medicine
palmd | April 21, 2009Overheard from the 210th annual emergency meeting of the Society for Evidence-Free Healing.
Chair: The meeting will come to order.
Some Dude: Seconded.
Chair: Um, I'm the Chair. I don't need a "second".
Some Other Dude: That sounds like an oppressive application of the dominant paradigm.
Chair: Fine, fine. Would anyone object coming to order? No? Thank you very much.
While it may seem to many of you that we have made great strides in having our ancient, holistic healing methods given an official stamp of approval (and perhaps Medicare reimbursement) we have some very troubling…
grrlscientist | April 21, 2009tags: polo horses, mysterious deaths polo ponies, florida, International Polo Club Palm Beach, Lechuza Caracas, Victor Vargas
Polo horse.
Image: orphaned, contact me for proper attribution [larger view].
By now, most of you have heard the tragic story of the twenty-one polo horses that died suddenly within a few hours of each other in Wellington, Palm Beach County, Florida. These horses, which comprised more than one-third of the 60-horse Venezuelan polo team, Lechuza Caracas, were scheduled to compete in the featured game in the 105th U.S. Open polo match on Sunday afternoon. Upon…
oracknows | April 21, 2009I'm really starting to hate the Huffington Post.
It used to be that I just disliked it intensely. The reasons are, of course, obvious. Ever since its very beginning nearly four years ago, HuffPo has been a hotbed of antivaccine lunacy. Over the years, it's served up pseudoscience and antivaccine nuttery from such "luminaries" of the antivaccine movement as David Kirby, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Dr. Jay Gordon, Deirde Imus, among others, in an unholy tradition that continues to this very day. HuffPo didn't limit itself to just antivaccine lunacy, either. It wasn't long before the Dark Lord of…
oracknows | April 20, 2009Blog bud PalMD was asked this most difficult question:
A colleague of mine asked a great question: if you have one question to ask a booster of so-called alternative medicine in a public forum, what should it be?
To which he responded:
My answer: "Can you please give specific examples of alternative medicine theories and modalities that have been abandoned because they have been found to be ineffective?"
I tend to agree. If there's one difference between so-called "alternative" medicine and science- and evidence-based medicine, it's that ineffective therapies in general are abandoned. Now, I…
ddobbs | April 20, 2009Earlier today I drew attention to a post by Questionable Authority on The Torture Memos, Medical "Professionals", and the Hippocratic Oath. Says Mike,
I cannot remember ever in my life being as ashamed of my country as I am at this moment. The contents of the memos are so insanely wrong that I'd like to believe that they're fiction, but they're clearly not.
He ends by calling for the AMA to identify the medical professionals involved and help them find new lines of work. A commenter on one of my earlier posts on psychologists, doctors, and torture, T. Hunt, joins him:
While the modern…
ddobbs | April 20, 2009Ed Yong examines how a simple writing exercise helps break vicious cycle that holds back black students.
The Questionable Authority considers The Torture Memos, Medical "Professionals", and the Hippocratic Oath.
Jessica Palmer, in a healthy display of online media's corrective power, tries to make clear that For the last time: that "Twitter is Evil" paper is not about Twitter!.
Zimmer takes a tour of assisted migration.
Effect measure argues the lack of universal health care in the US is morally and fiscally bankrupt.
grrlscientist | April 20, 2009tags: Scientia Pro Publica, Science for the People, biology, evolution, medicine, earth science, behavioral ecology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, blog carnival
Image: wemidji (Jacques Marcoux).
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
This is only the second issue of Scientia Pro Publica, but I am so pleased with its progress so far. Not only are friends and colleagues contributing their essays to this blog carnival, but there is an impressive influx of "new blood", too. Together, all of us are helping to promote the value of…
palmd | April 20, 2009A colleague of mine asked a great question: if you have one question to ask a booster of so-called alternative medicine in a public forum, what should it be? I'll give you my answer below the fold, then open the thread to see what you think.
My answer: "Can you please give specific examples of alternative medicine theories and modalities that have been abandoned because they have been found to be ineffective?"
I have information that some other skeptical doctor-bloggers seem to agree with this. Why? Why not ask, "can you give me specific evidence of a proven alternative theory/modality…
oracknows | April 20, 2009About a week and a half ago, something happened that makes me realize that the Jenny and Jim antivaccine propaganda tour that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago was clearly only phase I of Generation Rescue's April public relations offensive. About ten days ago, courtesy of J.B. Handley, the founder of Generation Rescue, who in order to have a couple of famous faces fronting his organization has allowed himself to be displaced, so that Generation Rescue has now been "reborn" as Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey's Autism Organization (the better to capitalize on her D-list celebrity yoked to Jim…
denialism | April 20, 2009I've been absent, I apologize, but my last rotation in medical school has been a sub-internship in Trauma surgery. Aside from work, sleep, eating, and buying a house in Baltimore, blogging has necessarily suffered.
