medicine
Probably you've been reading about the new swine flu outbreak on Effect Measure and Aetiology. At this stage, public health officials are keeping careful watch on this epidemic to try to keep it from becoming a pandemic.
And this is the news in the back of my mind as I need to arrange air travel in the coming months. Nothing makes me want to book airline tickets more than the project of being in a metal tube with germy humans.
I did some poking around to see what kinds of measures the airlines might be taking to avoid helping spread swine flu and the people carrying it around.
US Airways…
Christmas greeting card, school unknown, circa 1920.
Dittrick Medical History Center
from Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine 1880-1930
Slate has an intriguing new review by Barron Lerner of a book called Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine 1880-1930, by John Harley Warner and James M. Edmonson. The book delves into the turn-of-the-century practice of photographing medical students with cadavers - photos that today read as weird, grotesque, even offensive.
The photos unearthed by Warner and Edmonson depict an astonishing variety of…
palmd |
I used to teach at a hospital downtown. While on rounds, I'd often ask my residents and students where they were born, and get answers such as, "Alabama", "Kerala, India", "Damascus, Syria". Inevitably, they'd ask me where I was born, and I'd point to the floor and say, "Right here".
"You mean in Michigan?"
"No," I'd explain, "I mean right here in this hospital."
So I have a certain pride about my hometown. I like Detroit, and although I, like many others born there, don't live in the city, I always hope for a recovery. So it saddens me whenever I see news stories that paint my natal…
razib |
See FuturePundit & Effect Measure. Also see H5N1. CDC recommends (especially for residents of California & Texas):
* Cover your nose and mouth with a tissue when you cough or sneeze. Throw the tissue in the trash after you use it.
* Wash your hands often with soap and water, especially after you cough or sneeze. Alcohol-based hands cleaners are also effective.
* Try to avoid close contact with sick people.
* If you get sick, CDC recommends that you stay home from work or school and limit contact with others to keep from infecting them.
* Avoid touching your eyes, nose or mouth. Germs…
palmd |
The other day, I wrote about the fake health experts at the Huffington Post. Prominent among them is "Dr" Patricia Fitzgerald. Now, we already talked about how writing a health piece in a major media outlet and using the title of "Dr" can be deceptive; the reader is likely to assume you are a medical doctor. In Fitzgerald's case, she isn't anything resembling a medical doctor, or even a health expert.
Like many of HuffPo's so-called health experts, she's selling something. While I'm all for capitalism, she presents herself as something she is not---a legitimate doctor. Let's examine what…
tags: polo horses, poisoned polo ponies, Florida, International Polo Club Palm Beach, Lechuza Caracas, Franck's Pharmacy, Biodyl, selenium
A Lechuza pony stands ready for play.
Image: New York Social Diary (2008).
The mysterious deaths of twenty-one Venezuelan polo horses was apparently due to a mistake by the pharmacy that incorrectly prepared the vitamin-and-electrolyte cocktail that was injected into these horses prior to their match on Sunday. A chemist at Franck's Pharmacy in Ocala, Florida added ten times the requested dosage of selenium to the cocktail. It appears this was an error…
The alternative medicine industry has been complaining that regulations demanding they prove their products are safe before being granted a licence resemble "a sledgehammer to crack a walnut".
Global Regulatory Services reports from a keynote debate at the Natural & Organic Products Europe Show held in London earlier this month. A panel of speakers from across the herbal remedies industry stated that while they supported the MHRA's Herbal Directive in principle, some felt it was too stringent and expensive in requiring companies to prove their products were safe, effective and…
I'm tired of blogging about anti-vaccine nonsense again. Don't get me wrong, I had an enormous amount of fun writing my commentary on Fire Marshal Bill's attempt to explain vaccine/autism pseudoscience. It was a hoot, if I do say so myself, but it depresses me that writing such posts is so necessary so often. Fortunately, it's Friday, and you know what that means (well, at least some of the time, anyway). That's right, it's time for some woo.
This time around, it's not just any woo. In fact, it's woo that relates to my area of expertise. As you may recall, I do a lot of breast cancer surgery…
Better late than never, given that DrugMonkey has already been all over this. Unfortunately, there was another serious outbreak of antivaccine idiocy over at HuffPo that I felt I had to deal with before this:
Embedded video from CNN Video
It was a great day indeed. For far too long, animal rights terrorists have intimidated reesarchers into silence. According to the L.A. Times:
Competing rallies at UCLA today over the controversial issue of animal research are peaceful so far, with supporters of the research appearing to outnumber opponents by more than 10 to 1.
About 400 people,…
ddobbs |
Reading the Mindreading Studies - Science Progress seeks a handle on fMRI hype, hope, and horizons
The evolving Swine Flu story [Effect Measure] The skinny on a scary run of deadly swine flu, from people who've been doing this a while.
Green Issues Fade Is green losing its lustre?
Eli Lilly Tops List of Drug-Company Pay to Vermont Docs Altogether, 78 drug companies spent just shy of $3 million dollars in payments to health professionals in Vermont last year. This is a state of about 600,000 people, and only a few thousand doctors. Payments to psychiatrists, for instance, totaled $479,306.19…
ddobbs |
In Predicting the determined self-castrator Vaughn Bell links and looks at
a surprising study looking at psychological attributes that predict which castration enthusiasts who will actually go on to remove their own testicles, in contrast to those who just fantasise about it.
