oracknows | September 10, 2008As angry as you justifiably may be at times at the medical profession, it's (usually) not our fault.
Dr. Rob Explains why.
I'm sure PalMD understands even better than I do.
oracknows | September 10, 2008I hate postmodernism.
Well, not exactly postmodernism per se, but I hate it when pseudoscientists and purveyors of dubious "alternative" medicine treatments invoke bizarre postmodernist-sounding arguments to attack science or, in the case of medicine, science- and evidence-based medicine. Usually these attacks involve a claim that science is nothing more than one other "narrative" among many others, a "narrative" that isn't necessarily any more valid than any other. Even worse, these sorts of arguments often claim that science (or, in this case, evidence-based medicine) is nothing more than a…
oracknows | September 9, 2008Well, here's a rare bit of good news in the endless tedium that has become the U.S. election. It appears that Barack Obama has ticked off the antivaccine contingent. I know, I know, I said I would try to lay off this topic for a few days, but this is just too amusing. Apparently, he's gone a long way towards redeeming himself for his previous gaffe when it came to vaccines and autism, and the antivaccine zealots over at Age of Autism are all in a tizzy over it:
Last Friday evening, September 5, 2008, I had the opportunity to ask Senator Barack Obama about childhood vaccine safety/choice. His…
oracknows | September 9, 2008If there's one thing I really detest, it's cancer quackery. Indeed, one of the very earliest posts on this blog was about this very topic, and applying science, skepticism, and critical thinking to extraordinary claims of cancer cures has remained a major theme of this blog ever since. Shortly after that, I described how, because of the variable course of cancer and the fact that many cancers are cured with surgery alone, "testimonials" for cancer quackery can sound very convincing. It's a topic I've covered several times over the three and a half year history of this blog. Whenever a high…
oracknows | September 8, 2008"One dumb tumor is still smarter than ten smart oncologists."
--George Sledge, MD
My only retort is that, slowly but surely, oncologists and we oncologic surgeons are getting smarter.
oracknows | September 8, 2008If there's one thing that cancer researchers, indeed most biomedical researchers in the U.S., know today it's that the research funding climate sucks right now. Indeed, after the completion of the near-doubling of the NIH budget in 2003, during which time it was flying high, the NIH budget in essence crash landed--hard. Paylines, which had been well over the 20th percentile (meaning that over 20% of grant applications in any give deadline cycle were funded) plummeted to near single-digit ranges almost overnight. Indeed, I almost fell victim to this myself in 2004. The initial score on my R01…
oracknows | September 7, 2008It's almost here yet again. (Man, how time flies!)
This Thursday (September 11), longtime skeptic extraordinaire Robert Carroll, the man behind the indispensable Skeptic's Dictionary, will be hosting the 95th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle at Skeptimedia. That's a mere four days from now! I can't wait to see what Bob cooks up for this special Meeting of the Circle, especially given that it happens to coincide with a certain horrific event from seven years ago that in even that short a time period that has brought out some of the very worst conspiracy-mongering and paranoia requiring a…
oracknows | September 6, 2008...is through his plush guts, as Liz Ditz tells me:
I particularly like the plush pancreas, even though I haven't done pancreatic surgery on a regular basis since the 1990s. I'm a little confused, though, about why the plush gallbladder is purple instead of green. Surgeons really, really hate to see purple gallbladders, because the only purple gallbladder is a dead or dying gallbladder. (OK, necrotic gallbladders are usually greenish black, but they can look purplish in some areas.) I'm also a bit puzzled by the choice of yellow for the liver, given that the liver is reddish-brown. But,…
oracknows | September 5, 2008I guess I'm just going to have to face it. I'm entering a period of lots of vaccine blogging again. After all, Jenny McCarthy's book is coming out this month, and I've heard rumblings that she's scheduled to be on the undisputed Queen of Woo Oprah Winfrey's TV show later this month; so beware. Already in some bookstores is Paul Offit's book Autism's False Prophets, and there's little doubt that the antivaccination smear machine is gearing up to slime him as hard as they can.
It's going to be a depressingly busy fall on the antivax front.
I keep hoping I can take an extended break from this…
oracknows | September 5, 2008I've railed on more than one occasion about how much I detest science by press release. For one thing, it bypasses the peer review process and reports results directly to the public, which to me is a strike against any study. Indeed, releasing results by press release or using a press release to tout a study before it's even published is, as far as I'm concerned, quite dubious, and when I see it I'm automatically way more suspicious of whether the study represents good (or even OK) science.
One form of science by press release that can be a bit more subtle than, say, the cold fusion guys…
oracknows | September 4, 2008As usual, when Jon Stewart nails it:
My goodness! Two political posts in a row. I'd better watch myself, or I'll become one of those dime-a-dozen political bloggers that I complain about. Not that I count this, given that it's just a Daily Show video clip. Still, it's so spot-on that I couldn't resist. Don't worry. Tomorrow it's back to medicine, surgery, and science.
