medicine
oracknows | July 29, 2009I realize this is well over a month old, and maybe some of you have seen it before, but I haven't. It's a fascinating look by surgeon and inventor Catherine Mohr at the history of surgery and how it has evolved over the centuries.
One thing that talks like this remind me is just how much surgery has evolved just in the short span of my career thus far, since I went to medical school in the mid-1980s. Indeed, I undertook my surgical training right in the middle of the laparoscopic revolution and experienced some of the disconnect that older surgeons must have experienced. You see, I went…
palmd | July 29, 2009In part I, I presented you wish some admittedly artificial categories of problems in our health care system. First we discussed patient-centered problems. Today, we'll look at problems posed by medical science and practice itself.
Medical science
The science of medicine is not always compatible with the practice of medicine. Medicine is still largely a cottage industry, with hard-working, independent practitioners working in small or medium-sized practices. Aside from licensing statutes, there are no official guidelines that doctors must follow to be officially "certified". Once a…
oracknows | July 29, 2009A while back, I wrote about the grievous miscarriage of justice that occurred to Simon Singh in the form of a ruling against him in the libel suit brought against him by the British Chiropractic Association. Suffice it to say, that the BCA is using the U.K.'s exceedingly plaintiff-friendly libel laws to silence legitimate criticism of the dubious practices of its members. This resulted in a campaign from the British pro-science organization Sense About Science to Keep Libel Laws Out of Science.
Now, I learn that, true to Internet tradition, the attempt to suppress information or punish…
palmd | July 28, 2009Yes, I know, the two are not mutually exclusive, but I still think it's a good title. The latest bit of evil idiocy? More fanning of fears about health care reform. Don't misunderstand, there's plenty of potential pitfalls to health care reform, but Rush is an idiot. He calls it "Five Freedoms You'll Lose Under Obamacare". Let's see what he's talking about.
I'll let you in on his absurdist intro just for the fun of it:
One of the best points that anybody could make in describing the uniqueness and greatness of this country, do you realize that the history of the world is tyranny? The…
palmd | July 28, 2009I know only one certainty regarding health care reform in the US: I won't be a significant policy maker. And neither, likely, will you. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't educate ourselves, try to understand the problems and potential solutions, because whatever our government implements over the next year, health care reform is going to be a process, rather than a single, achievable endpoint.
I've been consciously avoiding writing this piece, but people keep bugging me. One of the reasons I've avoided it is because I'm not a policy expert, and I don't want to do the extensive research…
ejohnson | July 28, 2009
As President Obama continues to garner support for his healthcare reform plan, ScienceBloggers are also taking a look at the issues in play. Peter Lipson of White Coat Underground investigates the perception that centralized, salary-based medicine is more efficient than a system based on private practice. Revere of Effect Measure discusses the dangerous tendency to eliminate all reserve capacity--spare hospital beds--in order to cut costs. Mike the Mad Biologist argues against what he calls a mislabeled "centrist" position on reform. And Razib of Gene Expression presents a glimpse of what…
grrlscientist | July 28, 2009tags: Onion News Network, ONN, children's healthcare, humor, funny, satire, fucking hilarious, streaming video
A recent study reveals that children are strongly opposed to healthcare -- according to respondents between ages of three and eight years old, the most common answer to the question "do you want to go to the doctor more?" was a resounding "NOOOOOO!" [1:35]
oracknows | July 28, 2009In discussions of that bastion of what Harriet Hall (a.k.a. The SkepDoc) likes to call "tooth fairy science," where sometimes rigorous science, sometimes not, is applied to the study of hypotheses that are utterly implausible and incredible from a basic science standpoint (such as homeopathy or reiki), the National Center of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), I've often taken Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) to task. That's because Senator Harkin is undeniably the father of that misbegotten beast that has sucked down over $2.5 billion of taxpayer money with nothing to show for it. It's…
palmd | July 27, 2009Smelting: gerund, the act of catching smelt (a small Great Lakes fish) by dipping a bucket in the water during the smelt run season: ex. Smelting is like shooting fish in a barrel.
Sometimes it's too easy. You see, when you criticize someone for being wrong, that's one thing, but when you imply that they are wrong because their entire world-view is incorrect, well, sometimes you get a response.
In a piece last week I was very critical of a new diet and it's creator, and she apparently watches the web, because she came by to comment.
