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Vagus Nerve Stimulation for Depression

This subject is not really news anymore, but I am writing about it to call attention to a review article, href="http://www.nature.com/npp/journal/v31/n7/abs/1301082a.html">VNS Therapy in Treatment-Resistant Depression: Clinical Evidence and Putative Neurobiological Mechanisms.  In this post, I provide a little overview of VNS therapy, comment on some other sources of information, and say a little bit about where I would like the research to go next. VNS Therapy in Treatment-Resistant Depression: Clinical Evidence and Putative Neurobiological Mechanisms Charles B Nemeroff*,1,2,…

The Friday Fermentable: "Mixing Drinks With Work and Staying Sober, Too" (NYTimes)

Figure 1. SouthernFriedScientist (@SFriedScientist) and Kevin Zelnio (Deep Sea News; @kzelnio) and their 40s preparing to leave to attend the 4th International Symposium on Chemosynthesis-Based Ecosystems - Hydrothermal Vents, Seeps and Other Reducing Habitats - in Okinawa, Japan. Yes, Dr Zelnio, those are absolutely gorgeous beards. I don't know if Kim Severson of the New York Times knew this when writing her thought-provoking article earlier this week, but it coincided with the annual meetings of the Research Society on Alcoholism (RSA) and the College of Problems on Drug Dependence (…

Why we tolerate "mystical mumbo jumbo" in academic medicine

Yet another hat tip this morning to anjou, a regular reader, commenter, and human RSS feed on all things cancer and alternative medicine (not to mention turning me on to Vanessa Hidary, the "Hebrew Mamita" spoken-word artist). Last night anjou brought to me a superb AP Impact article, Alternative medicine goes mainstream, from medical writer Marilynn Marchione. I know that AP has been skewered as of late by various science bloggers but this particular article by Marchione is one of the best treatments I have seen in the last two years regarding the truth behind the alternative medicine…

Bora runs out of internet; starts new carnival - CORRECTION: Martin (The Lay Scientist) is the actual founder

CORRECTION: The following was to be a part-sincere/part-serious sendup of my buddy Bora's penchant for monitoring the entire Internet. Bora did indeed host the first edition of Praxis, the new blog carnival of academic life. However. The Praxis experimental carnival of "the experience of living the scientific" was established, founded, and otherwise continues to be led by Martin, author of The Lay Scientist blog. Mini Bio: Well I'm Martin, I live in Cambridge, England, and this is me on the Amazon in 2007. I did a frankly weird Ph.D. looking at the relationship between models from ecology,…

Die, you gravy-sucking pigs*

. . .that's the message from Dr Bertha Madras, deputy director of the White House Office on National Drug Control Policy, to heroin and morphine users whose lives might be saved in the overdose situation by public distribution of "overdose rescue kits" comprised of a $9.50 nasal spray containing Narcan. Narcan is the brand name for naloxone, an antagonist (blocker) of these drugs at μ opioid receptors. When an overdose of opioid drugs binds to these receptors in the respiratory control center of a primitive part of our brain, one stops breathing, a situation that pathologists say is "…

Hoasca, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), and the US Supreme Court

As we approach 100,000 visitors since joining ScienceBlogs I am amazed to still be getting 500-700 visits per month at the old home of Terra Sigillata, all without any promotion or new posts. The most-visited of the old posts is the following which appeared originally on 21 February 2006. Much of humankind's experience with pharmacologically-active natural products has been through the mind-altering effects of plants used in religious ceremonies. Today [21 Feb 2006], the US Supreme Court upheld a decision to permit a New Mexico sect of a Brazilian religious order to continue using an…

Westerners focus on the eyes, East Asians on the nose

When you look at someone's face, what part do you concentrate on? Common wisdom has it that the eyes are the focal point of the face and they are the features that draw attention first. But according to a new study, that may not be universally true - while Western cultures do fixate on the eyes, East Asians tend to focus on the nose. We owe a lot of our knowledge about the way we look at images to a Russian psychologist Alfred Yarbus. He was the first scientist to carefully record the subtle eye movements that people make when they take in a view. Yarbus's experiments showed that our gaze…

What is this Juneteenth of which you speak?

