Hoisted 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…
Generally, 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.org/…
One 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…
Judith 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-…
I 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.
A 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=…
Sigmund 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.)
The 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…
Do 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):124-8…
The 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…
I 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.com…
...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.
Zyprexa 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:…
I 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 only a…
This 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 all…
There 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.  
Several 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="…
Usually 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="…
Deputy 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 a…
Usually 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://…