medicine
oracknows | December 10, 2008
I have to wonder if the most famous denizen of the Discovery Institute in medical circles, Dr. Michael Egnor, is on vacation or something. For some reason, he's been especially active over at the Discovery Institute's repository of pseudoscience, Evolution News & Views, over the last couple of weeks. Neurosurgeons tend to be very busy people, more so even than a humble breast cancer surgeon like me, and few are as motivated as I am to blog. Yet, these days Dr. Egnor's been flooding EN&V with more of his blather than I've seen him do in a long time, maybe ever.
It's times like these…
sb admin | December 9, 2008This was first posted at Science-Based Medicine on Monday, but I can't seem to keep myself from cross-posting. --PalMD
I've been thinking about an interesting organism lately, an organism that illustrates some basic principles in science-based medicine.
The organism is called Haemophilus influenzae (H flu), a gram-negative bacterium discovered in the late 19th century. H flu has a great story, both in historic and modern times.
The brilliant microbiologist Richard Pfeiffer isolated H flu from influenza patients in the late 1800's (hence its name) and for many years, it was believed to be…
purepedantry | December 9, 2008I was sorry to read over at Megan McArdle's blog over at the Atlantic yesterday that she has Hashimoto's thyroiditis and as a consequence has to give up being a vegan. (Her diet was high in soy for protein, and there is some evidence that soy interferes with thyroid function. More on this in a bit.) Anyway, I noticed in the comments that there are lots of people that hadn't ever heard of Hashimoto's (and my Mom actually had it too), so I would say a couple of things to clarify.
Hashimoto's thyroiditis is the most common kind of thyroid failure in areas of the world where people get enough…
ddobbs | December 9, 2008Looks like a special effects lab, but it's a bakery that makes bread in the shape (and look) of body parts. Via Biomedicine on Display, where you can find more photos as well as a link to this YouTube video of the baked goods.
My wife is an ace baker as well as a vegetarian. Not sure what she's going to think of this.
jstemwedel | December 9, 2008Back in November, at the Philosophy of Science Association meeting in Pittsburgh, I heard a really interesting talk by Jeremy Howick of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford University about the challenges of double-blind trials in medical research. I'm not going to reconstruct his talk here (since it's his research, not mine), but I wanted to give him the credit for bringing some tantalizing details to my attention before I share them with you here.
First, he noted that "blinding" might not be as apt a description of what actually happens in medical trials as "masking". A double…
oracknows | December 9, 2008My original post that asked the intentionally provocative question Was Nazi science good science? provoked a lot of comments, some of which made me think, which is good. This post was inspired by an article in which historian of the Nazi era Richard Evans was featured in a story about Nazi science and expressed his amazement at how much Nazi science was treated just like any other science, with little or no comment by other scientists of the era about the completely unethical and downright evil nature of the experiments, which reduced human beings to the status of laboratory animals, and…
ddobbs | December 8, 2008A few that rolled away with the tide ...
PsychCentral not impressed with Outliers
Look Who's in the Operating Room
From the Deutches Museum, tractors as core culture
And from Boing Boing, a Studley tool chest. And I was all excited to get my little canvas toolbag yesterday.
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Malcolm Gladwell, Medtronics, Deutsches Museum, Wildlife
oracknows | December 8, 2008In 2007, I wrote a series of posts about what I found to be a fascinating yet at the same time disturbing phenomenon, specifically self-experimentation by cancer patients using an as yet unapproved drug called dichloroacetate. If you'll recall, DCA is a small molecule drug that was used to treat congenital lactic acidosis in children through its inhibition of the enzyme pyruvate dehydrogenase kinase. This inhibition shifts the metabolism of glucose towards oxidative metabolism in the mitochondria and away from glycolysis, the product of which is lactic acid. In January 2007, Dr. Evangelos…
j7uy5 | December 8, 2008
Tapentadol
is a drug for pain. It was approved by the US FDA for the
treatment of moderate to severe pain. The
href="http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/NEWS/2008/NEW01916.html">FDA
news release was dated 24 November 2008, although the actual
approval was a few days earlier.
Tapentadol acts on μ-opioid receptors, making it similar to
morphine
and its ilk. Do we need another opioid agonist? And
if so,
why? Suspicions deepen because it was produced by the same
company that makes tramadol. Indeed, it is similar to
tramadol in
many ways. Tramadol is the active ingredient in
Ultram®, now…
oracknows | December 5, 2008What is it about celebrity models and credulity towards woo?