A couple of reader questions came in this week following our interview with the inspiring African-American leader and mentor, Jason Dorsette. I had mentioned therein about first meeting Mr. Dorsette two years ago this week at a local Juneteenth celebration. A few readers, even those in the southern United States had not heard of this commemoration. So, since today is the ascribed date of Juneteenth and the US Father's Day weekend is typically the time that municipal celebrations are held, I thought I'd leave you with a brief description and some good links. I can't do any better than TIME's…

Where the whales came from .. maybe

It doesn't really matter how many transition fossils paleontologists uncover. Creationists are forever claiming fasely that they've produced "nothing which would qualify as intermediate" between today's whales and their terrestrial ancestors. So this week's fascinating news that we might have figured out what such a forebearer looked like is unlikely to change anyone's mind. Still, it would be nice if everyone who rejected evolution watched the video that the journal Nature has made freely available to help explain the paper it just published on what may be "the missing Eocene piece of the…

Playing to type in Japan

What with absurdly high levels of belief in astrology, sky fairies, homeopathy, and whatnot, it sometimes seems like the United States of America has the market cornered in superstitious nonsense. Far from it. The Chinese, for example, have their penchant for quack remedies concocted from rare species (the more endangered the better). Now we learn that the Japanese, not to be outdone by either of their geopolitical and economic rivals, appear to have recently acquired a bizarre belief in the power of blood types to determine one's destiny. Here's the essential bits of a story by the New York…

The Hydrogen Partition Function, or, How Matt Didn't Pay Attention

I always tell my students that they should never just write down an equation blindly and start plugging things in. If you don't understand what you're doing, you're much more likely to make a mistake. Sometimes I don't take my own advice. On a science forum I read occasionally, a person who was just taking their first quantum mechanics class asked just how exactly you would go about preparing a system such as a hydrogen atom in a particular quantum state. It was correctly suggested that at room temperature, pretty much all of the atoms would automatically be in the ground state by virtue of…

On the Implausibility of the Death Star's Trash Compactor

Here's one from the vault. But not our vault. It's an all-time favorite of mine, from McSweeney's a few years ago, written by Joshua Tyree: "On the Implausibility of the Death Star's Trash Compactor." Lets file it under physics. For example: 2. Why do both walls of the trash compactor move towards each other, rather than employing a one-movable-wall system that would thus rely on the anchored stability, to say nothing of the strength, of the other, non-moving wall, to crush trash more effectively? It's available here, in the original. But I deem it worthy of a full reprint below the…

AU Hires New Faculty in Science Journalism and Risk Communication

This year the School of Communication at American University has hired leading junior faculty in the areas of science journalism and risk communication. The two new faculty, scheduled to move to Washington, DC in August, will contribute significantly to SOC's research capacity, professional initiatives, and teaching portfolio. Below with their permission, I have posted brief bios. DECLAN FAHY Declan Fahy joins the journalism faculty as a tenure-track assistant professor. He has reported extensively on science, health, and environmental issues, as well as many other topics, for the Irish…

Autism cranks attempt to intimidate blogger by subpoena

You have got to be friggin' kidding me!? Kathleen Seidel, blogger at neurodiversity.com, has been subpoenaed by Rev. Lisa Sykes and Seth Sykes to appear in their case against the Bayer company. Their case alleges that mercury additives to vaccines caused their son's autism. Now Seidel is a blogger who has taken repeated issue with both the theory that mercury in vaccines causes autism and their tactics in pressing this position. It would appear that a recent post -- The Commerce in Causation which details the particularly slimy behavior of one Mr. Clifford Shoemaker, a personal injury…

Wired Magazine's Top 10 New Organisms of 2007

As many of you might have noticed, Benny and I have been off for the week for Christmas in San Francisco. The plan was to visit the Zoo on Wednesday, which obviously did not happen, so we checked out the Monterey Bay Aquarium for a twelfth time. Anyway, our apologies for the lack of posts. We will pick up next week but we leave you with this piece, directly lifted from this Wired article. Genetic engineering isn't just for scientists in ivory towers or corporate R&D labs anymore. Researchers are still creating new mice and crops every week, but the tools and knowledge necessary to create…

Interview with Dr. Corfield, Mucin Biologist

A few weeks ago, Zooillogix brought you a story about Japanese researchers using giant jellyfish as an ingredient in cosmetics. Jellyfish are predominantly composed of mucin (mucus is made of mucins), and one of our news sources quoted Dr. Tony Corfield, a Mucin Biologist from the University of Bristol. We decided to track down Dr. Corfield and see if he might illuminate the shadowy, sticky field of mucin biology for Zooillogix readers. We are very grateful For Dr. Corfield's thoughtful responses to our sometimes less than respectful questions and his sense of humor. What exactly is the field…

