medicine
clock | September 1, 2008Towards a Data Sharing Culture: Recommendations for Leadership from Academic Health Centers:
Sharing biomedical research and health care data is important but difficult. Recognizing this, many initiatives facilitate, fund, request, or require researchers to share their data [1-5]. These initiatives address the technical aspects of data sharing, but rarely focus on incentives for key stakeholders [6]. Academic health centers (AHCs) have a critical role in enabling, encouraging, and rewarding data sharing. The leaders of medical schools and academic-affiliated hospitals can play a unique role…
oracknows | September 1, 2008Say it ain't so!
Skeptics' Circle host from earlier this year Rod Clark informs me that another celebrity has been sucked into maw of antivaccine propagandizing disguised as an autism charity. The one luring these celebrities in, of course, is that tireless, ever-Indigo campaigner against vaccines and for quackery Jenny McCarthy, flexing her D-list celebrity luster and snookering celebrities into supporting her antivaccine cause (unless, of course, that celebrity is Charlie Sheen, who's already an antivaccine loon and thus requires no deception). First, it was Britney Spears, Hugh Hefner, and…
j7uy5 | August 31, 2008Many denture adhesive creams contain zinc. This has always
been known. The zinc is harmless, or so we thought.
The problem is thought to be rare. The peculiar thing about
this finding is that no amount of safety testing on the zinc itself
could have detected the problem. That's because the problem
does not come directly from zinc. Rather, is in the effect
that zinc has upon the absorption of copper.
From a recent issue of Neurology ($ for full access):
href="http://www.neurology.org/cgi/content/abstract/71/9/639">Denture
cream
An unusual source of excess zinc, leading to…
sb admin | August 31, 2008Dr. Signout, over at, well, Signout, wrote an interesting piece the other day. It's a piece that everyone should read and think about while they can, because you never know when you may need to think about this.
One of the most dramatic procedures in any hospital is the CPR, also known as a "code blue", or simply a "code". This is the choreographed chaos that takes place when someone's cardiopulmonary status deteriorates to the point that only immediate and violent intervention will prevent their death. To put it more dramatically, the object of a code is often to forestall or even reverse…
oracknows | August 31, 2008As my fellow Americans (ack! I'm sounding like a politician!) know, this happens to be a holiday weekend in the States, Monday being Labor Day. Given that, I'm taking it easy blogging until Tuesday, given that most people (in the U.S. at least) are probably out taking advantage of the opportunity that what is traditionally considered the last weekend of the summer vacation season affords. Me and my wife, we're taking advantage of this three day weekend to do somthing truly fun: To finally put our basement in order. (There's still a ton of stuff down there from when we moved in.) Woo-hoo!
In…
oracknows | August 29, 2008I hesitated about whether to post this, knowing how many antivaccine activists read this blog, which is why I didn't post it yesterday. Still, I think this might be of sufficient interest to my readers that I thought I'd announce it, just with relatively short notice.
It turns out that today's Science Friday with Ira Flatow features a discussion of childhood vaccines, complete with an appearance by a man whom antivaccinationists consider the Dark Lord of Vaccination himself, Dr. Paul Offit. It's on at 2 PM, and I'm told that Dr. Offit will be in the 2:20 to 2:40 PM segment, but I generally…
sb admin | August 29, 2008Last year's flu season was bad. Hopefully this year's will be better (for us, not for the virus). The CDC is changing the recommendations a bit to improve the population's coverage, and I'm hoping I won't be quite as busy this winter.
Last year, I provided you with weekly flu activity updates. I'll probably do that again, but I think we need to kick off the season with an influenza primer. Get ready for some science! (BTW, for a more extensive look at influenza biology, see Effect Measure.)
The Disease
The flu is misunderstood. It is a respiratory illness, not a "stomach bug". Is is…
oracknows | August 29, 2008The single most necessary task for a physician practicing science- and evidence-based medicine is the evaluation of the biomedical literature to extract from it just what science and the evidence support as the best medical therapy for a given situation. It is rare for the literature to be so clear on a topic that different physicians won't come to at least somewhat different conclusions. Far more common is the situation where the studies are conflicting, although usually with a preponderance of studies tending to support one or two interventions more than others, or where there are few or…
oracknows | August 28, 2008A reader of this blog was outed by a moron posting as "Mark" on the Age of Autism blog. I will not link to the outing, nor will I link to Age of Autism. I have, however, kept a nice screen shot of the page, just in case someone over there has an attack of conscience, and I will also comment on the observation that "outing" its enemies is a favorite technique of cranks in general. However, it seems to be a particular favorite of antivaccine cranks. So is hypocrisy, it would appear. After all, "Mark" did not post under his full name but only under his first name, while he thinks nothing of…
sb admin | August 28, 2008It's no secret that I have no respect for Joe Mercola. Every time I read one of his promotional emails or make a visit to his website, I see more fantastic claims. Usually, I don't see blatant lies...until now...
This guy likes to claim that he's in the woo-peddling business to help people...it's not about profit. This is clearly untrue. But other than his dissembling about his motives, I've never really checked his site for lies in particular...just silly, illogical falsehoods.
