you are intellectually trained to deal with medical problems and emergencies, actual experience with how to respond to emergent clinical situations is difficult to teach and usually only comes with experience. Further, real clinical experts make medical decisions almost by reflex. You see this in medical school that while you as a medical student have to actively think about what is going on in any given situation, medical experts act more by pattern recognition and have an instant reflexive response to clinical situations. And how…
sb admin | March 23, 2008I'm trying to understand "morgellons syndrome". Based on Morgellons Research Foundation reports, there are a lot of people out there who believe they have this so-called disease. But what is it? I decided to dig deeper on the research end of things. I went to the MRF website, and to MedLine, looking for something, anything, to help me find out more about this problem. I must report that the science doesn't look good for the morgie boosters.
First, there has been little legitimate research on morgellons as such. The CDC is doing an epidemiologic study to determine what, if anything, may…
sb admin | March 23, 2008When I use the word "scientist", I mean something pretty specific---someone actually doing experiments and publishing the results. Some physicians are scientists. In fact, the MSTP that Mark H is a part of exists specifically to train doctors to do research and bring the results to the bedside.
Most doctors aren't scientists, by my definition. But good doctors these days have to be able to read and interpret scientific literature if the wish to practice science-based medicine.
I think of ScienceBlogs as a community of scientists communicating with the lay-public and other scientists. I'…
sb admin | March 20, 2008Last updated 09 October 2008
When writing on medical topics, a few issues are important to address directly, conveniently laid out by the Health on the Net Foundation.
Medical authority and complementarity, or, "I'm not your doctor"
We don't give advice here. Our posts represent our own opinions, thoughts, etc. and no one else's. Neither our hospitals, partners, universities, nor anyone else has approved of anything we write. The information in our posts is intended for discussion purposes only and not as recommendations on how to diagnose or treat illnesses. Our writings do not claim to…
mikethemadbiologist | March 20, 2008OK, last post about this bozo, and then I'm done (famous last words...). In the previous post, I dealt with Egnor's claim that the evolution of antibiotic resistance by selection of resistant genotypes is obvious, and not germane (namely, that it wasn't obvious at one point in time). What bothered me with not just Egnor's claim (which I'll get to a minute) and ScienceBlogling Mike's response is that evolutionary biology does have a significant role to play in combating the evolution and spread of antibiotic resistance.
First, what Egnor said:
The important medical research on antibiotic…
oracknows | March 20, 2008There's no doubt about it: Stem cells are hot.
Yes indeed, they're not only hot, but they're hip, they're happenin', they're right now, baby. Scientists are falling all over themselves with excitement at the potential applications that could potentially come from stem cell technology. True, no validated therapies for embryonic stem cells have yet made it into clinical practice, and the challenges that need to be overcome before that can happen are arguably greater than what was believed in the heady days a few years ago, before President Bush declared his ill-advised restriction on embryonic…
purepedantry | March 20, 2008CNN has a story about a Navy neurologist who tried using mirrors to help soldiers from Iraq with phantom pain. Phantom pain is pain in amputees that is perceived to originate in the amputated limb. What causes it is not exactly clear although many theories exist. However, it is often refractory to pain medication (this is common in so-called central pain or pain originating in the brain), so it can be really difficult to make these patients feel better.
Dr. Jack Tsao, the Navy neurologist, had the idea that if you used a mirror to show the image of the opposing, intact limb where the…
sb admin | March 19, 2008On OSHA's latest regulatory agenda, the agency noted it would complete the required SBREFA report for a draft rule on beryllium in January 2008, and it did (121-page PDF here) This report stems from the December 6 meeting between OSHA, the Small Business Administration and small entity representatives, as required by the Small Business Regulatory Enforcement Fairness Act . This 1996 law requires OSHA (and EPA) to share a draft of proposed regulations to a group of small business owners (i.e., companies with 500 or fewer employees) so they can suggest changes to it or to the agency's…
purepedantry | March 19, 2008I was struck by this story on NPR about so-called "stem cell tourists." Stem cell tourists are parents taking their children to China for injections of stem cells in hopes of curing a wide variety of diseases. I want to convey at least in some small way what an insanely bad idea this is:
Jena Teague and her husband Terry Williams are among these new visitors. They traveled to China to seek stem-cell treatment for their blind, 7-month-old baby daughter, Laylah. She was born with optic nerve hypoplasia, or ONH -- when the optic nerves fail to develop properly in the womb. Conventional…
oracknows | March 19, 2008Imagine that you're a soldier in Iraq. Imagine further that you're on patrol in a dangerous area in the middle of summer, the desert heat penetrating your 80 lb pack much the way boiling water penetrates the shell of a lobster. Your heart is racing as you and your unit nervously dart to and fro, every shadow a potentially deadly threat, every alley a refuge from which the enemy can attack and kill. The area's thick with insurgents and terrorists, and you feel as though you have a huge bullseye painted on both your chest and back.
A loud roar fills your ears, and you feel as though you have no…
revere | March 19, 2008The chief veterinary officer of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reaffirmed what everyone paying attention already knows: the bird flu situation in Indonesia is critical. The archipelago nation is the fourth most populous country in the world fragmented geographically on 17,000 islands and politically by a disastrously decentralized government. Of its 31 provinces, FAO says 31 have reported infected poultry, and on some of the largest -- Java, Sumatra, Bali and southern Sulawesi -- it is endemic and solidly entrenched. There are an estimated 30 million poultry smallholdings in…
terrasig | March 18, 2008This issue was brought up by my fellow blogger, Joseph at Corpus Callosum, following an article in yesterday's LA Times.
For those not familiar with the concept or countries other than the US where laws may differ, generic drugs are those with the same active chemical as the originally-approved "brand name" drug. The original drug manufacturer is the one that conducts all of the preclinical and clinical safety and efficacy testing, natural product isolation and/or chemical synthesis, formulation with inactive ingredients to assure dissolution and reproducible release of the drug, etc. In…
sb admin | March 14, 2008A group of concerned universities put out a statement about how flat funding for the National Institute of Health âputs a generation of science at risk,â and the House Committee on Science and technology has been holding hearings. Naturally, science bloggers have some thoughts on this:
Janet Stemwedel at Adventures in Ethics and Science explains why non-researchers should care about this issue.
DrugMoneky argues that the pipeline problem isnât just due to funding amounts â cultural biases against younger investigators during grant review also play a role.
At Respectful Insolence, NIH-…
clock | March 12, 2008POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIP OPPORTUNITY in SLEEP MEDICINE
Charles A. Czeisler, Steven W. Lockley, Christopher P. Landrigan, Laura K. Barger
Harvard Work Hours, Health and Safety Group
Division of Sleep Medicine, Brigham & Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School
The Harvard Work Hours Health and Safety Group focuses on understanding the consequences of extended work hours and disordered sleep schedules on health and safety across a range of professions and populations. We also develop and test countermeasures to prevent the increased risk of accidents and injury for both worker health and…
clock | March 9, 2008On the Wired Science blog - The Internet Is Changing the Scientific Method:
If all other fields can go 2.0, incorporating collaboration and social networking, it's about time that science does too. In the bellwether journal Science this week, a computer scientist argues that many modern problems are resistant to traditional scientific inquiry.
The title of the post is a big misnomer as the paper does not say anything about the change in the Scientific Method, but about the change scientists go about their work (perhaps "methodology"?). Read the rambunctious comment thread.
The paper is…