Eye movements reveal unconscious memory retrieval

THIS short film clip shows two images of the same scene. Watch it carefully, and see if you can spot the subtle differences between them. As you watch, your eyes will dart back and forth across the images, so that you can perceive the most important features. And even though you might not be consciously aware of the differences, your brain will have picked up on them. This implicit form of remembering is referred to as relational memory; in this case, the brain is encoding the perceptual associations between items in the image. And recent studies have shown that relational…

Rats know their limits with border cells

Spatial navigation is the process on which we rely to orient ourselves within the environment and to negotiate our way through it. Our  ability to do so depends upon cognitive maps, mental representations of the surrounding spaces, which are constructed by the brain and are used by it to calculate one's present location, based on landmarks in the environment and on our movements within it, and to plan future movements. The term "cognitive map" was first used in a landmark 1948 paper, in which the behavioural psychologist Edward Tolman described his now famous studies of rats in mazes. In…

RETICENCE? The IPCC's Communication Problem

Previously, I've noted the major hole that the IPCC digs itself by releasing its consensus reports on Fridays, only to be lost in the weekend news cycle. Back in February, the timing of the IPCC report helped contribute to what I described as a "massive communication failure" in generating wider attention among the U.S. media and public. Now several leading climate scientists, led by James Hansen, are calling attention to a bigger problem. They argue that the IPCC's conclusions are scientifically "too reticent" (a great frame device). According to these scientists, it's more than just a…

A Nobel Prize for The Shadow Network

This morning it was announced that two American scientists won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and or Medicine, for their 1998 discovery of a hidden network of genes. It may seem odd that a network of genes could lurk undiscovered for so long. But the cell is very much a mysterious place. In the 1950s, scientists established the basic model for how genes work. A gene is made of DNA, the cell makes a single-stranded copy of a gene in a molecule called RNA, and it then uses the RNA as a template for building a protein. This so-called Central Dogma proved to be correct for many thousands of genes…

Mooney Gets the Treatment

Welcome to the club, Chris Mooney... Chris Mooney is the author of the excellent book, The Republican War on Science. He examines big hot-button scientific issues of the day such as global warming, stem cell research, and, of course, evolution. It's a polemic, to be sure, but a well-researched one. Over the past couple weeks I've been meaning to write a post here to let readers know that it has just come out in paperback, with some great updates since the hardback. But it's been hard enough for me to find time to blog, period, and it seemed like Mooney was enjoying a good reception without…

"AH-HAH!" Insights And The Right Frontal Lobe

There are three on-off light switches on the wall of the first floor of a building. One of the switches is initially off and controls an incandescent bulb in a lamp on the third floor of the building. The other two switches do not control the bulb or anything else (they are disconnected). How can you find out which one of the three switches turns the light bulb on and off? You can toggle the switches as many times as you want and for as long as you want, but you can walk only once to the third floor to check on the light bulb. While you're working on that, I'll show you what you look like (…

Remembering Malcolm X As We Release His Murderer

RaceWire is reporting that Thomas Hagan, one of three men convicted for the assassination of Malcolm X (and the only to plead guilty), was released after his 17th attempt at parole yesterday. Hagan, at the time of the murder, was known as Talmadge X and was a militant member of the Nation of Islam. According to The New York Times: Mr. Hagan said in a 1977 affidavit that he and several accomplices . . . decided to kill Malcolm X because he was a "hypocrite" who had "gone against the leader of the Nation of Islam," Elijah Muhammad. Mr. Hagan said that after one man shot Malcolm X in the chest…

Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India

As Jawaharlal Nehru wrote of his native land but as a stranger in the process of discovery, "India is a geographical and economic entity, a cultural unity amidst diversity, a bundle of contradictions held together by invisible threads." These invisible threads were the spiritual beliefs of the people, the Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita and the Manu Smriti. The sacred Ganges was a symbol of India's life blood, as much for the Indian people as for the British colonialists, that, as Rudyard Kipling described in his story "The Bridge Builders," was a natural force that needed to be conquered if the…

Peripheral Vision

I believe the world is a complex phenomenological experience that can be explained, rationalized, and lived in myriad different ways. The way I see it, we all begin with the same fundamental mystery -- why are we here? what is life? -- and we attack this problem with whatever tools we find work best; some of us use science, parsing and decoding the secrets of life with a toolbox of methods and reason. Others, with the same goals in mind, use art, arranging ideas and objects in intentional ways designed to root at the questions of existence. Others still depend on the framework of religion to…

