medicine
oracknows | January 15, 2009My dear readers, I beg your indulgence for the moment.
I had been planning on doing something a bit more serious than what I've been up to lately. Believe it or not, NaturalNews.com pointed me to a study that's actually pretty interesting. It even challenges to some extend existing results. Of course, Mike Adams' minion's interpretation of the study was so wrong as to be not even wrong, as they say (so what else is new?). But therein lies the entertainment value with the educational value.
Sometimes, however, something happens, and a followup to something I've written before is demanded. It…
oracknows | January 14, 2009Good news! After an extended and distinguished stint as a coblogger on Denialism.com, blog bud PalMD has decided to resurrect his own blog, the place where he got started, White Coat Underground. The only difference is that this time he's doing it as a member of the ScienceBlogs collective.
Head on over and say hi. Tell him Orac sent you.
palmd | January 14, 2009In case you missed it, we're plugging the "diavlog" that Janet and I recorded the other night. I could talk medical ethics all day, and we spent an hour doing just that. Thankfully (for you) the thing is indexed, and you can skip around. Still, if you have the patience, try to catch the whole thing.
palmd | January 14, 2009Hope, of all ills that men endure,
The only cheap and universal cure.
---Abraham Cowley, The Mistress. For Hope. c. 1647
I was visiting my friend in the hospital the other day. She had a port put in under the skin of her chest for chemotherapy. The whole story is unfair. She's a terrific person, with a great husband and an adorable son. She's also doing remarkably well. But that's not today's story.
Another friend wondered if maybe she should recommend a macrobiotic diet or something, anything, to help stop this stupid disease. Now, you…
palmd | January 14, 2009While I wait for The Powers That Be to help fix the commenting feature on the brand new blog, let me tell you a little bit more about this place. (You can read my "About" page, but that's pretty boring, and there for technical reasons.)
I'm an internist, that is, a specialist in prevention and treatment of adult diseases (which most emphatically does not mean anything to do with porn). I'm privileged to have a back stage pass to other peoples' lives---every day is an education. This gives me both special insight and special responsibilities. When I started White Coat Underground a couple…
oracknows | January 14, 2009I find it hard to believe that we're already two weeks into 2009. The older I get and the longer I've been blogging, it seems, the faster time files. It's gotten so bad that it's not at all infrequent that I remember a post that I've written, go searching for it, and end up amazed that it's several months or even a couple of years old. In any case, 2009 has gotten off to a pretty decent start, with posts about HIV/AIDS denialism, the probable selection of Dr. Sanjay Gupta as Surgeon General, a followup on Tong Ren, Holocaust denial, and the "bait and switch" of Deepak Chopra and "alternative…
oracknows | January 13, 2009Last week, I did multiple posts about the death of HIV/AIDS denialist Christine Maggiore of what for all the world looked like an HIV-related pneumonia, the excuses HIV/AIDS denialists made to try to persuade people that it wasn't AIDS, and the attempted coverup of damning posts. In the past, I've also taken a certain comedian by the name of Bill Maher to task for his antivaccine views, germ theory denialism, and embrace of detoxification quackery and conspiracy mongering about big pharma.
I should have known that wasn't all. I should have realized that he would be sympathetic to HIV/AIDS…
oracknows | January 13, 2009About four weeks ago, I wrote what I thought to be an amusing piece about how our blog "buddy" J. B. Handley, antivaccine advocate extraordinaire and now second fiddle in the organization he founded (Generation Rescue) to a Jenny-come-lately former purveyor of Indigo Child woo previously best known for being Playboy Playmate of the Year, a game show hostess on MTV, the star of her own short-lived sitcom, and a gross-out comedienne known for eating her own vomit or sitting in a pool of her own menstrual blood. Unfortunately, along with her A-list boyfriend Jim Carrey, this former D-list star…
oracknows | January 12, 2009In responding to Deepak Chopra's "integrative medicine" nonsense from last week that I "http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2009/01/the_three_musketeers_of_woo_m…," Derek Lowe proposes the best trial of Qi Gong ever:
"Chronic pain is one of the major sources of worker's compensation claims costs, yet studies show that it is often susceptible to acupuncture and Qi Gong. Herbs usually have far fewer side effects than pharmaceuticals".
Studies show, do they? Is there really a believable study that shows that Qi-freaking-Gong, of all things, is good for chronic pain? Ancient hokum about "energy…
purepedantry | January 12, 2009There is a very good article in the NYTimes about whether doctors should inform patients about disparities in care between hospitals:
An article published online in October
in the journal PLoS Medicine really hit home with me. Noting that the
quality of cancer care is uneven, its authors argued that as part of
the informed-consent process, doctors have an ethical obligation to
tell patients if they are more likely to survive, be cured, live longer
or avoid complications by going to Hospital A instead of Hospital B.
