medicine
oracknows | June 29, 2009A couple of weeks ago, NEWSWEEK science columnist Sharon Begley wrote an article entitled From Bench To Bedside: Academia slows the search for cures. It was a rather poorly argued bit of polemic, backed up only with anecdotes that came across as sour grapes by scientists whose grant proposals the NIH had decided not to fund, and based on many misconceptions she had regarding basic science versus translational research, journal impact factors, and how journals actually determine what they will publish. Not suprisingly, Begley's article caught flak from others, including Mike the Mad Biologist…
palmd | June 28, 2009(NB: as is usual with my more "science-y" posts, oversimplification is the rule. --PalMD)
It's been a very long while since I've updated my series on cancer. I keep meaning to, but you know how things go. Lately, though, I've been curious about radiation oncology, the use of ionizing radiation to treat cancers. What set me off was a recent Times article about some pretty crappy practices. Radiation oncology requires a very thorough education in physics and medicine and the field attracts some of the best minds, but no field is immune to unethical behavior (which in this case I feel is…
oracknows | June 27, 2009If you had the choice between the "standard" option for insurance or the naturopathic option, which would you choose?
(Click to see the full cartoon; it's a bit old. But I hadn't seen it before; so it's new to me.)
Of course, this is the very reason alt-med boosters don't want anyone to have to choose. They want to "integrate" their quackery into scientific medicine.
oracknows | June 26, 2009If there's one thing that I've found that's simultaneously gratifying and somewhat infuriating over the last year or so, it's that the skeptical movement has finally really noticed that anti-vaccination movement in a big way. Those of us who've been on the blogospheric front lines for the last few years have sometimes been frustrated that this issue, at least until recently, got so little attention outside of our dedicated little circle and the much larger circle of anti-vaccine zealots and the quacks who enable and encourage them.
That's not to say that there weren't some prominent skeptics…
oracknows | June 26, 2009I have a love-hate relationship with Mike Adams.
Mike Adams, regular readers of this blog, is the "intellectual force" between that repository of quackery and sheer lunacy, NaturalNews.com. I hate him because he is a vile human being who cheerfully promotes bogus therapies on his website. (You know, I think we skeptics should borrow Simon Singh's phraseology at every opportunity.) He's also an opportunistic ghoul who never, ever misses an opportunity to take advantage of a celebrity who's suffering from or dying of cancer to make breathlessly hysterical claims that they would have lived if…
oracknows | June 25, 2009Unfortunately, I saw this coming, although I had thought that it might be a few more months. Farrah Fawcett has lost her three year battle with anal cancer:
Farrah Fawcett, an actress and television star whose good looks and signature flowing hairstyle influenced a generation of women and bewitched a generation of men, beginning with a celebrated pinup poster, died Thursday morning in Santa Monica, Calif. She was 62 and lived in West Los Angeles.
Her death, at St. John's Health Center, was caused by anal cancer, which she had been battling since 2006, said her spokesman, Paul Bloch.
To an…
palmd | June 25, 2009Medical science rarely undergoes revolutionary changes. Progress tends to be slow and steady, with new ideas undergoing extensive investigation before being implemented. This pace can be frustrating and every once in a while, someone comes along who thinks they have discovered The Secret to It All. Despite the apparent insanity of such grandiosity (or perhaps because if it), you can always rely on the Huffington Post to give it a platform. (Interestingly, most of these Ideas can't be simultaneously correct, but that doesn't seem to bother HuffPo).
The latest Revolutionary Thinker is Dr…
oracknows | June 25, 2009Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported that the reason for Apple CEO Steve Job's five month medical leave of absence from Apple is that he needed a liver transplant, which, according to the story, he underwent a couple of months ago in Memphis. In my discussion, I assumed, for the most part, the most likely clinical scenario, namely that Steve Jobs' insulinoma had metastasized to his liver and that the liver transplant had been done for that indication, but, as some pointed out, it was possible that Jobs had somehow fried his liver without his tumor having metastasized. Unlikely,…
oracknows | June 24, 2009The other day, I came across an update on the Daniel Hauser saga. Specifically, I commented about how he is not only undergoing the chemotherapy ordered by his doctors. As you may recall, Hauser is a 13-year-old boy who, after being diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma and undergoing one round of chemotherapy, refused to undergo any more. His mother supported him, and ultimately a judge had to order Daniel's parents to make sure that he underwent standard therapy for his very curable form of cancer. Daniel's mother Colleen took off with him shortly afterward, rumored to be heading for Tijuana.…
palmd | June 24, 2009Everyone who uses the internet leaves some sort of footprint, even if it's just a string of visited addresses. This presence is magnified if you've ever been in the news, been listed on a website (e.g., as faculty), or if you write a blog. Social networking sites such as facebook and Twitter add a whole new dimension of online presence. Everyone should be concerned about what their online presence says about them (if your public Amazon wish list is full of sex toys, for example...) but physicians should have special concerns which fall into some broad categories. First, we'll briefly…
oracknows | June 24, 2009At the risk of repeating myself (but, then, since when did such concerns ever stop me before?), I'll just start out by mentioning that, of all the non-herbal "alternative" medicine remedies out there, I used to give a bit of a pass to acupuncture. No, I never did buy any of that nonsense about how sticking thin needles into the skin at points along various "meridians" somehow "redirects the flow of qi," that mystical life force upon which so much woo, particularly woo based on Eastern mysticism and traditional Chinese medicine depends. However, because acupuncture involves an actual physical…
grrlscientist | June 24, 2009tags: medicine, surgery, robots, Catherine Mohr, TEDTalks, streaming video
In this video, surgeon and inventor Catherine Mohr tours the history of surgery (and its pre-painkiller, pre-antiseptic past), then demonstrates some of the newest tools for surgery through tiny incisions, performed using nimble robot hands. Fascinating -- and very graphic. This is an inspiring presentation, but she neglected to mention all the other people who contribute to this technology, from engineers and computer designers to scientists. [21:28]
TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and…
oracknows | June 23, 2009Last week, I wrote about the FDA's warning about the zinc-containing "homeopathic" cold remedy known as Zicam. Basically, Zicam was approved without testing to show it to be both safe and efficacious because it slipped in using an old 1938 law that allows homeopathic remedies to bypass the usual process for FDA approval. Too bad that, due to the zinc in Zicam, it can cause anosmia, or the loss of the sense of smell.
