Medicine
revere | December 2, 2006I would be embarrassed by this cheap and easy post about chicken soup for symptoms of cold and flu, but I have a more serious purpose. I want to ask ScienceBlogger colleagues who inveigh constantly against alternative medicine (or "woo" as orac at Respectful Insolence insists on calling it) what they think of this and why.
Here's the set-up:
The suspected benefits of chicken soup were reported centuries ago. The Egyptian Jewish physician and philosopher, Moshe ben Maimonides, recommended chicken soup for respiratory tract symptoms in his 12th century writings which were, in turn, based on…
sb admin | December 1, 2006by Susan F. WoodÂ
After the recent post here on KETEK, both the Wall Street Journal and Senator Grassley are on the move. The WSJ reports today on another antibiotic Cubicin which has been seeking approval for use in endocarditis and discusses the competing issues of data quality and high standards, with the push for more antibiotics, particularly in the case of serious infections without effective treatment. The case of Cubicin in some respects serves as an example of this, however Ketek does not. They both illustrate problems identified by the recent Institute of Medicine Report on…
sb admin | November 30, 2006By Laura H. Kahn
The medical community is devoting a lot of effort to researching bioterrorism agents and diseases that could become human pandemics. But in many cases, theyâre overlooking a potentially critical resource: veterinarians.
Zoonoses are diseases of animals that can be transmitted to humans. These diseases include: SARS, West Nile virus, HIV/AIDS, and recently avian influenza (H5N1). Many of the agents of bioterrorism are zoonotic in origin such as anthrax, tularemia, and plague. Veterinarians have long recognized the interconnectedness between human and animal health and gave it…
terrasig | November 30, 2006FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Thursday, November 30, 2006
CONTACT: NIH News Media Branch, 301-496-5787
NIH ANNOUNCES MORE THAN 50 AWARDS IN THE PATHWAY TO INDEPENDENCE PROGRAM
Five-Year Grants Foster Transition to Research Independence
Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D., director of the National Institutes of Health, today named 58 recipients of the NIH Pathway to Independence Award.
The Pathway to Independence Program, announced in January of this year, offers a new opportunity for promising postdoctoral scientists to receive both mentored and independent research support from the same award.
"New…
revere | November 28, 2006[This is Part II of our explanation of some of the science behind the Polonium-210 poisoning case of Alexander Litvinenko. Part I. is here.]
In Part I. we sketched the physical background to understand radioisotopes like Polonium-210, the agent in the Litvinenko poisoning, but have yet to explain its connection to the biology. That's today's order of business.
Remember that the chemistry is located in the orbital electrons of each atom. Sharing electrons or pairing charges is how atoms bond with each other -- literally and figuratively. So if you mess up the electron structure you can mess up…
sb admin | November 27, 2006by Dick Clapp
The publication of my article on mortality among IBM workers was the culmination of a two and a half year process. I obtained the data, which included information on the deaths of nearly 32,000 former workers who had died between 1969 and 2001, when I served as an expert witness in a lawsuit brought against IBM on behalf of employees who had developed cancer after working at the companyâs San Jose facility. I found that among the workers, the death rates from several cancersâincluding cancers of some digestive organs, kidneys, brain and central nervous system, melanoma of the…
lborkowski | November 26, 2006by revere
[Since my colleague and new blog sibling Dave Ozonoff posted here some advice on NIH grant writing in response to a post of mine over at Effect Measure, I thought I'd cross-post a follow-up I did on NIH funding a few days later. BTW, Dave, I'll have to give you some lessons in snarkiness. Your post was way too benign!]
In the late 1990s congress decided to invest in our future by doubling the NIH budget. If you are a scientist today trying to get an NIH grant, however, you are in tough shape. Success rates are falling like a stone, with less than 20% of grant applications now being…
j7uy5 | November 25, 2006I was a bit perplexed by a recent study on a new treatment for alcohol
withdrawal. Ordinarily, I am in favor of new treatment
options, based on the supposition that nothing works for everyone, and
having more options is good. This counterbalances, to some
extent, the anti-pharma screed about "me-too" drugs, but that is
another story.
href="http://www.aafp.org/afp/20040315/1443.html" rel="tag">Alcohol
withdrawal is a significant clinical problem. While
most people who drink alcohol can simply stop, with no danger, people
who routinely drink too much may go into withdrawal. That is…
oracknows | November 24, 2006It may be Thanksgiving weekend here in the States, and fellow ScienceBloggers PZ and Ed may be getting sniping at each other over Larry Moran's rather intemperate comments. (Can't we all just get along, guys, at least for the holidays anyway?). Worse, this kerfluffle is threatening to suck in other fellow ScienceBloggers Mike Dunford, John Wilkins, John Lynch, and Chad Orzel, as well.
You know, this whole thing reminds me a lot of political and religious arguments that used to break out among my family sometimes during holiday gatherings. Let's hope the results of this one, like the results…
revere | November 24, 2006This week The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) published three articles on the evolving story of the influenza A/H5N1 panzootic that has the potential to become a human pandemic. Two are rather meager case series, one from Turkey and one from Indonesia. It is an extraordinary indication of the paucity of information that these papers could get published in one of the world's premier medical journals, a fact duly noted by Canadian Press's Helen Branswell. The two papers have some moderately interesting information, none of it startling for those who follow this issue. But the Commentary…
j7uy5 | November 23, 2006The NEJM has another open-access article about drug safety.
