medicine
sb admin | July 14, 2008I take care of my own patients in the hospital. I say that because it is not a given for internists. For a number of reasons, many having to do with time management and money, most internists utilize hospitalists, internal medicine docs who specialize in the care of hospitalized patients.
Taking care of patients in the hospital presents some unique challenges. First, they are very, very ill. You have to be pretty sick to get into a hospital these days. You must be willing to be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And you have to be able to deal with some rather intractable…
scientificactivist | July 12, 2008Legendary heart surgeon Michael DeBakey passed away Friday night at the age of 99. From the Houston Chronicle:
Medical statesman, chancellor emeritus of Baylor College of Medicine, and a surgeon at The Methodist Hospital since 1949, DeBakey trained thousands of surgeons over several generations, achieving legendary status decades before his death. During his career, he estimated he had performed more than 60,000 operations. His patients included the famous -- Russian President Boris Yeltsin and movie actress Marlene Dietrich among them -- and the uncelebrated.
"Dr. DeBakey singlehandedly…
oracknows | July 11, 2008The other day, I sarcastically "thanked" Andrew Wakefield for his role in making sure that measles is again endemic in the U.K. At the same time I wondered whether in 5 to 10 years I'd be similarly "thanking" Jenny McCarthy for her role in doing the same thing here in the United States.
It looks as though I won't have to wait five years:
At least 127 people in 15 states have come down with the measles, the biggest outbreak in the United States in more than 10 years, Reuters reported.
Cases started springing up in May, when more than 70 people in a dozen states became ill. According to federal…
oracknows | July 11, 2008I'd start out by saying that here's another one for my (in)famous Academic Woo Aggregator, except that this institution is already a part of the Woo Aggregator. The only thing I can say is that Steve Novella (who's from Yale and has had to manage an influx of woo at his home institution) might get to feel a bit of schadenfreude over this, because the institution in question is Harvard University.
And boy is this a doozy. In fact, it's a $6,500 dose of continuing medical education doozy! Check out Structural Acupuncture for Physicians:
Date: 10/2/2008 -- 6/7/2009
Course #: 00292317
Areas of…
oracknows | July 10, 2008It's been a week now since my wife and I learned that our beloved dog, whom we've had for eight years, had terminal cancer. At the time I was so sad and down that I just couldn't even imagine getting myself into the appropriately light-hearted frame of mind that I try to maintain. In the week since the shock of learning the diagnosis, I still can't achieve that frame of mind, although, as you may have noticed, I've been able to achieve the level of sarcastic snarkiness directed against pseudoscientists and antivaccinationists that my readers have come to expect. It's easy when you're angry…
oracknows | July 10, 2008While I'm taking some time to rag on TV news for its ludicrously credulous reporting of various "alternative" medicine claims, take a gander at this puff piece on a faith healer.
Where's James Randi when you need him? True, the story mentioned that not one of this faith healer's "healings" could be independently verified with objective information and data, but the rest of the tone of the story is quite credulous.
My answer to ABC News (remember: Steve Wilson works for an ABC affiliate) is this video:
The video speaks for itself. Bentley just kicked a guy with stage IV colon cancer in the…
oracknows | July 10, 2008What is it with the local news media in my hometown?
You might (or might not) remember when I noted back in February that there was one Detroit station that did an unbelievably, hilariously dumb and credulous story about "orbs" in photos and whether they are ghosts or spirits manifesting themselves to their friends and family. That story came courtesy of "reporter" Ama Daetz of the local NBC affiliate WDIV-TV (and I do use the term "reporter" loosely). It was so over-the-top, credulously stupid, so hard to distinguish from an Onion parody, that I even "honored" it with a spot on Your Friday…
oracknows | July 9, 2008Courtesy of antivaccinationist Kool Aid drinker Ginger Taylor, I saw this new term for those who argue against the scientifically dubious proposition that vaccines cause autism, specifically Paul Offit:
Vaccinianity - (Vax.e.an.eh.te) n. The worship of Vaccination. The belief that Vaccine is inherently Good and therefore cannot cause damage. If damage does occur, it is not because Vaccine was bad, but because the injured party was a poor receptacle for the inherently Good Vaccine. (ie. hanna poling was hurt when she came into contact with Vaccine, not because the Vaccine was harmful, but…
oracknows | July 9, 2008I've said it before, and I'll say it again. J.B. Handley, that bull-in-a-china-shop general in the mercury militia who detests me intensely, is about as ignorant as they come when it comes to science and clinical trials. Yesterday, he provided yet more evidence of his cluelessness in his latest piece posted to that repository for all things antivaccine, Age of Autism.
Mr. Handley's all in a lather because the Associate Press published a story yesterday about a proposed NIH-sponsored clinical trial of chelation therapy for autism entitled Fringe autism treatment could get federal study.…
denialism | July 8, 2008Complementing Pal's essay on Gardasil yesterday is our buddy la Pobre Habladora guest blogging on Feministe.
Which, I think, brings us to a new angle on anti-vax denialism because as Pal mentions, the motivations behind harping on Gardasil are different than the usual nonsense. Gardasil, to everyone's dismay, has become intertwined with sexual politics in this country. As the only vaccine that has been identified as preventing a sexually-transmitted disease (the HepB vaccine managed to avoid this, not to mention an association with IV-drug use) there has been a clear impetus among the anti-…
oracknows | July 8, 2008Thanks, Andrew Wakefield.