For the most part.
oracknows | September 4, 2008
I'm a Detroit guy.
I was born there and raised there for the first ten years of my life. After that, my family moved to the suburbs, but still Detroit's my hometown, even though I spent 20 years away from southeast Michigan. Consequently, I really, really hated what has been happening there since January. That's when text messages revealed that Detroit's lying, philandering mayor Kwame Kilpatrick revealed that he and the woman with whom he had been having an affair, Christine Beatty, had lied under oath about their affair in a whistle-blowing trial.
Now the chickens are finally coming home…
oracknows | September 3, 2008This is getting to be monotonous, but it's a monotony that I like, as should anyone who supports scientific medicine and hates the resurgence of infectious diseases that antivaccinationists have been causing of late with their fearmongering about vaccines that frightens parents into refusing to vaccinate their children. It's the drumbeat of studies, seemingly coming out every few months, that fail to find even a whiff of a link or correlation between vaccines, thimerosal-containing or otherwise, and autism. You'd think that the pseudoscientists who are so utterly convinced that it absolutely…
oracknows | September 3, 2008Since I've been discussing histidine and histamine today (how's that for a segue to an entirely different topic?), it seems like the perfect time to mention a story I saw yesterday about the ten worst cities for fall pollen, such as ragweed, according to the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America (AAFA).
I was amazed to see that none of the cities is located anywhere near where I live. Few of them are where I guessed they might be. Perhaps one of them is where you live, or nearby.
In any case, every year in the late summer and into fall I can look forward to a life of continual snot, with a…
oracknows | September 3, 2008Some people should keep their "gut feelings" to themselves.
You know the type: People who have no knowledge about a topic or, even worse, just enough knowledge to sound as if they have a clue about it to people who don't have a clue but who are at the same time easily spotted as utterly and completely clueless by people who do have a clue. These people often think they've discovered something that scientists, in all their blindness have missed, and have a burning urge to share their "gut feeling" about what they think they have discovered as though it's some revelation, a bolt out of the blue…
oracknows | September 2, 2008ResearchBlogging.org, that aggregator for blogging about peer-reviewed scientific research, has been given a makeover and a major overhaul. New features include:
There will be much, much more on our official launch date of September 2, but here is a partial list of new features:
Multiple language support (and 30 new German-language bloggers!)
Topic-specific RSS feeds
Post-by-post tagging with topics and subtopics
"Recover password" feature
Email alerts when there is a problem with posts
Users can flag posts that don't meet our guidelines
Customized user home pages with bios and blog…
oracknows | September 2, 2008Hanging out last night, the final night of a three day holiday weekend, I was momentarily at a loss for what to write. For one thing, having spent a good chunk of the last three days unpacking the remaining stuff we've had in our basement in boxes for the last six or seven months, my wife and I had a pretty good sense of accomplishment but not a lot of energy left. So much for one of my analyses of a study or a medical issue.
I was also half-tempted to go back and listen again to the Science Friday last week because the antivaccinationist named Chantal who called in at the end was a perfect…
oracknows | September 1, 2008Say it ain't so!
Skeptics' Circle host from earlier this year Rod Clark informs me that another celebrity has been sucked into maw of antivaccine propagandizing disguised as an autism charity. The one luring these celebrities in, of course, is that tireless, ever-Indigo campaigner against vaccines and for quackery Jenny McCarthy, flexing her D-list celebrity luster and snookering celebrities into supporting her antivaccine cause (unless, of course, that celebrity is Charlie Sheen, who's already an antivaccine loon and thus requires no deception). First, it was Britney Spears, Hugh Hefner, and…
oracknows | September 1, 2008This totally slipped my mind, and I've been meaning to mention it for a few days now, which makes the holiday weekend a perfect time to mention it. Seed Magazine and ScienceBlogs are supporting an effort to raise $10,000 for various science projects supported by DonorsChoose. To help the cause, all you have to do is to go to the Think Science Now website and vote for video profiles of scientists. Best of all, by doing so, you get to suck the money straight from an {enter "alternative medicine" and "antivaccinationist" mode} an evil, greedy, allopathic drug company {exit "alternative medicine…
oracknows | August 31, 2008As my fellow Americans (ack! I'm sounding like a politician!) know, this happens to be a holiday weekend in the States, Monday being Labor Day. Given that, I'm taking it easy blogging until Tuesday, given that most people (in the U.S. at least) are probably out taking advantage of the opportunity that what is traditionally considered the last weekend of the summer vacation season affords. Me and my wife, we're taking advantage of this three day weekend to do somthing truly fun: To finally put our basement in order. (There's still a ton of stuff down there from when we moved in.) Woo-hoo!
In…