medicine
oracknows | September 26, 2008It figures.
I know, I like to start posts with "it figures," and maybe I do it too often, but this time it really fits. For a moment I thought I was going to have a lot of egg on my face over this, but just for a moment. Yesterday, I wrote a rather extensive post about how some left wing bloggers are going into fits of paranoid conspiracy-mongering frenzy, claiming that John McCain's melanoma was more extensive than advertised and that he is supposedly dying of recurrent melanoma and hiding it from everyone. I spent a lot of effort, not to mention verbiage, explaining why that scenario is…
oracknows | September 25, 2008Less than a month ago, I got a bit perturbed by some vile rhetoric written by a left-wing blogger named Matt Stoller, who referred to John McCain as a "crazy, cancer-ridden dishonest madman." As you recall, I administered a bit of not-so-Respectful Insolence to him. It wasn't so much because I like John McCain. Indeed, I've pretty much decided that McCain is a lost cause, a shadow of his former self. I would have voted for him in 2000, but in the last eight years he's let his ambition to become President utterly destroy whatever honor he had left, a truly sad thing to see given his previous…
sb admin | September 24, 2008Once a cancer has been diagnosed, we must use our knowledge of biology, medicine, and clinical trials to plan treatment. Treatment can be curative or palliative (that is, with a goal of reducing symptoms or extending life, rather than effecting a cure).
Understanding cancer treatment requires a little bit of basic biology, and as with all of my more "science-y" posts, please forgive any oversimplification (but please also note that this complexity stands in stark contrast to the simplistic altmed cancer "cures"), or for overtopping the head of the hapless non-scientist.
As you recall from…
oracknows | September 24, 2008As you may have guessed, I'm tired of David Kirby. I've slapped down his nonsense so many times before, but, like the Energizer Bunny, he keeps going and going and going, spewing his pseudoscientific antivaccine nonsense, all the while asking that we really, truly believe that he isn't "antivaccine." He just repackages standard antivaccine tropes in clever and dense verbiage to make them somewhat less obvious--but not to those of us familiar with them.
Most recently, he attacked Dr. Rahul K. Parikh, a pediatrician who wrote an excellent and largely favorable review of Dr. Paul Offit's latest…
oracknows | September 24, 2008Here we go again.
Tuesday night and yesterday, you probably saw it, plastered all over the media, in the newspapers, on ABC, on the radio, in press releases, and around the blogosphere. Yes, it was another bit of science by press release, with news outlets practically falling all over themselves to hype the results of an acupuncture study reported earlier this week at the annual meeting of the American Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology (ASTRO). Leading the pack was ABC News:
A new medical study finds that acupuncture, an ancient form of healing that has been around for thousands…
grrlscientist | September 24, 2008tags: x-ray crystallography, foot and mouth disease, research, viral research, streaming video
Below the fold is an utterly fascinating video that documents the current state of the research in one lab that is developing a drug that stops foot and mouth disease virus from replicating in the host cells. Even better, this beautfully executed video was created by the lab members themselves! I can hardly wait for more scientists and labs to document their research in real-people accessible videos such as these [6:03]
This lab has its own blog, so go there!
oracknows | September 23, 2008Thanks to our "friends" at the Age of Autism, I've learned something interesting.
I knew that antivaccinationist "mother warrior" and Indigo Child Supreme Jenny McCarthy was slated to appear tomorrow, September 24, on the television show that arguably serves as the most powerful and pervasive promoter of woo, magical thinking, and dubious health advice in the world, The Oprah Winfrey Show. I hadn't actually planned on watching it (I'm never home when it's on anyway), and setting the DVR to record it for later viewing seems more than I'm willing to do to expose my brain to the neuron-…
oracknows | September 23, 2008If there is one difference that defines scientific medicine compared to "alternative medicine" it is the application of the scientific method to health claims. Science and the scientific method require transparency: transparency in methodology, transparency in results, transparency in data analysis. Because one of the most important aspects of science is the testing of new results by other investigators to see if they hold up, the diligent recording of scientific results is critical, but even more important is the publication of results. Indeed, the most important peer review is not the peer…
sb admin | September 22, 2008This story is disturbing for a host of reasons, but there's a medical ethics issue hiding in here.
Apparently, if you work for the Long Island Railroad, you can retire at 50, then claim disability for a job you no longer have, and collect both a disability check and a pension. I shit you not. But it gets better. According to the Times, "Virtually every career employee -- as many as 97 percent in one recent year -- applies for and gets disability payments soon after retirement...."
I strongly encourage you to read the whole article, but let's focus on a particular point.
