Medicine
oracknows | July 14, 2006From The Daily Mail:
British holidaymakers are putting their lives at risk by relying on homeopathy to protect them against malaria, doctors have warned.
The medical experts condemned the practice of prescribing pills and potions made from tree bark, swamp water and rotting plants as 'outrageous quackery' and 'dangerous nonsense'.
Their warning follows an undercover investigation which found that alternative medicine clinics readily sell travellers homeopathic protection against malaria, despite clear Government advice that there is no evidence such treatments work.
It also comes after a…
oracknows | July 13, 2006Over the couple of days or so, a minor flurry of comments have hit the ol' blog. I hate to let commenters dictate the content of my blog, but it's strictly a coincidence that this happens to be a post I had been planning sometime this week anyway and it comes around the same time as the minor altie comment deluge hit the blog. Or maybe it's not such a coincidence, coming as it does in the wake of a court hearing relevant to the case of Starchild Abraham Cherrix. Recent commenters have castigated me, claiming that the Hoxsey treatment is not quackery; asserting that cancer is "not due to a…
tsmith | July 12, 2006 The good Dr. Flea has taken some flack previously for comments he's made regarding the treatment of ear infections (or rather, the non-treatment of such). As he notes, most ear infections resolve without antibiotics. Despite this, ear infections are the most common illness for which children visit a pediatrician, receive antibiotics, and undergo surgery in the U.S., at a huge economic cost. A new paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests at least some of that cost is wasted, because the bacteria are present in the form of antibiotic-resistant biofilms.
A biofilm…
mikethemadbiologist | July 10, 2006There is a winner in the War on Drugs: methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, also known as MRSA. A recent article in the Journal of Clinical Microbiology reached the following conclusion:
Injecting drug users accounted for 49% of CA-MRSA infections but only 19% of the HA-MRSA infections (odds ratio, 4.2; 95% confidence interval, 2.4 to 7.4). Our study shows that a single clone of CA-MRSA accounts for the majority of infections. This strain originated in the community and is not related to MRSA strains from healthcare settings. Injecting drug users could be a major reservoir for CA-…
signout | July 10, 2006You'll hear residents everywhere refer to "codes" as both the most terrifying and the most exhilarating experiences they have during training. "Code" is short for "code blue," or "code red," or whatever term each hospital applies to situations wherein help is needed in resuscitating a patient. It's used as a noun ("I wet my pants during the code today") and a verb, both transitive ("Rounds were so boring today, I nearly had to code my attending") and intransitive ("Your patient probably coded because of the Tylenol you wrote for"). Codes are often chaotic, and, I won't hesitate to tell you,…
oracknows | July 10, 2006I had tried to give the Dr. Mark Geier and his son David a rest for a while, as I suspected my readers may have been getting a little tired of my bashing them, no matter how deserved that bashing may have been. After all, they do shoddy science in the service of "proving" that mercury in vaccines causes autism. They concoct dubious IRBs riddled with conflicts of interest to "approve" their research. When the evidence that this is not the case becomes more and more compelling, they add a twist of a claim that many autistic children suffer from "precocious" puberty," which requires treatment…
retrospectacle | July 6, 2006Although I haven't seen the journal article about the case yet (it was published in the Journal of Clinical Research, I believe) , its already been reported on CNN and other news venues. A crash victim who has been barely conscious for over 20 years suddenly regained speech and movement after his damaged brain spontaneously repaired itself. This is an extremely unusual case, but an important one due to the fact that now that we know it CAN be done, we can gain a better understanding of how to induce it in other more mundane injuries. (More under the fold.)
Severe head injuries resulting in…
tsmith | July 5, 2006I mentioned before that I often have my posts mostly written in my head before I ever sit down to type them out. And indeed, though I hadn't had a chance to actually sit at a computer yet, I had a science post all planned for today, based on an article I ran across last week. I think that will wait for tomorrow, though, after reading this post over at Terra Sigillata, where Abel writes about the sudden death of a 23-year-old brother of a former lab intern from a staph infection.
I sometimes get asked why I "waste my time" studying infectious disease, when they don't cause nearly the…
purepedantry | July 4, 2006Neurodudes has an excellent article on software intended to reduce medical errors.
Just from my limited personal experience, I would say that such software would be useful if people understand that it is limited in scope. There are three general reasons I think that software is useful in medicine:
Standardization. There are many diseases for which there are clear standards of care. For example, chest pain has a very straightforward heuristic that we follow in diagnosing a patient, and for each possible diagnosis there is a clear set of treatments. In areas for which there is not a lot…
oracknows | July 3, 2006I used to like The Cancer Blog. I really did. It was one of the first medical blogs I discovered many months ago when I first dipped my toe into the blogosphere. Indeed, less than two months after I started blogging, one of The Cancer Blog's bloggers then, Dr. Leonardo Faoro, even invited me to join him as one of its bloggers. Although as a new blogger I was very flattered by the attention and offer, I nonetheless reluctantly turned the offer down because at the time I didn't know whether this whole blogging thing would work out and was afraid of being tied down and obligated to provide a…
terrasig | June 29, 2006As someone who has been associated with colleges of pharmacy as student or professor for 25 years, I feel compelled to weigh in on the debate raging in the US between a pharmacist's right of conscientious objection to filling certain prescriptions and their responsibilities as a licensed health professional of the state. I originally intended this discussion to target the emergency contraceptive, Plan B. However, today's post by Tara about a pharmacist refusing to fill a Vicodin prescription for a relative after breast surgery reminds me of the slippery slope we face in permitting health…
oracknows | June 28, 2006Damn you, Kathleen.
