Medicine
catdynamics | March 28, 2007USAir flight 1014 - New Orleans-Charlotte held on runway while man tested for smallpox
Update: He was the Director of the Navy Medical Service Corps? (kos diary)
That is weird.
Update: WBTV news story and in Reason Magazine
Admiral Brannman
Director of Naval Medical Center San Diego or he was until recently
Hm, they have an infectious disease clinic (duh, they're ginormous) doing antiviral research.
Naval Health Research Center is working on effects of smallpox vaccine on pregnancy...
Chimerix is working on a smallpox antiviral - they are based in North Carolina, their Chairman of the Board…
oracknows | March 28, 2007It's been a week since I last wrote about dichloroacetate (DCA), the chemotherapeutic agent that targets tumor cells by an interesting new mechanism based on the Warburg effect, as I've described in the past. After a very interesting article in Cancer Cell in January by investigators at the University of Alberta, the blogosphere erupted with wild speculation that this was a "cure" for cancer, based only on animal studies that were fairly impressive. Because DCA is a small molecule that is supposedly "unpatentable," pharmaceutical companies have been rather cool in their interest, and it is…
oracknows | March 28, 2007It's been a bad few days.
A mere four days after Elizabeth Edwards announced that her breast cancer had recurred in her rib, with an update the other day saying that the apparently was also another lesion in in her hip, I learn from a commenter and multiple other sources that White House Press Secretary Tony Snow has suffered a recurrence of his colon cancer. Apparently, it has spread to the liver:
CBS/AP) Presidential spokesman Tony Snow's cancer has returned and spread to his liver and elsewhere in his body, shaken White House colleagues announced Tuesday. They said he told them he planned…
oracknows | March 27, 2007I've lamented time and time again how woo has been infiltrating American medical schools, even going so far as to find its way into being totally integrated into mandatory curriculum from the very first term of the first year of medical school at Georgetown. I realize I'm a bit late on this one, but sadly it's not just the U.S. where pseudoscience, anti-science, and woo are infiltrating universities. In the U.K., it's starting too:
Over the past decade, several British universities have started offering bachelor of science (BSc) degrees in alternative medicine, including six that offer BSc…
oracknows | March 27, 2007I realize that being in academic medicine at a tertiary care center often produces the "ivory tower" syndrome, but occasionally it is brought home to me that the way we practice surgery here often differs considerably from how surgery is practiced "in the trenches." This time around, it was a study about how often surgeons referred women whose breast cancers are large enough to require a mastectomy to treat to plastic surgeons for a discussion of reconstruction options prior to the mastectomy. The answer was: Not nearly often enough. See for yourself:
ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- Forty-four percent of…
hrynyshyn | March 27, 2007This week's Nature explores the growth of university-level instruction in that most incredible of non-conventional medical therapeutic techniques, homeopathy. That's troubling enough, but apparently it's only a part of an even more disturbing trend: the granting of BSc degrees, by otherwise respectable institutions of higher learning, in fields that don't even qualify as pseudo-scientific, let alone science-oriented. Among the new science degrees one can earn in the UK are:
Geography of Mountain Leadership, Staffordshire University
Hospitality Management, Manchester Metropolitan University…
purepedantry | March 26, 2007This is absolutely ingenious:
Patients rely on their physicians to recognize signs of trouble, yet for common heart murmurs, that ability is only fair at best. Fortunately, the solution is simple: listening repeatedly. In fact, intensive repetition -- listening at least 400 times to each heart sound -- significantly improved the stethoscope abilities of doctors, according to a study presented today at the American College of Cardiology's annual meeting.
After demonstrating last year that medical students greatly improved their stethoscope skills by listening repeatedly to heart sounds on…
terrasig | March 25, 2007I noted just last week the latest review by Drs Newman and Cragg citing that nature remains the source of 70% of prescription drugs. Wall Street Journal medical reporter Ron Winslow took his turn yesterday contributing to the paper's new HealthBlog from New Orleans, site of the American College of Cardiology meeting.
Turns out that a semi-synthetic analog of a compound derived from the bark of Australian magnolia may enhance anti-clotting therapy following stent implants without increasing bleeding risks. The parent molecule and the analog tested in this trial act as antagonists, or…
tsmith | March 24, 2007 Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection is as old as civilization. The bacterium infects approximately a third of the world's population--roughly 2 billion individuals. It's estimated that 8 million new cases are contracted each year--around a new infection every second. ~2 million individuals die as a result of TB every year. The bacterium also plays a prominent role in the history of microbiology: it was on March 24, 1882, that Robert Koch announced his discovery of the causative agent of the dread disease tuberculosis:
"If the importance of a disease for mankind is measured by the…
oracknows | March 21, 2007Late yesterday afternoon, I was lazily checking my referral logs to see who might be linking to Respectful Insolenceâ¢, as most bloggers like to do from time to time (and any blogger who claims otherwise is probably feeding you a line), when I noticed a fairly large number of visits coming from one location, namely here. I was wondering when this would happen, but it looks as though the regulars at The DCA Site have finally noticed some of my writing. Surprisingly, what they say about me is not that bad, although that's probably because they seem to have found the least--shall we say?--…
revere | March 19, 2007In the old days doctors traded clinical pearls and experience face to face at medical meetings. With the internet and online publication we sometimes forget how important those personal information exchanges can be and often still are. Canadian Press's Helen Branswell (still the world's best flu reporter) now tells us that about 100 doctors with the most experience actually treating H5N1 infections will be meeting this week in southern Turkey to swap experiences:
Doctors who have treated H5N1 avian flu patients are meeting in a Turkish seaside town to try to find answers to the myriad…
terrasig | March 19, 2007My blog buddy Orac at Respectful Insolence has a superb post today following up on his continuous coverage of dichloroacetate and two posts I had recently on local coverage in the Edmonton Journal of this unapproved, experimental compound. As an oncologic surgeon, he provides an authoritative rebuttal to the argument that there's no harm in buying DCA for self-medication by cancer patients whom medicine can no longer help.
