Medicine
clock | July 20, 2007HOUSE BACKS TAXPAYER-FUNDED RESEARCH ACCESS
Final Appropriations Bill Mandates Free Access to NIH Research Findings
Washington, D.C. - July 20, 2007 - In what advocates hailed as a major advance for scientific communication, the U.S. House of Representatives yesterday approved a measure directing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to provide free public online access to agency-funded research findings within 12 months of their publication in a peer-reviewed journal. With broad bipartisan support, the House passed the provision as part of the FY2008 Labor, HHS, and Education…
denialism | July 18, 2007Two Guardian articles appear today on Andrew Wakefield and his associates. The first is a discussion of his unethical and invasive methods used in his now-debunked study that purported to show a link between autism and the MMR vaccine.
Vulnerable children were subjected to "inappropriate and invasive" tests by a doctor who prompted one of the biggest health controversies of the past 10 years, it was alleged today.
Andrew Wakefield, who linked the MMR vaccine to autism, was described at a General Medical Council (GMC) fitness panel as having breached "some of the most fundamental rules of…
j7uy5 | July 17, 2007
href="http://www.webmd.com/digestive-disorders/tc/Clostridium-Difficile-Colitis-Overview"
rel="tag">Clostridium difficile cases
are on the rise,
according to a
study in Archives of Surgery. It seems
odd to me that this study would come out now, just a few days after I
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/07/uk_study_shows_benefit_from_pr.php">posted
about the same topic.
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">I posted about it
because of the finding that the active cultures, that are used in
yogurt, appear to reduce the frequency and severity of
face="…
oracknows | July 17, 2007Not surprisingly, in response to my article on the health risks of secondhand smoke yesterday, the "skeptics' came out in force, although I must admit that even I hadn't expected quite as large an influx as what appeared. Perhaps I'll prepare a general response in the near future (and, no, I didn't take the Surgeon General's report as the be-all and end-all, but it did make a compelling case for SHS causing increasing the risk of lung cancer and cardiovascular disease at least, and it also served as a convenient aggregator of the many, many studies out there). In the meantime one commenter…
sporte | July 17, 2007I had an enlightening experience recently, after I wrote some bioinformatics activities, under contract, for a community college. At the end of the project, the person at the college asked me if the activities were anything like the things that a "bioinformatics technician" would do on the job.
tags: biotechnology careers, biotechnology, career+descriptions,
bioinformatics
Well no, I said, and added that I'd never heard of a bioinformatics technician before and I really didn't know what they would do. I thought that the people most likely to use our activities on-the-job would be…
neurophilosophy | July 16, 2007
The French anatomist, anthropologist, and surgeon Pierre Paul Broca (1824-1880) is best remembered for his descriptions of two patients who had lost the ability to speak after sustaining damage to the left frontal lobe of the brain. Broca's observations of these patients, and the conclusions he reached after his post-mortem examinations, would lead to major advances in the understanding of the brain, and laid the foundations for modern neuropsychology.
In 1859, Broca founded the Societe d'Anthropologie de Paris. Two years later, several heated debates had arisen there: one was about the…
omnibrain | July 16, 2007Wow... I knew that many animals had herpes and if you want to get a herpes free lab animal it costs many times what a 'normal' herpes carrying animal does. But wow... Chlamydia in Koalas?! Maybe some of you bio people out there can tell us whether it's the same Chlamydia humans carry. So basically If I go to Australia and nail a koala - can I catch it and give it to my sheep?
Here's the exciting details on how Australian scientists are going to protect the koala population from STD's.
Professor Peter Timms, from QUT's Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation, said chlamydia was a…
oracknows | July 16, 2007I've said it before, and I'll say it again. I just don't understand it.
I just don't understand how anyone can take the charlatan Andrew Wakefield seriously anymore.
If anyone had any doubt that there is a cult of personality around this discredited vaccine fear-monger, whose shoddy science and undisclosed conflicts of interest managed to ignite a false hysteria over the MMR vaccine, wonder no more. Observe the support that he still commands from parents as he is finally called to account for his misdeeds:
Waving placards and chanting support for Dr Andrew Wakefield, parents from across the…
mikethemadbiologist | July 15, 2007John Nichols, in an interview with Bill Moyers, clarifies a very important--and misunderstood--point about impeachment (italics mine):
JOHN NICHOLS: Bill Moyers, you are making a mistake. You are making a mistake that too many people make.
BILL MOYERS: Yes.
JOHN NICHOLS: You are seeing impeachment as a constitutional crisis. Impeachment is the cure for a constitutional crisis. Don't mistake the medicine for the disease. When you have a constitutional crisis, the founders are very clear. They said there is a way to deal with this. We don't have to have a war. We don't have to raise an army and…
oracknows | July 12, 2007Mike Adams is an idiot.
There, I said it.
Adams runs the NewsTarget website, a repository for all things "alternative" medicine. In it, he rails against "conventional" medicine as utterly useless and touts all manner of woo as the "cure" for a variety of diseases. I generally ignore his website these days because I fear that reading it regularly will cause me to lose too many neurons, and, as I get older, I want to hold on to my what neurons I have remaining for as long as possible, or, if I must lose them, to do so in a pleasurable way, perhaps as a result of a fine bottle of wine. But,…
signout | July 12, 2007About a year ago, when I was an intern in the throes of my first medicine ward rotations, I got a compliment that shone in my memory for weeks.
