medicine
ddobbs | March 4, 2009I'm having difficulty even reading, much less posting about, the river of stories about pharma and device industries, FDA regs, conflicts of interest, and so on. But I'll take a stab here at spotlighting the main events and making some sense of where this is headed. For I don't think it's just coincidence that brings in a few days an archetypal pharma scandal, an unexpected and emphatic Supreme court reversal, an underwear check administered to the entire faculty of the Harvard Medical School, and the decision to "make an example" of surgeons who took kickbacks for using medical devices.
The…
oracknows | March 4, 2009As this posts I should be on an airplane winging its way to much warmer climes than where I reside in order to attend the Society of Surgical Oncology 62nd Annual Cancer Symposium. There, in Phoenix, I will eagerly absorb all the latest and greatest knowledge in the realm of cancer surgery, commune with friends whom I often don't see more than once every year or two at this meeting, and, hopefully, drink much good beer.
I'll likely still be blogging, but if I'm learning too much or having too much fun, you may see a couple of reruns again. As for any sort of meetups, I don't know if I'll have…
palmd | March 4, 2009OK, the title is inaccurate. Kirby is not bound by the same code of ethics as researchers and doctors, so perhaps he's not unethical. But his latest rant in HuffPo encourages unethical behavior. Honestly, I'm getting tired of writing about this guy, but he just keeps bringing the stupid, and something about that just calls out for a response.
So what's so horrible about his latest hunk of drivel? Well, first he starts with a blatant misinterpretation of the truth:
It is not accurate for members of the media to report that the link between vaccines and autism has been "disproven."…
oracknows | March 4, 2009If there's' one theme, one cause, that this blog has emphasized throughout the four years of its existence and the three years of its having resided on ScienceBlogs, it's been to champion science- and evidence-based medicine over pseudoscience and quackery. Whether it's refuting the lies of antivaccine zealots, having a little fun with some of the more outrageously bizarre forms of pseudoscience, railing against cancer quackery, lamenting how easily pseudoscientific quackery has infiltrated medical academia, complaining about drug companies rigging clinical studies, or trying to educate my…
palmd | March 3, 2009The blogosphere is doing a reasonably good job of covering this, but I'm still fuming over Senator Tom Harkin's (D-IA) health care policy hearings. Each morsel of the hearing contains more idiocy than the last. In my attempt to shed some light into Harkin's guano-filled cave, I'm going to examine some of the specific testimony, starting with that of Dr. Dean Ornish.
Medicine today focuses primarily on drugs and surgery, genes and germs, microbes and molecules, but we are so much more than that.
When I hear statements like this, my bullshit detector asplodes. Sure, it's only one sentence…
ksharpe | March 3, 2009Originally posted by Scicurious
On February 26, 2009, at 1:06 AM
About a week ago, a prof in my MRU loaned me a book he'd just read, saying it would be right up my alley. He was very right. I couldn't put it down. It's already changed a great deal about the way that I think about addiction, as well as the way I think about finding a cure.
The book was "The End of My Addiction" by Olivier Ameisen. Half case report, half memoir, Olivier Ameisen was a well-known cardiologist doing some crazy good work in New York. Unfortunately, he was also an alcoholic. After more than a decade of broken…
clock | March 3, 2009Under the fold:
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The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c
Harold Varmus
Daily Show Full EpisodesImportant Things With Demetri Martin
Political HumorJoke of the Day
j7uy5 | March 3, 2009At first I was happy to see some good news on the Internet, a
refreshing break from the avalanche of bad stuff rolling down every
peak.
href="http://www.boston.com/news/health/articles/2009/03/02/fewer_children_have_high_lead_levels/">Fewer
children have high lead levels
Associated Press / March 2, 2009
CHICAGO - In a stunning improvement in children's health, far fewer
children have high lead levels than 20 years ago, according to new
government research.
Federal researchers credited the improvement on aggressive efforts to
reduce children's exposure to lead in old house paint, soil…
oracknows | March 3, 2009Yesterday, I wrote about Senator Tom Harkin's (D-IA) little woo-fest in the Senate's Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, which he called Integrative Care: A Pathway to a Healthier Nation. I and a lot of the rest of the medical blogosphere (such as PalMD, Val Jones, and Tufted Titmouse) shook our heads in disbelief and disgust at Harkin's statement (video here) about the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM):
One of the purposes of this center was to investigate and validate alternative approaches. Quite frankly, I must say publicly that it has…
oracknows | March 2, 2009The Tufted Titmouse explains in a spot-on parody of Senator Harkin's statement to his Senate panel.
