oracknows | June 27, 2010Now that I've had my new iPhone 4 for nearly four days, I need to know what to do with my old iPhone. One has to wonder: Will it blend?
Clearly the iPhone 4 blends.
oracknows | June 25, 2010Many are the times when I've complained about how the press reports on science and medicine. I love it when science is reported well, but sadly such examples are far fewer than I'd like to see. In fact, there are times when I feel as though I'm living this in an alternate universe where it's not beyond the ken to see sports reported the way science seems to be reported.
oracknows | June 24, 2010Remember Boyd Haley?
He's the Professor and former Chairman of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Kentucky whose formerly respectable career tanked because he fell into pseudoscience. For whatever reason, a while back he became enamored first of dental amalgam quackery to the point where he became involved in organizations like Consumers for Dental Choice (a.k.a. "Toxic Teeth"), whose expressed raison d'etre is to "work to abolish mercury dental fillings"). From that position, he promoted the idea that mercury-containing dental amalgams are horrifically toxic, helping to spread…
oracknows | June 24, 2010...is because I lucked out and my iPhone 4 arrived a day early. Gadget geek that I am, I couldn't resist taking the time I'd normally spend blogging last night to set it up the way I like it. Yes, whenever I get a new smartphone, just as whenever I get a new computer, I like to start from scratch.
What? Did you think it had something to do with something else, like a certain college student from Brandeis? Perish the thought! In fact, here's my response:
More later. Maybe. I was too busy testing out the new phone to bother with such petty concerns.
Queue the Apple haters to…
oracknows | June 23, 2010June is almost over. If you work in an academic medical center, as I do, that can mean only one thing.
The new interns are coming, and existing residents will soon be advancing to the next level. The joy! The excitement! The trepidation! And it's not all just the senior residents and the faculty feeling these emotions. It's the patients too. At least, it's the patients feeling the trepidation. The reason is the longstanding belief in academic medical centers, a belief that has diffused out of them and into "common wisdom," that you really, really don't want to get sick in July.
But is there…
oracknows | June 22, 2010(NOTE ADDED 12/7/2010: Kim Tinkham has died of what was almost certainly metastatic breast cancer. Also note that, when it was publicized on the Internet and on the blogosphere that Tinkham's cancer gave every indication of having recurred and she was dying, her "practitioner" Robert O. Young removed the videos embedded below from YouTube.)
Remember Kim Tinkham?
She's the woman who was diagnosed with Stage III breast cancer about three years ago. At the time, she became infamous because she showed up on Oprah Winfrey's show, back when Oprah was in her "Secret" phase and proceeded to alarm…
oracknows | June 21, 2010Coming soon: Penn & Teller take on the anti-vaccine movement on an upcoming episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit! No doubt it will resemble this little preview that Penn himself has taped:
Note: Lots of NSFW language. It is, after all, Penn.
I will mention one thing. Penn's wrong when he says that Wakefield is no longer a doctor. He still has the degree; he's still a doctor. It's just with his having had his license to practice in the U.K. stripped from him he is no longer a licensed physician. He can no longer treat patients. I understand why Penn keeps repeating the "not a doctor"…
oracknows | June 21, 2010Over the last few decades, there has been a veritable explosion in the quantity of scientific journals and published papers. It's a veritable avalanche. Some of the reason for this is simply the increase in the number of scientific researchers that has occurred over the last few decades. Another reason I'd suggest is that there are now numerous whole fields of science that didn't exist 30 years ago, fields such as genomics, HIV/AIDS, angiogenesis, and various technologies that have come into their own in the last decade or so. It's not surprising that these disciplines would spawn their own…
oracknows | June 18, 2010In the wake of President Obama's election, there was a great deal of hope that he would take science-based medicine seriously and, as he promised in his inaugural speech, "restore science to its rightful place." Shortly before Obama's inauguration, in fact, Steve Salzberg proposed that the Obama administration should defund the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM).
NCCAM, as you may recall, is a center in the National Institutes of Health largely dedicated to funding pseudoscience. True, there is some legitimate research mixed in with the pseudoscience, but it's…
oracknows | June 17, 2010If there's one thing that the loons over at the anti-vaccine crank blog Age of Autism might actually be somewhat good at, it's leaping on a news story and trying to liken it to their unshakable pseudoscientific belief that vaccines cause autism. Unfortunately for them (and fortunately for our our amusement), the merry band of anti-vaccine activists over there is so utterly, irredeemably bad at constructing a coherent and logical metaphor that whenever they try the result comes out something like these two posts:
If President Obama Had Been Talking About the Autism "Spill"
Olmsted on Autism…
oracknows | June 17, 2010Ozzy Osbourne is, like many rock stars of his advancing age, an amazing creature. Having subjected his body to abuse beyond the ability of most normal people to understand in terms of booze, drugs, and crazy living on the road, like the Energizer Bunny he just keeps going and going and going along. Naturally, given that, against all probability, Ozzy has somehow managed to make it past 60, scientists wonder why he is still alive.
