Medicine
terrasig | March 7, 2007While spending so much time last week on the issue of conscientious objection by pharmacists, I overlooked the 26 February publication in Archives of Internal Medicine of a very well-designed clinical trial to test the hypothesis that garlic/garlic supplements lower LDL-cholesterol. The trial, conducted at Stanford University Medical School, was notable in that several of the authors are well-recognized experts in the chemistry and preclinical pharmacology of garlic and paid particular detail to the bioavailability of the sulfur-containing amino acids thought to exert garlic's beneficial…
mementomori | March 5, 2007Since 1984 the U. S. Preventative Services Task Force, a panel of 16 academic medical experts, has issued advice regarding preventative treatments. It regards itself as (if I may quote from their own humble self-description) "the leading independent panel of private-sector experts in prevention and primary care. The USPSTF conducts rigorous, impartial assessments of the scientific evidence for the effectiveness of a broad range of clinical preventive services, including screening, counseling, and preventive medications. Its recommendations are considered the 'gold standard' for clinical…
revere | March 5, 2007The mainstream media (MSM) have covered the disgraceful treatment of US Iraq War veterans by the Army's Walter Reed Medical Center quite well and it has resulted in the firing of the medical center's commmander and the forced resignation of the Secretary of the Army, its civilian head. But before either of them sent down the tubes, the first to go was one William Winkenwerder, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs (ASD/HA), last heard of in this space as the Pentagon's Chief Medical Bully. Good riddance.
Why was Winkenwerder the first to go? Here are his official responsibilities…
oracknows | March 5, 2007One of the claims most frequently made by "alternative medicine" advocates regarding why alt-med is supposedly superior (or at least equal) to "conventional" medicine and should not be dismissed, regardless of how scientifically improbably any individual alt-med modality may be, is that the treatments are highly "individualized." In other words, the "entire patient" is taken into account with what is frequently referred to as a "holistic approach" that looks at "every aspect" of the patient, with the result that every patient requires a different treatment, sometimes even for the same disease…
tqa | March 4, 2007
If you live in the US and pay any attention to the news, you've probably heard something about the situation at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. A feature article in the February 18th edition of the Washington Post set things off, reporting on atrocious conditions in a building used to house wounded soldiers being treated on an outpatient basis. The mold, mice, and mess in building 18 have, since then, received a great deal of attention. Within days, the commander of Walter Reed was fired, the Secretary of the Army resigned in disgrace, two special commissions have been appointed, and…
sb admin | March 3, 2007By David Michaels
The state of Pennsylvania has filed lawsuits against three drug manufacturers, claiming the firms fraudulently marketed antipsychotic drugs. According to Bloomberg News, the state alleges that Eli Lilly & Co. âhid the risks and exaggerated the benefits of its antipsychotic medication Zyprexa while persuading doctors to prescribe it for unapproved uses.â AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson's Janssen Pharmaceutical are accused of doing the same for other drugs:
The defendants cost Pennsylvania's Medicaid and drug assistance for the elderly program millions of dollars for…
oracknows | March 2, 2007I didn't get back home until late last night; unfortunately there was no time to do a segment of Your Friday Dose of Woo that was up to my standards. Fortunately, there's something that I've been holding in reserve for just such an occasion that fits right in. Long-timers may remember that, near the very beginning of my blog, I did a post entitled What is an altie? It was basically a Jeff Foxworthy-like listing of "You just might be an altie if..." statements that, I think, had a good point. For those of you not familiar with the term "altie," it was coined about three or four years ago on…
revere | March 1, 2007The new public health site, The Pump Handle (TPH), continues to produce top notch posts. The latest is by David Michaels, Professor and Associate Chairman in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health, the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services (and former Assistant Secretary for Heath at the Department of Energy in the Clinton administration). It's about the dietary supplement industry, or as I prefer to call it, the quackery in a capsule biz. One of their favorite products is the anti-oxidant cancer preventative scam. There is quite a body of…
cortex | February 28, 2007Here at Scienceblogs, we spent a lot of time debunking various types of unscientific falsehoods (aka "woo," religious believers, and the conservapedia.) As far as I'm concerned, that's just great. The world always is always suffering from a shortage of skepticism. We need more empiricism and less certainty.
But it's worth reminding ourselves of the obvious: peer-reviewed science is also vulnerable to bad biases, false suppositions and sloppy interpretations. Data doesn't generate itself. Over at Overcoming Bias, they've compiled a short list of recent examples. Here are the most damning:
A…
terrasig | February 27, 2007As if everyone doesn't have enough deadlines right now, 1 March is the deadline for submission of medical education manuscripts to the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The call for papers was issued in December and accepted manuscripts will appear in the 5 September 2007 issue:
Practicing physicians aspire to be good, whether this attribute is defined with respect to intellectual skills, manual skills, or professional standards. In medicine, it may indeed be nobler to teach others to be good (in any of these senses). However, doing so is arguably far more difficult. Those…
pharyngula | February 27, 2007Here I've been thinking of getting a nice tattoo (something discreet and subtle, like an octopus someplace you'll never see it), and then I learn that for the sake of my health, I better not. After all, some good Christian doctor might refuse to help me when I'm sick. Dr Gary Merrill, who proudly proclaims his Christian faith, turned away a little girl with an ear infection because her mother had a tattoo.