Very early in the history of this blog, we first encountered Suzanne Somers, someone who underwent lumpectomy and radiation therapy for breast cancer, as well as radiation, but eschewed chemotherapy for "alternative" medicine. Guess to what she attributed her survival? Then she got into bioidentical hormones, even though it's generally a bad idea to pump yourself full of huge doses of estrogen far beyond anything ever used for hormone replacement therapy if you're a breast cancer survivor. (Her luck in not having induced a…
oracknows | December 4, 2008I've long had an interest in World War II history. Ever since I was around 11 or 12 years old, a major portion of my reading diet has consisted of books and articles about World War II. Back when I was young, my interest was, as you might expect, primarily the battles. The military history of World War II fascinated me, and I build many, many models of World War II fighter aircraft and warships when I was in my early teens. (No cracks about how the airplane glue obviously affected me, although it is true that back then it was real airplane glue, chock full of toluene and lots of other organic…
oracknows | December 3, 2008A small part of me is glad that my inquiries a while back to get a job at Northwestern University in Chicago came to nothing when I read stuff like this on, of all places, Julie Deardorff's blog:
Next appointment? Sept. 21, 2009
It now takes 10 months to get an appointment for a regular screening mammogram at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, which runs the largest single-site breast center in Illinois. And if that causes you any stress or inconvenience, Northwestern officials are sorry.
"The growing national shortage of radiologists who have advanced training in reading mammograms has had a…
oracknows | December 3, 2008Ever since I started paying attention to it, acupuncture has, at least until recently, inspired ambivalence more than anything else in me. As a skeptic and science-based physician, I found it very easy to dismiss utter quackery like homeopathy or the various "energy healing" modalities, such as reiki or therapeutic touch strictly on the science alone. After all, homeopathy is based on magical thinking more than anything else, specifically the concepts of "like cures like," the concept that dilution with vigorous shaking can make a remedy stronger, and the idea that water has "memory" all are…
ddobbs | December 2, 2008A few that keep slipping out of my hands:
It's All in Your Head -- Sally Satel, in the Wall St Journal, on a recent study showing about half of American doctors use placebos in practice. Satel, who wrote an interesting piece NY Times Magazine piece a while back on her search for a kidney donor, also has an interesting piece on a Senate bill designed to allow states to reward organ donors.
PhamaLot on Pharma's Influence on the Media.
On a related note, a Columbia Journalism Review piece on Science Reporting by Press Release
Andrew Sullivan on The AP's Cowardice.
Hospitals Fail to Take Basic…
sb admin | December 2, 2008We sometimes treat them like second-class citizens. Or do we? Certainly smokers hate it when we force them out into the cold for a butt. Here in Michigan, we're thinking about restricting smoking in a lot of public places. There benefits are supposed to accrue to three groups: the smokers themselves, their co-workers who are exposed to second-hand smoke, and the public, who pays more for health care because of smoking.
I asked a simplistic question once about whether smokers should pay higher insurance premiums, that doesn't really bring the same benefits to everyone as a more…
oracknows | December 2, 2008Well, it looks as though I've stepped into it yet one more time.
Believe it or not, I hadn't intended to stir up trouble among the ScienceBlogs collective, both English- and German-speaking. Really. Oh, I'll admit that there are occasionally times when I actually do mean to stir up trouble. One recent example is when it was rumored that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. might be chosen to be Secretary of the Interior or, even worse, Director of the EPA. Much to my surprise, I actually did manage to stir up a goodly amount of blogospheric reaction, too. Although I believed it to be a good cause, this…
ddobbs | December 1, 2008So says the Wall St. Journal's Health Blog:
Obama Presidency Could Bring Cheaper Medicines, Universal Coverage
Disclosure of interest: I spent about $10,000 this year on health insurance, $6000 out of pocket; owe $1200 to doctors and hospitals; and still haven't gone through my deductible.
oracknows | December 1, 2008I tell ya, I'm on the light blogging schedule for a mere four days, thanks to the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, the happy invasion of family on Thursday and Friday, and a significant amount of grant writing I've had to deal with on Saturday and Sunday, and somehow I missed not only a study relevant to my field of interest, but the reaction of antiscientific quackery apologists to said study. First, let's look at the reaction, then the study, which reports that as many as 22% of mammographically detected breast cancer may spontaneously regress.
First off the block is Dr. Joel Fuhrman:
It's…
oracknows | November 30, 2008I don't read ScienceBlogs.de for the simple reason that I don't understand German beyond a few words and phrases. Consequently, I don't know what our German counterparts are up to. However, a reader sent me a link that gives me reason to be very concerned about at least one of the blogs in the German ScienceBorg Collective. It's a blog called Lob der Krankheit, which apparently means something like "Praise of Illness." Specifically, my reader referred me to a post entitled "Aluminium muss raus aus Impfstoffen!" because it concerned him. In essence, it means "aluminum must be removed or…