medicine
oracknows | August 7, 2008This is disturbing.
No, it's not disturbing because it's a story potentially about autism. It's not even disturbing because it indicates that Jenny McCarthy might soon have some competition in the brain dead antivaccinationist autism mom competition. It's disturbing because of who Jenny's new competition might be:
Britney has a whole new problem on her hands to deal with. According to In Touch, she fears that her youngest son Jayden James may be autistic.
Family friends say he often seems to be off in his own little world, playing by himself, and he starts crying for no reason.
Britney and…
oracknows | August 7, 2008...to ask über-quack Hulda Clark, the woman who disagrees with Dr. Simoncini in that she thinks that all cancer is caused by an intestinal fluke and that she can cure it by "zapping" it with a chintzy device she calls a "Zapper" that looks a lot like a Scientology E-meter, any question you want. She's going to be broadcasting her quackery all over the intertubes tonight on Patrick Timpone's One Radio Network at 7 PM CDT:
Thursday, August 7, 7-8 PM Talk to the Legendary Dr. Hulda Clark
Dr. Clark has a clinic in Mexico and claims a high success rate with Cancer patients and uses the word "…
sb admin | August 7, 2008In an earlier post, I wrote about the epistemology (or perhaps ontology---we never really did settle it) of disease. Defining what is disease is sometimes obvious, sometimes not. If you have HIV, you have HIV---a test is positive or negative, treatments are known. If you have high blood pressure, it's a little trickier. How do we know that 140 mmHg is "hypertension" and that 139 is not? Does it even matter? An essay in this week's Annals of Internal Medicine says "yes".
As stated above, some diseases/diagnoses are binary---you have chlamydia or you don't. Some are continuous---…
oracknows | August 7, 2008I don't much like Mike Adams of NaturalNews.com (formerly NewsTarget.com). Indeed, I haven't yet been able to find a more blatant purveyor of the worst kind of quackery and paranoid anti-physician and anti-medicine conspiracy theories anywhere on the Internet, with the possible exception of Whale.to. However, Whale.to is so utterly, outrageously, incoherently full of not just quackery but paranoid New World Order conspiracy theories and other paranormal silliness that any but the most deluded can easily see it for what it is with just a cursory reading of a few of its many, many pages. It's…
grrlscientist | August 6, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, premature hair graying, autosomal dominant trait, genetics, horses, hair color, syntaxin-17, melanocortin-1 receptor, cis-acting regulatory mutation, melanoma, evolution
This horse is in the process of losing its pigment.
It will end up being all white by the time it is eight years old.
Image: Horse Wallpaper [larger view].
Even though I have always been a fan of black horses, my heart did leap at the sight of the noble Shadowfax racing towards Gandalf in response to his call in the Lord of the Rings. White horses have symbolized purity throughout most ages…
oracknows | August 6, 2008A couple of days ago, I did a Respectfully Insolent⢠takedown of a disappointingly credulous and misinformation-laden article published on Medscape about the human papilloma virus vaccine Gardasil. The article was clearly biased, and, worse, it quoted Oprah's favorite woo-loving gynecologist Dr. Christiane Northrup parroting germ theory denialism and the myth that Louis Pasteur "recanted" on his deathbed. All in all, it was a terrible article.
Today, multiple people have pointed out to me and I have seen at the blog Holford Watch that the link to the Medscape article now leads to a "page…
oracknows | August 5, 2008Bizarrely enough, Suzanne Somers has been a common topic of discussion on this blog since the very beginning. Indeed, in one of my earliest substantive posts, way back in December 2004 when I had just started this blog on Blogger, I used her as an example of how misleading breast cancer testimonials can be. At the time, I only knew Somers as a breast cancer survivor who had decided to turn to "alternative" therapy. What she really meant was that she had undergone surgery and radiation but had decided not to undergo chemotherapy, opting instead for mistletoe extract
I also explained at the…
clock | August 5, 2008I heard that this is how it happened: when I went to Belgrade and talked about OA at the med school at University of Belgrade, I mentioned that Vedran is the local Web guru for them if they need anything. Someone from the Oncology hospital was there and later she contacted Vedran and asked him to make a blog aggregator that pulls together what people are writing about cancer. So, he did it - the Oncology Blog Aggregator is now live. If you know of good cancer blogs that should be included in the aggregator, let me know in the comments.
