One of the annoyances of becoming an attending is the need to sign up for managed care and insurance plans. The forms are all similar, but they are sufficiently different that you can't just fill one out and be done with it. Every couple of years, a flood of paperwork comes through, asking for renewal. One disadvantage of working for a state institution is that I don't have much say over what plans I have to sign up for. My cancer institute makes the deals and then distributes the applications. However, one advantage is that there is an office that fills out a lot of the simple "busy work"…

You may not know this, but today has been designated Ten Commandments Day. It sounds pretty innocuous, right? After all, why would anyone object to a celebration of the Ten Commandments? And, of course, it's every American's right under the First Amendment to celebrate the precepts of his or her religion. Nothing wrong with that. So why do I have misgivings about this Ten Commandments Day? Could it have something to do with the rhetoric on the website? For example: Is it possible that the mark of God-- the Ten Commandments was placed in America over 500 years ago? Is it possible that God…

Today is my sister's birthday, and what good is a blog if I can't shamelessly hijack it when I wish to wish family members a happy birthday? So, happy birthday, sister! Have a great day! And our mascot does, too! EneMan says: "Happy Birthday!"

I can't believe I almost forgot this, but in the U.S. May 6 is Nurses' Day. Doctors, show the nurses you work with how much you appreciate their care and help. I know my clinical workload would be far less manageable without my nurse; I might not even be able to handle it and my laboratory research at the same time. (Unfortunately, I'll have to wait until Monday to show my appreciation, as she was off work Thursday and Friday, and heavily involved working with my partner on Wednesday.) Patients, show how much you appreciate their caring work.

Continuing to some extent a theme from the other day, I wish my textbooks had read like this one. I have to say, this is the first time I've ever seen the term ménage à trois in a science textbook. It's also used as a surprisingly good analogy, although I wonder how the author would know about what constitutes a "successful" ménage à trois.

Lately, I've been frequently lamenting how easily physicians can be seduced by the pseudoscience known as "intelligent design" (ID) creationism (or even old-fashioned young earth creationism). Yesterday, I even hung my head in shame after learning of a particularly clueless creationist surgeon, to the point of speculating that I might not be able to show my face in ScienceBlogs for a few days. Then, just as I was getting set to show my face in ScienceBlogs again after only a one day absence (having decided not to let one clueless surgeon deter me), I see this on Bill Dembski's blog.…

Continuing on a theme, physicians can be really clueless sometimes; case in point, what happened at my medical school a couple of days ago. The university that I work at is pretty large. It has three campuses several hundred, if not over a thousand, faculty members spread out between the campuses. Like many large universities, it has multiple mailing lists which are used to distribute information and make announcements. There are mailing lists for the basic science faculty, for graduate students, for medical students, for the residents of various departments, for staff members, and for…

I had planned on posting about this last night, but a late night in the O.R. kept me from it. Consequently, Chad beat me to it, but better late than never, I say. I join Chad in apologizing to my readers for the tornado ad that started running on ScienceBlogs earlier this week and includes a Flash animated tornado that flies over the page. I don't mind advertising. Really, I don't. After all, something has to pay for ScienceBlogs, and, as much as I like to think my writing is good, I doubt that many people would pay Seed for the privilege of reading it. However, I detest web ads that…

He's actually finally going to release the original, unaltered, un-"improved" trilogy on DVD: Fans can look forward to a September filled with classic Star Wars nostalgia, led by the premiere of LEGO Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy video game and the long-awaited DVD release of the original theatrical incarnations of the classic Star Wars trilogy. In response to overwhelming demand, Lucasfilm Ltd. and Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment will release attractively priced individual two-disc releases of Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. Each release includes the…

Damn you, PZ! I know I spent three whole posts discussing the problem of credulity towards creationism among physicians. I spent a lot of time in those posts explaining potential reasons why physicians might be susceptible to the blandishments of creationists and even used the example of a medical student who is a proud young earth creationist as an example of the perils to medicine of not taking a stand regarding this sort of pseudoscience. Leave it to PZ to one-up me. Sadly, PZ has found an example of a physician who makes Alice (our blogging young earth creationist medical student) look…

Kevin, MD, one of the big names in the medical blogosphere, is two years old today. His style is a lot less wordy than mine, as he is more given to "Instapundit"-style "link and comment" posts, but he sure does find a lot of interesting material. I don't know where or how he comes up with it all. Go wish him a happy blogiversary!

