cancer
oracknows | October 7, 2010Last week blew by me in a blur. Because I was in full grant writing frenzy to get an R01 in the can by Friday, pretty much anything that wasn't totally urgent got shoved aside, at least after Wednesday. Of course, it was last Wednesday that yet another mammography study was being touted as a "landmark" study. I had just enough time to look it over briefly and decide that I really should blog about it, particularly given that it came hot on the heels of a Norwegian study less than a week before that found the benefits of mammography to be less than previously believed and even more…
mikethemadbiologist | October 4, 2010You might have, by now, seen that obnoxious article by Scott Kern bemoaning the sorry state of the cancer research facility at which he works. Apparently, the building is nearly empty on weekends, so people aren't working hard enough, and thereby killing cancer patients. Rebecca sums up the tone of the article:
There have been a few responses (updated: Janet has one also) to this chuckleheaded essay by Scott Kern (pdf) chiding, well, basically anyone who isn't in the lab 60+ hours every week about how they lack passion about their research, and are essentially letting sick people die…
oracknows | October 3, 2010As I recover from the joy of deadlines, I decided to take the weekend off from blogging (new material, at least). In the meantime, here's some good Sunday reading for you, the Cancer Research Blog Carnival.
The Insolence shall return tomorrow. And there are, unfortunately, many deserving targets, not all of them woo.
oracknows | September 27, 2010I hate The Huffington Post. I really do.
Why, you ask, do I hate HuffPo so? I hate HuffPo so because of its history from the very beginning of its existence of promoting the vilest forms of anti-vaccine quackery and pseudoscience. It's because, over the last couple of years, not content with being the one-stop-shop for all things antivax on the Internet, right up there with Whale.to, Mercola.com, and NaturalNews.com, HuffPo branched out very early into quantum quackery, courtesy of Deepak Chopra. Just search for "Huffington Post" and "Deepak Chopra" on this blog and you'll discover how many…
oracknows | September 27, 2010Unfortunately, it's grant application crunch time again over the weekend. That means something's got to give, and what happened to be the thing to give was this blog. Fortunately, all is not lost, as a "good friend" of mine has commented on a recent New England Journal of Medicine study from Thursday about mammography. It may not be as "insolent" as the commentary that Orac lays down, but it's pretty darned good.
I'm fully expecting that the "alternative" medicine crowd will soon jump all over this study as "proof" that mammography is useless. It's nothing of the sort, and, more importantly,…
oracknows | September 20, 2010A critical aspect of both evidence-based medicine (EBM) and science-based medicine (SBM) is the randomized clinical trial. Ideally, particularly for conditions with a large subjective component in symptomatology, the trial should be randomized, double-blind, and placebo-controlled. As Kimball Atwood pointed out just last week (me too), in EBM, scientific prior probability tends to be discounted while in SBM it is not, particularly for therapies that are wildly improbable strictly on the basis of basic science, but for both the randomized clinical trial remains, in essence, where the "rubber…
cmonforton | September 16, 2010The Center for Public Integrity's Jim Morris reports this week on a civil lawsuit between the chemical manufacturer Rohm and Haas, and the family of Franklin Branham, 63, who died just a month after being diagnosed with a glioblastoma brain tumor. The Branham family is the first of 31 victims who lived in McCullom Lake, Illinois and are suing the Dow Chemical subsidiary for contaminating their air and water with vinyl chloride and other carcinogens. In "Brain cancer trial may influence science on toxic chemical," Morris provides a preview of the duel likely to ensue between the plaintiff's…
oracknows | September 15, 2010I'm a cancer surgeon.
I started out as a general surgeon, but my passion and scientific interest goaded me into specializing in cancer. Ultimately, I ended up subspecializing even more, ultimately becoming a breast cancer surgeon, but through it all cancer, not just breast cancer, has remained my clinical and scientific passion. So has science-based medicine. Developed as a response to the concept of "evidence-based medicine" (EBM), SBM postulates that clinical care should be based on the best science available, including the consideration of basic sciences and prior probability. EBM…
oracknows | September 6, 2010After chilling out for part of the weekend, yesterday I became so engrossed in writing my part of a training grant for my postdoc that, before I knew it, it was way too late to provide you with the Insolence you crave. Oh, well. Tomorrow for sure. In the meantime, I'll post a couple of bits of "classic" (if you can call it that) Insolence. This particular bit of insolence dates back nearly four years, all the way back to November 2006. Remember, if you haven't been reading at least four years, it's new to you! Besides, it's always fun (or disturbing) to me to see how well some of my older…
oracknows | September 3, 2010One of the most frustrating aspects of taking care of cancer patients is that in general, with a handful of specific exceptions, we do not have good curative therapies for patients with stage IV cancer, particularly solid tumors. Consequently, we are forced to view patients with stage IV cancer as "incurable" because, the vast majority of the time, they are incurable. Over the years, we have thrown everything but the kitchen sink at patients with stage IV disease, largely with dissapointing results. That's not to say that the few specific exceptions to which I alluded are not a reason for…
sa smith | September 1, 2010Oh no...
Im genuinely crying over this.
Cedric the Tasmanian Devil died.
