medicine
oracknows | November 28, 2008You know what my answer to this question would be. But what about puppet Steve Colbert's answer? He disagrees. Or does he:
"Now sure, she's not the kind of expert who relies on facts and figures....She knows what she feels is true. She's that kind of expert."
Heh.
Oh, damn. PZ beat me to this. Damn it, making fun of Jenny McCarthy and antivaccinationists is my turf on ScienceBlogs!
sb admin | November 28, 2008MarkH is going through the process of deciding what to what to do when he grows up. This is a much more difficult and important decision than many may realize. In order to understand the gravity of this process, I'll have to refresh your memories a bit regarding medical education.
In the U.S., to apply for medical school, you must have completed a (usually) 4-year bachelor's degree from a university. During the final year, you take what amounts to an entrance exam (the MCAT), and send out preliminary applications (often with fees). If the schools like your preliminary applications, they…
oracknows | November 28, 2008Believe it or not, sometimes even Orac has a life. I know, I know, between the ridiculously logorrheic blogging here and other online activities, coupled with even more ridiculous long hours working at his day job, it's hard to conceive. However, my wife and I had a whole passel of relatives over, several of whom spent the night. This puts a crimp in the blogging activity, but for once I don't care that much. Fortunately, there's a lot of good reading out there, of which I picked a few examples:
The "Gonzalez Trial" for Pancreatic Cancer: Outcome Revealed. Remember the Gonzalez trial? It was…
purepedantry | November 27, 2008Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
I was reading the Web this morning, and this story reminded me of a Thanksgiving a couple years ago.
The news story is about how Thanksgiving dinner can cause flareups of gout. Gout -- if you don't know -- is an inflammatory joint disease caused by the deposition of little crystals of uric acid. Uric acid is a compound found in many types of food and drink. It is actually a product of purine metabolism (purine is a component of DNA). Foods that have the most purines are meats -- particularly sweat meats. Here is a list of danger foods. Eating lots of…
oracknows | November 27, 2008Continuing the theme from yesterday one last time this week and bringing our long disused blog mascot front and center, I wish all my readers a happy Thanksgiving!
sb admin | November 26, 2008As a physician, few things frustrate and sadden me as much as preventable deaths. I see it all the time---the guy who kept putting off his colonoscopy and was later diagnosed with metastatic colon cancer, the woman who put off coming to the doctor with her breast lump until it broke through her skin, the heart patient who couldn't stop smoking. They all haunt me. But what if the ghosts were numbered in the hundreds of thousands rather than dozens?
That's what it must be like to be Thabo Mbeki, that is if he has a conscience. It may (or may not) be bad "framing" to call someone a "…
oracknows | November 26, 2008...EneMan thinks he's "too sexy":
Unfortunately, someone else is claiming EneMan as her mascot:
We can't have that. Remember, EneMan has been this blogs mascot since December 2004. Maybe he's getting restless because he hasn't been featured very often the last couple of years. I wonder if I should remedy that...
oracknows | November 26, 2008Here we go again.
Every so often, one of the--shall we say?--less popular members of our crew of science bloggers, someone who, despite being an academic whose area of expertise is ostensibly science communication, has stepped in it again. I'm referring, of course to Matt Nisbet. Only this time, it's not him lecturing us just on how to combat creationism. No, this time around, he isn't limiting himself to just that, although that is what he made his name doing, around the blogosphere anyway. This time around, he's perturbed at a certain word, a certain term that we skeptics sometimes feel…
ddobbs | November 25, 2008More wheels coming off the bus.
Research Center Tied to Drug Company - NYTimes.com:
By GARDINER HARRIS
Published: November 24, 2008
When a Congressional investigation revealed in June that Dr. Joseph Biederman, a world-renowned child psychiatrist, had earned far more money from drug makers than he had reported to his university, he said that his interests were "solely in the advancement of medical treatment through rigorous and objective study."
But e-mail messages and internal documents from Johnson & Johnson made public in a court filing reveal that Dr. Biederman pushed the company to…
oracknows | November 25, 2008As I sat down on the couch in front of the TV last night to do my nightly blogging ritual, trying to tickle the gray matter to come up with the pearls of wisdom or insolence that my readers have come to know and love, I had a fantastic idea for a serious consideration of a question that comes up in the discussion of science and pseudoscience and how to combat pseudoscience. It would be serious and sober. It would be highly relevant to the interests of my readers. It would rival anything I've ever written for this blog before.
