Medicine
omnibrain | June 8, 2007Clearly I'm not a medicine bio person - but this just had to make it onto the blog.
Researchers at Burnham Institute for Medical Research ("Burnham") have provided the first evidence that gamma-secretase, an enzyme key to the progression of Alzheimer's, acts as a tumor suppressor by altering the pathway of epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), a potential treatment target for cancer. Expedited to publication online by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, these findings reveal a limitation of targeting gamma-secretase for treatment of Alzheimer's and potentially other diseases.…
cortex | June 8, 2007David Leonhardt makes a good point. Controlling health care costs - one of our most important domestic policy problems - will require our politicians to make hard (and unpopular) decisions.
In Idaho Falls, Idaho, anyone suffering from the sort of lower back pain that may conceivably be helped by the fusing of two vertebrae is quite likely to have the surgery. It's known as lumbar fusion, and the rate at which it is performed in Idaho Falls is almost five times the national average. The rate in Idaho Falls is 20 times that in Bangor, Me., where lumbar fusion is less common than anywhere else.…
bushwells | June 7, 2007
So the notion that human semen may act as an antidepressant is rearing its semi-flaccid head again.
Broadsheet from Salon.com (May, 2007) asks are you addicted to semen?
Someday they'll have a patch for that. Dr. Gordon G. Gallup theorizes (via Feministing) that women have a "chemical dependency" on semen. He's based this conclusion on a survey that found that women who regularly had sex without condoms became increasingly depressed the longer they went without sex (read: semen). Women who regularly used condoms didn't have this experience. So, it could be that if you consistently have sex…
j7uy5 | June 7, 2007
Amy Goodman has a good article on Truthdig. The
reason I like the article is that it provides follow-up to an issue
that was in the headlines, briefly a couple of years ago. It
has largely been ignored by the media since then.
href="http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070605_a_hypocritical_oath_psychologists_and_torture/">Hypocritical
Oath: Psychologists and Torture
By Amy Goodman
Jun 5, 2007
First, do no harm. This tenet of medicine applies equally to
psychologists, yet they are increasingly implicated in abusive
interrogations, dare we say torture, at U.S. military…
oracknows | June 5, 2007Somehow this one passed under my radar four years ago. However, the there's a reason for this. First, I wasn't blogging then and thus wasn't paying as close attention to alternative medicine. Also, apparently, the State of Oregon didn't know about it until 16 months after the fact, which was still before I started blogging. In any case, behold the sad case of Sandy Boylan:
Sandy Boylan was a contagiously cheerful woman whose hobby was handing out bouquets of homegrown flowers. But in the summer of 2003, she was scared.
The 53-year-old B&B owner from Dallas, Ore., had been told by her…
tsmith | June 4, 2007 Syphilis is a disease frequently shrouded in many levels of mystery. It appeared suddenly in Europe in the late 1400s as a highly virulent and often fatal disease, a disease that could give Ebola a run for its money when it comes to sheer grotesque-ness. Victims may be covered with pustules from head to toe, diseased flesh peeled from their bodies, and patients may be in agonizing pain for weeks or months prior to death. However, after this inauspicious beginning, syphilis seems to have become less virulent, and instead shifted in presentation to more of the chronic disease that we know…
revere | June 4, 2007Most influenza subtypes are said to be diseases of birds, so it is somewhat surprising there hasn't been more study of poultry workers or veterinarians exposed to infected birds in the course of their work. A study by Gregory Gray and his team at , an epidemiologist at the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases, at the University of Iowa's College of Public Health has just been published. The results cast into doubt the mantra that transmission of avian influenza virus to humans is difficult and uncommon.
Graduate student Kendall Myers in Gray's team studied the blood sera obtained from…
pharyngula | June 3, 2007The only thing you need to read today: the first hand account of an doctor, explaining why he does abortions: it's because someone has to give those oppressed by circumstance a choice.
By 1967 I was a third year medical student, still with no visible means of support, and we were pregnant with our third child. It was the spring of that year and I was ending my rotation in the Ob-Gyn Service clinic. I was assigned a 40 plus year old, poverty stricken mother of several children. I think she was unmarried but I am not sure of that now. This care worn mother-of-several had a large abdominal mass…
revere | June 3, 2007What do we know about transmission of tuberculosis on an airplane? Not much, apparently. There is very little literature on it and not a single case of active TB has ever been traced to an airplane contact. On the other hand, it isn't very easy to estimate the risks. The only way you can do it is in cases such as the current one where you know someone with TB got on an airplane and potentially exposed others. Then you would do intensive follow-up of fellow passengers and crew to see if you could find others who might have gotten infected. Now the problems really start.
First, there's the task…
oracknows | June 3, 2007I haven't yet mentioned it, but since Friday evening I've been in Chicago for the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting. (If anyone happens to be attending the meeting and is interested in a meetup, let me know. My time's pretty well booked until I leave on Tuesday afternoon, but we might be able to squeeze something in.)
