Medicine
oracknows | January 23, 2007I came across an interesting tidbit about dichloroacetate (DCA), the compound that the media and all too many bloggers are touting as some sort of cheap "cure" for cancer whose development is being ignored or suppressed by big pharma because it wouldn't be profitable enough. I poured a bit of cold water on all of them yesterday, because most of their comments were based on false hope, given how few drugs that show promise in cell culture and animals actually pan out in human trials, and ignorance of how clinical trials for new cancer drugs work.
This particular tidbit is posted on the…
oracknows | January 23, 2007Well, it's finally been posted, video of the debate between Arthur Allen, author of Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver (a book that I am about 2/3 of the way through and plan on reviewing before the end of the month if possible) and mercury militia vaccine fearmonger David Kirby, author of Evidence of Harm and arguably one of the two people who have done more than anyone else to bring the bogus claim that mercury in vaccines is the cause of the increase in the number of diagnoses of autism over the last 15 years or so to a wider audience. (The other is Robert F…
signout | January 23, 2007At about this time last week, I asked for bloggers' thoughts on the interface of scientific evidence with health and health care. In an unscientific poll of the blogosphere, about 40% of you gave this theme the finger, while about 60% of you found it interesting to the point of arousal. To the first group, I say, I hope we can still be friends. Meanwhile, the second group should sit quietly and think about what it has done.
I sure have. There's great variety, great thought, and great effort evident (heh) among the entries in this week's collection. I hope you will find it as thought-provoking…
oracknows | January 22, 2007I would have written about this one on Friday, except that Your Friday Dose of Woo had to be served up. (You did read last week's YFDoW, didn't you? It was a particularly loopy bit of woo, with a bad computer interface grafted on to it, to boot!) The reason I wanted to write about it is because the responses to this particular bit of news in the blogosphere grated on me, for reasons that will become apparent soon.
It's about a new cancer drug that I learned about from both fellow ScienceBlogger Jonah and readers who forwarded articles about it to me. If you believe some other bloggers (one of…
tfk | January 20, 2007In testimony before a joint session of committees covering stem cell policy and the NIH, the interim chair of the NIH's stem cell policy task force told the senators that Bush's stem cell policy is hampering research:
The National Institutes of Health official overseeing the implementation of President Bush's embryonic stem cell policy yesterday suggested that the controversial program is delaying cures, an unusually blunt assessment for an executive branch official. …
When Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) asked her how the policy was affecting medical research, she said, "We are missing out…
oracknows | January 19, 2007The winners of the 2006 Medical Weblog Awards have been announced at Medgadget. Winners include our favorite pediatrician Flea (and if he manages to tick off the antivaccination loons, you know he's alright with me) for Best New Medical Weblog; NHS Blog Doctor for Best Medical Weblog; and Anxiety, Depression, and Addiction Treatments for Best Clinical Sciences Weblog.
Go here to find out who else won.
Congratulations to all the winners!
signout | January 17, 2007For those of you new to Signout, I'm a first-year resident (i.e., an intern) in a medical residency program in the United States.
Medical education is different all over the world. In the U.S., we spend four years getting a bachelor's degree (which doesn't need to be science-related); four years getting a medical degree (in which we take a standardized group of courses in medically related sciences and clinical medicine); anywhere from three to seven years training as a resident (all clinical, all the time, and standardized according to the requirements of the field in which the training is…
oracknows | January 17, 2007Drat! Real life has once again interfered with my blogging. Fortunately, there's still a lot of what I consider to be good stuff in the archives of the old blog that has yet to be transferred to the new blog. Today looks like a perfect time to transfer at least a couple more articles from the old blog. This particular article first appeared on January 12, 2006. For those who haven't seen it before, pretend I just wrote it. For those who have, savor its Insolence once again.
I was perusing some journals yesterday, including the most recent issue of Nature, when I came across a rather…
mikethemadbiologist | January 17, 2007There's an interesting article about the norovirus outbreak in Boston (it also seems to be nationwide). At this point, over half a percent of all the residents of Boston have gone to the emergency room due to this virus--which means even more have been sick.
First, as always, wash your damn hands! Now, onto the public health. What's interesting is that Massachusetts has installed a real-time surveillance system to deal with bioterrorism and biopreparedness (i.e., avian flu--got that, Fumento?). But as the biosecurity 'community'* is beginning to learn, you can't separate biosecurity from…
oracknows | January 17, 2007Drat! Real life has once again interfered with my blogging. Fortunately, there's still a lot of what I consider to be good stuff in the archives of the old blog that has yet to be transferred to the new blog. Today looks like a perfect time to transfer at least a couple more articles from the old blog. This particular article first appeared on April 25, 2005. One reason I reposted it is that I recently forgot the very precepts that I discussed in it when over the holidays a relative brought up the topic of Sylvia Browne, provoking a clearly too vigorous response about her being a fraud. (…
oracknows | January 17, 2007Drat! Real life has once again interfered with my blogging. Fortunately, there's still a lot of what I consider to be good stuff in the archives of the old blog that has yet to be transferred to the new blog. Today looks like a perfect time to transfer at least a couple more articles from the old blog. This particular article first appeared on December 5, 2005. For those who haven't seen it before, pretend I just wrote it. For those who have, savor it once again.
