medicine
oracknows | March 4, 2010Homeopaths are irritating.
They're irritating for a number of reasons. One is their magical thinking, and, make no mistake, their thinking is nothing but pure magic, sympathetic magic to be precise. That's all that the principle of "like cures like" really is at its heart. Normally, that principle states that "like produces like," but homeopathy reverses that principle by saying that, while like produces like at normal concentrations, like reverses like at high dilutions. Somehow the magical process of shaking the remedy very hard between each dilution step (called "succussion") imbues it…
palmd | March 3, 2010Sexual violence is a huge problem in the US. Among college-age women, for example, 20-25% report an attempted or completed rape while in college. Assault itself is prevalent enough to constitute a major public health problem, but add to that the sequelae---STIs, PTSD, fear, etc.---and sexual assault isn't just a major public health problem; it's one of our most common and devastating public health problems.
Given that most perpetrators of sexual violence are men, we have a target population for prevention. Now, some might argue that focusing on preventing sexual violence by educating men…
clock | March 3, 2010From the NC Museum of Natural Sciences:
OUR BODIES: The Final Frontier
Tuesday, March 23, 2010 - 6:30-8:30 pm with discussion beginning
at 7:00 followed by Q&A
Location: Tir Na Nog 218 South Blount Street, Raleigh, 833-7795
We have come to think of the world as known. It isn't. Even basic parts of our own bodies remain totally unexplored. For example, have you ever stopped to wonder why you are naked? Aside from naked mole rats, we are among the only land mammals to be essentially devoid of hair. Why? Join us for a discussion about the human body and its adaptations…
oracknows | March 3, 2010
Help! Help! I'm being repressed.
Somehow, that is the image I have gotten in the three weeks since the very last shred of Andrew Wakefield's facade of scientific respectability tumbled. As you may recall, at the end of January, the British General Medical Council found Andrew Wakefield, the man whose trial lawyer-funded, breathtakingly incompetent, and quite possibly fraudulent study in 1998 launched the most recent iteration of the anti-vaccine movement, not to mention a thousand (actually, many more) autism quacks, guilty of gross research misconduct, characterizing him as "irresponsible…
oracknows | March 2, 2010I hadn't really planned on writing anymore about animal rights extremists. The topic seemed as though it had played out over the few days. But those who've followed this blog know that I'm nothing if not tenacious when I grab onto a topic, and sometimes certain topics demand several posts. More importantly, over the last few days, I've had a minor infestation of animal rights extremists into my blog. Heck, Camille Marino even made an appearance. However, one animal rights apologist has been particularly persistent, someone named Douglas Watts, who's been a particularly persistent pest,…
oracknows | March 1, 2010I've had it with Dr. Oz.
Although I haven't seen his show today (for one thing, I work for a living; for another thing, even if I had today off I wouldn't waste it watching Dr. Oz's show), readers have informed me that yesterday, on March 1, 2010, Dr. Oz threw away whatever shred of respectability that he had left. On March 1, 2010, Dr. Oz had Deepak Chopra on his show.
But that wasn't enough.
After all, Chopra is a never-ending font of woo in categories too numerous to recount here, a small subset of which includes evolution, neuroscience, and medicine, but most of his woo is is fairly "…
palmd | March 1, 2010Here in the U.S. our rich are very rich and all but our poorest live better than most Haitians. In this context it's easy to lose perspective and to be a bit naive about the survival needs of the people in post-quake Haiti.
Or maybe that's being too generous. How hard could it be for an adult to realize that finding food, water, shelter, and basic medical care for yourself and your family take precedence over any other needs? Does it really take being subjected to life-threatening conditions yourself to have such a basic level of empathy?
The hordes of medical cultists descending on…
oracknows | March 1, 2010In my recent rehashing, rebranding, and repurposing an article addressing many of the flaws in the so-called scientific arguments against animal research often made by animal rights activists and extremists, I only briefly discussed one common argument among many, namely that computer simulations can replace the use of animals in medical research by modeling human physiology. I pointed out that, for a simulation to be valid, we have to understand quite a bit about the system beforehand and that simulations aren't much good if they can't be tested against reality. Mark Chu-Carroll decided to…
oracknows | March 1, 2010I spent a lot of time writing about animal rights extremists who have threatened to harass the children of an investigator whom they view as a "vivisector" and how they fetishize the very violence they decry. Unfortunately, I was disappointed to see that a fellow ScienceBlogger, namely Eric Michael Johnson of The Primate Diaries, appears to share some of the scientific misconceptions that the animal rights extremists when he prefaces an Open Letter to the Animal Liberation Front with:
Vivisection, or what in polite society is merely called animal experimentation, is a barbaric practice that…
oracknows | February 26, 2010I realize that there are two huge target-rich articles out there that my readers have been clamoring for me to comment on. First, there's a particularly silly and simplistic article by Nicholas Kristof about how it's supposedly the "toxins" causing autism (an article in which he apparently doesn't realize that Current Opinions in Pediatrics is not really a peer-reviewed journal but rather publishes review articles by invitation), and then there's a fawning TIME Magazine article bout Jenny McCarthy. When two such--shall we say?--target-rich articles appear on the same day, I'd be falling all…
grrlscientist | February 25, 2010tags: neuroscience, health, medicine, health care, blindness, poverty, India, Pawan Sinha, TEDTalks, streaming video
Pawan Sinha details his groundbreaking research into how the brain's visual system develops. Dr Sinha and his team provide free vision-restoring treatment to children born blind, and then study how their brains learn to interpret visual data. The work offers insights into neuroscience, engineering and even autism.