I will say a few things though that should be a public service message on the TV. People need to wear helmets when driving ATVs. I'm sorry I know I'm repeating myself. As before, I'd say any time your going faster than 10-15mph and not enclosed and belted in steel cage you should be wearing a helmet. That includes on bikes, on motorcycles, scooters, go-carts, ATVs, skis…
palmd | April 19, 2009My regular readers know that I hold the Huffington Post in the lowest possible regard when it comes to its medical writing. HuffPo offers a daily platform for the worst pseudo-science and infectious disease promotion. Apparently that was getting to hard, because now I think their down to phoning it in. Last week's post by a "body cleanse expert" reads like a late-night infomercial, and is about as accurate.
The article, with the fanciful title of, "Antibiotics Cause Cancer?" is written by Kim Evans whose medical qualifications are apparently limited to selling books on how to cleanse your…
scientificactivist | April 19, 2009Further to the points I wrote about in my previous post on the CIA torture memos, Mike Dunford of The Questionable Authority has previously raised another important issue: the complicity of medical professionals in CIA torture:
Reading these memos, it's very clear that there are quite a few CIA employees who are allegedly medical professionals. Those people need to find new professions. I would strongly suggest that you take a few minutes - particularly if you're a doctor or a psychologist - to suggest to your colleagues at the American Medical Association and the American Psychological…
oracknows | April 19, 2009I forgot to mention yesterday (although I did on Twitter) that I'm currently in Denver, where I will be attending the 100th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), as I do almost every year at this time. I hope to see, as Isis would put it, some hot, hot science over the next three and a half days. In between sessions, I'll be putting the finishing touches on my Challenge Grant, seeing old friends, and possibly even blogging. The frequency depends upon (1) how many old friends I see and (2) how good or crappy the wifi is at the Colorado Convention Center.
In the…
palmd | April 18, 2009I've never done this before, but the previous threads are getting rather messy and I'm closing them down. Feel free to use this thread for your ongoing discussion. A few thoughts first.
Obviously some of the rhetoric is heated, which is fine. But if you're going to throw around invective, don't complain if it's thrown back. Also, please remember that an ad hominem argument is invalid if it substitutes for substantive argument, but that insults that simply color, rather that replace and argument are not invalid, just, well, colorful.
Also remember that when trying to understand how to take…
oracknows | April 17, 2009I've complained about it time and time again because it's annoyed me time and time again. Specifically, I'm talking about how various news outlets report scientific studies involving so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), sometimes called "integrative medicine" (IM), the latter of which I like to refer to adding a bit of woo to make the scientific medicine go down. In general, because the press likes stories that buck the establishment, it tends to favor studies that seem to show that CAM modalities work. Even worse, it tends to misinterpret negative studies in the most…
scientificactivist | April 17, 2009The Lay Scientist has a new guest post up from British physician "DeeTee" about measles, a horrible disease that until recently had been virtually eradicated from the developed world. Unfortunately, despite the fact that measles is totally preventable with proper vaccination, the misguided campaigning of anti-vaccination fanatics has caused measles to once again raise its ugly head in our own backyard, as DeeTee explains:
But last year all that changed. Where I work we saw dozens of cases of measles over the summer. It was odd having to dredge my memory banks to remember details of this "…
oracknows | April 16, 2009One of the stereotypes of anti-vaccine loons is that they are predominantly left wing New Agey ex-hippie types, usually well-educated and affluent. Certainly recent stories out of California indicating that Marin and Sonoma counties are ground zero for declining vaccine rates would seem to back up that stereotype. However, there is a right wing religious variety of antivaccinationist, and it's hard not to point out that Representative Dan Burton (R-IN) is arguably the best friend the mercury militia has in Washington. But if you want to get a true flavor of right wing paranoid whackaloon,…
tqa | April 16, 2009
I just finished reading the torture memos that were released today. I cannot remember ever in my life being as ashamed of my country as I am at this moment. The contents of the memos are so insanely wrong that I'd like to believe that they're fiction, but they're clearly not. While I understand President Obama's desire to move forward, I am appalled by his decision to rule out prosecutions for anyone who relied on the excuse that these memos said that what they were doing was OK.
Of course, prosecutions aren't the only possible consequences, and there are some disciplinary options that the…
palmd | April 16, 2009Science is hard. It often requires us to put aside our beliefs and preconceptions to more accurately understand how the world works. But it is not in any way unimaginative. To paraphrase a wildly brilliant guy, every time a scientist formulates a hypothesis, she must imagine a different world. It can be a very creative process.
We advocates for science are often accused of being unimaginative and uncreative. This is false. We are also accused of being closed-minded. This is false. But it is also true. Scientists are very skeptical. To quote one of our regular readers:
To state the…
grrlscientist | April 15, 2009tags: performance horses, polo, racing, tendon injury, stem cell research
Horses clear a jump during the Challenge Cup Handicap Steeplechase
on the second day of the Cheltenham Festival in the UK.
Image: BBC News.
Those of you who follow my writings about racehorses and other high-performance horses will be interested to learn that several companies that I've been following have been redirecting their stem-cell research that they originally developed to help injured horses to help people recover from Achilles tendon injuries.
After a tendon or ligament tear, both horses and people…