Dr. Melhorn, who…
oracknows | September 22, 2008Every blogger encounters a post that he wishe he or she had written. Here's one such time, as Prometheus schools us on how alternative practitioners manage to be so persuasive and convincing:
How they do the voodoo that they do so well - Part 1
How they do the voodoo that they do so well - Part 2
grrlscientist | September 22, 2008tags: socialized medicine, uninsured Americans, health care policy, election2008, politics
I have a confession to make: I am an American who has no health insurance, and I have been so ever since my postdoctoral funding ended four years ago. But I am not alone: according to the most recently available statistics, somewhere between 45-47 million Americans are living without any sort health care coverage, and every year, more and more working adults and families join the ranks of the uninsured. Shockingly, according to the Urban Institute's estimate, 22,000 Americans actually died in 2006…
oracknows | September 22, 2008Oddly enough, I'm more tired this morning than I was on Friday.
That's the sort of thing that happens when I actually do as much work over the weekend as I often do on two typical weekdays. The reason is that I've suddenly found myself with an unexpected promotion, and--oh, by the way--there's stuff that needs to be done on Monday. Consequently, my originally intended topic for Monday will have to wait until Tuesday or Wednesday, mainly because it might require a bit of thought. That's OK. It'll wait. Besides, it'll be much more useful and educational if I have a little time to think about it…
oracknows | September 21, 2008As hard as it is to believe, it's almost here: The 96th Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle, which will be appearing on Thursday, September 25. This time around, it's set to land at Endcycle. If you're a skeptical blogger, don't forget to get your best stuff ready by Wednesday.
Now, I've heard from a few of you that there's no contact information for Jeremy at Endcycle on the blog. I've sent him a gentle reminder to post some contact information. In the meantime, if you can't wait, feel free to send me your entries and I'll forward them on.
oracknows | September 21, 2008No, it's not Pink Floyd, but I needed surgery, I'd want these guys trying to wake me up after it was over:
They don't have to sing about it while they're doing it, though. After I'm safely awake and in the recovery room would be fine.
sb admin | September 19, 2008Me: Hi, I'm Dr. Pal and I'll be taking care of you here in the hospital.
Patient: Where the hell is my real doctor?
Me: He's at the office seeing patients. He doesn't come to the hospital anymore.
Patient: Why the hell not?
Me: Well, it's complicated, but it's getting harder and harder for doctors to pay their overhead. They have to see more and more patients, and in the time it takes to come to the hospital and see one patient, he can see 5 or 6 in the office.
Patient: What's wrong with him just getting up earlier?
OK, time for a brief lesson on modern medical practice. First of all, I'm…
sb admin | September 19, 2008In Cancer 101, I gave some basics to understanding cancer. A commenter asked a good question, and our next lesson will attempt a simple answer.
The question regarded how a pathologist can tell if a cancer is "invasive" by looking at a specimen. Well, depending on the specimen, the answer changes, but let's use the colon as an example. Most colon cancers start out as benign polyps. Eventually the cells in the polyp can become malignant, and after that, they can they can begin to grow through layers of normal cells.
Here is a diagram of a cancer of the colon at various stages. As you can…
oracknows | September 19, 2008As a cancer surgeon, I maintain a particularly intense contempt for peddlers of cancer quackery. Although I've been fortunate enough not to have had to see the end results of it more than a handful of times in my career, women with bleeding, stinking, fungating tumors with widespread metastases that could have been treated if they hadn't decided upon woo rather than good old-fashioned surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, I've become aware of enough such cases and seen the dishonest marketing of quackery enough to drive me to maintain this blog and undertake other activities to promote…
grrlscientist | September 19, 2008tags: human anatomy, human bodies exhibit, forensic pathologist, Cyril Wecht, streaming video
This is an absolutely fascinating tour of the Human Bodies Exhibit by forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht. This video will prove to be especially interesting to students of human anatomy and medical students [9:35]
oracknows | September 18, 2008I feel a bit bad this week.
You see, since Tuesday I've been pretty much wallowing in some of the most outrageous woo, antiscience, and abuses of logic and reason I've ever come across, courtesy of the merry band of clueless antivaccinationists over at Age of Autism. I had thought that I should try to do a serious science post for today. But I got back from work too late, and those sorts of posts are a lot more work than the usual run-of-the-mill post. There's all that reading, analysis, and sometimes looking up of references. True, they're intellectually satisfying, but I can't do them every…
oracknows | September 17, 2008Well, well, well, well.
Sometimes science and ethics do win out after all:
CHICAGO (AP) -- A government agency has dropped plans for a study of a controversial treatment for autism that critics had called an unethical experiment on children.
The National Institute of Mental Health said in a statement Wednesday that the study of the treatment -- called chelation -- has been abandoned. The agency decided the money would be better used testing other potential therapies for autism and related disorders, the statement said.
The study had been on hold because of safety concerns after another study…