There was an interesting article in this week's New York Times Magazine about Susan Sontag's last battle with cancer, written by…
terrasig | January 14, 2007A thoughtful reader of mine and Kevin MD's just brought to my attention the plight of six members of a California family who apparently ingested Amanita phalloides (deathcap) mushrooms following a New Year's Day outing.
Jondi Gumz of the Santa Cruz Sentinel reported today on the circuitous route the attending physicians took to obtain a source and FDA emergency approval to try an intravenous formulation of an herbal medicine from Europe.
Using Google Scholar, a search engine of scholarly literature, he [Dr Todd Mitchell] found a promising avenue of treatment: Extract from milk thistle, a…
bushwells | January 11, 2007Let's see, the Biz shot its right foot with the Vioxx debacle, then its left foot with Zyprexa (and others, but that's a recent one), so now it must look for another site for further damage of its tattered n' shattered image. Hmmm, how about lobbing off a couple of fingers? The FDA's approval of Slentrol, Pfizer's new chemical entity (NCE) for treatment of obese dogs ought to do the trick. Zing! There go the fingers.
As a minion of the dark overlords, I have to say that the announcement made me cringe for a number of reasons, the primary one being that this further solidifies the…
tfk | January 11, 2007Tiller didn't break law in reporting underage abortions:
The Women's Health Care Services clinic in Wichita, operated by George Tiller, followed mandatory reporting laws for underage teenage sex in 15 abortions performed in 2003, Sedgwick County District Attorney Nola Foulston said today. The abortions were investigated by the Kansas Attorney General's office late last year.
Foulston said that her office had investigated court records presented by outgoing Attorney General Phill Kline last month to see if Tiller had followed mandatory reporting laws, and even given proper information to other…
pharyngula | January 10, 2007
There's an important phenomenon in development called neurulation. This is a process that starts with a flat sheet of ectodermal cells, folds them into a tube, and creates our dorsal nervous system. Here's a simple cross-section of the process in a salamander, but in general outline we humans do pretty much the same thing. Cells move up and inward, and then zipper together along the length of the animal to produce a closed tube.
It's a seemingly simple event with a great deal of underlying complexity. It requires coordinated changes in the shape of ectodermal cells to drive the changes in…
tsmith | January 10, 2007 When it comes to hemorrhagic fevers, Ebola and Marburg tend to get the lions' share of the press. Both are highly fatal, both can cause people to die in excruciating ways, and both have come to represent somewhat our fear of and fascination with emerging exotic diseases. However, as I've pointed out previously, as far as actual fatalities--or even illnesses go--both viruses are small potatoes. Other viruses that can also have hemorrhagic manifestations--including dengue and yellow fever--are much more common. One of these other viruses that frequently causes hemorrhagic fever is Rift…
j7uy5 | January 10, 2007Notice the prominent use of the word "potential." That is
potential as in may or may not ever come to anything. As word
of these potential treatments gets out, we can expect that unscrupulous
persons will try to market things that sound like the potential
treatments I am about to discuss, but which are completely bogus.
So, I hope that people keep this kind of thing in mind, and
to the extent possible, learn to distinguish fact from fiction when it
comes to health products.
rel="tag">Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is one of those
things that seems to attract a lot of attention from certain…
oracknows | January 9, 2007Inspired by the story of the faith healer who claimed that Jesus cured her of a breast cancer she in fact never had and, it turned out, who also claimed that faith had healed her brother of a terminal cancer and covered up the fact that he was dying while promoting her book, here's a proposed cure for televangelists who claim they can cure disease through the power of prayer:
New York - (Ass Mess): A team of plastic surgeons, clinical psychatrists and orthodontists has patented a radical procedure that cures evangelical preachers from claiming Jesus is more effective at healing cancer than…
sb admin | January 9, 2007By Michael Silverstein
Thirty-five years after the passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the promise of worker protection remains substantially unfulfilled. Over the past several months, I have been traveling across the country and talking with people experienced in worker health and safety to gather ideas about what we can do to protect workers better. The more I hear, the more I am certain that we canât achieve this by simply trying harder to do more of the same.
The draft paper âGetting Home Safe and Sound? OSHA at Thirty-Fiveâ summarizes what Iâve learned and suggests three…
oracknows | January 8, 2007Last week, our Seed overlords published on the flagship an Agence France-Presse article about a survey in Britain whose results showed that large numbers of people believe that cancer is due to "fate" rather than risk factors that can be modified to decrease one's risk of developing the disease:
LONDON (AFP)--More than a quarter of people believe that fate alone will determine whether they get cancer, not their lifestyle choices, according to a survey conducted by charity Cancer Research UK.
The poll of more than 4,000 adults across the country asked people if they thought they could reduce…