medicine
denialism | November 7, 2008It's that time of year, 4th year medical students (like me - kind of) are choosing their future careers and starting to interview all over the country in their residency programs of choice. I've been notably quiet - subsumed in work, study and applications - but I am catching up on writing about the clerkships I've done in the meantime (Pediatrics, Psych, OB/Gyn and Family Medicine). But since I'm applying for residency now (MD/PhDs have an abbreviated 4th year) I figured now would be a good time to tell people about what this is like, and in the coming months what cities I'm going to be in…
oracknows | November 6, 2008Yesterday, I wrote about a very disturbing development (disturbing, at least, to the science-based community) in the transition to an Obama Administration. That disturbing development is the multiple reports that antivaccine crank Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is being seriously considered to head the Environmental Protection Agency or even the Department of the Interior. Given RFK, Jr.'s conspiracy-mongering over vaccines, his utter failure to change his belief that mercury in vaccines causes autism in the face of overwhelming evidence that it does not. My argument was that appointing someone who is…
oracknows | November 6, 2008I wrote about this study the other day, but clearly I didn't have the final word. As usual, The Onion nails it.
oracknows | November 5, 2008One of the aspects of the Barack Obama candidacy that raised my hopes and those of so many of my fellow ScienceBloggers, as well as scientists tired of the crass politicization of science under the Bush administration, was the prospect of an Administration in which science and reason were valued and in which cranks were not allowed to impose their agenda on agencies whose policies should be driven by the science. That's one reason why I was very disturbed when I read a post on Election Day suggesting that antivaccinationist crank and activist extraordinaire, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., was being…
oracknows | November 5, 2008...is Joseph at Autism Natural Variation.
It turns out that he can't find the correlation between precipitation levels and autism diagnoses that Waldman et al study; he too points out that urbanicity was not controlled for; and he even thinks a bit of cherry picking may have occurred.
Meanwhile, Steve Novella is a bit less harsh, but his analysis is pretty skeptical as well.
oracknows | November 5, 2008I guess Barack Obama's mad hypnotic powers worked.
One non-political thing that this election has reminded me of is that when you've been blogging as long as I have (nearly four years now--almost as long as a Presidential term!--assuming you're good and have found a niche in the blogosphere, you can become one of the "go-to" bloggers for certain subjects. Even though I've taken on the pseudonym (and, some might say, the persona) of a cranky talking computer with a bad attitude that looked like a cheap Plexiglas box of multicolored blinking lights and was featured in a 30 year old British…
oracknows | November 4, 2008OK, even though I have said time and time again that I rarely do any posts that are strictly political in nature, mainly because political bloggers are a dime a dozen, great political bloggers are rare, and I don't consider myself anything better than an at best passable political blogger. However, when politics intersects my areas of medical interest, I can't resist diving in, and unfortunately, Walter Olson gave me a reason to dive in today. In fact, to some extent he killed my election day buzz about the prospects for an Obama victory and a return to a government that respects science and…
clock | November 4, 2008Low-Hanging Fruit is a website which collects data about drug/compound screens against parasitic organisms.
Michelle Arkin and James McKerrow explain:
The apples on the tree at the website represent links to data for the parasites indicated. In some cases, this data is a simple list of hits to be viewed by those individuals and agencies interested in rapid follow-up. In other instances, a more complete database can be accessed under "protocols and statistics" as compiled by Pipeline Pilot (Accelrys) software.
oracknows | November 3, 2008Remember the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS)?
It's been a long time since I've written much about the AAPS, of course, but refreshing your memory will be easy. It's the ultra-libertarian wingnut medical "association" that routinely scrapes the bottom of the barrel, as far as pseudoscience goes, as long as that pseudoscience fits in with their schizophrenic combination of Ayn Randian "superman" libertarianism mixed with a toxic brew of anti-immigration, antivaccinationism, HIV/AIDS denialism, and social conservatism that leads them to lie about the evidence to argue that…
sb admin | November 2, 2008If you have kids you have probably been exposed to the idea that more kids have food allergies these days. Well, the data seem to bear this out. There are several hypotheses about why this is so, but not a lot of data. Rather than engage in speculation, I'd like to wade back into the dangerous waters of real science and tell you a little about allergies. Perhaps after you've read my grossly oversimplified explication, you'll come up with your own science-based hypothesis to explain increased childhood food allergies.
First, let's talk about what isn't going on. The Huffington Post, always…
terrasig | November 2, 2008If you haven't already heard it elsewhere, one of your favorite blogging physicians, Dr Val Jones, has recently hung out her own e-shingle at Getting Better with Dr Val. Many of you know Dr Val from her previous blog at Revolution Health, Dr Val and the Voice of Reason. Dr Val served there as Senior Medical Director and oversaw the growth of the consumer health portal as it grew to 120 million pageviews per month (!).