Since my sisters live in Chicago, Friday night I met up with them and we decided to go out to a bar to get some beer and burgers. The bar, on West Division Street in Wicker Park, was Smallbar. I'd never been there before, mainly because the bar didn't exist when I…
terrasig | June 2, 2007Here are some interesting news items I found during the week but lacked the time to blog about:
Natural alternatives to growth-promoting antibiotics in livestock feed in EU
Related: Herbal therapy for pigs at PigProgress.net
Coke and Cargill partner on herbal sweetener, Stevia (Rebiana)
Singapore herbal remedy adulterated with potent prescription drugs
Famed Karolinska Institutet opens Osher Centre for Integrative Medicine
Herbs misused relative to evidence-based guidelines
Slippery elm bark poaching in Kentucky
Creosote shrub compound extends mouse lifespan
People shouldn't start taking NDGA…
mementomori | June 1, 2007I have a question for any students in the audience today. Are you ready? Here it is: what is the most important part of the medical history?
The medical history, by the way, is what physicians document when they meet a patient for the first time. The doctor asks a series of questions and the answers are shaped into a narrative that documents the details of the clinical situation in order to deduce what exactly is wrong with the patient and maybe even correct the problem. The medical history is recorded in this order:
Chief Complaint
History of Present Illness
Allergies
Medicines
Past…
j7uy5 | May 31, 2007I
wrote about a similar topic a bit ago, it which a relationship was
found between
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/04/depression_and_pain_in_retired.php">chronic
pain and depression in retired pro football players.
Now, there is an NTY article that reviews some findings about
a relationship between concussions and depression.
title="NYT permanent link via RSS"
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/31/sports/football/31concussions.html?ex=1338264000&en=aa42809a8c7be226&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss">Concussions
Tied to Depression in Ex-N.F.…
sporte | May 31, 2007I want my genome sequenced, too!
Apparently, it's become a popular thing to get your genome sequenced. Craig Venter was the first. Jim Watson's genome (of Project Jim) was ceremonially released this morning (courtesy of 454), and now George Chuch, Larry King, cosmologist Stephen Hawking, Google co-founder Larry Page, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and former junk-bond trader Michael Milken want theirs done, too (1).
Two articles from different GenomeWeb releases made a strange combination this morning when I turned on my computer. In one release, GW mentioned that NHGRI (the National…
oracknows | May 31, 2007I've been a bit remiss when it comes to writing about the lunacy in which it is claimed that vaccines cause autism, allegedly due to the mercury in the thimerosal preservative that was in most childhood vaccines until the end of 2002, when it was removed from all but flu vaccines. It turns out that the class action suit by parents who think that vaccines caused their children's autism will be going to court in June. Hearings for this suit, known as the Autism Omnibus, will mark a new phase in the pseudoscientific pursuit of "compensation" for nonexistent "vaccine injuries." Even though…
oracknows | May 30, 2007I love it.
You see I noticed an old "friend," the Herbinator, making this comment about me regarding dichloroacetate:
I was listening to CBC Radio - the Current, as is my want, and there was a show on about DCA, or Dichloroacetic acid. DCA is a molecule so simple and cheap to make that drug companies are unable to patent it ... so they simply pass on researching it. Some say that DCA is a most excellent and effective cancer treatment.
I have to confess that I had never heard of DCA before. And so I perked an ear toward listening to the radio show as simplicity itself and uppity people…
oracknows | May 29, 2007It never seems to end, does it?
I'm talking about the hype and questionable practices revolving around dichloroacetate (DCA), the small molecule chemotherapeutic agent that targets the Warburg effect, in essence normalizing the metabolism of tumor cells and thereby inhibiting their growth. (See here and here for more details.) A report by Evangelos Michelakis at the University of Alberta in Cancer Cell in January reported strong antitumor activity against a wide variety of tumors in rat tumor models resulted in a phenomenon ballooning out of control in a way that he could never have imagined…
revere | May 27, 2007Just this month three prominent members of the flu science establishment warned their colleagues that predicting an influenza pandemic was not really possible (Taubenberger, Morens and Fauci, JAMA. 2007 May 9;297(18):2025-7). Not just the time frame is unpredictable, but also the subtype. H5N1 is the bogeyman, and rightly given its horrific case fatality rate (60%), but influenza is primarily a disease of birds. There is therefore a huge reservoir and other subtypes can cause trouble. As if to add an exclamation mark to a well timed warning, this week saw an outbreak of H7N2 in a poultry…
mikethemadbiologist | May 25, 2007A couple of weeks ago, after I posted about a very serious emerging bacterial threat, KPC, I received an email from a reader with an elderly relative in the hospital with a very serious case of pneumonia caused by KPC. What he* told me is shocking.
The relative, who has had repeated hospital stays and a previous MRSA infection, was in the hospital for a week before any laboratory cultures were performed. That's right, a patient with practically every major risk factor for a multidrug resistant infection wasn't tested for a week. So this patient wasn't isolated, exposing other ICU patients and…
oracknows | May 24, 2007A number of readers have mailed me links to this story, and, yes, it is right up my alley. In reading it, I fear that it's a vision of the future for two young cancer patients who are very unlikely to survive their cancers because their parents eschewed evidence-based medicine in favor of woo, Starchild Abraham Cherrix and Katie Wernecke, both of whom had relapsed when last I discussed them. The case is one with which I had not been familiar, namely that of Noah Maxin, of Canton, OH:
CANTON No one in the courtroom nearly five years ago wanted this day to come. Not Noah Maxin's parents. Not…