Every time I think that I can give the whole mercury/autism thing a rest for a while and move on to less infuriating pastures, you keep finding things that keep dragging me back to the pit of pseudoscience inhabited by Dr. Mark Geier and his son David. The first time around, Kathleen found the Geiers misrepresenting David Geier's credentials on published journal articles to make it appear that David Geier had done the work reported in the articles at George Washington University when in fact he had not. I found David Geier's appropriation of the name of George Washington…
mikethemadbiologist | June 27, 2006One of my many pet peeves is that nobody takes 'ordinary' bacterial infections seriously. I originally wrote this post Jan. 8, 2006, but I was ranting about Acinetobacter since the previous August. The good news is that people other than infectious disease specialists are worrying about it. The bad news is that the Infectious Disease Society of America states that there's no antibiotic in the pipeline to treat multidrug resistant Acinetobacter.
One of the talks I heard at the ICAAC meeting was about the emerging pathogen Acinetobacter baumannii (given by Yehuda Carmeli). Israel is having…
tsmith | June 27, 2006Head over to Medviews to check out this week's Grand Rounds, a weekly round-up of medical blog posts. Some goodies: Genetics and Health's Top 10 reasons you should care about genetics, and Clinical Cases and Images on reasons not to be a doctor.
oracknows | June 26, 2006I've written several times about two young victims of what is normally a highly treatable cancer (Hodgkin's lymphoma) and how, with their parents' support, they have jeopardized their lives by choosing alternative therapies. The first, Katie Wernecke, was initially taken from her family by the State of Texas, but her parents ultimately won a court battle and took her out of the state for altie treatment with vitamin C infusions. Presently, she is somewhere out of state receiving some unknown treatment that, according to her father, he cannot disclose or the doctors will no longer treat her.…
j7uy5 | June 25, 2006I got an email that I almost deleted without reading, thinking for a moment that it would be spam. It turned out not to be. Since the author appears to be well-intentioned, I'll go ahead and post it here. He mentions some on-line resources regarding the diagnosis and treatment of adult ADHD.
Based upon the title of the email, I thought it was going to be one of those pitches for Internet drug sales. It is not. Instead, it promotes a site put up by an independent ADHD coach. Presumably, the main purpose is to promote his business. I have no particujlar objection to that. I have no…
retrospectacle | June 24, 2006
I just couldn't resist that title. A more accurate title would have been "Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Prevents Migraines From Progressing," but, when in doubt, err on the side of drama. And, I actually wasn't THAT far off, really. (Note: Ray gun above is not real (duh). Real device under the fold.)
As reported in Medical News Today , a handheld device which relies on transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to deliver an mild electric current for about 1 millisecond is able to interrupt migraines from progressing to the headache stage. This is extremely useful clinically, as migraine…
j7uy5 | June 22, 2006Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) currently is being
investigated as a treatment for major depression. (See
href="http://spectrum.ieee.org/mar06/3050">Psychiatry's
Shocking New Tools in IEEE Spectrum.)
Now, there is a report that it also may be useful for
migraine headache.
href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060621.whmigraine22/BNStory/specialScienceandHealth/home">Magnetic
device can head off migraines, neurologists sayUNNATI GANDHIGlobe and Mail
It's like something out of a video game.
Flashing lights, vertigo, a visual shower of “…
oracknows | June 21, 2006Via The Onion (of course), Dr. Mike Ruddy proclaims:
'm a doctor, and I'm damn good at it. Why? Because I learned to be a doctor the old-fashioned way: gumption, elbow grease, and trial and error. I'm not one of these blowhards in a white coat who'll wear your ears out with 10 hours of mumbo-jumbo technical jargon about "diagnosis" this and "prognosis" that, just because he loves the sound of his own voice. No sir. I just get the job done.
Those fancy-pants college-boy doctors are always making a big deal about their "credentials." But I'm no show-off phony with a lot of framed pieces of…
oracknows | June 21, 2006It's been a very interesting week for those of us who try to keep an eye on antivaccination warriors who scare mothers with claims based on either no science or bad science of dire consequences that will come from vaccinating their children.
A very interesting week indeed, kind of like that old curse, "May you live in interesting times."
Last week, eight years after his study that set off scare whose repercussions continue even now, Andrew Wakefield was finally called to account for professional misconduct for unreported conflicts of interest and highly unethical and unprofessional behavior.…