That's as far as I got; I couldn't summon the strength to read further, but maybe you can.
Those interested will definitely want to check out the essay with which David Foster Wallace opened his essay collection Consider the Lobster "Big Red Son" opens
The American Academy All emergency medicine confirms it:…
palmd |
It's no secret that I think the Huffington Post is an teeming den execrable pseudoscientific snakes. Still, when it comes to fanning the vaccination manufatroversy, they are really off the deep end. Take the latest piece of dreck on Jenny McCarthy, GoD (Google Doctorate). It's written by the infamous "Dr." Patricia Fitzgerald, and this is where I get cranky. Worse than all the drivel spouted by Jenny is HuffPo giving their imprimatur of authority to Fitzgerald. Let me 'splain.
Look, there's a lot of ways to legitimately gain the title of "doctor". The most common are to go to a…
tags: polo horses, poisoned polo ponies, Florida, International Polo Club Palm Beach, Lechuza Caracas, Franck's Pharmacy
Victor Vargas, patron of Venezuelan team Lechuza Caracas (1), left,
hits a shot past Carlos Gracida (2), right, of Mokarow Farms in the
Stanford U.S. Open Polo Championships at the International Polo Club Palm Beach.
Image: Jim Rassol.
The mysterious deaths of twenty-one Venezuelan polo horses became less mysterious and more outrageous today after a veterinary pharmacy admitted they incorrectly prepared the vitamin-and-electrolyte cocktail that was injected into these…
palmd |
Orac isn't known for his sound bites. He tends to write pieces which, in the blogosphere, might be considered rather long, and for good reason---he has a lot to say, and he says it well. But sometimes there is a gem of insolence that is so apt, it must be reshared:
But what really makes this analogy so brain dead is that it was the very epidemiological methods that have so consistently failed to find any correlation between vaccines and autism that led scientists to realize that smoking is strongly correlated with cancer. Jim [Carrey], while accepting the epidemiology linking tobacco smoke…
After writing about a new low of pseudoscience published in that repository of all things antivaccine and quackery, The Huffington Post (do you even have to ask?), on Tuesday, I had hoped--really hoped--that I could ignore HuffPo for a while. After all, there's only so much stupid that even Orac can tolerate before his logic circuits start shorting out and he has to shut down a while so that his self-repair circuits can undo the damage. Besides, I sometimes think that the twit who created HuffPo, Arianna Huffington, likes the attention that pseudoscience turds dropped onto her blog by…
ddobbs |
As the comments and correspondence about my PTSD story and posts accrue, I've been pondering ways to pull out some of the most interesting, powerful, and affecting. I finally decided to just start posting some, sometimes with commentary, sometimes without. This is a story of many different colors and textures.
I'll start with this excerpt from a long, eloquent blog response to my story about PTSD at Scientific American by Kayla Williams, a vet of the Iraq War who blogs at VetVoice. Williams is accumulating quite a strong run of posts there, including posts on torture, being a…
palmd |
Yes, that's right, the Huffington Post, that broadsheet of blarney, that tabloid of medical trumpery has done it. Not content to risk our mental health by lending legitimacy to all kinds of pseudoscientific charlatans, they just let Jim Carrey write a piece on vaccines and autism. Yes, the boyfriend of uber-fukwit Jenny McCarthy has drunk her Kool Aid, but that's no surprise. I'll leave a good fisking to others, because a few of the commenters showed signs of higher cortical function, and this deserves some coverage.
Take this one for example:
I think Jim and Jenny McCarthy are instilling…
palmd |
Just when you think the Huffington Post can't get any more inane and idiotic, just when you think your synapses might be starting to heal, they come out with another post that simply makes your ears bleed.
Sure, HuffPo regularly comes down on the side of superstition, for example in the vaccine manufactroversy; and sure, they sometimes veer into the lane of deceptive medical infomercials. But I sort of held out hope that they wouldn't resort to hosting potential fraud.
Fraud, you say? Well, not clearly. But, just as we in the Midwest know that when the sky turns that certain shade of…
I'm sure it's obvious that I'm often puzzled (and, I daresay, many other skeptics and boosters of science- and evidence-based medicine are puzzled too) over why various forms of quackery and woo that have either about as close to zero prior probability as one can imagine and/or (more frequently "and") have failed to show evidence of any therapeutic effect greater than that of placebo in clinical trials manage to retain so much traction among the public. Examples abound, for instance homeopathy and reiki, the former of which is nothing more than sympathetic magic prettied up with science-y…
Following through with President Obama's executive order issued March 9, Removing Barriers to Responsible Scientific Research Involving Human Stem Cells (link to PDF), the NIH has released a draft of guidelines revising the NIH's position on how it may fund "responsible, scientifically worthy human stem cell research, including human embryonic stem cell research." The funding only extends to human embryonic stem cells derived from embryos created in excess at fertility clinics. ScienceBlogger Nick Anthis from The Scientific Activist views the creation of these guidelines as a "significant…