Today I got an email from Joe:
Why I Believe You Should Take Action NOW to Help Remove Potential Toxins from…
oracknows | August 28, 2008Believe it or not, there was one area of so-called "alternative" medicine that I used to be a lot less skeptical about than I am now. Homeopathy, I always realized to be a load of pseudoscientific magical thinking. Ditto reiki, therapeutic touch, and other forms of "energy healing." It didn't take an extensive review of the literature to figure that out, although I did ultimately end up doing fairly extensive literature reviews anyway. Then, the more I looked into the hodge-podge of "healing" modalities whose basis is not science but rather prescientific and often mystical thought, the less…
ddobbs | August 27, 2008When I called out a Scientific American post yesterday about a rise in measles cases because of unvaccinated children, I forgot to include a link to a longer story on the same issue that ran in the NY Times. It's short, but worth a look as well:
Measles Cases Grow in Number, and Officials Blame Parents’ Fear of Autism - NYTimes.com
More people had measles infections in the first seven months of this year than during any comparable period since 1996, and public health officials blamed growing numbers of parents who refuse to vaccinate their children.
Many of these parents say they believe…
ddobbs | August 27, 2008
Surgeon, attributed to Jan Sanders van Hemessen, c. 1550. Museo del Prado, Madrid
Over at Biophemera, a ScienceBlog I've somehow overlooked to date, biologist and artist Jessica Palmer ponders a question raised by a number of Renaissance paintings depicting surgeons removing "stones of madness" from patients's skulls: Did surgeons (or quacks) sham these operations?
It's a juicy and provocative consideration, well worth a look both for the article and the several paintings shown there.
Hemessen, Huys, and Bruegel all depict the same procedure: the removal of stones from the heads of…
oracknows | August 27, 2008I've been sarcastically "thanking" Jenny McCarthy for bringing the U.S. the gift of measles through her tireless efforts on behalf of Generation Rescue and other antivaccine groups and will continue to do so whenever I deem it appropriate. But Jenny isn't the only one who deserves our "thanks" (no, I'm not going to thank Andrew Wakefield again). Let's not forget all those religions who, either because they think vaccines are messing with God's will or because of some interpretation of a holy book written in prescientific times, religions like this one in Canada:
With the number of confirmed…
oracknows | August 27, 2008Last night was a late night at work, and I didn't have time to apply my usual annoyingly long-winded analysis to a study that I found interesting and had intended to look at today. It'll keep. In the meantime, there are always the brief "link-and-comment" (or in my case "link-and-snark") posts. Also, there was an article a couple of days ago that I have been meaning to bring up since I saw it but somehow allowed myself to get distracted. With the impending resurgence of measles and other previously controlled or even vanquished infectious diseases, courtesy of Jenny McCarthy, Generation…
ddobbs | August 26, 2008This one's causing a dust-up over at the Scientific American's "60-Second Science" blog
Measles is back, and it's because your kids aren't vaccinatedDavid Biello
If you didn't vaccinate your kids, you too could find yourself partly responsible for the resurgence of a disease thought eliminated in 2000.
Measles—a highly contagious disease-causing virus—is making a comeback in the U.S., thanks to parents fears over vaccines. Fifteen children under 20, including four babies, have been hospitalized and 131 sickened by the red splotches since the beginning of this year in 15 states and the…
oracknows | August 26, 2008Yesterday, I was annoyed by a particularly vile article by quackery promoter supreme Mike Adams claiming that Christina Applegate didn't need a bilateral mastectomy and could have "cured" herself of cancer with "natural" methods. Indeed, my contempt for Mike Adams knows no bounds, given that he is the purveyor of a seemingly never-ending stream of antiscience and quackery, much of it directed at cancer patients, who if they follow Adams' "advice" could very well miss their best chance at treating their cancer and thereby wind up dead. Indeed, so great is the amount of quackery emanating from…
j7uy5 | August 26, 2008JAMA has an article on the history of continuing medical education
(CME). Annoyingly, they did not make it one of the
open-access articles, so they don't get a link. However,
there are some telling excerpts and some good commentary over at
href="http://carlatpsychiatry.blogspot.com/2008/08/new-jama-history-of-cme-when-will-we.html">The
Carlat Psychiatry Blog.
There was a time when families used to sit, all together, at the dinner
table, and eat dinner together. I grew up in those days.
Dad, an MD, would sit at the head of the table. My
little sisters would sit next to him. The…
Suzanne Somers versus Christina Applegate in a bilateral prophylactic mastectomy fantasy cage match!
oracknows | August 25, 2008Earlier today, I did a rather extensive post about a particularly ghoulish attempt to exploit the story of a woman with cancer, in this case Christina Applegate. It turns out that Mike Adams isn't the only woo-meister looking to capitalize on Ms. Applegate's misfortune, You just knew it had to happen, but Thighmaster, Bioidentical Stem Cell Huckster Suzanne Somers has gotten in on the act. Apparently she's penned an open letter to Applegate that was published in People:
Dear Christina,
Cancer is scary, and lonely. You can't ask anyone to make decisions for you because it's just too heavy.…
oracknows | August 25, 2008This is getting to be nauseatingly frequent.
As my blog bud Mark Hoofnagle pointed out, the hard-core "alternative medicine" mavens, in particular that despicable promoter of quackery and distrust of scientific medicine who runs one of the two or three largest repositories of antiscience and quackery in existence, Mike Adams, seem to have decided that a lovely new tactic would be to descend upon every celebrity death or battle with serious disease, ghoul-like, and blame their deaths or suffering on conventional medicine rather than disease. Both PalMD and I noted this particularly vile tactic…