cancer
edyong | July 14, 2008Evolution dances to the tune of death. Killers - be they predators, diseases or competitive peers - can radically shape a species' life cycles by striking down individuals of a certain age. The survivors respond by changing their "life histories" - a collection of traits that defines their reproductive cycles, including how often they breed, when they start to do so and how many young they have.
If an animal's adult life is short and brutal, they tend to grow quickly and become sexually mature at a young age - a strategy that maximises their chances of siring the next generation. The…
oracknows | July 10, 2008It's been a week now since my wife and I learned that our beloved dog, whom we've had for eight years, had terminal cancer. At the time I was so sad and down that I just couldn't even imagine getting myself into the appropriately light-hearted frame of mind that I try to maintain. In the week since the shock of learning the diagnosis, I still can't achieve that frame of mind, although, as you may have noticed, I've been able to achieve the level of sarcastic snarkiness directed against pseudoscientists and antivaccinationists that my readers have come to expect. It's easy when you're angry…
oracknows | July 10, 2008While I'm taking some time to rag on TV news for its ludicrously credulous reporting of various "alternative" medicine claims, take a gander at this puff piece on a faith healer.
Where's James Randi when you need him? True, the story mentioned that not one of this faith healer's "healings" could be independently verified with objective information and data, but the rest of the tone of the story is quite credulous.
My answer to ABC News (remember: Steve Wilson works for an ABC affiliate) is this video:
The video speaks for itself. Bentley just kicked a guy with stage IV colon cancer in the…
oracknows | July 7, 2008Last week, The New York Times started a rather unusual series in its medical section entitled, The Evidence Gap, described thusly:
Articles in this series will explore medical treatments used despite scant proof they work and will consider steps toward medicine based on evidence.
When I first saw the series, I was prepared for a crapfest. My experience has generally been that when reporters start examining the evidence for and against a treatment they usually do a pretty lousy job. This is most obvious when it comes to "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), where we are routinely…
oracknows | July 5, 2008Thanks to everyone for your kind comments about the recent bad news about our dog. (Even someone who really detests me because of my position on the vaccine/autism issue was in this instance kind.) I don't know if I'll feel much like blogging for a while; on the other hand, blogging has been therapeutic for me in the past when bad things happen, even if I don't actually write about them. It's always been a good way to take my mind off of badness by concentrating on other badness, such as quackery. Also, Echo has often been my little (OK, well, not so little) black blog buddy, lying nearby or…
oracknows | July 4, 2008
Today is Friday, which has normally meant for the last two years that it's the time every week when I poke fun at some particularly outrageous woo. Indeed. I even had a great idea for a 4th of July-themed post today that (I hope) would have been hilarious. I had even started to write a bit of it a couple of nights ago.
Then real life intervened, and I didn't feel the least bit like humor last night. I still don't feel capable of humor this morning, either. Those of you who don't have pets may want just to skip the rest of this; you may not understand why I'm feeling so down and may view…
oracknows | July 3, 2008
One of the main issues that I've written about quite a bit is the issue of what the state should have the power to do when a child has cancer or another life-threatening disease and the parents choose quackery over scientific medicine when the disease is potentially (or even highly) treatable or curable with standard treatment. Most of the time, this has come in the context of patients like Abraham Cherrix, who, with his parents support chose the quackery that is the Hoxsey therapy over chemotherapy, or Katie Wernecke, whose parents chose high dose vitamin C and other woo, over effective…
oracknows | July 1, 2008Yesterday, I was depressed. Today I'm a little irritated.
I'm irritated because I came across a study from a couple of weeks ago that's actually a really cool study that applies actual science to the question of how diet and lifestyle changes might alter biology to improve health. It's exactly the sort of study that can apply help understand how diet affects health. It's a study by Dean Ornish, who's widely known for his advocacy of a lifestyle-driven approach to treating atherosclerotic coronary artery disease and producing evidence in the early 1990s that such a lifestyle alteration could…
mikethemadbiologist | June 26, 2008In a Journal of Infectious Diseases commentary about this article, there's a fascinating discussion of the relationship between the HTLV-1 virus, which can cause T-cell leukemia in about one percent of those infected, and gastric cancer caused by the bacterium Helicobacter pylori. And it's not what you would expect.
Here's the summary (italics mine; references removed for clarity):
In this issue of the Journal, Matsumoto et al. asked whether human T lymphotropic virus type 1 (HTLV-1) antibody status is associated with the risk of developing gastric cancer. In a cohort of >5000 patients…
oracknows | June 26, 2008
Sigh.
