Medicine
denialism | June 30, 2007
I went to see Michael Moore's Sicko last night and it is truly worthy of being seen by every American. I say that knowing how many feel about Michael Moore and his tendency towards spectacle. I hope that people can set aside whatever prejudice they have towards Moore and see this movie.
This is a movie that contains more truth than any he has made so far. I went in with a skeptical mind, knowing the issues that face the practice of medicine in the United States in this new millennium, how easy they can be discussed inaccurately or flippantly and how medicine was once practiced in this…
choofnagle | June 28, 2007Another interesting article in the Times discusses shining the light on pharmaceutical industry gifts to doctors. What's interesting about it is that shows another example of how industry self-regulatory principles often have holes (here, a lack of "detail") that leave the problem to be addressed unaddressed.
In the privacy field, the most notable example of this was the IRSG Principles, which allowed databrokers to sell personal information to anyone they deemed "qualified," and surprise, surprise, even criminals were "qualified" to buy Social Security Numbers. But back to doctors:
In…
denialism | June 27, 2007The New York Times writes an editorial about hospital rankings based on mortality of medicare patients from cardiac disease, and not surprisingly, misses the point on metrics of patient survival comparisons between hospitals.
Famed medical institutions like Johns Hopkins, the Cleveland Clinic and Massachusetts General Hospital are lumped into the broad national average category when perhaps they deserve better (we can't tell), and no doubt many other hospitals deserve a lesser ranking. In the next round of evaluations, the Medicare program ought to make public every institution's mortality…
tsmith | June 26, 2007 Women do some rather insane things to achieve modern standards of beauty. We wear shoes that do terrible things to our feet. We don bras that dig into our chest and push our breasts into strange conformations. We slide on pantyhose to firm our stomachs, makeup to hide our imperfections, and hair dye to diminish our grays. And we have this strange habit* of yanking other body hair out from the root, be it our eyebrows, underarms, legs, or pubic hair.
Yes, I do have a point here (besides making men squirm). The August issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases has a forthcoming article…
sb admin | June 24, 2007Louisville-Courier Journal reporters Laura Unger and Ralph Dunlop offer us the voices and faces of miners who are suffering from coal workers' pneumoconiosis. Their special report, Black Lung: Dust Hasn't Settled on Deadly Disease, includes an on-line version which features five compelling videos featuring 40- and 50-year old coal miners who are now suffering with the disabling lung disease. Mr. Danny Hall, 56, for example, who is still severely impaired despite receiving a lung transplant says "if I had to do over, I wouldn't ever go into coal mining."
The reporters begin the series…
denialism | June 22, 2007Tara points out that we missed a nice little article in Science last week about our friends at AidsTruth. They discuss their ongoing efforts to counter HIV/AIDS denialism on the Web.
Launched by AIDS researchers, clinicians, and activists from several countries, AIDSTruth.org offers more than 100 links to scientific reports to "debunk denialist myths" and "expose the denialist propaganda campaign for what it is ... to prevent further harm being done to individual and public health." The site also has a section that names denialists and unsparingly critiques their writings, variously accusing…
mikethemadbiologist | June 22, 2007With Massachusetts having prevented the attempt to de-legalize gay marriage, there is much discussion about the topic. But this story about a splinter Mormon group highlights the importance of outlawing one type of marriage: marriages between close relatives. By way of Lance Mannion, from Reuters (italics mine):
In a dusty neighborhood under sheer sandstone cliffs studded with juniper on the Arizona-Utah border, a rare genetic disorder is spreading through polygamous families on a wave of inbreeding.
The twin border communities of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona, have the world…
tsmith | June 22, 2007While I was out last week, I completely missed this Science article all about HIV denial and the AidsTruth.org website, and features frequent commenter Richard Jeffreys:
For 20 years, a small but vocal group of AIDS "dissenters" has attracted international attention by questioning whether HIV causes the disease. Many AIDS researchers from the outset thought it best to ignore these challenges. But last year, another small and equally vocal group decided to counter the dissenters--whom they call "denialists"--with a feisty Web site, AIDSTruth.org. It has started to attract international…
oracknows | June 21, 2007I've written extensively before about Starchild Abraham Cherrix, the (now) 17-year-old who was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease when he was 15 and who, after one course of chemotherapy, refused any further evidence-based medicine in favor of the quackery known as Hoxsey therapy. His refusal led to a big legal battle in Virginia, and the court ultimately (sort of) compromised, letting Abraham go to Mississippi to be treated by a radiation oncologist with taste for alternative medicine named Dr. R. Arnold Smith, who would give him low dose radiation and an unconventional variety of…
oracknows | June 21, 2007Has it really been two years?
