Medicine
tsmith | March 7, 2008It's just not been Vegas' week. First a ricin-laced hotel room, then a clinic-associated outbreak of hepatitis C virus (and potentially hepatitis B and HIV) that could become enormous. Meanwhile, an outbreak of hepatitis E is raging in Uganda. So what are these virues, and how in the world could a medical catastrophe of this magnitude happen in the U.S.? More after the jump...
The group of hepatitis viruses (A, B, C, D, E, and G) are related in name only. They've all been either associated with or found to cause hepatitis--inflammation of the liver. This can be acute inflammation (short…
oracknows | March 6, 2008There's an idiotic poll up at Larry King Live with the question: "Do you believe vaccines cause or contribute to autism?" Idiotic, because it's science that says whether or not vaccines cause or contribute to autism. Whether the public thinks they do or not is irrelevant to the biological, medical, and clinical science that say, to the best of our knowledge, they do not.
Even so, please go tell him the real science about vaccines and autism. The pseudoscientists have already stacked the deck, and clearly antivaccinationists are voting, as the numbers are running around 80% to 20% in favor of…
ddobbs | March 6, 2008With so much written here lately about placebos and drug effectiveness, I would not want to leave out this remarkable study: Placebo effect is stronger, apparently, if you pay more for the placebo.
This is a fascinating study described in a letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association. A crudely shortened version: Some researchers at MIT (none of them Bill Murray, as far as I can tell) gave light shocks to volunteers, then gave them some placebos that were costly and some that were cheap. The costly ones worked better.
It sounds like a bit of a stunt, but as Respectful…
revere | March 5, 2008Things are changing. And here's some evidence. This is a great story (hat tip Boingboing). It's about a new test for African sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis), a disease carried by the tse-tse fly that afflicts an estimated 66 million people in 36 countries. Not a nice disease:
At first, the main clinical signs of human trypanosomiasis are high fever, weakness and headache, joint pains and pruritus (itching). Gradually, the immune defence mechanisms and the patient's resistance are exhausted. As the parasite develops in the lymph and blood of the patient, the initial symptoms become more…
oracknows | March 5, 2008Perusing the news early this morning, I noticed an article on ABC News about placebos. One thing I found interesting about it was that it was a story about a research letter to JAMA, not a full study. Heck, there isn't even an abstract.
Even so, the study was rather interesting and described thusly:
The more expensive your pain medications are, the better the relief you get from taking them -- even if they're fake.
That's according to a study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which suggests that sugar pills labeled as expensive drugs relieve pain better…
tfk | March 4, 2008Congresswoman Nancy Boyda, recently elected from the Kansas 2nd, took a strong stance against granting retroactive immunity for telecoms that broke the law by letting the government listen to your phone calls without a warrant.
"I am adamant about protecting the Constitution," she explained. "They're giving nothing in return for it. We're not getting any more security and they're shredding the Constitution."
It's worth pointing out that the telecom trade association isn't even interested in this immunity.
But that isn't the only sanity growing in the Sunflower State these days. A grand…
oracknows | March 4, 2008I saw this and was going to write about it, but it turns out that Abel Pharmboy at Terra Sigillata beat me to it. Basically, the makers of Airborne have been slapped down bigtime for false advertising:
WASHINGTON--The makers of Airborne--a multivitamin and herbal supplement whose labels and ads falsely claimed that the product cures and prevents colds--will refund money to consumers who bought the product, as part of a $23.3 million class action settlement agreement. The company will pay for ads in Better Homes & Gardens, Parade, People, Newsweek, and many other magazines and newspapers…
oracknows | March 4, 2008If there's one type of so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" that I've always been very up front about, it's that I consider homeopathy to be the ultimate in pseudoscientific twaddle when it comes to CAM. The reasons should be obvious to anyone with a background in basic science. After all, homeopathy is nothing more than the most magical of magical thinking writ so large that it's a wonder than anyone can believe it.
Think about it. What are the two main principles of homeopathy? The first is "like cures like," which postulates on the basis of the prescientific observations of…
sb admin | March 3, 2008The State of Alaska's Department of Health and Social Services recently released a report on work-related lead poisoning over the last 12 years (1995-2006). I was shocked to read that 94 percent of the workers (289 men) with blood-lead levels above 25 ug/dL were employed in the mining industry. A follow-up story by Elizabeth Bluemink of the Anchorage Daily News reports that most of the adult blood-lead laboratory results came from the Red Dog lead-zinc mine near Kotzebue, Alaska. Although there is no MSHA standard to protect miners from lead poisoning, Teck Cominco Alaska Inc. has some…
clock | March 2, 2008I just noticed recently, when looking up a paper in the Journal of Biological Rhythms, that SAGE publishing group is starting to offer the Open Access option to the authors in some of its Journals:
Independent scholarly publisher, SAGE Publications, is now offering authors of papers published on SAGE Journals Online, the option to make their primary research articles freely available on publication. The 'SAGE Open' publishing option has been launched primarily to ensure that authors can comply with new stringent funding body requirements, (for example those now in place from the Wellcome…
oracknows | February 29, 2008Well, now I'm really in a pickle as far as the 2008 Presidential election goes. I really don't like Hillary Clinton and consider Barack Obama not ready for prime time; i.e., he's too inexperienced and too liberal for my liking. On the other hand, I used to like John McCain--at least until he started pandering to the religious right and became a cheerleader for the Iraq war. Now I have another reason not to vote for John McCain, which leaves me with not a single Presidential candidate that I can see myself voting for right now.