We had a rather complicated patient on our team. Her case was such that she often required several family meetings a day, and because I was busy with checkyboxen, those meetings were usually attended by my senior resident, Dr. Tremble. Of a certain afternoon, Dr. Tremble was in clinic, and I attended a meeting in his place. Afterward, the patient's husband followed me out of the room, and asked me--in front of the medical students, no less!--whether…
denialism | July 12, 2007Make no mistake about it, the promoters of alternative medicine are denialists. One of the more stunning examples of their denial of the efficacy of evidence-based medicine appeared in Newstarget with the headline The false gods of scientific medicine revealed: It's a cult, not a science by Mike Adams.
Promoters of conventional medicine claim that all the drug marketing, FDA approvals, surgical procedures, chemotherapy and all other treatments are based on "hard science." The term "science" is invoked with hilarious frequency: Science journals, science-based medicine, proven medical…
j7uy5 | July 11, 2007The
href="http://www.fda.gov/default.htm" rel="tag">FDA
just can't win. When they restrict something or say something
negative, they are being too restrictive or complicit with big pharma.
When they approve something too slowly they are insensitive
to the needs of patients. When they approve something too
quickly they are not protecting the public.
In fact, I've criticized them on all of these counts, all the while
knowing that it very difficult to know when the FDA is being fair and
balanced.
Now, we see headlines about a health claim that the FDA has denied.
It concerns
href…
tfk | July 11, 2007At the Johnson County District Attorney's Office Home Page, Phill Kline (the extra "l" is for loser) pimps a WingNutDaily column by local conspiracy theorist Jack Cashill (HT: KSDP Buffalo Blog). Kline's heading for the article is "WorldNetDaily coverage of Morrison / Tiller controversy," an accurate enough description which fails to establish why it belongs on a county-funded webpage. Tiller is an OB/GYN in Wichita who runs a family planning clinic, Morrison (then the Johnson County DA) beat Kline in last year's state Attorney General election.
Neither Morrison nor Tiller currently has…
sporte | July 11, 2007What do people in biotechnology do on the job?
What can students do with a science degree once they've finished college? Some answers can be found at the "Life Sciences Central web site. Created by the Workforce Development Council of Seattle-King County, this is a wonderful resource for anyone who's considering biotechnology for a potential career.
My favorite part of the site is the series of short video interviews from people in the biotech industry, describing what they do on the job and how they got there.
tags: biotechnology careers, biotechnology, career+descriptions
Ten interviews…
mementomori | July 10, 2007"Boob job with your hot dog, ma'am?"
"Patient's Own Body Fat Used in Breast Remodeling"
These two headlines have something in common. Did you decipher what it is?
That's right - they both refer to the same news release about an advance in reconstructive surgery for breast cancer patients, and I might add they prove the theorem that many headline composers are nothing more than unemployed comedy writers. Let's parse this news by first reading the copy below each headline. Here is story number one:
A scientific journal says that women could be having breast-enhancement procedures during…
revere | July 10, 2007CDC recommends (MMWR Recomm Rep. 2005 Jul 29;54(RR-8):1-40) hospitalized patients with influenza A be placed under standard and droplet isolation precautions for 5 days after the onset of their symptoms. This is based on studies of volunteers who received live attenuated flu vaccine drops in their noses. After 7 days only 1 of 18 were shedding virus. One might wonder if attenuated flu vaccine in healthy volunteers is the best way to estimate the length of viral shedding. A new paper of viral shedding in hospitalized elderly patients at the Mayo Clinic suggests it isn't. Sensitive methods for…
oracknows | July 6, 2007It was a rough day yesterday. I spent a long time in the O.R. It was one of those days that I couldn't figure out what happened. The number of operations that I had to do should have allowed me to finish operating by around 2 PM, leaving me time to do other things that needed to get done. But between delays in getting a patient back from nuclear medicine, long turnover times between cases, and a case that took me nearly two hours longer than it should have, it was well after 5 PM by the time I was done--and I still had a bunch of work to do. I'm not complaining; these things happen and there…
jstemwedel | July 5, 2007 I recently finished reading Greg Critser's Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs Are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies.
Frankly, I don't feel so well.
Critser starts off by dropping us into the regulatory environment in the U.S. in the early 1970s, walking us through the multifarious forces that started to change that environment. Some of the changes seem welcome and important -- for example, removing the requirement that companies wishing to market generic versions of FDA approved drugs (once the patents had expired on those drugs) produce additional studies demonstrating the…
oracknows | July 2, 2007About a month ago, I did a facetious throwaway piece about "homeopathic enchantments" being used by one of my favorite comic characters (who, alas, no longer has his own comic series), namely Doctor Strange, the Sorcerer Supreme. Given that it was not intended as anything other than a lark, I was rather surprised when it generated a long discussion thread fueled by a homeopath named Dana Ullman, who showed up in the comments and argued with me and several of my best regular commenters. He kept the discussion thread going far longer than the average thread on this blog, provoking annoyance on…