Now some scientists want to find out; they plan on sequencing Ozzy's genome.
Next up, Keith Richards!
The problem I see with this is that we don't necessarily have…
oracknows | June 17, 2010Back in the 1990s when I first dipped my toe into the pool that was Usenet, that massive, wild, and untamed frontier where most online discussion occurred before the rise of the web and later the blogosphere, I was truly a naif. I had no idea--no inkling--of the depths of quackery to which people would sink. If Usenet was my bootcamp that opened my eyes to the seemingly endless varieties of quackery and, in particular, the flavor of quackery that represents anti-vaccine lunacy and "biomedical treatments" for autism, then my graduate education in the battle for science-based medicine began in…
oracknows | June 16, 2010I think the message may finally getting through.
That message is that it's not always the best strategy to treat cancer aggressively. Don't get me wrong. If I have acute leukemia, I know I'll need the big guns, every bit of chemotherapy appropriate to the disease that modern oncology can throw at it up to and including a bone marrow transplant. But what about prostate cancer? Breast cancer? Thyroid cancer? It turns out that more treatment isn't always better for these diseases, depending on the subtype, and in some cases, such as early stage prostate cancer of low aggressiveness, it is quite…
oracknows | June 15, 2010Time and time again, anti-vaccine activists respond to charges of being "anti-vaccine" with a self-righteous wounded whine that goes something like this: "We aren't 'anti-vaccine.' We're pro-safe vaccine." Alternative claims are that they are "vaccine safety watchdogs" and that they'd vaccinate if only the government would "green our vaccines" or "space them out" or that they think the government isn't listening to them or whatever. Of course, all of these are smokescreens for their true agenda, which, at least among the activists, is anti-vaccine to the core.
In fact, so engrained are anti-…
oracknows | June 15, 2010I don't know if I need to get out the infamous paper bag or--even worse--the Doctor Doom mask out yet. As you may recall (if you are a long time reader, anyway) is that the mind-numbing stupidity of certain MDs has driven me to want to hide my face in utter shame at the embarrassment caused by my fellow physicians. Most frequently, it has been everyone's not-so-favorite creationist neurosurgeon with dualist tendencies, Dr. Michael Egnor. So bad was he that I compared him one time to Deepak Chopra.
Damned if P.Z. hasn't led me to another highly embarrassing physician woo-meister. Worse, it's…
oracknows | June 14, 2010I've had the immense good fortune to have trained and ultimately become a physician-scientist during a time when the pace of discovery and the paradigm changes in science have occurred just over the course of my career in medicine and science has been staggering. microRNA, the shift from single gene studies to genomics, the development of targeted therapies, the completion of the Human Genome Project, these are but a few examples. Of course, arguably the Human Genome Project is the granddaddy of all of the huge changes and paradigm shifts that has occurred to revolutionize biomedical research…
oracknows | June 13, 2010Remember my post about the genetics of autism last week? Remember how I predicted that the knives would come out from anti-vaccine loons? My original prediction was that Mark "Not a Doctor Not a Scientist" Blaxill would pull one of his usual brain dead attacks on genetic studies, such as his " immaculate mutations" gambit.
I guessed wrong, apparently. It wasn't Mark Blaxill who went on the attack first. Although Blaxill hadn't tried his hand at a pseudoscientific deconstruction of this study as of Sunday afternoon, John Stone over at the anti-vaccine propaganda blog Age of Autism has already…
oracknows | June 12, 2010Somehow, this doesn't seem all that far from the truth, except that kitties are cute.
The last line, however, is, sadly, all too prescient-sounding. In fact, I'm not sure that it's even funny because the truth hurts. I guess cute kitties make it easier to take. I wonder if they ever remade A Few Good Men with kittens.
(Warning: One NSFW word near the end.)
oracknows | June 11, 2010I wonder what the loons at Age of Autism will say about this.
Actually, I know what they'll say. Whenever a scientific study like the one just published earlier this week the top tier journal Nature, which examines genetic variations (CNVs) associated with autism and autism spectrum disorders (ASDs), comes out, they have a standard reply. Even though, as of this writing, I haven't seen yet seen a reply on the anti-vaccine crank blog Age of Autism to the study I'm about to describe, I'm sure it's coming and I'm sure it will look something like this article from a year ago by Mark "Not A…