As hard as it may be to believe, even if you have a terminal illness with only months to live, things can get worse. One thing worse than dying of cancer is hastening your…
oracknows | March 19, 2007It figures.
Whenever I go away for a conference, things of interest to me that I'd like to blog about start happening fast and furious. Indeed, I could only deal with one of them, and I chose to post my challenge to the Paleyist "intelligent design" creationist surgeon, Dr. William Egnor. Now that I'm back, I'll deal with the other major issue that's been a frequent topic of blogging over the last couple of months and bubbled up again into the blogosphere over the weekend.
Remember all the posts that I did on dichloroacetate (DCA), the small molecule chemotherapeutic agent that targets the…
terrasig | March 17, 2007From the same reporter at the Edmonton Journal who brought us yesterday's DCA article comes news of a highly-experienced Canadian pharmacist who has been providing patients with physician-prescribed dichloroacetate. Jodie Sinnema reports that a local pharmacist has been selling DCA to patients but their supplier has stopped providing the pharmacy with the compound after intervention by Health Canada, the Canadian equivalent of the US FDA.
Ron Marcinkoski, a pharmacist at Market Drugs Medical at 97th Street and 102nd Avenue, said he was doing what he could to help cancer patients when…
terrasig | March 16, 2007This week has seen the launch of a new health blog by the Wall Street Journal. While I don't hold the highly conservative views of the WSJ editorial pages, I have found the paper one of the best international sources of information on health trends in both conventional and alternative medicine. The only problem about the blog is that while it links to the day's health news, the original articles are still firewalled behind the subscription.
But I do wish to note Jacob Goldstein's post on an article by Geeta Anand about Dr Steven Harr. Harr is a Hopkins-trained doc-turned-stock analyst who…
mementomori | March 15, 2007Da mihi, Domine Deus, cor pervigil, quod nulla abducat a te curiosa cogitatio: da nobile, quod nulla deorsum trahat indigna affectio; da rectum, quod nulla seorsum obliquet sinistra intentio: da firmum, quod nulla frangat tribulatio: da liberum, quod nulla sibi vindicet violenta affectio.
Do intercessory prayers (those said on behalf of another person and no, I'm not talking about having your friends quickly pray that the approaching police officer doesn't give you a ticket) have an effect on the recovery from illness above and beyond what medical treatment can provide?
Answer: Some say…
tqa | March 12, 2007
As I mentioned earlier, both Mike the Mad Biologist and Josh Rosenau of Thoughts from Kansas have commented on a recent Salon article that features accusations that medically unfit troops are being deployed. The situation, if true, is unacceptable. However, judging from my wife's experiences as a brigade surgeon prior to deployment, the situation is likely to be a bit more complex than the article would make it appear.
Before I get into the specifics of the article, it might be good to start off with some basic facts about the operational medicine side of health care in the Army. For most…
mikethemadbiologist | March 12, 2007The latest snafu from the War Department: we're sending soldiers to Iraq who are unfit for combat. From Salon:
"This is not right," said Master Sgt. Ronald Jenkins, who has been ordered to Iraq even though he has a spine problem that doctors say would be damaged further by heavy Army protective gear. "This whole thing is about taking care of soldiers," he said angrily. "If you are fit to fight you are fit to fight. If you are not fit to fight, then you are not fit to fight."
As the military scrambles to pour more soldiers into Iraq, a unit of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division at Fort…
cortex | March 8, 2007Everybody wants to cure cancer and pioneer gene therapy. This sort of scientific discovery, especially when the discovery could have profound consequences, is a worthy ambition. But does this ambition distract us from less appealing but even more important endeavors? Does searching for the miracle cure come at a cost?
Atul Gawande, in his new book Better, argues that medical research should search for low-tech improvements (like making doctors more diligent about hand-washing) with the same zeal it lavishes on potential drugs and surgical techniques. He uses the treatment of cystic fibrosis…
mikethemadbiologist | March 7, 2007Or maybe terrifying is a better word. I just returned from the Network on Antimicrobial Resistance in Staphylococcus aureus meeting, where I learned some very interesting things about S. aureus (since I'm going to refer to MRSA, methicillin resistant S. aureus repeatedly, go check this link if you want to know more about MRSA):
1) 43% of all skin infections in the U.S. are the result of one strain of MRSA. Not 43% of staphylococcal infections. All skin infections.
2) According to the NHANES study, the number of people who carry S. aureus asymptomatically (in other words, it lives up your…