medicine
drorzel | April 20, 2010What's the application? Using lasers to cut and/or cauterize tissue during surgical procedures, instead of the traditional very small very sharp knives.
What problem(s) is it the solution to? 1) "How can we do surgery without touching the tissues being operated on?" 2) "How can I get rid of these annoying glasses/contact lenses?"
How does it work? First, you strap a device to your head that lets you shoot laser beams from your forehead, like one of the X-Men. then you use a magnifying glass to focus it to where it needs to be. Like so:
(I'm not sure exactly what sort of procedure that is,…
oracknows | April 20, 2010Day 3 of the 2010 AACR meeting dawns, and, sadly, I still have no posts. On the other hand, the reason I have no post yet today is because I've been attending the meeting and hanging out with old friends to the point where, when I got back to the hotel last night, I was just too damned tired to come up with anything coherent (which is really saying something).
What to do...what to do?
I know! Open thread time! It's the time-honored lazy blogger's fallback for times like these. True, I'm not PZ; so I doubt I could get the endless thread going that requires periodic resurrection as new posts,…
grrlscientist | April 19, 2010tags: evolutionary biology, evolutionary biogeography, molecular biology, medicine, ectoparasite, orificial hirudiniasis, mucosal leech infestation, hirudinoids, leech, Tyrannobdella rex, public health, zoology, PLoS ONE, anatomy, phylogenetic analysis, taxonomy, researchblogging.org,peer-reviewed research, journal club
Figure 1. Mucosally invasive hirudinoid leeches. Known from a wide variety of anatomical sites including eyes (A) as in this case involving Dinobdella ferox (B), mucosal leech species, as in a case involving Myxobdella annandalei (C), more frequently feed from the…
oracknows | April 19, 2010I've pivoted immediately from attending NECSS and participating in a panel on the infiltration of quackery into academia to heading down to Washington, DC for the AACR meeting. Then, after a packed day of meetings yesterday followed by spending yesterday evening with a friend whom I haven't seen for a long time, there's--gasp!--no new material today. Fortunately, there is this amusing little thing from two and a half years ago (which means it's new to you if you haven't been reading that long). It's also very appropriate, given that I'm at a big cancer research meeting and the decreasing…
grrlscientist | April 19, 2010tags: The Danger of Science Denial, vaccines, modern medicine, poverty, environmental destruction, science, cultural observation, film maker, animal behavior, Michael Specter, TEDTalks, streaming video
Vaccine-autism claims, "Frankenfood" bans, the herbal cure craze: All point to the public's growing fear (and, often, outright denial) of science and reason, says Michael Specter. He warns the trend spells disaster for human progress.
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their…
oracknows | April 16, 2010World Homeopathy Awareness Week ends today. In celebration, I can't resist one more swipe. So check out The (pseudo)Science of Homeopathy.
oracknows | April 16, 2010I'm almost beginning to feel sorry for Andrew Wakefield.
Well, not really. He did bring all the misery that's poured down upon him like an unending waterfall of woe, such as the British General Medical Council (GMC) finding him guilty of research misconduct and soon very likely to recommend that he be "struck off," a delightful British term for removing someone's medical license and thus striking him off the list of licensed physicians. Soon after, the editors of The Lancet retracted his infamous 1998 paper that purported to suggest that there was a link between the measles virus in the MMR…
oracknows | April 15, 2010World Homeopathy Awareness Week is fast coming to an end, unfortunately. And what would any sort of "homeopathy awareness" be without a commentary from James Randi?
I share with Randi his desire that people be aware of the true nature of homeopathy on this, the last day of World Homeopathy Awareness Week.
jstemwedel | April 15, 2010Making good ethical choices in the real world is hard, in large part because it requires us to find the best balance in responding to interested parties whose legitimate interests pull in different directions. The situation is further complicated by the fact that as we are trying to make the best ethical decision we can, or evaluating the ethical decision-making of others, we can't help but notice that there is not universal agreement about who counts as a party with legitimate interests that ought to be taken into account, let alone about how to weight the competing interests in the ethical…
oracknows | April 15, 2010Today is a great day.
Today, British science writer Simon Singh accomplished something I would never have believed possible, given British libel laws and a very bad ruling by Sir David Eady, the presiding judge, a ruling characterized as astonishingly illiberal. Despite the long odds, Singh appealed the ruling and actually won.
