medicine
oracknows | January 8, 2009First fellow ScienceBlogger Abel Pharmboy live-blogged (sort of) his vasectomy. That record could not stand, however. You just knew it wouldn't be long before someone tried to outdo him.
Now Kev is live-Tweeting (live-Twittering?) his own vasectomy. He's at the surgeon's office right now, but tells us the surgeon is running a little late! Follow along, if you dare.
oracknows | January 7, 2009One of my favorite novels of all time is George Orwell's classic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. When it came to imagining the end to which totalitarianism could take us, no one before or since has written a more compelling book about living under such a regime.
One aspect of Oceania, the fictional totalitarian state ruled by Big Brother, that still stands out when I think about the book is how Big Brother dealt with inconvenient news and history. In the book, Winston Smith, the protagonist, works at a government agency called the Ministry of Truth (also called Minitrue), one of the…
terrasig | January 7, 2009Just another quick note reflecting further on my 8-minute gut reaction yesterday to word that Sanjay Gupta might be nominated as Surgeon General in the Obama administration.
I still contend he's a great communicator but realize that the "both sides of the story" aspect of journalism has made some uneasy about where he'd actually stand on issues as a government leader of public health. In my post yesterday, I also neglected to consider some of the more controversial moments in Gupta's past stories as elegantly and comprehensively pointed out by my colleague and surgeon, Orac.
I was also…
tqa | January 7, 2009
There are widespread reports out right now suggesting that President-Elect Obama has selected CNN's medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta has selected to be the new Surgeon General. The reaction to this seems to be mixed. PZ, Orac, Chris, Paul Krugman and Dr. Val are variously unimpressed and/or opposed. Jake is ambivalent. Revere seems to be cautiously optimistic, while both Dr. Pal and Abel Pharmboy are happy. Personally, I'm a little bit more optimistic than cautious.
Some of the reasons that people are concerned about this choice are legitimate. There have been issues that have come…
oracknows | January 6, 2009As I was sitting in the O.R. lounge yesterday afternoon between cases, the television in the lounge was tuned to CNN. One thing I noted was some rather fawning coverage of President Bush regarding the military that seemed as though it belonged on FOX News rather than CNN. Not long after that, Wolf Blitzer breathlessly reported that CNN's Chief Medical Correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, had apparently been approached by the Obama Transition Team about becoming the new Surgeon General. I thought to myself, "Hmmm. That's interesting." And then I went back to the O.R. to finish up my schedule.…
oracknows | January 6, 2009
Unbelievably, it looks as though I've been nominated yet again for another blogging award. Really, folks, this is too much. How on earth am I going to live up to this level of accolades in 2009?
Not that that would stop me from pointing out that I'm in the running for the Best Health Policies/Ethics Weblog at Medgaget. So, if you like what I've been laying down, please vote for me here. If not, vote for Getting Better with Dr. Val, who would be my second choice if I can't win.
Another blog I can't help but recommend a vote for is in the category of Best New Medical Weblog. It's Science-…
terrasig | January 6, 2009PharmGirl just sent me this tip after I got out of a meeting but I see that some bloggers have already weighed in about Obama's apparent selection of Dr Sanjay Gupta for Surgeon General.
PalMD was briefly positive but PZ is concerned that Gupta is merely a talking head or placeholder and an apologist for the US health care system. However, I see two main advantages.
1. He knows firsthand the limitations of the US health care system, especially in poor rural and urban areas where access to care is a challenge even under normal circumstances. Gupta has also been on-site for several of the…
oracknows | January 6, 2009If there's one thing I've learned over the last four years of examining the various forms of woo out there, it's to be very, very skeptical whenever an advocate of a highly dubious-sounding "therapy" points to a study as "proof" that the therapy, whatever it is, works. Usually, what I find is a small pilot study with inadequate controls or even a poorly designed study. For example, the acupuncture literature is rife with these sorts of studies. It's also rife with larger studies for which the control was inadequate--or for which there was no real control at all. This phenomenon is…
oracknows | January 5, 2009...for me as Best Medical/Health Issues Blog.
At the very least, put me past Junkfood Science!
While you're at it, vote for the Best Science Blog. There are two fellow ScienceBloggers (PZ and Greg Laden) in contention, as well as one of my blog buds, Steve Novella of Neurologica and another of my favorite blogs, Bad Astronomy. A tough choice.
oracknows | January 5, 2009Over the last year and a half, Jenny McCarthy has been, unfortunately, a fairly frequent topic of this blog. There is, of course, a reason for this. Ever since she published her first book on autism back in the summer of 2007, she has become the public face of the antivaccine movement and autism quackery. Indeed, Generation Rescue, that reliable bastion of antiscientific antivaccine pseudoscience and autism quackery, has been--shall we say?--rebranded as "Jenny McCarthy's Autism Organization." In the process, she has demonstrated a level of burning stupid that defies description, a stupidity…
oracknows | January 4, 2009When first I commented on the unfortunate death of HIV/AIDS denialist Christine Maggiore a few days ago, little did I expect to be descended upon by several of her fellow denialists, who promptly swelled the comment thread after the post to close to a couple of hundred comments. Perhaps I should not have been so surprised. It's an emotional story, and whenever, for example, Tara Smith wrote about HIV/AIDS pseudoscience it was not uncommon for her posts to provoke well over a thousand comments. It also doesn't help that HIV/AIDS denialists tend to be among the most persistent of cranks.