He's baaack. Yes, that dualism-loving Energizer Bunny of antievolution nonsense, that "intelligent design" apologist neurosurgeon whose nonsense has driven me time and time again to contemplate hiding my head in a paper bag or even a Doctor Doom mask because of the shame of knowing that he is also a surgeon, that physician who denies that an understanding of evolution is important to medicine and who just doesn't know when to quit, Dr. Michael Egnor, is back to embarrass me yet again. It's been a long time--months, actually--and, quite frankly I found the break from his specious…
oracknows | June 23, 2008If there's one thing that lay people (and, indeed, many physicians) don't understand about screening for cancer is that it is anything but a simple matter. Intuitively, it seems that earlier detection should always be better, and it can be. However, as I explained in two lengthy posts last year, such is not always the case. To understand why requires an understanding of cancer biology. The reason is the extreme heterogeneity of tumor behavior and prognosis. This variability was well described in a study from about a month ago, in which it was observed that the doubling time of breast cancers…
oracknows | June 19, 2008I'm a cancer surgeon, and if there's one thing that drives me straight to the liquor cabinet it has to be quack cancer "cures." Very early in the history of this blog, I discussed one of the biggest quacks of all time, a woman who thinks that all cancer is caused by a liver fluke (but only if the patient has propyl alcohol in his body, which, according to her, allows the fluke to become established) and that she can cure all cancer with a combination of herbs and the use of a device that she calls a "Zapper" (which looks suspiciously like a Scientology E-meter). I'm referring, of course, to…
oracknows | June 17, 2008She was thin, white skin stretched over bones like worn parchment over old sticks being rhythmically blown in the wind as her chest rose and fell, each time with what seemed like a major effort. Incongruous with the rest of her body, her abdomen was distended, a balloon that looked dangerously close to popping, also rising and falling with each breath. She moaned softly and looked at me.
I introduced myself, told her I was a surgeon, and continued, "Your oncologist asked me to see you about your belly pain."
"Go ahead," she croaked, hardly acknowledging my presence in the way that patients…
terrasig | June 14, 2008As promised awhile back, my blogging frequency has dropped off a bit as I tend to some more time-consuming details in my meatspace existence.
I've also missed some fabulous posts around the blogosphere. I wanted to direct Terra Sig readers to a moving yet data-driven essay by Professor PZ Myers at the University of Minnesota at Morris, better known as the blogger who writes Pharyngula. PZ is a terrific writer but this post is particularly excellent.
I'll be back shortly with something meaningful.
oracknows | June 10, 2008Somehow, with all the blogging about vaccines last week, I totally missed a major update to a story that's been of great interest to me since I first became aware of it. It turns out that Starchild Abraham Cherrix, the teen who two years ago rejected conventional therapy for his lymphoma and sought out the quackery known as Hoxsey therapy, has turned 18:
Abraham Cherrix, the teenager who fought a court battle on the Eastern Shore for the right to choose his own cancer care, turns 18 today, officially freed from reporting his medical condition to the Accomack County court that has required…
terrasig | June 8, 2008Apologies for being such a homer with the last few posts (and a couple upcoming) but there have been interesting local happenings of broad interest, especially while I was away earlier this week.
Turns out that the good Senator Edward Kennedy took a foray to the Town-That-Tobacco-Built to have his glioblastoma excised by Dr Dr Allan Friedman. The local fishwrapper covered this while I was away and noted that while Duke is big on tooting their own horns, they kept an unusually low profile with their high-profile patient.
But I actually didn't learn this news until I received an e-mail from a…
oracknows | June 2, 2008Thanks to the ASCO meeting and meeting up with some relatives here in Chicago, I didn't quite finish what I was going to post this morning. There have been at least a couple of abstracts presented that I wouldn't mind blogging about; I just haven't gotten to them yet. I also haven't forgotten about Jenny McCarthy's upcoming antivaccination-fest in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday. More will be forthcoming on these and other topics, perhaps even as early as later today.
In the meantime, I wanted to mention that that I walked by the booth for the Colorectal Association of Canada and their infamous…
terrasig | May 31, 2008Our quick post yesterday cited Jonathan Alter's Newsweek essay this week on the sad state of cancer research funding in the context of Hamilton Jordan's recent death and Ted Kennedy's recent glioblastoma diagnosis. Like many areas of US federal research funding, cancer research support has been flat under the Bush administration and, in fact, declined in real dollars since 2004.
But when one hears a federally-funded researcher like me whining about this situation, one might think I am solely acting in a self-serving fashion, caring only about the preservation of my career and that of my…
oracknows | May 30, 2008In a couple of hours, I'll be en route to my favorite city in the world, a place where, although I lived there for but a brief three years, I felt completely at home.
Chicago, baby!
Yes, I'm on the way to the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting in Chicago. While there, I'll be checking out the latest and greatest findings from the world of cancer therapy. As any blogger would, I'm hoping not just to learn something but to find interesting blog material.
In the meantime, don't forget that the 88th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle is fast approaching on Thursday, June 5 at…
oracknows | May 30, 2008If there's one thing I've learned over the last couple of years of doing this little feature, it's that there are a couple of kinds of woo. Actually, there are certainly more than a couple, but pretty much all woo can be divided into a couple of types. The first time is where the woo is based on no science at all, but rather mysticism or some other religious or "spiritual" force. This may or may not be combined with the physical or with some sort of scientific or pseudoscientific explanations to justify it, but at its very heart the woo far more religion than science. Then, there's another…