oracknows | August 5, 2008Yesterday, there was a press release announcing the "Vaccinate Your Baby" campaign being promoted by the American Academy of Pediatrics and Every Child by Two. This morning in New York, there will be a press conference to unveil the initiative, described thusly:
Every Child By Two (ECBT) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) are launching a new campaign with actor Amanda Peet to urge parents to immunize their babies from vaccine-preventable diseases. This new initiative will address misinformation about vaccines that causes confusion among parents and puts children at risk. These myths…
purepedantry | August 5, 2008It has been a rough month here at Pure Pedantry.
At one point last week, I think I trained rats for 8 straight hours. (My job in the lab is training rats.) And let me just tell you, that is not particularly interesting. Visualize getting a repetitive stress injury moving around an pissed off animal with a limited attention span but to whom your entire future is chained. Anyway, in order to entertain myself, I have been playing every episode of South Park in order in the background. (Yes, I know...very, very sad.) Sufficeth to say, this has resulted in me having South Park on the brain…
oracknows | August 4, 2008It's happened again, only this time it's escalated. Sadly, this escalation was predictable.
Remember back in February, when I discussed how animal rights terrorists had been harassing a researcher at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC)? At the time, protesters attempted a home invasion of a researcher, leading to a police response where a home was searched by the police. This time around, however, these thugs have turned violent:
SANTA CRUZ -- The FBI today is expected to take over the investigation of the Saturday morning firebombings of a car and of a Westside home belonging to…
grrlscientist | August 4, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, Macaw Wasting Disease, myenteric ganglioneuritis, proventricular dilatation disease, Bornaviridae, avian bornavirus, negative strand RNA viruses, pan-viral microarray, ViroChip
One pair of the Little Blue (Spix's) Macaw, Cyanopsitta spixii.
This species is extinct in the wild and its captive population consists of roughly 70 to 100 individuals.
Image: Fundação Parque Zoológico de São Paulo (São Paulo Zoo), Brasil.
For more than 30 years, a mysterious disease, known as proventricular dilatation disease (PDD), has sent chills of terror down the spines of…
clock | August 4, 2008Mo has the scoop - a fascinating interview with Heather Perry, one of the rare people who voluntarily underwent trepanation surgery.
oracknows | August 4, 2008I've lamented time and time again how much woo has managed to infiltrate academic medicine, even to the point where prestigious medical schools such as Harvard and Yale have fallen under its sway. I've even gone so far as to lament that resistance is futile when it comes to the rising tide of woo threatening to wash over academic medicine, although lately I've been in a more pugnacious mood.
But what good is a pugnacious mood when denialist pseudoscience starts popping up credulously reported in news sources tailored for physicians and other health care professionals? That's exactly what…
sb admin | August 3, 2008The discussion we've had since Friday regarding the Bush administration's latest foray into theocracy brought up some interesting points. We discussed implications of the draft regulations including likely limitations on access to safe and effective birth control. But there is another issue here that disturbs me greatly.
Last week we talked a little bit about medical ethics. I'm not an Ethicist (Mike! Are you reading?), but I am a "practical ethicist", as are all health care providers. How do ethics inform the discussion of what care we can or cannot provide?
First, let's take the…
oracknows | August 2, 2008It's Saturday, and what better way to spend it than in front of the computer? Who cares if it's sunny and in the low 80s, temperature-wise? Why would you care about that when there's so much great blogging about science, specifically cancer research, at the latest installment of the 12th Edition of the Cancer Research Blog Carnival over at nosugrefneb.
sb admin | August 1, 2008I'm so angry I can barely type coherently. I have very strong feelings about abortion, but I believe it is possible to respectfully disagree about the ethical issues involved. I have an obstetrics colleague who does not perform abortions, but refers patients needing this service to others. That's the ethical way for a doctor to oppose abortion---don't do it, don't prosteletize, refer out. My personal feeling is a woman has the right to control her body and all that dwells within, but I can see why others would disagree.
All that being said, if you chose a profession that will, by its…