I'm tellin' ya, "integrative" reporting is the wave of the future, just like "integrative" medicine.
clock | March 2, 2009Senator Tom Harkin luvz him some alternative medicine. And he hates when the studies demonstrate those things don't work, so he tries to push them into the Obama Administration's health care plan by force. Read Orac, PalMD and PZ for details (and for info what you can do). This administration is supposed to be reality-based - let's make sure the wackos don't change that....
ddobbs | March 2, 2009Below, the "jugum penis," designed to prevent "nocturnal lincontinence" (aka masturbation). One of many wonders in a new London Science Museum online exhibit of historical medical objects called "Brought to Life," as featured in this New Scientist photo essay.
Don't try these at home.
bioephemera | March 2, 2009
Wax anatomical figure of reclining woman, Florence, Italy, 1771-1800
Science Museum London
Starting today, the Wellcome Trust and sciencemuseum.org.uk open a brand spanking new collection of medical history archives. "Brought to Life: Exploring the History of Medicine" is searchable by people, place, thing, theme, and time. You can view a timeline of medical history in Europe next to similar timelines for the Islamic empire, Egypt and Greece (I do wish China and India were as prominently placed). You can read essays about larger questions, like what "wellness" means, or play with a cool…
ddobbs | March 2, 2009Over at Healthcare ZDNet, a site new to me, Dana Blankenhorn says
The Obama strategy for achieving health reform is now clear.
Get the money first. This changes the terms of the debate, from what will it cost to how do we do things more efficiently?
He's got a point, but it seems to me he's only half right -- or a bit less -- for the push to establish comparative effectiveness data based on (the establishment of) electronic health records also does much to answer how to do things efficiently. That data will help identify where expensive procedures and drugs bring benefit and where they don't…
oracknows | March 2, 2009Over the weekend, some readers sent me a link to a story that, presumably, they thought would be of interest to me, given that I graduated from the University Michigan Medical School back in the late 1980s. Specifically, it's a report that U. of M. has halted the use of dogs in its surgical training:
Surgeons training at the University of Michigan Health System will no longer use live, healthy dogs to learn drastic surgical procedures that can save people's lives, the university announced Thursday.
The anesthetized animals -- obtained from shelters -- were used to teach tracheotomies, how to…
oracknows | March 1, 2009Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) owes me a new irony meter.
I'll explain in a minute, but first you have to know why I even give a rodent's posterior about Harkin. As you may recall, no single legislator in the U.S. has done more to damage the cause of science- and evidence-based medicine than Tom Harkin. It was through his efforts that the National Institutes of Health, despite the fact that its scientists were not agitating for it, had the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) rammed down its throat, first as the Office of Alternative Medicine (OAM) and then, when…
palmd | March 1, 2009Remember when President Obama said something about returning science to it's rightful place? Well, our new president has a real tough climb ahead of him. The previous administration shoved science aside for political expediency and religious ideology. Now, forces in the president's own party are trying to insert their own quasi-religious beliefs into health care reform, leaving science in a whole different place altogether.
Here's the deal. Some years back, Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) helped set up the National Center on Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). The whole idea of…
oracknows | February 27, 2009Let's try this again.
Two days ago, I tried to get away from blogging about antivaccinationists. I even succeeded for one day. Unfortunately, that was all, because J.B. Handley and his crew of antivaccine loons cooked up a really big, really deceptive, and really desperate gambit that just couldn't go unremarked upon. Thus was I sucked back in again. Even worse, this all came hot on the heels of a very sad time in the lives of my wife and myself. I needed something to lift my spirits.
And nothing lifts one's spirits quite like fine, grade-A woo.
Or perhaps I need my bio-photons analyzed with…
palmd | February 26, 2009Yesterday, a fellow medical blogger suffered a blow most of us cannot imagine. She goes by the name "drsmak" and was a great writer before her son fell ill, but when her son fell ill, her document of the struggle showed us how good the blogosphere can be. She allowed us a view of what it is like to love, and how that love is sometimes distilled into a painfully small elixir.
Drsmak did us all a great favor---she showed us how it is possible to survive the unsurvivable, and she has done it with great dignity and art. The blogosphere owes her a debt.
And you can help memorialize Henry, and…
oracknows | February 26, 2009Busted!
All right, I give up. Since I've been sucked into the whole vaccine thing again after only one day away, I might as well highlight this simultaneously amusing and depressing tidbit. Earlier today, I wrote about a coordinated attack by the antivaccine movement on the Autism Omnibus decision two weeks ago. Given that it involved Generation Rescue, Jim Carrey, Jenny McCarthy, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Deirdre Imus and her eirdre Imus Environmental Center for Pediatric Oncology, the Huffington Post, Age of Autism, and various other antivaccine activists, I thought it pretty obvious that…