Here's how Dr Val describes her new digs:
Getting Better is the continuation of Dr. Val Jones' previous blog at Revolution Health: "Dr. Val and the Voice of Reason." The…
oracknows | October 31, 2008I feel bad.
I realize that I've been completely neglecting my Academic Woo Aggregator. You remember my Academic Woo Aggregator, don't you? It was my attempt to compile a near-definitive list of academic medical centers that had "integrated" woo into their divisions or departments of "integrative medicine" (i.e., departments of academic-sounding quackery). Perusing it, I now realize that it's been over five months since I did a significant update to it. You just know that, given the rate of infiltration of unscientific medical practices into medical academia as seemingly respectable treatment…
oracknows | October 30, 2008I ask this question because I have seen something I have never seen before, something so earth-shattering that I wonder if the very axis of the earth has shifted, something so incredible that I have to pinch myself to make sure that I'm not living some unbelievably bizarre dream. I half expect the heavens to open and reveal the Second Coming. What could provoke such incredulity in me?
WorldNetDaily has published an article that is science-based and makes sense. A sample:
Much more disturbingly, McCarthy attacked Peet for daring to disagree with her. "She has a lot of [nerve] to come forward…
oracknows | October 30, 2008I've written here before about nutritional supplements. Specifically, I've expressed my dismay at the double standard, codified into law in 1994 in the form of the DSHEA. This particular bit of truly awful law in essence took away the power of the FDA and FTC to regulate dietary supplements, except under certain rather narrow conditions. In essence, if a supplement manufacturer is careful to keep the claims for a supplement from being too specific, the FDA is virtually powerless to regulate the supplement because the law defines dietary supplements as "food." So, in other words, vague,…
sb admin | October 29, 2008It's that time of year again---the time of year when everyone gets the sniffles, and everyone wants an antibiotic. Even folks who know better, who know intellectually that an antibiotic isn't going to fix their viral illness still harbor a strong suspicion that it just might help---and it couldn't hurt, right?
Well, I've got two words for ya'll: eat shit.
No, I don't mean that as an insult, I mean it quite literally. But you'll have to keep reading to see what I'm talking about.
Many readers are aware of the problem of antimicrobial resistance---the phenomenon whereby bacterial diseases…
oracknows | October 29, 2008Longtime readers of this blog know that my original exposure to antivaccination conspiracy theories first occurred in the context of the now pseudoscientific and discredited hypothesis that somehow the mercury in the thimerosal preservative that used to be used in vaccines was the cause of autism. Despite the backpedaling among antivaccination zealots such as J. B. Handley in the face of overwhelming epidemiological evidence that mercury in vaccines is in fact not detectably correlated with an increased incidence or risk of autism, there still remains a die-hard contingent who insists against…
jstemwedel | October 28, 2008The other day, my better half and I were discussing scratching. Predictably, in the course of the discussion, I became aware of every itchy square millimeter of skin I might possibly possess.
I wondered whether scratching actually works -- that is, whether scratching ever acts to make an itch go away, or even to reduce it.
"Of course it does," my better half opined. "Why else would we do it?"
"Because we're poorly adapted?" I ventured.
So, here's the question*:
Is there any good research to demonstrate whether scratching alleviates itching? Is there any evidence (beyond your mom's say-so…
sb admin | October 28, 2008I don't like to repost, but Steve Novella has some great pieces up right now, and this is directly related. --PalMD
s I've clearly demonstrated in earlier posts, I'm no philosopher. But I am a doctor, and, I believe, a good one at that, and I find some of this talk about "non-materialist" perspectives in science to be frankly disturbing, and not a little dangerous.
To catch you up on things, consider reading one of Steve Novella's best posts ever over at Neurologica. While you are there, you can also follow his debate with neurosurgeon Michael Egnor, the latest guru of mind-body dualism.
To…
oracknows | October 28, 2008The other day, I thought it was about time that I did some of that cool and fancy ResearchBlogging.org stuff, you know, to keep this blog from being nothing more than a collection of not-so-Respectfully Insolent spleen venting at generalized stupidity. I realize that those are some of the funnest posts here and that people like them, but a little variety is required. No study, however, had quite floated my boat, and I was almost to the point of being desperate enough for blog fodder that I considered perusing Age of Autism or even NaturalNews.com (maybe later in the week) in search of that…
oracknows | October 27, 2008Hot on the heals of my post earlier today about the flurry of misinformation-laden ads being aired in Michigan to try to prevent Proposition 2, the proposed amendment to the Michigan State Constitution that would allow embryonic stem cell research using embryos that would be discarded from fertility clinics, I've learned that my alma mater, the University of Michigan, where I did both my undergraduate and medical school training, has released a series of videos countering the dishonest propaganda of groups like MiCAUSE:
The truth about stem cell science
And there's more:
Where Do Embryonic…