Gene activity in the dead

Now you've got another paper you can file with that dead salmon fMRI paper: one that analyzes the transcriptome, or excuse me, the thanatotranscriptome, of dead zebrafish and mice. You should not be surprised to learn that when a multicellular organism dies, it's not as if every single cell is abruptly extinguished: the integrated, functional activity of the individual as a whole ceases, but individual cells struggle on for a while -- they're not getting oxygen or nutrients, in a mouse they're experiencing thermal stress as the body rapidly cools, but it takes a while for all of the cells to…

The Ig Nobels have been announced!

Every year, the crew behind the Annals of Improbable Research honor research that "first makes people laugh, then makes them think." These awards, known as the Ig Nobels, honor some of the most entertaining research published in the past year. The competition is fierce, and the prizes highly coveted. But without further ado! This year, the winners are... Engineering Acevedo-Whitehouse, K., Rocha-Gosselin, A., & Gendron, D. (2010). A novel non-invasive tool for disease surveillance of free-ranging whales and its relevance to conservation programs Animal Conservation, 13 (2), 217-225 DOI:…

There's always a biological excuse...

It's almost a given that, during any discussion about male infidelity, someone will throw out some variation of "men are biologically programmed to spread their seed." Why is there this theory that men are more driven to cheat? Part of it has to do with the size of their gametes. If bigger is better, then men are pathetic, for their little sperm are 1/100th the size of a woman's egg. Because women have such a greater investment in each offspring right from the get-go, the assumption is that women are pickier when it comes to who they allow to fertilize their eggs. Men, since it doesn't cost…

Are Conservation Efforts Harming Rare Species?

Since today is Earth Day, I've got all kinds of green, eco-friendly, conservation-type thoughts jumbling around in my head. I keep reading articles about how some rare alligator has a little hope or how some big rare fish got eaten, and thinking positively about the press surrounding our environment. All these daily, constant reminders about the status of species on the verge of collapse - this kind of awareness has got to be helping conserve those speices, right? But then I stumbled upon a PLoS ONE article that completely soured my mood. Rarity of Tigers raises the value of their skinsvia…

Diversity: Meeting Norms - Or Eliminating Barriers?

What is diversity? People talk about it all the time. We say we want to increase diversity. We want to have more diversity on our faculty or in our workforce. We want to manage diversity for success. We have diversity programs and diversity training and diversity workshops. So we must know what diversity is, right? Isn't diversity what those Other people have? You know, sort of like a disease. Everybody but white males has Diversity, and if we get more of those Others, we can catch some Diversity. (Though we may have to Lower Our Standards to get the Diversity.) I have never been…

Women Are, or Are Not, Doing Science, And Should Be Encouraged

So, here's the latest set of reports telling you exactly what the situation is for women in science, nicely collected for us in the AWIS Sept. 1, 2006 Washington Wire (thanks, AWIS!) FYI: STEM = science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. What follows are the titles of three reports, AWIS's summary, and then my summary. Rapid Increase in STEM Occupations in the Last Half-Century A new study published by the Commission on Professionals in Science and Technology (CPST) shows that the growth in American STEM occupations between 1950 and 2000 outpaced the growth of the total labor…

Let's Make Science Happen: The 2007 Scienceblogs DonorsChoose Challenge

DonorsChoose is a fantastic organization. Individual teachers submit proposals for things they'd like to do in their classroom, but can't afford to do. People can go to DonorsChoose, pick projects that they like, and donate money directly to those projects. You truly know where your money is going to go, and you can see what a big difference even a small donation can make. Last year, we had a major Scienceblogs funding drive for DonorsChoose. Our readers - you - were absolutely fantastic. In just 15 days, we managed to raise more than 23,000 dollars - not counting the 10,000 dollars in…

"Right to Work" doesn't come cheap

There's an article in Friday's Washington Post about the ongoing strike by Houston, Texas janitors. (The same folks who were getting trampled by police horses the other day.) Part of the article tells the story of Ercilia Sandoval, a Salvadorian immigrant who is one of the striking workers. If we take a look at her story, it becomes very easy to see who the real winners and losers are in right to work states. It should come as no surprise if I tell you that the losers outnumber the winners. It might surprise you if I tell you that you're probably (if you live anywhere in the US) one of the…

