medicine
oracknows | July 24, 2008You know, it really annoys me when I see idiocy as idiotic as the idiocy of this surgeon in New Jersey:
In a lawsuit filed yesterday, a Camden County woman accused her orthopedic surgeon of "rubbing a temporary tattoo of a red rose" on her belly while she was under anesthesia.
The patient discovered the tattoo below the panty line the next morning, when her husband was helping her get dressed to go home after the operation for a herniated disc, her attorney, Gregg A. Shivers, said in a phone interview yesterday.
"She was extremely emotionally upset by it," said Shivers. The suit, filed on…
oracknows | July 24, 2008
Regular readers of this blog know that I'm an Apple geek. The Macintosh is my preferred axe and has been, with few interruptions, since the late 1980s. Indeed, the only time I've used anything other than a Mac is when I've had no choice. The first time I saw one was in 1984, not long after the original Mac was released. My roommate somehow managed to come up with the money to buy one through the University of Michigan towards the end of my senior year. I really liked it right from the start but only got to play with it occasionally for a few months. After I graduated, I didn't even own a…
sb admin | July 23, 2008DROP YOUR CELL PHONE NOW!!!!111!
(don't send me the bill for the replacement)
I'm sure others will cover more of the scientific details, but science aside, we should examine why today's statement on cell phones out of Pittsburgh is so ridiculous. Setting aside the lack of data connecting cell phones and health problems, this is horribly irresponsible.
Here's the thumbnail: an alarmist report was released by the UP Cancer Institute's Center for Environmental Oncology. It was apparently targeted at the university community, and stated that despite lack of current evidence, the community should…
sb admin | July 23, 2008The folks at bloggingheads.tv whoring for some link love sent me an interesting link. They had a talking heads session ("diavlog"---damn, that's hard to say) between John Horgan and some other guy (sorry, "Some Other Guy"). Horgan is the guy who brought us The End of Science, a book which was more widely criticized than read. I haven't read it either, but after watching him, I think I need to do a little reading. He's a bright guy, and interesting to listen to, but as live chats often go, there were some errors that deserve parsing, not just because they are errors of fact, but because…
oracknows | July 23, 2008Enough with Radovan Karadzic, already!
I know schadenfreude can be a fun thing. I've even indulged in it myself from time to time. I also know that Radovan Karadzic was a very, very bad man who engaged in ethnic cleansing and genocide in the Balkans wars of the early and mid-1990s. My interest in the Holocaust and Holocaust denial makes it hard not to see the parallels between Karadzic and what Hitler wanted to do.
So, wonder all the people who have forwarded me links to stories revealing that Karadzic had been practicing alternative medicine while he was on the lam all these years, why have…
jstemwedel | July 23, 2008Connected to my last post (and anticipated by my razor-sharp commenters), in this post I want to look at the pros and cons of routine screening mammography in women under age 50, drawing on the discussion of this subject in the multi-page "patient instructions" document I received from my primary care physician.
The aim of screening mammography is to get information about what's going on in the breast tissue, detecting changes that are not apparent to the eye or to the touch. If some of these changes are the starts of cancer, the thought is that finding them sooner can only be better,…
oracknows | July 23, 2008I'm envious of Steve Novella. Well, just a little, anyway. The reason is that he's somehow managed to annoy David Kirby and the anti-vaccine contingent enough to provoke what appears to be a coordinated response to his debunking of anti-vaccine propaganda. For that alone he deserves some serious props.
You may have wondered why I haven't written much about Amanda Peet giving an interview in which she pointed out that she had looked into the matter and had found no reason to believe that vaccines caused autism or were unsafe. In the same interview, she referred to parents who don't vaccinate…
j7uy5 | July 23, 2008Harvard
Medical School recently completed a review of their required
premedical curriculum, culminating with the development of recommended
changes. The outcome of this process is reported in an
article in the recent issue of the New England Journal of
Medicine. It's one of their open-access articles:
href="http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/359/3/221">Relevance
and Rigor in Premedical Education
Jules L. Dienstag, M.D.
In recent decades, scientific knowledge has changed dramatically,
once-settled scientific principles have been replaced by more
sophisticated concepts and…
jstemwedel | July 22, 2008At the urging of my colleague Abel, who liveblogged his own vasectomy, I'm documenting my first mammogram. Given that I had pretty much no idea what to expect going into this, I'm hopeful that this post will demystify the experience a little for those who know they probably should get mammograms but have been putting it off.
Let me preface this by saying that there was no special reason that my primary care physician ordered a mammogram for me aside from my being 40. As such, there's no special cause to be worried for my health as I wait for the results.
Beginning of the month
Had my first…
oracknows | July 22, 2008I've gone on record as saying more times than I care to remember that there is no such thing as "alternative" medicine. There is only medicine. Indeed, the only reason any medicine is considered "alternative" is (1) it is on a scientific basis incredibly improbable and/or it comes from a pre-scientific "healing" tradition; (2) its efficacy is unproven in scientific studies and clinical trials; (3) its efficacy has been tested in randomized clinical trials and found wanting; or (4) a combination of (1) plus one or more of the other three. Of course, one argument that I have made before is that…
oracknows | July 21, 2008...professional wrestling!
