Author and journalist David Dobbs writes on science, medicine, nature, education, and culture for the New York Times Magazine, Slate, Scientific American Mind, and other publications. He is also the author of three books (see below), most recently Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral.
In a nifty bit of reporting, veteran health reporters Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer revealed in "Stealth Marketers," a story on Slate, that a "Prozac Nation: Revisited," a radio piece on antidepressants and suicide that ran on many public radio stations recently, "featured four prestigious…
From Well, Tara Parker-Hope's health blog at the NY Times:
More than half of the task force members who will oversee the next edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s most important diagnostic handbook have ties to the drug industry, reports a consumer watchdog group.
The Web site for…
I've been remiss in tracking here the farmed salmon issue I wrote about in the April/May Eating Well. Much has transpired; here a few tidbits and updates.
Soon after my feature ran, news broke that the Sacramento king (aka chinook) salmon run -- traditionally fairly robust, and the base of both…
That our brains account for 20 percent of our calorie use tends to amaze people, as it did me. Now it appears that about a third of that is devoted to brain maintenance rather than electrical signaling. The full dish here:
Link: Why Does the Brain Need So Much Power?: Scientific American.
It is…
We've seen our brain on drugs. Here's the dope on brainy people on drugs.
Survey results of 1400 scientists (or Nature readers, anyway) on use of neuroenhancers
Figure from Nature, "Poll results: look who's doping"
With baseball's steroid scandals seemingly behind us now -- or at least considered…
It seems that the rise in ER use comes not from the poor uninsured but from a much more affluent income sector.
From the Wall St. Journal Health Blog:
Rich, Not Poor, Are Crowding Emergency Rooms:
This is the conventional wisdom: Priced out of health insurance, ever more Americans are crowding…
Some great stuff I've come across, lack time to blog on, but would hate for you to miss:
In On being certain, neurologist and novelist Robert Burton, who writes a column at Slate Salon, looks at the science of what makes us feel certain about things -- even when we're dead wrong about them. His…
Suddenly it's salmon everywhere -- or in some cases, nowhere.
My story on "The Wild Salmon Debate: A Fresh Look at Whether Eating Farmed Salmon is ... Well ... OK," was published a couple weeks ago in Eating Well. You can see the Eating Well web version here or download a pdf here. The story…
The Kirsch study published a few weeks ago has stirred much discussion of the placebo power of antidepressants (or is it the antidepressant power of placebos?); it's clear that the act of taking a pill that you expect to help you often does help you.
But can the availability of a pill meant for…
This one's getting a lot of play: There are traceable levels of prescription drugs in many public water supplies.
The Times includes the AP story, which is both long and good. I bumped into it first on the Wall Street Journal Health Blog:
Health Blog : Big Pharma is in the Water
Big Pharma is in…
Why aren't your wages going up? Maybe because you're the one paying for the health insurance your boss is supposedly paying for.
That's the gist of a new commentary in JAMA, which I'd missed till the Health Blog at the Wall Street Journal brought it to my attention: "Who Really Pays for Health…
There's been a lot of attention the last couple years to the possibility of brain-based lie detector tests -- most of it premature. That coverage, I see now, has overlooked (as did I!) a 2005 study that showed compulsive liars are wired differently -- in an unexpected way -- than the rest of us.…
With so much written here lately about placebos and drug effectiveness, I would not want to leave out this remarkable study: Placebo effect is stronger, apparently, if you pay more for the placebo.
This is a fascinating study described in a letter to the Journal of the American Medical…
A quick heads-up: Nature weighs in on the flap over the Kirsch SSRI study that found antidepressants no more effective than placebo. I've given a lot of attention to the placebo issue. Nature stresses another point: That the Kirsch study underscores the need for clinical trial data to be public. At…
Now here's a match-up: the fine-grained, highly particularized, unpredictable, and insatiably curious mind of Nicholson Baker and the many-grained field of knowledge expressed in Wikipedia. In a great reading pleasure, Baker reviews John Broughton's Wikipedia: The Missing Manual in the current…
The ripples from the PLOS Medicine antidepressants-don't-work study by Kirsch et alia, which I covered below, just keep spreading. Those who want to follow it can do well by visiting or bookmarking this search I did (an ingenious Google News search for "Kirsch SSRI"). It seems to be tracking the…
The Kirsch study I wrote about a couple days ago, which found that antidepressants seem to have no more effect than placebo, has generated a wide variety of reactions in the blogosphere and press. Several things of note here:
1) In a pattern I've noticed repeatedly of late about other types of…
A jazz player's brain: Brain activation while improvising. Blue areas are deactivated comparable to normal, orange and read are ramped up. From PLOS One.
An intriguing finding: While improvising, jazz players seem to turn OFF the part of the brain that (to quote a new study just published in PLOS…
The amazing counting mosquitofish. Image courtesy Wikipedia
Eight years ago I published a book about a fight over how to count fish. Now it turns out that fish themselves can count. The account below comes from the BBC's natural history site, loveearth.com -- which is a well worth visiting anyway…
[This is a revised, expanded version of the original heads-up I put up last night.]
A large new meta-analysis of SSRI antidepressant trials concludes that the drugs have essentially no therapeutic effect at all. The study, in PLOS Medicine today, comes on the heels of another study published a few…
I've not had time to thoroughly read this yet. But on the heels of another study published a few weeks ago (I blogged on it here) showing that SSRIs have little therapeutic effect if you include the (unflattering) clinical trials the industry had previously hidden, PLOS Medicine now publishes a…
Yesterday's NY Times Magazine carried one of the best stories I've seen yet on our military efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq -- "Battle Company is Out There," a riveting and deeply informative piece by Elizabeth Rubin about the difficulties (to put it lightly) faced by a company of soldiers trying…
Clothes that produce power. Who ever thought?
Fabric may make the first real power suit
From Fabric may make the first real power suit : Nature News
The fibres, covered with 'hairs' of zinc oxide, can be wired up for power.The fibres, covered with 'hairs' of zinc oxide, can be…
And this:
Japan scientists make paper planes for space (Reuters)
Reuters - A spacecraft made of folded
paper zooming through the skies may sound far-fetched, but
Japanese scientists plan to launch paper planes from the
International Space Station to see if they make it back to
Earth.
I am sad…
Go figure:
Apparently immaculate Komodos hatched (AP)
AP - Two Komodo dragons have hatched at the Sedgwick County Zoo, apparently without the fertilization of a male. The dragons, both males, are believed to be the first in North America known to have hatched by parthenogenesis, which occurs…
Stumbled across this early this morning: Why the Mona Lisa's smile is so strangely alluring, and seems to come and go. From the website of Harvard neuroscientist Margaret LIvingstone:
The elusive quality of the Mona Lisa's smile can be explained by the fact that her smile is almost entirely in low…
A bit o' squabble has broken out about hopeful monsters. As paleontologist evolutionary geneticist Jerry Coyne notes in a guest post at The Loom, Carl Zimmer's blog, hopeful monsters are the products of ... well, there's the problem: They were either the product of sudden large evolutionary forces…
I've written before, both here and in print, about how FDA policy and drug company practices have allowed drug makers to publish (and the FDA to base approval on) only the most flattering drug-trial results while keeping less-flattering studies in the drawer. Today a New England Journal of…
The public will soon start getting quicker access to research results it sponsors. From BioMed Central Blog : NIH Public Access Policy to become mandatory:
NIH Public Access Policy to become mandatory
Many open access advocates will already have heard that NIH's Public Access Policy, until now…