An ecosystem in crisis

The rise of factory farming over the last half-century has resulted in a crisis for family farms. Factory farming benefits from the economy of scale, producing much, much more of whatever their product is - milk, beef, pork, whatever - at costs per unit that are far lower than a family farm can achieve. This allows the factory farms to sell their products cheaper than the family farmer can, driving the small farms out of business. Over the past decade or two, the decline of the family farm has received a fair amount of attention, mostly focused on the people who are affected, but there's…

IAP Statement on the teaching of evolution

The Interacademy Panel on International Issues has issued a statement on evolution: IAP STATEMENT ON THE TEACHING OF EVOLUTION We, the undersigned Academies of Sciences, have learned that in various parts of the world, within science courses taught in certain public systems of education, scientific evidence, data, and testable theories about the origins and evolution of life on Earth are being concealed, denied, or confused with theories not testable by science. We urge decision makers, teachers, and parents to educate all children about the methods and discoveries of science and to foster…

Does watching TV really kill you?

Today I had to put off my normal morning run in order to make time to be interviewed on a radio show at 7:30 a.m. As I waited on hold for the interview to start, I could hear the hosts joking back-and-forth about what the "latest TV controversy" is. "Is it the Jay Leno / Conan O'Brien news on NBC?" the host asked? No. Then the hosts rattled through several other hot-button issues on television before arriving at this: "New research from the American Heart Association Journal [Circulation] suggests that watching TV might actually reduce how long you live." How's that for a controversy? The…

Taxonomists and bad history

In a recent paper on biological nomenclature in Zoologica Scripta, Michel Laurin makes the following comment about the stability of Linnean ranks: However, taxa of the rank of family, genus or species are not more stable. ... This sad situation should not surprise us because the ranks, on which the traditional (RN) codes are based, are purely artificial. As Ereshefsky (2002: 309) stated, ‘they are ontologically empty designations’. Ranks were initially thought to be objective because, for Linnaeus, each rank reflected the plan of the Creator and could be recognized on the basis of…

Species as objects of explanation

Following on from my previous post "Are species theoretical objects", I want now to discuss what the status of species as phenomenal objects is. Some recent papers by Ingo Brigandt and Paul Griffiths (see refs), a view has been developed for some core concepts of biology - gene and homology - in which the theoretical status of these ideas is challenged. This view treats the concepts as referring to either obervational or operational objects or properties, just as I have suggested that species does. Brigandt has suggested that these objects or concepts are "units of explanation", and he and…

No new cortical neurons in humans, BrdU and C14 analysis

I have talked before about evidence that there is no new neurogenesis in the adult cortex, but that paper used stereological techniques. A new paper in PNAS shows a more direct method to demonstrate that there are no newly created neurons in the adult cortex -- and their technique for this is so clever that I have to talk about it. They use a spike in the atmospheric levels of Carbon 14 isotopes after nuclear testing -- before the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 -- to carbon date the creation of new cells in the human brain. First some background: If you want to start a fight among…

Some more of Whewell on classification

This is a kind of note to myself, an aide memoire to remind me of the fact that much of the modern narrative about classification in biology before Darwin is not correct. It's also interesting that Whewell defines systematics, but most interesting is the reinforcement of the prior note that Whewell did not support essentialism. Elsewhere, in the History, he famously said that species do not transmute because they have a real existence in nature - but in context he means that they are adapted, and if they varied would cease to be. Again, no mention of essentialism. Whewell is turning out to be…

The ontology of biology 1 - What an ontology really is

It has become common in recent years for people to use terms of philosophy in distinct contexts, as it has terms of biology. Thus, ontology has gone the way of taxonomy, being dragooned into service of database techniques, to mean something quite the opposite of what it originally meant. I have noticed this tendency of computer technology for decades, ever since I got hopelessly muddled when doing database programming in the early 80s until I realised that they were using some terminology of formal logic in exactly the wrong way (I forget what it was now). A database ontology is not an…

What are you looking at?