Here is the obvious reason for why I loved Cedric:
But I loved Cedric for scientific reasons too. I thought he was going to help us save Tasmanian Devils from extinction.
Dr. Alex Kreiss is the cute boy in that pic.
Dr Kreiss says it was a difficult day.
"We would see and do something with Cedric every week so it was a very sad day and not just for me but for the keepers that looked after him since he was born, for the other vets that worked with him and that did health checks with him. So it was very sad."…
oracknows | August 23, 2010
One of the main topics that I've covered over the last four or five of laying down a swath of not-so-Respectful Insolence directed at pseudoscience is the relatively rapid, seemingly relentless infiltration of pseudoscience into what should be bastions of science-based medicine (SBM), namely medical schools and academic medical centers promoted by academics who should, but apparently don't, know better. This infiltration has been facilitated by a variety of factors, including changes in the culture of medical academia and our own culture in general, not to mention a dedicated cadre of…
oracknows | August 5, 2010I hate science press releases.
Well, not exactly. I hate science press releases that hype a study beyond its importance. I hate it even more when the investigators who published the study make statements not justified by the study and use the study as a jumping off point to speculate wildly. True, it's not always the fault of the investigators, particularly if they don't have much experience dealing with the press, but all too often scientists fall prey to the tendency to gab glibly and give the reporter what he or she wants: Pithy, juicy quotes that relate the results to what the reporter…
lborkowski | July 30, 2010
New Solutions: The Drawing Board is a monthly feature produced by the journal New Solutions. Read more about it here.
By Alice Shabecoff
As the massive oil slicks from the BP disaster continue to advance upon shores and communities, worries over the effects on wildlife and the natural environment abound, and rightfully so: hailed as the biggest oil spill in our nation's history, much of the damage is irreparable, with more inevitably to come. Yet policy makers, community members and advocates are strangely silent about another unavoidable danger: substantial harm to the children of the coast…
oracknows | July 26, 2010Note: Parts of this post have appeared elsewhere, but not in this form.
If there's one aspect of so-called "alternative medicine" and "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) is that its practitioners tout as being a huge advantage over what they often refer to sneeringly as "conventional" or "scientific" medicine is that -- or so its practitioners claim -- alt-med treats the "whole patient," that it's "wholistic" in a way that the evil reductionist "Western" science-based medicine can't be. Supposedly, we reductionistic, unimaginative physicians only focus on disease and ignore the "…
terrasig | July 18, 2010This is not good. Not good at all.
On Friday, Paul Goldberg of The Cancer Letter reported on an investigation into Duke cancer researcher, Anil Potti, MD, and claims made that he was a Rhodes Scholar - in Australia. The misrepresentation was made on grant applications to NIH and the American Cancer Society.
The Cancer Letter, a $375/year go-to newsletter on cancer research, funding, and drug development, has made this issue free at this PDF link.
News & Observer higher education reporter, Eric Ferreri, has a nice overview of the situation. Potti has been placed on administrative leave by…
oracknows | July 14, 2010Wendy, I'm home.
Oh, wait a minute. I'm not that crazy. Yet.
Sometimes, though, it does seem as though the constant barrage of quackery, anti-vaccine pseudoscience, and pseudoscience in general might drive me to become like poor Jack Torrence of the Stephen King novel and movie The Shining. Fortunately for me, I discovered that there really are people out there who share my passion for science and reason and my dislike of woo. Unfortunately, I waited several years before venturing forth to gatherings of like-minded (and sometimes not-so-like-minded) skeptics to meet people in person and start…
oracknows | July 1, 2010Status report: I'm in the home stretch of writing my grant. It will be finished by 8 AM, when I have to be at work again, in tip top mental condition for the meetings I'll have to endure all morning. (What the heck happened to not doing anything substantive the day before a holiday weekend? At least I don't have to operate or see patients.) Whether it will take an all nighter to do it I am not yet sure. Whatever the case, here is the perfect mood music for late night science and grant writing.
"We're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine, and the machine is bleeding to death."
Yeah,…
sa smith | June 29, 2010As Carl Zimmer recently (and rightly) pointed out at the end of an article on epigenetics, while the concept of being able to alter our epigenetic profiles for therapeutic purposes is a really attractive concept, our current epigenetic therapy options are very, very messy.
Like I said last week:
Lemme give you an example. Lets say we find out that in people with Ke$ha Disease, their GTiM (Good Taste in Music) gene is underexpressed due to hypermethylation of the surrounding DNA. So, YAY! Thats treatable! We have drugs that could fix that, like 5-aza-2'-deoxycytidine!
Um, well, your DNA is…
lborkowski | June 25, 2010
New Solutions: The Drawing Board is a monthly feature produced by the journal New Solutions. Read more about it here.
By Richard Clapp
The President's Cancer Panel report released on May 6 had some strong findings and recommendations on ways to reduce the cancer burden caused by workplace exposures. This is welcome news to U.S. workers and trade unions, who have been largely left out of the cancer prevention conversation for the past few decades. Notably, the panel members wrote in their cover letter to President Obama, "With the growing body of evidence linking environmental exposures to…