Stephen Colbert, of course, thinks it must be the Democrats who are plotting against one of Rush Limbaugh's main sponsors:
The Colbert Report
Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c…
ejohnson | June 23, 2009
As the field of health care changes, so do its most staid institutions. Since its reorganization in 1900, the American Medical Association (AMA) served as a body of powerful political influence during the 20th century. But as Revere of Effect Measure and Joseph of The Corpus Callosum explain, membership in the AMA began declining with the advent of Medicare and corporate health care--its pull with legislators became less relevant to practicing physicians. Now, the AMA has released a statement of opposition to the public health care option in President Obama's health care reform plan, leading…
ddobbs | June 23, 2009
I can't claim to be 'objective' or neutral on health-care reform -- but who can? Everybody needs health care, some more than others. I need it less than most, as my family and I are, knock on wood, generally blessed with good health. Even so, we laid out $18K last year for health care, still owe money -- and no one in the family ever entered an ER, got a scan, received a prescription costing more than $100, or got admitted to a hospital. And we're among the lucky ones who can (supposedly) afford insurance. (We pay $10K for a plan with a $5K deductible.) This is one of several reasons I'm…
oracknows | June 23, 2009Over the last month or so, I've written numerous posts about Daniel Hauser. Danny, as you recall, is the 13-year-old Minnesota boy who was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma back in February, underwent one round of chemotherapy for it, and then decided that he wanted to pursue quackery instead of more chemotherapy. His mother supported his decision and justified it by appealing to a faux Native American religion known as Nemenhah, which is, in reality, nothing more than an excuse for its originator, a wannabe who named himself Chief Cloudpiler, to sell quackery under the guise of "Native…
oracknows | June 22, 2009It's no secret that, when it comes to computers, my preferred axe has been the Apple Macintosh. Indeed, back in the 1983-1984 school year I was in college living in a house with five other guys, and one of my roommates was a a total Apple geek. He had, as one might expect, an Apple IIe, and I immediately decided that, when it came to computers, I definitely liked the Apple product better than the IBM PC that my other roommate had. Of course, at the time I was nowhere well off enough to be able to afford either, but these two roommates were both computer science majors. They had to have a…
j7uy5 | June 22, 2009It was the second-most-blogged article on the NYT when I got up this
morning; now, it is the first-most-blogged. It is the article
that reports on a survey that shows 72% support for a government-run
health insurance program. The program would be similar to
Medicare, but would be available to persons under 65 and not on Social
Security Disability.
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/health/policy/21poll.html">In
Poll, Wide Support for Government-Run Health
By KEVIN SACK and MARJORIE CONNELLY
Published: June 20, 2009
Americans overwhelmingly support substantial changes to the…
oracknows | June 20, 2009Homeopathy Awareness Week is almost over, alas. I hope I've done a good job at making my readers even more "aware" of just how silly the principles of homeopathy are. To finish up, I thought I'd repost a bit of "classic insolence" from three years ago, because it's dedicated to one of the most amazing homeopathic woo-meisters I've ever seen: Lionel Milgrom. It was also the very first post I ever did for Your Friday Dose of Woo.
Enjoy!
While thinking about ways to make the blog better, I wondered if I should emulate some of my colleagues, many of whom have regular features every week, often on…
palmd | June 19, 2009I've been a bit remiss in my coverage of the Simon Singh case, reviewed in detail by Phil Plait, among others. As many of my readers already know, respected science writer Simon Singh is being sued for libel in England by the British Chiroquacktic Association (BCA) because he described some of their treatments as "bogus". Despite the fact that he underplayed his hand, he is still getting his legal ass whooped over in the motherland, thanks to their idiotic libel laws.
Be that as it may, the BCA wasn't complaining about Singh being wrong, but about him being mean. You see, "bogus" seemed to…