Imagine sitting in a coffee shop, having a nice conversation with your friend Dave. If Dave looks at something, your eyes will reflexively move to look at the same item. This is actually quite convenient, because it may help you figure out what Dave is talking about, or what he might comment on next. How much of this joint attention reflex depends on Dave's face? You'll do this even if he only moves his eyes, without turning his head, so it might be that what you're reacting to isn't so much his face, but the movement of his pupils. What we know about certain brain mechanisms makes this…

Most researchers don't understand error bars

[This post was originally published in March 2007] Earlier today I posted a poll [and I republished that poll yesterday] challenging Cognitive Daily readers to show me that they understand error bars -- those little I-shaped indicators of statistical power you sometimes see on graphs. I was quite confident that they wouldn't succeed. Why was I so sure? Because in 2005, a team led by Sarah Belia conducted a study of hundreds of researchers who had published articles in top psychology, neuroscience, and medical journals. Only a small portion of them could demonstrate accurate knowledge of how…

Endocrine Disruptors in the News, Again

The Guardian Unlimited has a provocative article on the role of endocrine disruptors in increasing the ratio of girl babies to boy babies in the Arctic.   I've written about the topic before ( href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/02/endocrine_disruptors.php">1 2) as have href="http://scienceblogs.com/terrasig/2007/02/lavender_and_tea_tree_oils_may.php">Abel and href="http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/12/satans_perfect_food_tofu.php">PZ.  James Hrynyshyn, on Island of Doubt, has already commented on the Guardian article: href="http://scienceblogs.com/…

News from the Lakeway Hotel

A while back, I mentioned these hate-filled loons in Kansas who were harassing a hotel owner because he was flying a rainbow flag—Pandagon has an excellent summary of the contretemps—in short, he had the flag in memory of his son, the local paper talked up the association of the rainbow with gays, and boy howdy, all of a sudden he was getting boycotted and abused by the community. In the latest news, some Kansas bigot has cut down the flag. I had a letter from the hotel owners forwarded to me. Robin & I can't even begin to come up with words strong enough to convey our appreciation for…

Basic Concepts: Hearing

Many of my SciBlings have been doing posts on "basic concepts" in their fields of expertise. As I am studying hair cell regeneration as a therapy for hearing impairment, I thought I might do a 'basic concepts post' on what hearing is, how humans hear, and why we lose it sometimes. The most reductionist answer is the ability to perceive sound in an environment. However, to humans, hearing is much more complex than that, as we use sound to communicate to others or to appreciate music. Humans, among many other species, perceive sound waves through holes in our heads (ears). However what we…

Belated retraction of Seralini's bad anti-GMO paper

Last year, the Elsevier journal Food and Chemical Toxicology by Gilles Seralini and others that purported to show that rats fed genetically modified corn were more prone to get cancer. The cranks loved it; Mike Adams thought it was great, it was touted on the Dr Oz show (I don't know why they were concerned; these are the people who think cancer can be cured with herbs, urine, and drinking hydrogen peroxide). But right from the beginning, scientists were appalled — not by the conclusion, but by the incredibly shoddy protocol used by the researchers. Biofortified went through the paper, step…

The Influence of Irrelevant Emotions on Moral Judgments

Back on the old blog, I wrote a series of posts in which I detailed a revolution in moral psychology. Sparked largely by recent empirical and theoretical work by neuroscientists, psychologists studying moral judgment have transitioned from Kantian rationalism, that goes back as far as, well, Kant (and in psychology, the Kantian Jean Piaget), to a more Humean approach, that considers emotion and motivation to be central. Some of the more interesting work utilizing this new approach has been done by Joshua Greene and his colleagues1 They have demonstrated that we use different processes to…

Stimulant Improves Sleep

Medscape has one of their brief 0.25 CME articles on the subject of methylphenidate (Ritalin, et. al.) and the effect it has on sleep.  (You have to register to read it, but registration is free.) This is interesting because it illustrates nicely how psychopharmacology can be confusing.  In this post, I try to show some of the ways in which this confusion can occur. href="http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/571987">Stimulant Improves Sleep in Adults With ADHD News Author: Pauline Anderson CME Author: Charles Vega, MD March 26, 2008 — A study suggests that the central nervous system…

Thoughts on LSD Treatment for Alcoholism

I ran across a press release ( href="http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-10/uoa-ltf100606.php">1 href="http://www.brightsurf.com/news/headlines/26739/LSD_treatment_for_alcoholism_gets_new_look.html">2) pertaining to a journal article (‘Hitting Highs at Rock Bottom’: LSD Treatment for Alcoholism, 1950–1970) on the use of LSD for treatment of alcoholism.  When I saw it, I thought I'd blog about it.  As it happens, several people beat me to it. Anyway, the topic is sufficiently compelling that I am going to post it anyway, and try to add a little to what has already been said…