Medicine
drorzel | September 19, 2006My pseudonymous colleague Orac makes it part of his mission to lampoon "alternative medicine" wherever he encounters it, so this may well piss him off: For the last several weeks, I've been taking a daily dose of pseudoscience. Why? I blame the medical establishment, but you're going to have to click below the fold to find out why.
As I've mentioned here several times, back in January, I started having very bad heartburn more or less constantly. After a couple of visits to my doctor, I was referred to a gastroenterologist, who scheduled an endoscopy, and then proclaimed that I have "gastro-…
drorzel | August 24, 2006In the comments to the recent post on BMI, commenter Colst pointed to another study of mortality and BMI that found significantly higher risks for overweight people. Today, I see that Kevin Beck at Dr. Bushwell's Chimpanzee refuge has a post describing what I think is the same study, with the title Risk of death much higher in overweight and obese. Which is true, if you look at the data in the right way.
Kevin posted a bunch of graphs from the study, and I'll excerpt two of them to keep things readable. The first is the relative risk of death for all the men in the study, as a function of BMI…
drorzel | August 22, 2006Over at Pure Pedantry, Jake has a nice post about a study showing that the ever-popular Body Mass Index measure is not a good predictor of the risk of heart disease. He's got a lot of details about the study, including this graph of risk vs. BMI:
Now, here's the thing. This is the second study I recall hearing about that has a similar result-- there was a flurry of articles a while back about a large study (or maybe one of those meta-studies) showing that people who were slightly overweight according to BMI had lower mortality than those of "normal" weight. And now, this study shows that…
drorzel | August 12, 2006This year marks 25 years since the identification of AIDS as a disease, and Seed is going with blanket coverage. The latest print issue is devoted to AIDS coverage, there's a temporary group blog covering the International AIDS conference, and this week's Ask a ScienceBlogger is AIDS-related:
To what extent do you worry about AIDS, either with respect to yourself, your children, or the world at large?
As this is very much outside my area of expertise, I don't expect to have much of anything to say on this topic this week, but I'll give a partial answer to the question below the fold.
On a…
drorzel | June 21, 2006Over at the Examining Room of Dr. Charles, one of the newer ScienceBlogs, there's a post reminding me that I want nothing to do with medical research. I mean, how do you sort out what's a cause, and what's an effect in data like this:
Another recent study, published in Diabetes Care this past March, looked at the relationship between hours slept and the risk of developing diabetes. Researchers followed 1,100 middle age men starting in 1987 up through 2004. The men who slept 6 hours or less per night had double the risk of developing diabetes as compared to those who slept 7-8 hours per night…