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 | February 25, 2010As much as I hate to bring more attention than I did a couple of days ago to the truly evil animal rights extremist website run by a truly despicable animal rights terrorist wannabe Camille Marino, a website whose very title, Negotiation Is Over (NIO) tells you everything you need to know about the attitude of the loons running the site, especially given their targeting of researchers' children for harassment, I can't help but notice that the efforts of fellow science bloggers and myself have been noticed, both at NIO and another animal rights site Thomas Paine Corner.
Good.
The reaction of…
palmd | February 25, 2010Ambivalent Academic made a fascinating observation today about certain parts of the animal rights movement:
What really strikes me is that a lot of this rhetoric reads like snuff-porn.
[...]
There is an undercurrent of appetite for the kind of violence they describe. It reads as if they take pleasure in imagining the violence they describe,... and they are inviting the reader to join in that sadistic pleasure. You can almost hear the drool.
I'm sure any sophisticated psychiatrist might have made this sort of observation, but I'm not even an unsophisticated psychiatrist. The images and…
emjohnson | February 25, 2010 Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulip, Rembrandt (1632)I have been extremely ill this week which has prevented me from posting as often as I would have liked. However, I have been keeping up on the suggestions offered to explain the nearly 300-year-old medical mystery involving "hairy crustaceous substances" voided in a woman's urine. Of all the potential explanations for this phenomenon I think Quinn O. nailed it with his diagnosis of pilimiction as the result of a dermoid tumor. In doing a little research on this condition I discovered that this is caused when an abnormal growth develops…
oracknows | February 25, 2010Pity the poor Haitians.
Not only is their nation dirt poor, but to kick off 2010, they suffered an earthquake that killed approximately a quarter of a million people, left at least 300,000 injured, and resulted in 1,000,000 homeless. Huge swaths of its capital of Port au Prince and Léogâne, among other cities, had been leveled. The devastation was (and remains) almost beyond comprehension, and it will be years, if not decades, before Haiti can recover. Disease and hunger are rampant. In the immediate aftermath, looting and violence were common.
Unfortunately, disaster seems to attract…
oracknows | February 24, 2010I have to admit, this one made me chuckle.
In an earlier post today, in which I expressed my outrage at animal rights terrorists targeting an investigator's children for harassment at their school, I asked the following question:
That reminds me: Where were these animal rights loons when "Andrew Wakefield was torturing baby Macacque monkeys in the name of horrendously bad science designed to be used as a "made for court" study against vaccine manufacturers?
Paul Browne responded in the comments:
Perhaps crank magnetism also acts as a force field that protects cranks from other cranks.
I…
palmd | February 24, 2010I have this friend. She used to be a scientist, but changed fields, earning a Ph.D. in philosophy. She now studies and teaches the ethics of the practice of science. I'm sure most of my readers understand how important this is. Without transparent, thoughtful, and informed discussions of ethics, the practice of science and medicine would be a disaster. The past has seen many egregious practices, such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, Nazi medical experimentation, and the historical abuse of the poor and minorities by science, but ethical dilemmas and disasters are not a detail of history…
oracknows | February 24, 2010Remember Dario Ringach?
He's the scientist who has endured a prolonged campaign of harassment because of his animal research. I first heard of him in 2006, when, after a campaign of threatening phone calls, people frightening his children, and demonstrations in front of his home, gave up doing primate research. Terrorism and intimidation worked, but who could blame Dr. Ringach? He was afraid for his family. That's because it was more than just threatening e-mails and phone calls, but rather the campaign of intimidation included masked thugs banging on the windows of his house at night,…
palmd | February 23, 2010Several months ago, Dr. Val Jones wrote about a growing fad in the treatment of musculoskeletal disorders. The therapy, called platelet rich plasma (PRP) injection, involves taking a small amount of blood from a patient, spinning it down in a centrifuge, and then injecting the plasma component into...somewhere. This treatment is becoming increasingly popular, and can be very lucrative for doctors. But does it work?
Blood platelets are very biologically active particles and plasma is not a bland fluid. Platelets and plasma contain many biologically active molecules, some of which may be…