From reading her website and her comment, I get the…
oracknows | July 27, 2009Last week, I expressed my surprise and dismay that the Atheist Alliance International chose Bill Maher for the Richard Dawkins Award. I was dismayed because Maher has championed pseudoscience, including dangerous antivaccine nonsense, germ theory denialism complete with repeating myths about Louis Pasteur supposedly recanting on his deathbed, a href="http://oracknows.blogspot.com/2005/12/bill-maher-anti-vax-wingnut.html">hostility towards "Western medicine" and an affinity for "alternative medicine," a history of sympathy to HIV/AIDS denialists, and the activities of PETA through his…
oracknows | July 26, 2009While I'm holed up in my Sanctum Sanctorum grinding out prose that I hope will keep my lab funded for another three years, I'm going to fall back on a lazy blogging trick to keep the posts flowing for one more day, namely the obnoxious reader e-mail. (Don't worry, there'll be new insolence tomorrow.) This time, I'm feeling the love from a reader named Shawn, who, unlike yesterday's correspondent, was not polite. It's not as wingnutty as some of what P.Z gets (come on, guys, you can do better!), but it's entertaining nonetheless:
You and Stephen Barrett should be butt buddies. Mr quackwatch…
palmd | July 26, 2009Lawmakers and the public in general have no idea how the business and practice of medicine operates. None. When you read statements from many representatives, you see such simplistic, anhistoric thinking that pessimism about health care reform is the only logical response.
Or so it seems from media reports. The New York Times, whose quality seems to be dropping by the femtosecond, reported this week on salaried vs. traditionally paid physicians. This could have been a terrific article, if the reporter knew anything.
Let me catch you up a bit. Doctors are generally paid in one of two ways…
oracknows | July 25, 2009Last night, I received an e-mail from a fairly well-known atheist (no, it wasn't Richard Dawkins, although that would have been totally cool) criticizing me for my post about Bill Maher's complete unsuitability for the Richard Dawkins Award. I'm not going to reprint my response to that part, because, well, his criticisms were pretty much a boilerplate of other blowback I've received from the post. What caught my attention more was that he noticed a couple of posts of mine about Jenny McCarthy.
I'll paraphrase, because I don't have this person's permission to post his e-mail. Not that that…
oracknows | July 24, 2009It's been a pretty good week on the ol' blog here, with lots of good material to draw from, finishing up yesterday with my expression of disdain for the choice of Bill Maher for the Richard Dawkins Award. I expected some blowback for my criticism, and I got some. However, I was surprised at how mild it was, at least from the one person I expected to defend the decision, P.Z. Myers. Quite frankly, his defense of the decision to select Bill Maher struck me as enormously half-hearted, in essence saying, "Sure he's a wingnut, but he's our wingnut, and, oh, by the way, all that quackery he…
oracknows | July 23, 2009The only thing he's left out is a takedown of Nazi analogies. After all, Nazis wanted universal health care, too, except that they wanted to guarantee the health of the volk more than any individual:
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palmd | July 23, 2009Alternative medicine practitioners love to coin magic words, but really, how can you blame them? Real medicine has a Clarkeian quality to it*; it's so successful, it seems like magic. But real doctors know that there is nothing magic about it. The "magic" is based on hard work, sound scientific principles, and years of study.
Magic words are great. Terms like mindfulness, functional medicine, or endocrine disruptors take a complicated problem and create a simple but false answer with no real data to back it up. More often than not, the magic word is the invention of a single person who…
oracknows | July 23, 2009Although I often don't agree with him and have cooled on him lately, I still rather like--even admire--Richard Dawkins. While it's true I've taken him to task for having a tin ear for bioethics, lamented his walking blindly right into charges of anti-Semitism (no, I don't think he's an anti-Semite), and half-defended/half-criticized him for seeming to endorsing eugenics. What's really irritated me about him in the past, though, is his use of the "Neville Chamber atheist" gambit that I so detest, so much so that I once featured Dawkins in a Hitler Zombie episode (albeit not as the victim). On…
palmd | July 22, 2009Since I abhor the entombment of real news beneath the Michael Jackson story, I didn't think I'd be posting about it, but here I am. You see, Jackson was reportedly under the "care" of a privately hired physician when he died, and was being treated with medications not normally used outside the hospital. I have a problem with this.
According to the Times, authorities are looking for records at the doctor's Houston office. That's not a bad idea.
I'm not a lawyer, and I don't know if: 1) the doctor was licensed to practice in California, or 2) if a doctor from Texas may practice in…
oracknows | July 22, 2009This may be the burningest stupid I've ever seen about vaccines. Maybe. It's so hard to tell given how much idiocy I've seen about vaccines.
I know, it's really, really hard to believe me when I say that what follows deserves to leap right up to the top ranks of brain-melting moronicity. After all, over the last four years, I've delved into the deepest, darkest chasms of pure anti-vaccine stupid. I've subjected myself to the incredible idiocy that is Jenny McCarthy and Kent Heckenlively. I've delved into the most vile cesspits of anti-vaccine propaganda, cesspits so full of misinformation and…
oracknows | July 21, 2009Ever since Jenny McCarthy hitched her fading star to the anti-vaccine movement and managed to get Oprah Winfrey to go along for the ride, she has become the public face of the anti-vaccine movement. Unfortunately, there hasn't been nearly as much blowback as there should be in the mainstream press, although bloggers have been all over McCarthy's promotion of the worst lies of the anti-vaccine movement and advocacy of autism quackery. Then I came across this the other day:
I'm of two minds on this. While it's a good thing to see cartoonists ridiculing Jenny McCarthy and Oprah for their…