medicine
oracknows | April 11, 2010It has now been nearly two months since Andrew Wakefield was forced to resign from Thoughtful House in the wake of his being found guilty of research misconduct by the British General Medical Council (GMC), the withdrawal of Wakefield's infamous 1998 Lancet paper, and the withdrawal of Wakefield's last grab at scientific credibility, his infamous hepatitis B "monkey study." After a period of silence, over the last week, Wakefield has started to pop up in the public eye again, most recently last week in an interview for an independent filmmaker that is getting wide play in the anti-vaccine…
oracknows | April 10, 2010As I pointed out yesterday, World Homeopathy Awareness Week began yesterday. One common question that's asked about homeopathy goes something like this: If homeopathy is just water, then what's the harm?
Here's the harm:
Part 1
Part 2
Homeopathy is magical thinking, far more religious or superstitious in nature than medical or scientific. And this form of magical thinking can lead people people to eschew effective medical therapy, with tragic results.
oracknows | April 10, 2010Today, April 10, is the first day of World Homeopathy Awareness Week (WHAW), or, as I like to call it, World Sympathetic Magic Awareness Week. Now, given my dim view of homeopathy, in which I view it as nothing more than, well, sympathetic magic, you'd think I wouldn't want people to pay attention to WHAW. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is because I view homeopathy as nothing more than quackery based on magical thinking that I actually want people to be aware of it, starting with some of the more hilarious bits that homeopaths have published over the last year. Like this bit:…
clock | April 9, 2010Next American Scientist Pizza Lunch:
It's not often that we get to dive a little deeper into a topic encountered at a recent pizza lunch talk. But we will this month. In March, Geoff Ginsburg from Duke briefed us well on the current science regarding genomic (or personalized) medicine and its promising applications. At noon on Tuesday, April 20, Jim Evans from UNC-Chapel Hill will discuss the complexity of implementing this new medicine with a talk entitled: Personalized Medicine: Too Much Information / Too Little Information. Like Dr. Ginsburg, Dr. Evans is a doctor-scientist. He is also…
oracknows | April 9, 2010Is chiropractic woo?
I'm often asked that question, and my answer has usually been something along the lines of, "It depends on what it is used for." Of course, there's no doubt that the "theory" behind chiropractic, namely that so-called "subluxations" of the spine are the source of nearly all disease, is a load of the purest woo. After all, going back to the origin of chiropractic in 1895, you will recall that Daniel David Palmer essentially made up chiropractic out of whole cloth when he claimed to have restored the hearing of a deaf janitor by "adjusting" a bump on his spine. As a result…
palmd | April 8, 2010
As an internist, my specialty is the prevention and treatment of adult diseases. One of the most common of these diseases is diabetes.
There are two main variants of diabetes: Type I (juvenile) and Type II. Type II accounts for about 95% of the 20 million cases of diabetes in the U.S. Diabetes is can be a disabling and deadly disease, but not because of the blood sugar fluctuations per se. High blood sugar damages blood vessels, which in turn damages the organs they supply.
We generally divide diabetic complications into two categories: microvascular (small blood vessel), and macrovascular…
oracknows | April 8, 2010Eat your fruits and vegetables.
Hasn't that been a constant refrain over the years from public health authorities? Certainly, I have. The benefits of eating fruits and vegetables have been widely touted, and seemingly with good reason. A diet high in fruits and vegetables, it is said, reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease and cancer. In the case of the latter, it as claimed that potential decreases in the risks of some cancers could be as high as 50% a day. As a result, the National Cancer Institute developed the 5-A-Day program, whose goal was to increase people's consumption of fruits…
oracknows | April 7, 2010One advantage of blogging is that I can sometimes tap into the knowledge of my readers to help me out. Some of you may recall a little something I created a couple of years ago known as the Academic Woo Aggregator. Basically, it was a list of medical schools and academic medical centers in the U.S. and Canada with departments or divisions of "integrative medicine" that promote what has been termed "quackademic medicine."
Unfortunately, I've been very remiss in updating it. The last update was in May 2008. I think it's long past due for an update. I haven't decided whether I will post such an…
grrlscientist | April 7, 2010tags: education, public outreach, SciCafe, science cafe, AMNH, American Museum of Natural History, NYC, streaming video
Who: Kristin Baldwin, Assistant Professor at Scripps Research's Department of Cell Biology
What: free public presentation, "The Future of Stem Cells"
When: TONIGHT at 700pm
Where: Gottesman Hall of Planet Earth, American Museum of Natural History, Enter at the 81st Street (Rose Center) [directions and maps]
Cost: FREE, and there is a cash bar too! (must be 21+ with ID)
What if your cells could be engineered to grow your own replacement organs? Glimpse the future of…
oracknows | April 7, 2010Beware, North Carolina. Beware. Your law has become quack-friendly to the point where doctors can do almost anything.