Thanks for bringing the measles back to the U.K. with your shoddy, litigation- and profit-driven pseudoscience:
Fourteen years after the local transmission of measles was halted in the United Kingdom (UK), the disease has once again become endemic, according to the Health Protection Agency (HPA), the public health body of England and Wales. In an update on measles cases in its weekly bulletin last week, the agency stated that, as a result of almost a decade of low mumps-measles-rubella (MMR) vaccination coverage across the UK, 'the number of children susceptible to…
oracknows | July 8, 2008Having lived in Ohio for eight years and married a woman from the Toledo area, I had come to think that Ohioans had more common sense. I guess I was wrong.
On the other hand, I should have realized that I was wrong. After all, Ohio is home to The Ohio State University Center for Integrative Medicine and the Cleveland Clinic Department of Integrative Medicine. So much for hard-nosed Midwestern skepticism, I guess. My only consolation as a University of Michigan graduate is that Ohio seems to be trying to surpass Michigan for promoting woo in academia. Or it would be were it not that a major…
sb admin | July 7, 2008I'm starting to worry about health coverage in the NY Times. Lawrence Altman is a great health reporter, and I like one of Michael Pollan's pieces in particular, but the Times also has a bunch of those blog-thinggies, and one of the writers has disappointed me before.
Oops, she did it again...
Tara Parker-Pope, one of the Times' bloggers, has credulously reprinted a lousy article from another magazine. First, that's some pretty lazy blogging---up there with re-posts, blog rolls, and open threads (all of which I can plead guilty to, but not often). More important, though, is the…
oracknows | July 7, 2008Given all the heartbreaking stuff that's going on with our dog this week, I'm rather grateful to John Lehrer for pointing me to this uplifting article about the dogs abused by the evil and despicable Michael Vick.
It turns out that that bastard didn't end up leaving all his dogs so vicious that euthanasia is the only option or too vicious to be reclaimed. Through love and hard work, most of the dogs have been saved:
Of the 49 pit bulls animal behavior experts evaluated in the fall, only one was deemed too vicious to warrant saving and was euthanized. (Another was euthanized because it was…
sb admin | July 7, 2008Look, I know no one is weeping for doctors and their complaints about payment cuts, but you should at least be concerned, and here's why.
Some doctors are rich...very rich. Most are not. Medical education is largely financed with debt, and primary care doesn't pay all that much. Small practices work on narrow margins, and often run "paycheck to paycheck". For internists, a large percentage of payments come from Medicare, the national health insurance program that covers seniors. Doctors participate with Medicare voluntarily---there is no law requiring us to see Medicare patients or to…
oracknows | July 7, 2008Last week, The New York Times started a rather unusual series in its medical section entitled, The Evidence Gap, described thusly:
Articles in this series will explore medical treatments used despite scant proof they work and will consider steps toward medicine based on evidence.
When I first saw the series, I was prepared for a crapfest. My experience has generally been that when reporters start examining the evidence for and against a treatment they usually do a pretty lousy job. This is most obvious when it comes to "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), where we are routinely…
oracknows | July 5, 2008Thanks to everyone for your kind comments about the recent bad news about our dog. (Even someone who really detests me because of my position on the vaccine/autism issue was in this instance kind.) I don't know if I'll feel much like blogging for a while; on the other hand, blogging has been therapeutic for me in the past when bad things happen, even if I don't actually write about them. It's always been a good way to take my mind off of badness by concentrating on other badness, such as quackery. Also, Echo has often been my little (OK, well, not so little) black blog buddy, lying nearby or…
oracknows | July 4, 2008
Today is Friday, which has normally meant for the last two years that it's the time every week when I poke fun at some particularly outrageous woo. Indeed. I even had a great idea for a 4th of July-themed post today that (I hope) would have been hilarious. I had even started to write a bit of it a couple of nights ago.
Then real life intervened, and I didn't feel the least bit like humor last night. I still don't feel capable of humor this morning, either. Those of you who don't have pets may want just to skip the rest of this; you may not understand why I'm feeling so down and may view…
sb admin | July 3, 2008Sometimes things just fall into your lap. This evening I was working on a different piece, and not getting very far, when an email arrived in my in-box.
You see, when you write for the 21st most influential science blog, you get a lot of unsolicited mail (OK, fine...I get spam in my blog-related inbox. But my spam is cool.)
What's great about a lot of this spam is that it is usually written by an actual person, and directed at me by name, which means they had to at least glance at the blog. In this case, a "glance" was all, or perhaps the writer simply suffers from poor reading…
oracknows | July 3, 2008I've written time and time again about how antivaccinationists go out of their way to try to reassure us that they really, truly are not "antivaccine" or even that they support vaccination. Of course, such disclaimers are often nothing more than a prelude to a tirade of blatantly antivaccination rhetoric and misinformation about "toxins" in vaccines and the like, and if you try to pin an antivaccinationist down and ask her if there was any evidence that would ever change her mind or persuade her that it's safe to vaccinate, you'll either get a lot of hemming and hawing of the "Green Our…