John McCain has credulously fallen for the blandishments of…
grrlscientist | February 28, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, bipolar disorder, clinical depression, mental illness, mood disorder, functional genomics, blood test, biomarkers
Image: Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
According to the United States Department of Health and Human Services, serious mental illnesses affect approximately 44 million Americans. Serious mental illnesses include mood disorders; depression and bipolar disorder. Unfortunately, correctly diagnosing mental illnesses, such as bipolar disorder, appears to be a sort of voodoo science that depends upon the skill of the mental health professional…
ddobbs | February 28, 2008The Kirsch study I wrote about a couple days ago, which found that antidepressants seem to have no more effect than placebo, has generated a wide variety of reactions in the blogosphere and press. Several things of note here:
1) In a pattern I've noticed repeatedly of late about other types of stories about things in the U.S., this story got much more attention in the British press than it did here in the U.S. (The authors were from the UK, but the paper was published in a U.S.-based journal, and antidepressant use is a huge issue in the U.S.)
2) The responses -- some by bloggers, writers,…
purepedantry | February 26, 2008Doctors at the University of Navarra have implanted an auditory brainstem implant (ABI) in the youngest patient ever attempted -- a 13 month-old girl:
A team of ear, nose and throat specialists and neurosurgeons at the University Hospital of Navarra, led by doctors Manuel Manrique Rodriguez, specialist in ear, nose and throat surgery and Bartolome Bejarano Herruzo, specialist in paediatric neurosurgery, have successfully operated on a 13 month-old girl from Murcia, who had been born deaf due to the lack of auditory nerves. She is the youngest patient in the world who has received an auditory…
ddobbs | February 26, 2008[This is a revised, expanded version of the original heads-up I put up last night.]
A large new meta-analysis of SSRI antidepressant trials concludes that the drugs have essentially no therapeutic effect at all. The study, in PLOS Medicine today, comes on the heels of another study published a few weeks ago (I blogged on it here) showing that SSRIs have little therapeutic effect if you include the (unflattering) clinical trials the industry had previously hidden.
The PLOS study is a meta-analysis of 47 clinical trials that account for almost all full data on clinical trials of SSRIs such as…
terrasig | February 25, 2008[Note: I originally posted this last Thursday under another title but it got lost in other events of that day. As I find it ironic that Mr Comarow has been attacked by an alternative medicine practitioner and advocate, I find this story worthy of reposting.]
A few weeks ago the skeptical blogosphere was up in arms about an article in US News & World Report by Avery Comarow on alternative medicine services in US academic medical centers. Mr Comarow is a senior medical writer for USN&WR and best known as editor for the last 18 years of the magazine's annual feature, America's Best…
oracknows | February 25, 2008Back in late December, I came across an op-ed piece in the New York Times written by Dr. Atul Gawande, general and endocrine surgeon and author of Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science and Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, that struck me as a travesty of what our system for protecting human subjects should be, as it did fellow ScienceBlogger Revere.
In brief, the article described an action by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Human Research Protection that, on its surface, appeared to be a case of bureaucracy hewing to the letter of the…
mikethemadbiologist | February 24, 2008A while back I wrote about how the Office of Human Research Protection (OHRP) had blocked the implementation of a checklist for ICUs that would most likely prevent roughly 20,000 deaths from infectious disease annually. ScienceBlogling Revere reports that the OHRP has reversed its decision (italics mine):
The Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP) -- part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services -- has concluded that Michigan hospitals can continue implementing a checklist to reduce the rate of catheter-related infections in intensive care unit settings (ICUs) without…
oracknows | February 23, 2008Anyone who reads this blog knows my opinion of homeopathy. Just type "homeopathy" in the little search box on the left side of this blog, and you'll be greeted with many, many posts dating back to the very beginnings of Orac's presence on ScienceBlogs. Of course, science is with me on this one, as it does not support the primary claims of homeopathy, including:
Like cures like
Dilution with succussion makes a remedy stronger
Water has "memory" of remedies that it has come in contact with, which is how homeopathic remedies can "work," even though they've been diluted to the point where, even…
revere | February 22, 2008Recently we posted on the insanity of requiring informed consent for posting a hygiene checklist in the ICU. This week the New England Journal of Medicine weighed in.
Here's some background from the NEJM Commentary:
About 80,000 catheter-related bloodstream infections occur in U.S. intensive care units (ICUs) each year, causing as many as 28,000 deaths and costing the health care system as much as $2.3 billion. If there were procedures that could prevent these infections, wouldn't we encourage hospitals to introduce them? And wouldn't we encourage the development, testing, and dissemination…