…Dr. Gary Merrill wouldn't treat her daughter for an ear infection because Tasha, the mother, has tattoos.
The writing is on the wall—literally: "This is a private office. Appearance and…
apalazzo | February 24, 2007Last week I attended a seminar by Dr. Yamada who is now president of the Bill and Melinda Bates Foundation.
Here's a couple of interesting points from his talk:
- The pharmaceutical industry has developed and patented almost 15,000 drugs, only 30 of which are directed towards diseases that exclusively afflict the third world. You might be thinking "well what do you expect, in a capitalist economy, drugs go to those who can pay for them." However things are changing. Several of the big pharmas are developing drugs and vaccines directed against Malaria, TB and other tropical diseases. But…
oracknows | February 24, 2007Remember how I alluded to the fact that perhaps I've been doing a little too much blogging about dichloroacetate and the unscrupulous "entrepreneurs" who are taking advantage of desperate cancer patients to sell the stuff to them? Well, I can't resist mentioning something truly amusing that I just noticed.
The "health freedom" warriors and "entrepreneurs" responsible for The DCA Site and BuyDCA.com appear to have noticed me and my humble efforts.
How do I know that they've noticed me? Remember the long exchange between Heather Nordstrom and two people questioning the ethics and legality of…
oracknows | February 22, 2007I've probably beat this one into the ground over the last couple of days; so this will be uncharacteristically brief, because it's time to move on. Also, it was fun to see DaveScot go into paroxysms to try to justify the dangerous, unethical, and reckless actions of Heather Nordstrom and her stepfather in setting up The DCA Site and its sister site, BuyDCA.com, where Heather et al are selling "Pet-DCA" in a ludicrously obvious (and probably ineffective) ploy to be able to claim to the FDA, "Hey, we're not selling this for human consumption." One wonders, perhaps, if DaveScot may actually have…
oracknows | February 21, 2007Yesterday, I wrote about how anti-science pro-"intelligent design" kook extraordinaire Dave Springer (a.k.a. DaveScot) has taken to promoting dichloroacetate as a treatment for cancer and one website in particular, The DCA Site that claims to exist to "help inform people of the exciting research done on DCA [dichloroacetate] by scientists at the University of Alberta. In January 2007 a team of scientists at the University of Alberta published a paper in the scientific journal Cancer Cell describing the discovery that a simple, cheap molecule, DCA, worked to reactivate the apoptosis mechanism…
oracknows | February 20, 2007I hadn't planned on writing about dichloroacetate, the inexpensive compound whose success in treating experimental cancer in rats that provoked a blogopheric storm about a "cancer cure" that would supposedly never see the light of day because it's not patentable. After all, I've done about seven posts on the topic, give or take a couple, in the course of the last four weeks or so. That's saturation blogging, and, really, nothing new has happened on the news front that merits a new post.
Or so I thought.
Then, like Michael Corleone in The Godfather, Part III, just when I thought that I was out…
grrlscientist | February 19, 2007"The brain is soft," writes Katrina Firlik in her book, Another Day in the Frontal Lobe (NYC: Random House, 2006). "Some of my colleagues compare it to toothpaste but that's not quite right. Tofu -- the soft variety, for those who know tofu -- may be a more accurate comparison." So begins the interesting tale of the residency of the first female neurosurgeon in America.
After briefly introducing her reader to the history of neurosurgery, Firlik moves on to describe the nature of her specialty, which she says is a combination of science and mechanics. Unlike neurologists and psychiatrists,…
j7uy5 | February 19, 2007Joltvolta (great name, by the way), asked a good question after I
posted part 3.
When you say proceed methodically, employ good data
collection, etc. How does the individual do that for themselves? If
they don't have the availability to see a specialist multiple times a
week, or even in a month, what options do they have?
I will get to that, eventually, but there are a few more things I have
to cover first. After all, part of my agenda in writing this
series is to enable patients to do more for themselves. There is
a shortage of specialists, and so long as that is the case, it will be…
revere | February 15, 2007Health Care Renewal is an excellent blog with a special interest in medical conflict of interest issues. Last week one of the HCR bloggers, Roy Poses, posted about "The Threat of Pseudoevidence-Based Medicine." The occasion was a article by Smith in the UK journal Clinical Governance (2007; 12: 42-52), which I don't have access to, but there is enough in the excerpts and commentary at HCR to get the basic idea.
We hear a lot about Evidence Based Medicine (EBM), using the best available evidence to inform clinical practice. The gold standard for evidence is a randomized clinical trial,…
revere | February 12, 2007There are so many sad and dismaying things about this story, not the least of which is that even without my telling you, you know how it will end:
It took two years of hell to convince him, but finally Jonathan Schulze was ready.
On the morning of Jan. 11, Jonathan, an Iraq war veteran with two Purple Hearts, neatly packed his US Marine Corps duffel bag with his sharply creased clothes, a framed photo of his new baby girl, and a leather-bound Bible and headed out from the family farm for a 75-mile drive to the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in St. Cloud, Minn.
Family and friends had…