j7uy5 | March 3, 2008Hoisted
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2008/02/clear_think_about_the_overmedi.php#comment-768312">from
the comments:
I find it particularly alarming that children are
prescribed some of these drugs. How much is truly known about how
various psychiatric drugs affect the development of the brain? If a
fifteen-year-old is put on a regimen of SSRI inhibitors, how will it
affect him down the road? If he's on them long enough, will he
experience any adverse effects when he's thirty-five or forty? For that
reason, I think that physicians should be extremely sparing in
prescribing…
j7uy5 | March 2, 2008Generally, no. But some can. Some are rather good
at it. A contest was reported in Science Magazine:
The rules were simple: Using no words or images,
interpret your Ph.D. thesis in dance form. Entrants were divided into
three categories—graduate student, postdoc, and
professor—and the prize for each was a year's subscription to
Science.
The winning videos are
href="http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/319/5865/905b#dancegallery">here.
Want more? Wait until next year:
2009 Dance Your PhD contest:
Want to dance your own thesis? Stay tuned to
href="http://www.johnbohannon.…
j7uy5 | March 2, 2008One of the darker chapters in the history of the
title="American Medical Association">AMA is
their historical opposition to universal, single-payer health care
coverage. The term socialized
medicine came into use in the post-World-War-II period, in
an attempt to falsely conflate such a health care plan with the menace
of Communism.
Evidently, many people did not bother to discern the distinction
between socialism and Communism; nor did they appreciate the fact that
we have a mixed
economy anyway.
I recall those days. That is, I recall the days when the
invocation of Communism…
j7uy5 | February 28, 2008Judith Warner has some insightful essays in the NYT column, pertaining
to the long-raging question about whether psychiatric patients are
style="font-style: italic;">overmedicated or
style="font-style: italic;">undermedicated.
One of the essays addresses the question directly:
style="font-weight: bold;"
href="http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/14/overselling-overmedication/">Overselling
Overmedication
Judith Warner
February 14, 2008
...In the book, Barber
argues that Americans are being vastly
overmedicated for often relatively minor mental health concerns. This
over-…
j7uy5 | February 28, 2008I noticed this photo on Flickr...
style="width: 375px; height: 500px;" class="inset"
alt="click for original" title="click for original"
src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2281/2289722392_4203b644c1.jpg?v=0"
border="0" height="500" width="375">
A smile is always worth something.
j7uy5 | February 25, 2008A fellow blogger, Logtar,
href="http://blog.logtar.com/2008/02/18/bodies-revealed-boycott/">tipped
me off to a controversy, and asked if I had anything to say
about it. The controversy has come about over an exhibit:
rel="tag" href="http://www.bodiesrevealed.com/index-home.html">Bodies
Revealed. It's a traveling exhibit that displays
plastinated human cadavers. The exhibit was organized by
href="http://www.prxi.com/prxi.html">Premier Exhibitions, Inc.
A bit of background can be gotten from an article in Scientific
American,
href="http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=…
j7uy5 | February 23, 2008Sigmund Freud was right about a lot of things, but he also was wrong
about a lot of
things. For example, he thought that there were only two
fundamental motivations: sex and aggression. Bloggers know
better, as this xkcd panel illustrates...
href="http://xkcd.com/386/">
(I know
href="http://scienceblogs.com/evolvingthoughts/2008/02/why_i_never_sleep.php">my
colleague already posted this, but I couldn't resist putting
this twist on it.)
j7uy5 | February 19, 2008The FDA has been making a strenuous effort to combat the problem of
href="http://www.fda.gov/fdac/features/2005/405_confusion.html">
look-alike, sound-alike drug names. The reason is
simple: there have been tens of thousands of documented medication
errors, in which the wrong drug is substituted for a different one with
a similar name.
An 8-year-old died, it was
suspected, after receiving methadone instead of methylphenidate, a drug
used to treat attention deficit disorders. A 19-year-old man showed
signs of potentially fatal complications after he was given clozapine
instead of…
j7uy5 | February 18, 2008Do cell phones decrease male fertility? Researchers at the
Cleveland Clinic think so. According to
href="http://www.clevelandclinic.org/reproductiveresearchcenter/staff/agarwala.html">Ashok
Agarwal, et. al., greater
use of cell phones is associated with decreased sprem count.
Other factors, such as sperm motility, are diminished as well.
href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez/17482179">Effect of
cell phone usage on semen analysis in men attending infertility clinic:
an observational study.
Agarwal A, Deepinder F, Sharma RK, Ranga G, Li J.
Fertil Steril. 2008
Jan;89(1):124…
j7uy5 | February 17, 2008The US Food and Drug Administration is a weird chimera: it contains
some elements of rule-bound regulatory hell, and some elements of
laissez-faire libertarianism. On the libertarian side, they allow
physicians to prescribe any drug that they have approved, even if was
not approved for the use for which it is being prescribed. On the
rule-bound side, they have incredibly complex rules for how the drugs
can be marketed.
One such rule is that drug companies are not allowed to market a drug
for any purpose for which the drug has not been approved explicitly.