In any…
oracknows | January 3, 2009I can only guess that being voted Age of Autism's "Reporter of the Year" went to David Kirby's head. Of course, the only real competition was Dan Olmsted, who apparently couldn't find the Clinic for Special Children in Amish country (or, more likely, didn't bother to look for it) yet bravely claims there are no autistic Amish (which probably explains why he no longer works for UPI); Steve Wilson of WXYZ News in Detroit, who trotted out long-discredited canards about mercury in vaccines to produce a dishonest, fear mongering report and then showed up in the comments of a blog to make a fool of…
oracknows | January 2, 2009Now that 2009 is about to kick into gear, I have to look back at 2008 one last time to acknowledge one failure. As a backdrop to that failure, I note that the antivaccine propaganda site Age of Autism has posted a series of their People of the Year "awards" for 2008, including, antivaccine luminaries such as:
Person of the Year: Dr. Bernardine Healy. Just because a hack political appointee known to tilt science to be in line with ideology hops on the "too many too soon" bandwagon, AoA thinks it has a legitimate argument from authority. It doesn't.
Couple of the Year: Jenny McCarthy and Jim…
oracknows | January 2, 2009Here we go again.
You know, now that it's 2009, I had hoped that one of the most irritating people alive would continue his blissful quiet. I'm referring, of course, to Deepak Chopra, that Indian physician who demonstrates that a medical training is no protection whatsoever against pseudoscientific and anti-scientific thinking. Indeed, Chopra goes far beyond that in that, not only has he become a leader of the so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) movement, also sometimes called the "integrative medicine" (IM) movement that seeks to "integrate" treatments that range from…
sb admin | January 1, 2009Antidepressants are a very useful class of medications. With the introduction of the first modern antidepressant, fluoxetine (Prozac) in the U.S. in the late 1980's, the pharmacologic treatment of depression has undergone a revolution (and an enduring controversy). Older classes of antidepressants were often effective, but came with a host of unpleasant toxicities---MAOIs can lead to potentially fatal interactions with certain other drugs, and even foods, and tricyclic antidepressants, when misused, can lead to fatal overdoses. Prozac, the first of a new class of medications known as SSRIs…
jstemwedel | December 31, 2008
He defended the views he expressed in many of his radio programs and said that, because he consulted for so many drugmakers at once, he had no particular bias.
"These companies compete with each other and cancel each other out," he said.
The New York Times on psychiatrist and former radio host, Dr. Frederick K. Goodwin, whose NPR program "The Infinite Mind" was cancelled after it was discovered that Goodwin failed to disclose more than $1 million in income received for giving marketing lectures for drugmakers.
Dr. Goodwin seems a little unclear on the concept of conflict of interest.
It…
purepedantry | December 31, 2008PhRMA -- the association of pharmaceutical companies -- has agreed to a voluntary moratorium on drug paraphernalia given to doctors:
Starting Jan. 1, the pharmaceutical industry has agreed to a voluntary moratorium on the kind of branded goodies -- Viagra pens, Zoloft soap dispensers, Lipitor mugs -- that were meant to foster good will and, some would say, encourage doctors to prescribe more of the drugs.
No longer will Merck furnish doctors with purplish adhesive bandages advertising Gardasil, a vaccine against the human papillomavirus. Banished, too, are black T-shirts from Allergan adorned…
oracknows | December 31, 2008Yesterday, I commented on the tragic death of HIV/AIDS denialist Christine Maggiore, who was HIV-positive herself and refused to use antiretroviral drugs during her pregnancy to prevent maternal-fetal transmission of the virus and insisted on breast feeding even though the virus can be transmitted to the baby through breast milk. Her cultish clinging to the belief that HIV does not cause AIDS against all scientific evidence showing otherwise cost her daughter her life in 2005 and, very likely, cost her her own life a few days ago. I concede that it is quite possible that Maggiore did not die…
oracknows | December 31, 2008I know, I know, I've criticized P.Z. Myer's poll-crashing proclivities as being childish and pointless. However, so few people seem to agree with my take on it that I'm wondering whether, if I can't beat 'em I should join 'em. So let's try it out.
On the Obama Transition Team website, Generation Rescue has put up this question (just type in the search term "Generation Rescue" to find the question:
Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey were named 2008 Couple of the Year (www.ageofautism.com) due to their advocacy work for Generation Rescue. Why hasn't the Transistion Team made autism a top priority…
j7uy5 | December 31, 2008Ethanol is a poison. But the difference between poison and
medicine sometimes is only a matter of dosage.
For decades, there have been studies that purport to show a small
benefit from regular consumption of small amounts of ethanol, with
obvious problems caused by excessive alcohol consumption.
Physicians, however, are divided about what to do with this
information. Do we recommend that people have one alcohol
beverage per day, or do we remain silent on the subject?
One reason to be reluctant to recommend moderate drinking, as opposed
to abstinence, is that it is very difficult to prove…