Ya gotta love it...

Last week, I wrote a rather lengthy (or, as my detractors would probably call it, "long-winded") post about the concept of a medical wikipedia. As you may recall, I expressed considerable skepticism about whether the wikipedia concept could work as well as its boosters claim it could. Even though others have clarified what a medical wikipedia could and could not do, I still can't help but worry that activists and alties would hijack the wiki for their own purposes. Now I've found an actual example to consider, although it's not quite what I warned about. It turns out that there is an AIDS…

I love a good fisking, and James over at Autism Street has administered a real blog slapdown to a really idiotic article defending "natural medicine." He rightly points out the jaw-droppingly obvious straw men and appeals to other ways of knowing that Mike Adams uses in the article. But don't take just my word for it about how good the fisking is. The Amazing Randi himself (or a very convincing doppelganger) dropped by in the comments to lend tactical air support.

According to CNN, Revenge of the Nerds is being remade. I have only one question: Why? It's not like the first movie was a great masterwork or anything. Even so, it was fairly amusing (and now hopelessly dated) as an example of fantasy fulfillment for geeks everywhere, but that's about it. It's also noteworthy because it was Anthony Edwards' first starring role (and he had hair back then) and because James Cromwell played Louis Skolnick's father, with John Goodman playing the football coach. The question produced by this remake, though, would be: What are the differences between the nerds of…

In the comments of my post regarding Andrea Clarke, the woman whom a Texas hospital is trying to pull the plug on because its bioethics committee has declared her care "futile" despite the fact that she is not comatose and is able to communicate her wishes comes an update posted yesterday to the Democratic Underground discussion boards: I don't really know how to begin this post. Everything is so different now, than it was before. It's like everyone moved the pieces on the chessboard, while I was out of the room. First the good news: Andrea's white blood cell count is down, for the fourth day…

Three blog carnivals to hawk today: 1. The History Carnival 2. RINO Sightings (May Day Show Trial Edition) 3. Grand Rounds has been delayed. It was supposed to show up at Polite Dissent, but when I checked out his site to look for it this morning, his blog was gone and a site advertising cheap airfares was in its place. Scott just sent out an e-mail stating: I'm not sure what happened. When I went to bed last night at 2 AM, everything was perfect and a 50-item Grand Rounds was posted. When I got this morning, my site had been hijacked. Arrgh!! Anyway, the folks at Hosting Matters assure me…

Yesterday was May Day, and Catallarchy has posted its annual Day of Remembrance for for the victims of Communism. Of particular interest to readers of this blog is a rather extensive article about just what can happen when political ideology is allowed to warp science, specifically what happened to science under Communism because of Trofim Lysenko: Lysenko's doctrines were an unholy merger of Lamarckism with Stalinism: the infinite malleability of man was mirrored by the infinite malleability of plants. (Lysenko claimed that if you grew plants incrementally further and further North each year…

As you may know, I'm totally hooked on 24, and with only four episodes to go I'm getting antsy to see how it all ends. In the meantime, however, it's hard not to be amused by Tom Tomorrow's appropriation of one of my favorite shows: I wonder if they're referring to this blog?

A little more than a year ago, the entire nation was captivated by the case of Terri Schiavo. As you may remember, Ms. Schiavo was an unfortunate woman who lapsed into a persistent vegetative state after suffering anoxic brain damage after a cardiac arrest. Her husband insisted that she had stated that she never wanted to be kept alive in such a state; consequently, he fought to have her feeding tube removed. Her parents fought to have it left in. Eventually, her husband Michael Schiavo prevailed, and Ms. Schiavo died on March 31, 2005. In my mind, this was indeed a matter of personal…