And that obligation holds even if the doctor happens to work at
Hospital B,…
oracknows | January 12, 2009The seemingly never-ending quest of advocates of unscientific medicine, the so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) movement is to convince policy makers, patients, and physicians that, really and truly, it no longer deserves the qualifier of "alternative," that it is in fact mainstream and even "scientific." That very search for respectability without accountability is the very reason why "alternative" medicine originally morphed into CAM in order to soften the "alternative" label a decade or two ago. Increasingly, however, advocates of such highly implausible medical…
clock | January 11, 2009Listen to my SciBlings Janet and Pal,MD discuss scientific and medical ethics:
jstemwedel | January 11, 2009While the ScienceBlogs upgrade was underway, a shiny new Bloggingheads diavlog was posted, featuring yours truly and PalMD.
Mostly we talked about medical ethics, with some time spent on ethical issues around research with human subjects.
oracknows | January 10, 2009I don't watch Private Practice. I didn't like Grey's Anatomy, which, every time I caught part of it, struck me as the cheesiest sort of medical soap opera, a General Hospital transplanted to prime time. Given that Private Practice is a spinoff of Grey's Anatomy, I never saw any reason whatsoever to watch. However, on Thursday night an episode aired that royally pissed off the antivaccine contingent, and that has to be a good thing. The episode, Contamination, featured a storyline in which an unvaccinated child shows up in the emergency room with the measles. The parents are antivaccine and…
jstemwedel | January 9, 2009You know what makes an already scary world a lot scarier? When a government decides it's a crime for disease researchers to do their job.
From Declan Butler:
Iran has summarily tried two of the nation's HIV researchers with communicating with an "enemy government," in a half-day trial that started and ended on 31 December in Tehran's Revolutionary Court. There will be no further court hearings, and a verdict is expected within days.
The brothers, Arash and Kamiar Alaei, who have achieved international acclaim for their progressive HIV-prevention programme, have been held in Tehran's…
clock | January 9, 2009This is your weekend reading - lots of it, some fascinating, some enraging, but perhaps if enough people are aware and scream loudly enough, something can be done:
Assistance Monkeys, Ducks, Parrots, Pigs and Ducks ... Should the law protect them?
More Follow Up on NYT Story About Assistance Creatures
More Assistance Creature Follow Up - The History of Service Monkeys, Plus Monkey Waiters
Newsflash! DOJ ADA Changes Leaked -- All Animals Set to Be Banned Except Dogs
DoJ's Rationale Behind Banning Non-Canine Service Animals
DOJ's Proposal and Rationale for Allowing Psychiatric Service Animals (…
oracknows | January 9, 2009Three weeks ago, I reintroduced my readers to one of the most amazingly skilled weaver of woo tales who has ever lived. I'm referring, of course, to Lionel Milgrom, the man who can pepper his homeopathic woo with quantum nonsense the way Bobby Flay seasons his latest creation with various spices. Now, I'm about to admit a huge hole in my knowledge here. I realize that it seems simply unbelievable that I would have a hole at all in my knowledge, much less a major hole, but there you are. Not even cranky supercomputers are perfect, I guess.
The huge hole in my knowledge revealed by my…
oracknows | January 9, 2009During the confirmation hearings yesterday for Tom Daschle, who is to become the Secretary of Health and Human Services, there was this exchange:
J. REED: As you grapple with health care reform, you're also grappling with the budget, so good luck on both matters. But if you could pay particular attention to Title VII, that would be very appreciative. In a similar vein, Section 317 of CDC's program on immunization is so important. It's been estimated that we need to provide these about $1.1 billion to cover all the recommended vaccines for eligible children and adults. And frankly, we provided…
jstemwedel | January 8, 2009There's an interesting story on The New Republic website at the moment, "Going Under" by Jason Zengerle, that relates the sad story of a young anesthesiologist's descent into addiction. What I find interesting about it is the larger questions it raises about why this particular anesthesiologist's story is not so unusual. Indeed, the article offers an:
Observation: Anesthesiologists seem to suffer from addiction in greater numbers than physicians in other specialties.
And, it lays out
Three hypotheses as to why this might be so:
H1: Anesthesiologists have greater access to the addictive…
terrasig | January 8, 2009With tears in my eyes and my head bowed in deep respect, I share with you the account of Kevin Leitch's vasectomy via Twitter:
http://twitter.com/kevleitch
Kev is an autism and manic depression advocate in West Midlands, UK, who blogs at LeftBrainRightBrain and was one of my earliest followers on Twitter. (P.S. you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/abelpharmboy)
All Twittering in response, which includes Kev's own tweets, can be found using the hashtag, #kevsnip.
I first learned of his plans via Twitter but he also posted his scheme here. I am largely credited with the first…