Why, you may reasonably wonder, am I saying this? The answer is what appears to be the end of a long and painful story of cancer quackery and anti-vaccine celebrity that has tainted North Carolina for years now. Do you remember Dr. Rashid Buttar? Regular readers know who he is, as he's been a recurring character on this blog since the very beginning. Most recently, he figured prominently in the case of Desiree Jennings, the young woman who claimed that the flu vaccine caused a…
grrlscientist | April 7, 2010tags: Sex, Drugs and HIV -- Let's Get Rational, behavior, disease, prostitution, gay men, drug addicts, sex, STD, HIV, AIDS, poverty, medicine, public health, Compassion Conundrum, Elizabeth Pisani, TEDTalks, streaming video
Armed with bracing logic, wit and her "public-health nerd" glasses, Elizabeth Pisani reveals the myriad of inconsistencies in today's political systems that prevent our dollars from effectively fighting the spread of HIV. Her research with at-risk populations -- from junkies in prison to sex workers on the street in Cambodia -- demonstrates the sometimes counter-intuitive…
oracknows | April 6, 2010Since a whole bunch of you have been sending me this and posting it in my comments, I don't see how I can avoid mentioning it. Apparently it's being reported on The Superficial, Celebitchy, and People.com that Jim Carrey and Jenny McCarthy have broken up. I must admit that it's hard not to feel a bit of schadenfreude over this and wonder if maybe Jim Carrey was getting tired of the whole anti-vaccine scene, as The Superficial suggested:
I can only assume this has everything to do with Jenny McCarthy being completely shot down by the medical community only to continuing claiming a Playboy…
grrlscientist | April 6, 2010tags: education, public outreach, SciCafe, science cafe, AMNH, American Museum of Natural History, NYC, streaming video
Who: Kristin Baldwin, Assistant Professor at Scripps Research's Department of Cell Biology
What: free public presentation, "The Future of Stem Cells"
When: Wednesday, 7 April at 700pm
Where: Gottesman Hall of Planet Earth, American Museum of Natural History, Enter at the 81st Street (Rose Center) [directions and maps]
Cost: FREE, and there is a cash bar too! (must be 21+ with ID)
What if your cells could be engineered to grow your own replacement organs? Glimpse the…
palmd | April 6, 2010Bad medical ideas often start with good intentions. Most doctors are interested in preventing and treating disease, and some diseases are particularly challenging. Some rise to this challenge, forming clever hypotheses and finding accurate ways to test them, but others aren't so successful. Sometimes, hypotheses are too implausible to be worth spending much time on. Sometimes, the method used to test a hypothesis is simply not valid.
This story begins on the website Age of Autism. AoA is one of the homes of the antivaccination movement and gives a lot of time to those who still believe…
oracknows | April 6, 2010He's baa-aack.
You knew he couldn't stay gone for long, I'm sure. He's just like the zombie who rises again just as the hero turns his back, thinking the zombie dead, or the blond terrorist in Die Hard who appeared to have met his end hanging from a chain only to appear later in the movie, just when it looks as though it's all over and Bruce Willis has triumphed, to try to take a shot at him. That's right. I'm referring to the anti-vaccine quack whose trial lawyer-funded, incompetent, and probably fraudulent research launched a thousand autism quacks looking to "cure" autism "vaccine injury…
oracknows | April 5, 2010About four months ago, the skeptical blogosphere was abuzz about a tragic story. The story was that of a Belgian man named Rom Houben, who had been unfortunate enough to have been in a motor vehicle collision and suffered serious brain injury. That brain injury left him in a comatose state, which had been diagnosed as a persistent vegetative state. What brought him worldwide prominence was a claim by neurologist Steven Laureys that he was not in a persistent vegetative state at all, but was rather fully conscious and "locked in," meaning that he could see, hear, and feel everything but could…
clock | April 5, 2010Long-time observers of the progressive blogopshere are likely aware of Barbara O' Brien and her blogging at The Mahablog, Crooks and Liars, AlterNet, and elsewhere. She was a panelist at the Yearly Kos Convention and a featured guest blogger at the Take Back America Conference in Washington, DC.
Now, Barbara has a new project - Mesothelioma Blog - where she is dissecting the Health Care Bill, the public concern of health care, and related issues in health care in the United States. The topics include health reform, public health, and asbestos contamination.. Check out Mesothelioma Blog…
oracknows | April 4, 2010Remember John Benneth? He's a homeopath who runs a website called The Science of Homeopathy and produced a woo-tastic video claiming to show us how homeopathy works. Steve Novella also took on his video. For his trouble, he was rewarded with one of the most hilariously off-base attacks I've ever seen, even from anti-vaccine loons. So full of awesome looniness was the video that it induced in me a distinct sense of envy. After all, all I have is J.B. Handley attacking me.
Now, for reasons that elude me, Mr. Benneth has produced a second video. It's just as outrageous. In fact, it's even more…
palmd | April 3, 2010Some crazy, currently unbloggable crap is going down around Casa Pal this week, so I'm going to have to open up a bloggy doggy bag for you. I have a nice piece in the works for Sunday or Monday which is brand, spanking new. This was originally published on 5/6/2009. --PalMD
Some bad ideas refuse to die. Others die and then come back to eat your brains. Of course, zombies don't just rise from the grave for no reason. They need some sort of animating principle, like meteors, puffer fish toxin, a voodoo priestess, or all three.
Brain-eating, measles-promoting zombies. Not pictured:…
oracknows | April 2, 2010Every so often someone shows me something that so amuses me that I either must have one or must blog about it. This time around, it was my wife. Last weekend, we were reading the newspapers. On the weekend, we happen to get the New York Times as well as our local newspaper. There, ensconsed in the USA Weekend advertisement section stuffed into the local newspaper, I saw it. I saw it, and I had to have it.
Well, not really. But I had to blog about it anyway.
Ask yourself: When you're in pain, what do you need? Is it enough just to have the power of magnet woo to heal you? Of course not! You…