Amazingly, it has indeed. On June 16, 2005, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. deposited the biggest, steamingest, drippiest (not to mention stinkiest) turd I had as yet seen in my then young blogging career, specifically an article published simultaneously by both Salon.com and Rolling Stone entitled Deadly Immunity. Along with David Kirby's Evidence of Harm: Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic: A Medical Mystery, which had been published a couple of months earlier, RFK, Jr. arguably did more than almost anyone else besides the aforementioned David Kirby to…
oracknows | June 20, 2007Having exhausted myself for the time being on two things that irritate me a lot (namely creationist neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Egnor and the antivaccination pseudoscience being presented as "evidence" that vaccines cause autism at the Autism Omnibus), it's time for a change of pace. For all my tendency to deride certain "alternative medicine" modalities as pseudoscientific nonsense (homeopathy, anyone?), you may have noticed that I tend to take a softer line with acupuncture. No, it's not because I'm a believer. Certainly, I don't buy for a minute that somehow sticking needles in "meridians" in…
mementomori | June 18, 2007We live in exciting times, and not just because David Hasselhoff is back on prime-time television. GlaxoSmithKline has just announced it is developing five new agents to fight cancer and expects to have them introduced within three years. A story like this has the same effect on oncologists as an unguarded steak does on the family Labrador. I shall try not to salivate as I type this, but it is difficult to contain elation when a deep-pocketed industry giant confesses a craven craving to attack the same disease one has been toiling against for so many years.
The drugs will treat a range of…
oracknows | June 18, 2007Thanks, archy and PZ.
You just ruined my day.
Really. If you thought that Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church was bad, you really ain't seen nothin' yet until you've checked out Paul Hill Days. The Phelpses may be evil in the way that they torment people in their moment of grief with their "God hates fags" hatred, but these people are violent killers in the name of God.
No matter what side of the abortion debate that you happen to come down on, surely you must find this paeon to the murderer Paul Hill as vile as I do. Here's just a taste:
On July 29th, 1994, Paul Hill boldly defended…
cortex | June 18, 2007Another heartbreaking tale of improper medical care for veterans from The Washington Post. This time, the article is about the lack of mental health care for mentally troubled veterans, especially when it comes to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). While the Army excels at providing emergency trauma care for veterans injured in the body - only ten percent of wounded soldiers have died in this Iraq war, compared to 24 percent for the first Gulf war - the Army and Veterans Administration have consistently failed to adequately care for the injured brain. It's as if the Army still subscribes…
j7uy5 | June 14, 2007This
is kind of a rambling rehash of an old
href="http://corpus-callosum.blogspot.com/2004/03/multidrug-resistant-tb-lessons-about.html">post.
But it turns out to be topical now. What is more it
illustrates some interesting points about evolution: some obvious,
others subtle. One thing is shows very nicely is that once
nature solves a problem, the same solution keeps cropping up in other
places.
On March 16, 2004, the World Health Organization released a report on
multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. This is a serious problem,
especially in the former Soviet states of eastern Europe…
oracknows | June 14, 2007Things have been very quiet as far as the story of Katie Wernecke, the 14-year-old girl with lymphoma whose parents fought a legal battle with the State of Texas to be able to choose "alternative" therapy involving high dose vitamin C, despite the fact that her conventional therapeutic options had not been exhausted and she still stood a reasonable chance of being saved with chemotherapy and radiation. More recently, we learned the sad news that her cancer had relapsed in a big way, with tumors in her chest. When last we saw her, she had written a heartbreaking story about a dying girl with…
cortex | June 14, 2007Imagine you are a doctor, and a patient comes into your office with a serious case of back pain. You begin by performing all the standard diagnostic tests, including an MRI and X-ray. Then, you perform an extensive interview. You ask about his psychological history, and rate his level of depression, fear and anxiety. You also assess him for a variety of risk factors that tend to correlate with back pain, including his job satisfaction, and whether or not he is involved in pertinent litigation. After this extensive medical evaluation, you try to predict how intense his back pain is and how…
tsmith | June 13, 2007 Over at The Examining Room of Dr. Charles, the good doc brings up another instance of quackery from an unexpected source: Dr. Henry Heimlich, originator of the Heimlich maneuver for choking. While that procedure has clearly saved many lives, Dr. Heimlich doesn't stop there--he advocates using his maneuver for drowning victims and asthmatics, neither of which have been scientifically proven (and indeed, major medical associations have spoken out against them). Dr. Charles also reveals that Heimlich also carries out other questionable research, including deliberately infecting HIV+…
clock | June 13, 2007Children With Sleep Disorder Symptoms Are More Likely To Have Trouble Academically:
Students with symptoms of sleep disorders are more likely to receive bad grades in classes such as math, reading and writing than peers without symptoms of sleep disorders, according to recent research.
Slow Wave Activity During Sleep Is Lower In African-Americans Than Caucasians:
Slow wave activity (SWA), a stable trait dependent marker of the intensity of non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, is lower in young healthy African-Americans compared to Caucasians who were matched for age, gender and body weight,…
cmooney | June 12, 2007I've done something a bit off the beaten path recently--teamed up with a scientist to write an editorial for a medical journal. My piece, with Beth Jordan, M.D., who is the scientific director of the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals, just appeared in Contraception. Here is the gist:
In the medical and especially the highly politicized reproductive health arena, one consequence of the frequent misappropriation of the mantle of science can be seen in a cacophony of news headlines, presenting bewildering and often conflicting information: "Rethinking Hormones, Again", "What?…