Medicine
drorzel | May 20, 2008Welcome to today's exciting episode of "How Big a Dork Am I?" Today, we'll be discussing the making of unnecessary models:
In this graph, the blue points represent the average mass in grams of a fetus at a given week of gestation, while the red line is the mass predicted by a simple model treating the fetus as a sphere of uniform density with a linearly increasing radius.
The "model" was set up by taking the 40-week length reported at BabyCenter, and dividing by two to get an approximate radius for the spherical baby. Then I assumed that the actual radius increased linearly from zero to the…
drorzel | May 16, 2008I've had recurring problems with hives for a couple of years now. I have, at times, jokingly attributed this to an allergic reaction to George W. Bush continuing to be President, but I really have no idea what, exactly, is causing the problem. My allergist says that it's most likely an autoimmune thing, and thus there isn't any cause to find, and I'll just drive myself crazy chasing false correlations.
I can tell you, though, that the whole thing has given me some sympathy for people who seek solutions for their health problems in "alternative medicine." Because, really, if somebody told me…
drorzel | April 21, 2008One of many parts of the FutureBaby! process that I was lamentably ignorant of is the idea of the hospital tour. When I first mentioned to colleagues that we were expecting, many of them (mostly women) asked "Where are you going to have the baby?"
My initial response was "How the hell should I know? In a hospital, I hope. Preferably not in the back of a cab." I always just assumed you went to whatever hospital was closest when things started happening. Probably because I grew up out in the sticks, where hospitals aren't exactly thick on the ground.
But no, this is a Major Decision-- people…
drorzel | April 11, 2008With the "Vox Day" business winding down (one way or another), it's time to unwind with something less contentious and controversial: Framing! No-- seriously. Most of the really loud opponents have publically washed their hands of the whole topic, so I expect this will be relatively non-controversial. What could possibly go wrong?
Anyway, Janet is thinking about "framing" and the example of stem cells given in the Nisbet and Scheufele article in The Scientist (PDF here). She identifies three "core values" that framers on one side or the other might be trying to reach:
cures for diseases are…
drorzel | March 8, 2008Dave Munger has been spending a lot of time in waiting rooms:
When it comes to waiting rooms, it turns out, eye doctors wipe the floor with everyone else's ass. Not only does the eye doctor have the least shabby interior decor, it also arguably offers the best selection of reading material and visual entertainment (in the form of an infomercial for Lasik surgery on a 40-inch plasma TV mounted on the wall).
Here at the allergist nearly all the magazines are of the complimentary local shoppers' guide variety. We've got Charlotte Woman, the area Seniors guide, and a holistic medicine brochure.…
drorzel | February 28, 2008EurekAlert tossed up a press release from the University of Minnesota yesterday with the provocative title: "U of Minn researchers find primary alcohol prevention programs are needed for 'tweens'" and the even more eye-popping subtitle "Study recommends that prevention programs occur as early as third grade." What, you may ask, is the problem this is intended to solve?
The study found that adolescents who already use alcohol are less receptive to prevention programs aimed at all students. Intervening at earlier ages, specifically between third and fifth grade, would allow for truly universal…
drorzel | January 21, 2008The mysterious Revere looks at school killings today (or, more accurately, looks at a study looking at school killings). He/she/they opens with an arresting factoid:
The second leading cause of death in the 5 to 18 year old age group in the US is homicide. These are school aged children and the first thing that comes to mind are the big names like Columbine and Virginia Tech. But we know there are other school-related homicides that kill only one or two. Moreover there seem to be more of them than we remember from years past. But are there?
You may or may not be surprised to learn that…
drorzel | January 15, 2008Steroid scandals in sports, most particularly baseball, have been dominating sports media for a couple of years now. I thought that there really wasn't anything I could possibly care less about, but the New York Times proved me wrong with an article on steroid use among hip-hop artists.
Actually, the Times story is a report on an investigation by my local paper (I'm so proud), but I read the Times first in the mornings. The Albany Times Union does come through with a handy guide to hip-hop artists accused of using steroids. Look quickly before it goes behind the paywall.
What these stories…
drorzel | December 19, 2007Another cold December day, another ornament from the Tree of SCIENCE!!! This one's for the doctors in the house:
That's a little elf guy smoking a pipe, and he represents the science of public health.and epidemiology.
I'm a little dubious about some of the more extravagant claims made regarding the dangers of secondhand smoke, but there's really no denying that one of the most important and beneficial societal transformations in my lifetime has been the implementation of smoking bans in restaurants and workplaces, and the decrease in the acceptability of public smoking. You don't really…
drorzel | October 8, 2007I somehow managed to lose track of time for a bit, and forgot that it was Nobel season until I saw this morning's announcement that the 2007 Nobel Prize in Medicine hase just been announced, going to Mario R. Capecchi, Sir Martin J. Evans, and Oliver Smithies,
for their discoveries of principles for introducing specific gene modifications in mice by the use of embryonic stem cells
Good thing they got the Nobel, because that sounds like the sort of icky, un-Godly work we wouldn't want to actually, you know, fund.