As a result, the British Chiropractic Association has thrown in the towel on its bogus libel action against Singh:
Having carefully considered its position in the light of the judgment of the Court of Appeal (1st April 2010), the British Chiropractic Association (BCA)…
oracknows | April 15, 2010Although this blog is not the Denialism Blog, there is no doubt that one of the overarching themes of Respectful Insolence has been, since its very beginning, combatting science denial. Go back to the very beginning and read a couple of my earliest posts, dating way back to 2004. In one of them I discussed cancer cure testimonials and why they are almost never evidence of efficacy of a given alt-med therapy, a post that, in my ever-insolent opinion, holds up with anything I write today. In another one, I wondered how intelligent people could use alt-med, and in another one I discussed "…
oracknows | April 14, 2010Michael Specter, author of Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives, on the danger of science denial:
He also wrote an editorial to go along with it. Given that combatting science denialism, be it the anti-vaccine movement, the "alt-med" movement, or "intelligent design" creationism, maybe I'll comment further tomorrow. In the meantime, watch the video...
palmd | April 14, 2010A young relative of mine recently asked me my thoughts about medicine as a career. It's a relatively common question in my mail bag, and a tough one to answer, especially when asked by strangers. Career choices are very personal, so I don't like to give advice as much as let people know what they can expect from a career in medicine. Here's one of the latest letters to show up in my inbox (edited by me for anonymity, etc.).
Dear Pal,
I'm a third year medical student at the end of my clerkships now, and I've found that I pretty well like everything. I did my pediatrics rotation early and…
oracknows | April 14, 2010With all the anti-vaccine nonsense going on and my feeling the obligation to fire a broadside at "America's doctor," there was a tasty bit of woo that totally escaped my attention from an old "friend" of the blog. Actually, he's an old "friend" of many skeptical blogs, both here on ScienceBlogs and around the blogosphere. In fact, it's a man so steeped in only the finest quantum woo that I once coined a name for it: Choprawoo.
Yes, we're talkin' Deepak "Quantum Consciousness" Chopra! He's back and woo-ier than ever in--where else?--that repository of woo, quackery, and anti-vaccine lunacy,…
palmd | April 13, 2010A few months ago, DrugMonkey reported on a study about how we as health care workers view narcotic users. Narcotic use and abuse is something we deal with every day and presents many challenges. Narcotics are an important tool for controlling pain and many different strategies have been used to try to prevent their legitimate use from changing to abuse. Despite this, prescription narcotic abuse is very common.
But narcotics are not the most frequently used addictive substances. For example, about a fifth of Americans smoke. But we as health care providers react differently to different…
oracknows | April 13, 2010Believe it or not, there was once a time when Dr. Mehmet Oz didn't bother me that much. At least, for all his flirting with woo, I never quite thought that he had completely gone over to the Dark Side. Although I probably knew deep down that I was fooling myself. Maybe it was because Dr. Oz is a surgeon--and not just a surgeon but a cardiac surgeon. After the enthusiastic embrace of pseudoscience by so many surgeons, and in particular Dr. Michael Egnor's embrace of "intelligent design" creationism and mind-brain dualism, maybe I didn't want to believe that yet another surgeon had fallen for a…
clock | April 12, 2010Whenever I read a paper from Karl-Arne Stokkan's lab, and I have read every one of them, no matter how dense the scientese language I always start imagining them running around the cold, dark Arctic, wielding enormous butterfly nets, looking for and catching reindeer (or ptarmigans, whichever animal the paper is about) to do their research.
If I was not so averse to cold, I'd think this would be the best career in science ever!
It is no surprise that their latest paper - A Circadian Clock Is Not Required in an Arctic Mammal (press release) - was widely covered by the media, both…
palmd | April 12, 2010In the Soviet Union, party membership was everything. Your job, your access to food and other consumer goods, and your apartment all depended on your standing with the party. And votes were simply a tool to provide a patina of legitimacy. No one who liked warm weather voted against the Party.
One of the many advantages of the protections provided by the U.S. constitution is that we generally cannot be hired or fired based on our personal or political beliefs. We also get to elect our leaders frequently. So it should be with a great sense of irony that various teabagger groups shout and…
oracknows | April 12, 2010Six days ago, celebrity spokescouple for the anti-vaccine movement, Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey, announced their breakup over Twitter. Some of us who have been following the antics of "Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey's Autism Organization - Generation Rescue" have wondered what this would mean for the pro-disease movement pushing the idea that vaccines cause autism. Would Jim Carrey still lend his considerable Hollywood clout, which is at least an order of magnitude greater than Jenny McCarthy's, to Generation Rescue? We didn't have long to wait. By Friday, Generation Rescue had completely…
j7uy5 | April 12, 2010This is a pretty neat idea. This technology, still under
development, promises to enable the printing of skin grafts. It
uses a technology similar to inkjet printers:
href="http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-04/cell-fabricator-prinks-healing-flesh-burn-victims">Inkjet
Cell Fabricator Prints Healing Flesh Directly Onto Wounds
Popular Science
By Stuart Fox
04.09.2010
As if fabricating a new heart from scratch wasn't impressive enough,
the doctors at the Wake Forest Institute of Regenerative Medicine have
come up with another astounding breakthrough. This time, they've…