I ended up writing this instead. Oh, well, maybe tomorrow. Besides…
sb admin | November 24, 2008The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) is a government agency tasked with (among other things), "[exploring] complementary and alternative healing practices in the context of rigorous science." In this space we have talked about NCCAM quite a bit, but I have to admit that I don't think about them very much. The other day, though, I was reading though JAMA and I came across a study funded by the agency. The study, which showed that Ginkgo does not prevent Alzheimer's-type dementia, was pretty good, so I cruised on over to NCCAM's website to see what else they'…
oracknows | November 24, 2008
There are times when I see a quote by someone who is clearly extremely intelligent, but the quote is so utterly dumb, so devoid of any evidence that a single functioning neuron was behind it, that I can only shake my head in disbelief. Thanks to Dr. Val, Dr. Wes, and Walter Olson, I've found one more such quote. It's by a trial lawyer named Gerry Spence, who was awarded the CAOC Lifetime Achievement Award and bestowed this gem of brain-sucking stupidity on the assembled throng of lawyers attending the awards ceremony:
"We have to redefine who we are: We are the most important people in…
oracknows | November 24, 2008One of the handful of key themes that run through this blog day in, day out, week in, week, out, and year in, year out is that science and the application of the scientific method represent the most successful strategy that humans have yet come up with to improve human health. A consequence of this theme, of course, is the consideration of unscientific "therapies," specifically those known as "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) or, sometimes, "integrative medicine" (IM). As chronicled here (and many other places), the vast majority of CAM therapies are based on prescientific…
sb admin | November 22, 2008For many Americans, it's open enrollment time, the period your employer give you to make changes in your health insurance coverage. You may not understand your insurance very well, but you have to understand this one important fact: your health care providers know even less about your insurance than you do. Most doctor's offices have a sign that says something like, "Your insurance is your business." There is know way for your doctor's office to know all the details of all the different insurance plans.
Each state has different rules, and each part of the country differs in what kind of…
oracknows | November 22, 2008Well, this is depressing to learn. I'd be even more depressed if I were Canadian. All I can say to my neighbors to the north is that I feel your pain, albeit belatedly. I just learned that the recently appointed Minister of State for Science and Technology within Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Cabinet is Gary Goodyear. So what's the big deal?
Gary Goodyear is an chiropractor. Not only that, but he's an acupuncturist, too. Nothing like putting someone who believes in pseudoscience in charge of science and technology. I wonder how that will work out.
Now, for Harper's next appointment, let's…
amillikan | November 21, 2008Medicine & Health
Krayzie pillz? From Flickr, by Dvortygirl
“If two minute men and late age male inability to perform aren't enough reasons [to end male circumcision], I don't know what are. But maybe the good MD has some $Viagr$ to pimp you with.“
The real Cool Maleorgan Freedom on Why male circumcision and female genital mutilation are not morally equivalent.
oracknows | November 21, 2008Leave it to an infectious disease specialist (Dr. Mark Crislip) to dismantle the most recent favorite talking point of the antivaccine fringe, namely "too many too soon," that deceptive and scientifically ignorant concept that somehow the current vaccine schedule "overwhelms" the immune system of infants, causing all manner of chronic health conditions and neurological problems, including autism. In his usual characteristic level of sarcasm that earns him a tip of the hat as far as not-so-respectful insolence goes, he entitles his lesson:
The infection schedule versus the vaccine schedule.
It…
sb admin | November 21, 2008Here's a question for you: is there, or should there be, any difference between studies of "alternative" and non-alternative medicine? I've argued before that there is no such thing as alternative medicine. So why do we need a separate agency to study "alternative" medicine? The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine seems to be just such an agency. For example, the latest study of Gingko biloba for the prevention of dementia could have been funded by other agencies, such as NIMH. Why NCCAM?
First a glance at the study in question. In the introduction, the authors…
oracknows | November 21, 2008
I had thought about taking the day off after celebrating the 100th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle yesterday, but a skeptic's work is never done, and, besides, my wife's out of town for a couple of days. Given the choice of television, working on my program's section of our cancer center core grant or one of the two other grants I'm currently juggling, or blogging, I wonder what appeals to me more. Hmmmm....
Ah, screw it. I've been living my work nearly every waking hour for the last few days. Heck, I even got stuck at work fairly late last night because of the bane of being s surgeon,…
oracknows | November 19, 2008It looks as though the Jenny McCarthy woo factor has claimed two more celebrity victims' brains. If a recently viewed press release is any indication, it appears that Anthony Edwards and Dustin Hoffman are getting into the autism quackery business:
Internet Marketing Company joins Jenny McCarthy, Jim Carrey, Dustin Hoffman, Anthony Edwards and others in fight to help children with Autism.
GREENSBORO, N.C. (June 4, 2008) -- Market America announced today that it is in the development and testing stages of a new line of nutraceutical products that will support the health of children with Autism…