Anyway, the announcement of this prize means that the rest of the Nobels will be…
drorzel | October 6, 2007As noted here in the past, I had horrible stomach problems for a good chunk of last year. This was diagnosed as "Gastro-Esophageal Reflux Disease" or "GERD," which basically amounts to "Your stomach hurts." After a number of deeply unsatisfactory appointments with a gastroenterologist, and some tests about which the less said the better, it eventually got better, and I haven't had serious problems with it for a while now.
Wednesday, I aggravated an old shoulder injury playing basketball. I separated both shoulders (at different times) playing rugby, back in the day, and every now and then I…
drorzel | July 5, 2007Just in time to drive parents into a panic for the rest of the summer, the New York Times has a big article about sunscreen:
Dr. [James] Spencer [a dermatologist in Florida] said that an S.P.F. 15 product screens about 94 percent of UVB rays while an S.P.F. 30 product screens 97 percent. Manufacturers determine the S.P.F. by dividing how many minutes it takes lab volunteers to burn wearing a thick layer of the product by the minutes they take to burn without the product.
But people rarely get the level of S.P.F. listed because labels do not explain how much to use, said Dr. Vincent A. DeLeo…
drorzel | June 13, 2007Bora's probably already aware of this, but the annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies is currently underway in Minnesota. Like many professional society meeting, this has led to a giant blort of press releases on EurekAlert, as the PR office for the conference tries to drum up some attention.
The press releases in question came across my RSS feeds this morning, and they're notable for the "Well, DUH!" quality of the headlines:
College students who pull 'all-nighters' and get no sleep more likely to have a lower GPA
Students with medical-related majors more likely to…
drorzel | May 4, 2007I came home Wednesday night to find a message on the answering machine. This is somewhat unusual, as most of the people who call us are trying to get us to donate money to some cause or another, and they don't leave messages. I hit play:
Hi, this is [Name] from [Gastroenterology Practice]. This message is for Chad, I'm calling to confirm your appointment for a procedure at [Hospital] on May 7th.
This was somewhat alarming, because I had no recollection of scheduling any sort of procedure at [Hospital], let alone one for Monday...
I called them yesterday afternoon, and left a message. A…
drorzel | February 14, 2007Somebody at work had printed out a table of MCAT scores by major, compiled by the AIP. I couldn't find it on the web, but I found the original source, and made my own version of the relevant bit. This shows the average numerical scores on the three sections of the MCAT test for students majoring in biological and physical sciences (shortened to "biology" and "physics" for the table), for students who applied to med school, and students who got into med school:
The results are striking. Not only did the physics applicants do better than the biologists on the physics portion of the test, as…
drorzel | December 12, 2006Surprising approximately no-one outside the medical profession, Eurekalert today features a press release about a paper showing that doctors on long shifts make more mistakes:
The study, published in PLoS Medicine, which was led by Charles Czeisler and Laura Barger from Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, included 2737 medical residents, who completed 17,003 monthly reports. In months in which residents worked even one long shift-of 24 hours or more -they were three times more likely to report a fatigue-related significant medical error compared with months in which they…
drorzel | November 3, 2006Via Inside Higher Ed's Quick Takes, some good news about the medical profession:
The proportion of medical residents who said they had worked more than 80 hours a week in the previous four weeks at any point during the 2005-6 academic year fell to 2.4 percent, spread among 18.7 percent of all residency programs, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education announced Thursday. That is down from 3.0 percent among 21 percent of programs in 2004-5 and 3.4 percent of residents among 24.8 percent of programs, the council said. The issue of excessive hours worked by doctors in training…
drorzel | October 24, 2006I was up far too late last night watching football, and our DSL was down during the crucial hours between work and Monday Night Football, so I couldn't pre-write any blog posts. Which means you get sleep-deprived idle thoughts as blog posts this morning. I blame Verizon.
So here's a question about medicine, or rather the media coverage of medicine, that has been bugging me. In stories about the bird flu or whatever, you'll frequently read statements of the form "We're closer to having a worldwide pandemic than at any time since 1918."
My question is, in what sense is that true? That is, is…
drorzel | October 22, 2006The New York Times Magazine this week has a troubling story of scientific misconduct, involving the fraudulent research of Eric Poehlman:
Before his fall from grace, Poehlman oversaw a lab where nearly a dozen students and postdoctoral researchers carried out his projects. His research earned him recognition among his peers and invitations to speak at conferences around the world. And he made nearly $140,000, one of the top salaries at the University of Vermont. All of that began to change six years ago, when [Walter] DeNino [a technician in Poehlman's lab] took his concerns about anomalies…
drorzel | October 13, 2006The silliest graph I've ever seen presented in public looked something like this:
It was an after-dinner talk at a DAMOP meeting a few years back, and the speaker was somebody associated with the Hubble Space Telescope. I don't recall what was being plotted, but he talked for a while about ho proud they were of this data, and how well it fit the theory, and then he put up this plot. The blueish circle is the data point, and the dotted line is a theoretical fit to the data.
The physicists in the audience all guffawed. He asked "What's so funny?" and somebody near the front asked "What's the…