That particular rule has been…
j7uy5 | February 11, 2008I noticed while writing this, that the word
style="font-style: italic;">numb, if modified
by adding the suffix -er,
becomes an entirely different word.
style="font-style: italic;">Number does not
convey the meaning of more
numb.
According to Answers.com, number
is a adjective, with the root numb.
The thing is, it only works if spoken; if written, it is
ambiguous. Ambiguity can be useful, but usually it is just a
nuisance.
Anyway.
href="http://www.charlesbarberwriting.com/pages/author.html"
rel="tag">Charles Barber wrote a book,
href="http://www.charlesbarberwriting.…
j7uy5 | February 10, 2008...You are trying to run a country. What would you like to do?
href="http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2008/02/overwhelmed-at-work.html">
This must be old, before Powell joined the torrent of acceptably
competent persons leaving the Administration, and before MS Office
2007. It is still funny. HT:
href="http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2008/02/overwhelmed-at-work.html">Dark
Roasted Blend.
j7uy5 | February 7, 2008Zyprexa Adhera is a new formulation of
href="http://zyprexa.com/index.jsp">Eli LIlly's
antipsychotic medication,
href="http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/druginfo/medmaster/a601213.html">olanzapine.
It contains the same active ingredient as the pills, but it
is a long-acting injection. It is supposed to last two to
four weeks.
There is not a lot of specific information available yet. It
is not on the market yet, either. The milestone is that in
was just recommended for approval by the
title="Food and Drug Administration">
href="http://www.fda.gov/">FDA.
Background:…
j7uy5 | February 4, 2008I haven't been posting much. I have been trying to figure out
why. Probably it is because all I want to say is that Bush is
an idiot, and I guess I have said that already. More than
once.
But this latest gig is a particularly egregious case. I would
like to comment upon the situation, because it illustrates something
about health care policy that is not obvious.
The budget proposal put forth by the Administration calls for
href="http://thinkprogress.org/2008/02/04/nussle-health-care/">$200
billion in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid over the next five
years.
Granted, this is…
j7uy5 | February 3, 2008This absolutely blows my mind. Evidently, it is OK to drop
cluster bombs on municipal areas. But show your
derrière, and you're off the job.
href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080203/wl_mideast_afp/mideastconflictisraelmilitary">Israeli
soldiers suspended for mooning Palestinians
JERUSALEM (AFP) - The Israeli army said on Sunday that it had suspended
several soldiers after they were filmed exposing their bare buttocks to
Palestinians in the south of the occupied West Bank.
"All personnel implicated in this unfortunate affair have been
identified and immediately suspended from…
j7uy5 | January 28, 2008There are no cash rewards, and no instant fame. But I have
looked at a great many "best photo" series, and this is the most
enjoyable. Why? Because every single one of the
photos is in the public domain.
It's the
href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Bild_des_Jahres/2007">Wikipedia
Commons Picture of the Year series. The page is in
German. My German is über-rusty, but it scarcely
matters.
This one is a photo from
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antelope_Canyon" rel="tag">Antelope
Canyon.
j7uy5 | January 27, 2008Several days ago, I saw
href="http://www.epicurious.com/articlesguides/blogs/editor/2008/01/expensive-wine.html">an
article about some research on the relationship between the
price of wine, the subjective experience of taste, and the effect of
wine on brain function as assessed by
title="Wikipedia: Functional magnetic resonance imaging"
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FMRI" rel="tag">fMRI.
The research is part of the growing body of work that pertains to the
study of neural effects of marketing:
href="www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/persuaders/etc/neuro.html"
rel…
j7uy5 | January 25, 2008Usually I cringe when I see yet another newspaper article about
suicide. But I always read them. This time, I did
cringe, but needlessly. The article turned out to be OK.
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/24/washington/24fda.html?ei=5090&en=69952ee3ab69a7b3&ex=1358917200&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=print">F.D.A.
Requiring Suicide Studies in Drug Trials
By
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/gardiner_harris/index.html?inline=nyt-per"
title="More Articles by Gardiner Harris">GARDINER HARRIS
January 24, 2008
src…
j7uy5 | January 21, 2008Deputy Dog has a post detailing "
href="http://deputy-dog.com/2008/01/04/5-unbelievably-cool-research-facilities/">5
unbelievably cool research facilities." The one
shown here is the Z
Machine, at the Sandia National Lab in Albuquerque, New
Mexico.
(Sandia Labs have more than one location.)
src="http://www.sandia.gov/images/logo.gif" align="left"
height="60" width="151">This device produces X-rays.
Sure, there are a lot of X-ray machines. But only
one can burn 290 trillion watts. That is about 80 times the
entire world's production of electricity, although it only lasts for…
j7uy5 | January 20, 2008Usually when we think of
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_medical_record">electronic
medical records (EMR) as being
three-dimensional, we think of the relational aspect of databases.
Researchers at IBM, however, are testing a different concept.
The idea is to have a rendered 3D representation of the anatomy of the
patient, and to use that as a basis for the record. This is
reported in IEEE Spectrum.
href="http://spectrum.ieee.org/jan08/5854">Visualizing
Electronic Health Records With "Google-Earth for the Body"
By Robert N. Charette
January 2008
href="http…