As usual, when they publish something on an open-access
basis, it is something of interest to the general public, pertaining to
health care policy.
This one describes specific instances of drug companies concealing
information from the FDA and the public.
href="http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/355/21/2169">Dangerous
Deception — Hiding the Evidence of Adverse Drug Effects
Volume 355:2169-2171 November 23, 2006 Number 21
Jerry Avorn, M.D.
September 30 is becoming a day of infamy for drug
safety. On that date in…
oracknows | November 22, 2006A few days ago, I posted a response to another physician who was not happy with me, no, not happy with me at all. What made him unhappy was the vociferousness with which I criticized the creeping infiltration of woo that is insinuating itself into medical school curricula and expressed dismay at the threat that I see to evidence-based medicine (EBM) from it. He interpreted this vociferousness as "anger," but in reality it is more frustration, a dismay that was exacerbated by his defense of including unproven therapies in his practice. I did not respond so harshly somuch because I think that…
revere | November 20, 2006In the late 1990s congress decided to invest in our future by doubling the NIH budget. If you are a scientist today trying to get an NIH grant, however, you are in tough shape. Success rates are falling like a stone, with less than 20% of grant applications now being funded. It is common to submit a proposal several times before finally getting a grant or giving up and moving on. What happened?
A lot of scientists want to know that and it prompted NIH Director Elias Zerhouni to try and explain in in the latest issue of Science magazine, the country's premier science journal. The opening…
jstemwedel | November 18, 2006This morning, younger offspring asked me what "hyperbolic" meant. (Yeah, I'll admit that this is because I used it in conversation with younger offspring. It was not a conversation about conic sections or trigonometry, though, so cut me some slack.)
Anyway, long story short, I now have a product I totally need to market, even though it'll probably result in Orac lambasting me in his "Friday Dose of Woo" feature:
I want to sell hyperbolic chambers. (Not hypobaric chambers, hyperbolic chambers.) The obvious buyers would be hospitals and medical centers that specialize in the treatment of…
tsmith | November 17, 2006PZ and others have already blogged about this, but since it deals with public health in a big way, I thought I'd give it a mention here as well. Seems Bush has made yet another highly questionable appointment in the Department of Health and Human Services. Shocking, I know.
The Bush administration has appointed a new chief of family-planning programs at the Department of Health and Human Services who worked at a Christian pregnancy-counseling organization that regards the distribution of contraceptives as "demeaning to women."
More after the jump...
Eric Keroack, medical director for A…
oracknows | November 17, 2006Given my love of science and advocacy of evidence-based medicine, people may have come to the erroneous conclusion that I hate all woo. Nothing could be further from the truth. I just want medical woo to be subject to the same scientific testing as conventional medicine, because I believe that there should not even be a difference between "alternative medicine" and medicine. There's just medicine that has good scientific, clinical, and epidemiological evidence to suggest it works, and that's all I care about. Heck, if someone produced good scientific evidence that there was something to…
oracknows | November 16, 2006Although I'm clearly not as vociferous about this as other ScienceBloggers, I do remain concerned about the rise of fundamentalist religion, whether it be Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or whatever. Whenever dogmatic, literal, fundamentalist interpretation of whatever holy scriptures someone believes in takes hold, the brain shuts off, and no other interpretation other than the narrow interpretation of the fundamentalist is viewed as acceptable. Another pernicious effect is that, if scripture seems to conflict with science, science loses, and religion-inspired non-science like creationism takes…
revere | November 15, 2006My Scibling, Orac, over at Respectful Insolence has a special thing about those he calls "alties." They make him crazy. For Orac alties represent a broad category of alternative medicine approaches. I more or less agree with him but I don't have the same passion about it he does. I'm also willing to believe some things now considered alternative approaches will become mainstream at some point and I know that many things we now consider conventional will be abandoned as without any scientific foundation. That's pretty much the way things work and I don't draw any larger lessons from it, except…
j7uy5 | November 15, 2006First there was Alternative Medicine, then there was Complimentary and
Alternative Medicine, and now there is Integrative, Complimentary and
Alternative Medicine.
I guess the natural cynic in me becomes suspicious when I see acronyms
undergoing hypertrophy.
So is this growing collection of concepts worthwhile? Do we
really need to create a terminology? Or does the acronym
creep indicate that the concepts are to vague, too ill-defined, to
merit the creation of a term?
href="http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2006/11/the_future_of_american_medicine_woo_1.php">Orac,
href="http://…
revere | November 15, 2006Over a year ago reports from Japan began to circulate that the influenza antiviral, Tamiflu, which is prescribed there often for uncomplicated seasonal influenza, was causing abnormal behavior, most worrisomely delirium and suicidal behavior in children. The drug is approved for adults and children over a year old. At that time the FDA decided the evidence was insufficient but planned to revisit the issue in a year. Now the year is up and FDA has apparently decided the evidence is stronger. They are now recommending patients who take Tamiflu be "monitored" for abnormal behavior. It isn't…