This just cracked me up this morning: NEW YORK - Kevin Trudeau, the million-selling author, infomercial star and convicted felon, swears that his new health guide, "More Natural 'Cures' Revealed," is 100 percent true. Make that 100 percent true "in essence."` "My point is I don't want to be caught in what is true, what isn't true, what is opinion, what is an idea," Trudeau, whose self-published "Natural Cures 'They' Don't Want You to Know About," thrived despite his criminal past and other legal run-ins, said. "More Natural Cures," released in May and also self-published, is a sequel to "…

As of midnight last night, it's official... ...I'm now an Associate Professor of Surgery.

I sort of expected some attacks when I posted yesterday yesterday about how physicians' incomes have been steadily falling. After all, whenever Kevin, M.D. does similar posts, people with--shall we say?--issues regarding physicians often come out in droves to post nasty comments, just as they tend to do whenever he posts about how out of control the malpractice system in this country is. In fact, I was pleasantly surprised when there were so few such comments. But et tu, Radagast? Actually, I never really asked anyone to have a lot of sympathy for us doctors. As I've said many times, I make a…

While thinking about ways to make the blog better, I wondered if I should emulate some of my colleagues, many of whom have regular features every week, often on Friday. And, since I usually get a little less serious on Fridays anyway (and, because traffic seems to fall off 50% or more anyway regardless of what I post, on the weekends, too), it seemed like a good idea. But I couldn't think of something that ties together the common themes of this blog, yet maintains a suitably Friday-blogging light-hearted feel to it. And then I came across this article: L. R. Milgrom (2006). Towards a New…

A new study suggests that, adjusted for inflation, physicians' incomes are, by and large, falling: Doctors may be well off compared with the bulk oftheir patients, but a new study says fees physicians get from the government and private insurers aren't keeping up with inflation. Last week, the Center for Studying Health System Change said net incomes for physicians fell from an average of $180,930 in 1995 to $168,122 in 2003, a decline of about 7 percent, when adjusted for inflation. Medicalspecialists fared better, the study said. Their in comes slip ped an average of 2.1 percent, from $178,…

Earlier this week, I was in Washington to attend my first ever NIH study section as an actual reviewer. It was definitely an illuminating experience, and overall I left with, believe it or not, more faith in the system the NIH uses to determine how grant money is doled out. Maybe I'll become more cynical after I've attended a few, but this session was full of very fair but tough-minded reviewers who really wanted to score everything high but couldn't. Perhaps I'll write in more detail about it after I've had a chance to absorb the experience; given the confidentiality of the meeting (we had…

Damn 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…

One year ago yesterday, a turd flew, the first of many to come. A new skeptic had arrived in the blogosphere, and he called himself (appropriately enough, given his propensity for lobbing fecalgrams at the credulous) The Pooflinger. I feel real bad that I missed his blogiversary because of something as insignificant as being on an NIH study section. Well, no, I don't actually feel that bad, because being on my first study section is a major step in my career. But, now that I'm back, I have to send Matt (a.k.a. The Pooflinger) some belated blogiversary wishes. As you may know, Matt quickly…

The latest Grand Rounds is up over at Medviews. Enjoy

There's a lot of bad history out there. People abuse and misuse history all the time for their own ideological or political ends. Sometimes people are just ignorant of history. Fortunately, in the blogosphere, there's an antidote: The Carnival of Bad History. Jonathan has posted The Carnival of Bad History #6 at Frog in a Well. Naturally, there's lots of stuff on that ultimate in bad history (which I happen to take a great deal of interest in), Holocaust denial, but there are also debunked examples of lots of other bad history too. Enjoy.

Busy at NIH Study section today, I didn't have time to compose anything extensive. (And there is most definitely something that needs a little Respectful Insolence going on; unfortunately, it will have to wait until tomorrow to receive it.) Fortunately, I had some thing in reserver for just such an occasion. From my e-mail several weeks ago (name & location withheld): Dr. Orac, My name is D. I am a Chiropractor and a Medical Doctor (IM resident at Medical Center X). I knew something wasn't right about the whole Chiropractic thing about half way through my education but could never quite…

I'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.…

Lord Runolfr recently reminded me of a bit of wisdom, courtesy of the Doctor (fourth Doctor, played by Tom Baker) from the episode entitled The Face of Evil. Here's the quote: You know, the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit their views. Which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering. Apply this quote as you see fit. It certainly rings true. It also reminds me of some other good Doctor Who quotes: 'Oil? An emergency? Ha! It's about time the people who run…

About two weeks ago, I did a brief post about a Lithuanian guy whose blood alcohol level was beyond what would kill most mortal men but who was fully conscious and nominally able to drive. I facetiously referred to it as "one quarter of my heritage at its finest," given that I'm one quarter Lithuanian. Well, I'm also one-half Polish on my father's side, and a little more than a week ago, I came across this example of that part of my heritage at its finest Not surprisingly, this item involves drinking too. It also involves the World Cup, in this case, a semi-friendly rivalry between Polish and…

It's in Japanese, but anyone can understand...

Via Black Triangle, I've come across an article about a real medical hero, a man responsible for the development of many of the vaccines we have today. Indeed, it can be argued that this man, Dr. Maurice Hillman, may have saved more lives than any other physician in history. Those who remember him describe his reaction to the controversy stirred up by Andrew Wakefield: The MMR was introduced into the UK in 1988, but became increasingly controversial following Andrew Wakefield's study published in the Lancet in the late 1990s, which linked the vaccine with autism. That study has now been…

While we're on the topic of Holocaust deniers again, here's something on the lighter side... I thought I'd seen everything. Then, via Improbable Research, I found something truly strange. Are you ready for....Hitler Cats? It's a blog dedicated to cats that look like Hitler. I have to tell you, though, that some of them to me look like the "mustache" was painted on (although this one, at least, was photgraphed with a fine young Aryan child), and this particular cat doesn't look much like Hitler at all. What can one say but: Heil Kitty!

Holocaust deniers sometimes refer to the Holocaust as the "Holohoax," as if the whole thing were one huge hoax perpetrated on the world by Jews. Indeed, if you have the stomach to dive into the deepest, darkest, most disgusting parts of the Internet, where Holocaust deniers freely spew their lies, you will even find explicit assertions that the Holocaust is nothing but a hoax that the Jews used to justify the formation of the State of Israel and to collect reparation money. Indeed, do a Google search for the term "Holohoax" and you will find well over 43,000 entries. That the Holocaust was a…

In the light of recently discovered possible chicanery on the part of Mark Geier and his dubious IRB, I found this report by John Leavitt very interesting: My interest in inserting bacterial genes into mammalian cells stemmed from a paper published in Nature in 1971 by NIH scientists, Carl Merril, Mark Geier, and John Petricciani, entitled "Bacterial Virus Gene Expression in Human Cells." (Nature 233:398-400). Merril and colleagues presented experiments that claimed to show that a bacterial gene encoding galactosyltransferase, transduced into a bacteriophage DNA molecule, could be '…

The latest Tangled Bank has been posted. Go get your science fix there. Over at Emergiblog, a new nursing blog carnival (Change of Shift) has been inaugurated with Volume 1, Number 1.