You know, it seems eerily appropriate. Generation Rescue always struck me as being akin to pro wrestling anyway, especially its founder J. B. Handley. His antics in the service of the scientifically discredited notion that mercury in vaccines cause autism (or, these days, that it's vaccines that cause autism) always struck me as being largely for show more than anything else, and certainly his trademark bluster is very much like that of a pro wrestler taunting his opponents.
Generation Rescue apparently gets the celebrities it deserves.
I also have to wonder if this…
oracknows | July 21, 2008In the celebrity vaccine wars, as we all know, Jenny McCarthy has become the de facto leader of the "vaccines-cause-autism" lunatic fringe. However, apparently she has managed to recruit another celebrity to help her out. Her choice is amazingly appropriate: Britney Spears, who was seen at a fundraiser for "Jenny McCarthy's autism charity Generation Rescue."
Because no one knows parenting and science like Britney Spears, I guess.
On the other hand, I have to wonder what J. B. Handley, founder of GR, thinks of having the Hollywood press refer to his baby as "Jenny McCarthy's autism charity"?…
oracknows | July 21, 2008Well, I won't back down
No, I won't back down
You can stand me up at the gates of hell
But I won't back down
Gonna stand my ground
Won't be turned around
And I'll keep this world from draggin' me down
Gonna stand my ground
And I won't back down
From I Won't Back Down by Tom Petty, 1989
On Friday, I wrote a rather long post about the whole issue of "framing" science and the issue of anti-vaccine activism. In essence, I tweaked Matt Nisbett and Chris Mooney to give those of us in the trenches fighting the antiscientific belief that drives antivaccinationism some tools, some "frames," to use to…
oracknows | July 19, 2008I suppose I had better get ready for another e-mail with a wounded, puppy-dog, plaintive complaint of "I'm not really anti-vaccine" in it. You see, that's what has happened in the past a couple of times after I wrote about that pediatrician to the children of the stars (in particular Jenny McCarthy's child) and ubiquitous go-to pediatrician whenever the media wants to hear some "skepticism" about the safety of vaccines, Dr. Jay Gordon. Clearly, it really, really bothers him when someone refers to him as being "anti-vaccine," but what other term fits him so well these days? After all, Dr.…
grrlscientist | July 18, 2008tags: bipolar disorder, manic depression, mental illness, psychiatry, suicide, audioblog
Image: Myself43.
A friend sent me this interesting link to an audio piece that recently appeared in the NYTimes about bipolar disorder. This piece may help those with the disorder to feel less alone and help those who love someone with the disorder to get a better understanding of what it is like to live with it. It's not very long, and it's well worth listening to.
oracknows | July 18, 2008Three days ago, ScienceBlogs did something it hasn't done before. ScienceBloggers were given screener DVDs of a new movie by one of our own, Randy Olson of Shifting Baselines. The movie was Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy, and the idea was to get as many of us as possible to review the movie and post our reviews on the same day. The reviews were pretty mixed, ranging from panning the movie to really, really liking it, with the majority from my reading tending towards negative.
Of course, as regular readers know, life intervened for me in a truly depressing way, which is why I was not part of…
oracknows | July 17, 2008Oh, no.
I don't know how they got it. I don't know where they got it. But somehow, they got it. Somehow, those advocates of the idea that mercury in vaccines causes autism have gotten a hold of the white paper telling how big pharma fooled everyone about the real mercury content of vaccines!
It's a veritable smoking gun! How could our Big Pharma and CDC paymasters have allowed this to happen? Even worse, our plans for using D2O to stabilize vaccines have been exposed! Someone will pay for this. The super-secret vaccine police are now questioning every operative, threatening to pump them up…
oracknows | July 16, 2008One of the great "myths" of the mercury militia, that movement that insists no matter what the actual scientific evidence shows that it absolutely, positively has to be mercury from vaccines that cause autism is the Myth of the Poor Excretor. In other words, the claim is that autistic children are somehow "poor excretors" of mercury, thus making the mercury that used to be in vaccines more toxic to them so that it gave them autism. One of the key pieces of evidence cited to counter this myth is a study by Ip et al (2004) that failed to find any correlation between hair and blood mercury…
oracknows | July 16, 2008I was contemplating how to get back into the swing of things as far as getting the blogging juices flowing again after the unfortunate events of the last few days, given how much my last post drained me. I suppose I could have dived into the infamous PZ versus the cracker incident, but, quite frankly, the utter ridiculousness and childishness of the whole affair bored and disgusted me too much, although I don't rule out a brief post about it later today or tomorrow (that is, if anyone even still cares). If I do, I guarantee that my take on the whole kerfluffle will make no one happy, but it…
j7uy5 | July 15, 2008
href="http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/restless_legs/restless_legs.htm">Restless
Legs Syndrome has been more in the public eye lately.
I understand this is because of aggressive direct-to-consumer
advertising. I'm not much of a consumer, so I haven't seen
the ads, but people tell me about them.
Whatever you think of DTC advertising, RLS is real, and it is a
significant problem for some people.
Years ago, it was discovered that RLS can be alleviated for some people
with carbidopa/levodopa. But that was an off-patent medicine.
When patented medicines [Requip (ropinirole) and…