medicine
sb admin | July 3, 2008Orac was kind enough to pollute my inbox with the latest idiocy from the journal that has never met a crank it didn't like. As Orac says, "Medical Hypotheses [is] the journal where the editors encourage the authors to make shit up."
Before I tell you about the latest "hypothesis", let me give you an idea of what kind of thinking goes into this publication. The latest issue has an editorial that argues that it is the "maverick" scientist who makes the real scientific breakthroughs, and that teamwork is only for the "modestly talented".
Not that there's anything inherently wrong with being…
oracknows | July 3, 2008
One of the main issues that I've written about quite a bit is the issue of what the state should have the power to do when a child has cancer or another life-threatening disease and the parents choose quackery over scientific medicine when the disease is potentially (or even highly) treatable or curable with standard treatment. Most of the time, this has come in the context of patients like Abraham Cherrix, who, with his parents support chose the quackery that is the Hoxsey therapy over chemotherapy, or Katie Wernecke, whose parents chose high dose vitamin C and other woo, over effective…
sb admin | July 2, 2008Sure, we have obesity problems in this country, but we also have more direct food safety problems. Summer has brought with it news of the bungled tomato-Salmonella affair, and now, from the Midwest, contaminated beef.
One of our local supermarket chains has been forced to recall hamburger meat because of over a dozen cases of E. coli-related disease. These cases have occurred over a wide area, and the bacteria are genetically linked, indicating a likely common source.
erv handed me some legitimate criticism regarding my very brief post on diarrhea. It was certainly not my intention to…
oracknows | July 2, 2008I've written extensively before about how advocates of non-science-based "medical" treatments, such as naturopathy, homeopathy, and all the woo that follows have been waging a war on all fronts against science- and evidence-based medicine in their effort to have their so-called "complementary and alternative medicine" (or the newer, brighter, shinier name "integrative medicine") be perceived as co-equal with scientific medicine. They've infiltrated academia. They've insinuated their agenda into medical school curricula. They've even managed to have the teaching of woo become a mandatory part…
oracknows | July 2, 2008In the eyes, of anti-vaccine advocates, vaccines bear the brunt of blame for a variety of conditions, including autism, asthma, neurodevelopmental disorders, autoimmune disorders and a wide variety others. Often this link is based on retrospective data, in which parents or patients recall and self-report how many vaccines they've had and which ones. This self-recall is then correlated with the health condition under study, and sometimes correlations are found. However, it's long been known that self-reporting has a tendency to be unreliable, with a tendency to conflate incidents that may or…
sb admin | July 1, 2008I hadn't realized that Vermont has passed a law requiring insurers to cover naturopathic care.
We've covered extensively the quackery that is naturopathy, but really, if a patient chooses to see a quack, it's their business. But with health care costs soaring, requiring insurers to pay for voodoo is a rather bad idea. Already, many plans cover chiropractic, another unproven treatment. Throwing more health care dollars at more unproved and disproved treatments will help no one (except the quacks who have boat payments to make).
There are many causes of high costs of health care: we…
oracknows | July 1, 2008Yesterday, I was depressed. Today I'm a little irritated.
I'm irritated because I came across a study from a couple of weeks ago that's actually a really cool study that applies actual science to the question of how diet and lifestyle changes might alter biology to improve health. It's exactly the sort of study that can apply help understand how diet affects health. It's a study by Dean Ornish, who's widely known for his advocacy of a lifestyle-driven approach to treating atherosclerotic coronary artery disease and producing evidence in the early 1990s that such a lifestyle alteration could…
oracknows | June 30, 2008
"I am Locutus of Borg. Resistance is futile. Your life as it has been is over. From this time forward, you will service us." - Locutus of Borg.
"Strength is irrelevant. Resistance is futile...Your culture will adapt to service ours." -- The Borg.
I'm a bit depressed these days.
Maybe a better term for it would be pessimistic, as I'm not really depressed about the state of my life per se. More precisely, I'm becoming increasingly pessimistic about the state of science- and evidence-based medicine in this country. What brought this pessimism to the forefront was last Thursday's post, which…
grrlscientist | June 30, 2008tags: Ovulation, medicine, technology, streaming video
Recently, human ovulation was captured on video for the first time ever. Two researchers, Stephan Gordts and Ivo Brosens of the Leuven Institute for Fertility & Embryology in Belgium, performed transvaginal laparoscopy, which involves making a small cut in the vaginal wall and observing the ovary with an endoscope. "This allows us direct access to and observation of the tubo-ovarian structures without manipulation using forceps," reports Gordts. Below the fold is part of their video. [0:55]
Read more about it.
oracknows | June 29, 2008I have some bad news for the medical blogosphere. Well, actually Sid Schwab does. Apparently, he's decided to drop out of the blogosphere, at least for now.
Sid's grown enormously as a blogger since he first started hawking his book a couple of years ago in the comments here. He got on my nerves at first, but I quickly took a liking to him and his blog, realizing that his early self-promotion came from his being new to the blogosphere and not realizing that too much of that sort of stuff is generally frowned upon. Now he's a well-respected medical blogger, and definitely one of the best. The…
oracknows | June 28, 2008Apparently there's a chiropracter named Billy Sticker running for President. His platform:
My platform:
To increase your patient count by 200% during my first term
To increase your income by 200%
Pass legislation designating Chiropractic the Official Health Care of America
Reduce our dependency on pharmaceuticals (because Chiropractic would be the official health care!)
He even has his own video coverage:
Say it ain't so! A woo-meister for President. That'd be a step down even from our current President! It's even worse than that, though. He's apparently a guy who sells marketing…
oracknows | June 27, 2008I realize that I've been mighty hard on Jenny McCarthy these last several months. I've made fun of her for her idiocy, her arrogance of ignorance, and her antivaccination lunacy, not to mention her utter ignorance of science, and, yes, I've been rather vicious at times. However, she richly deserved it. Indeed, I argue that in fact my reaction was actually mild in comparison to the sheer lunacy that she regularly spews and the threat to public health her ignorant antivaccinationist activism represents.
But it's Friday, and that means it's fun day. That means it's time for an excursion into…
oracknows | June 26, 2008A few months ago, I wrote a post lamenting how science- and evidence-based medicine has lost the linguistic high ground to the woo peddlers, those who have "rebranded" quackery first into "alternative" medicine, then into "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), and more recently into "integrative" medicine (as though "integrating" antiscience and pseudoscience into effective, science-based medicine somehow adds anything of value to medicine) and discussing strategies for reclaiming it.
Now, I've found out how CAM promoters pulled it off. Dr. Wallace Sampson has the scoop and dishes it…
oracknows | June 26, 2008
Sigh.
He's baaack. Yes, that dualism-loving Energizer Bunny of antievolution nonsense, that "intelligent design" apologist neurosurgeon whose nonsense has driven me time and time again to contemplate hiding my head in a paper bag or even a Doctor Doom mask because of the shame of knowing that he is also a surgeon, that physician who denies that an understanding of evolution is important to medicine and who just doesn't know when to quit, Dr. Michael Egnor, is back to embarrass me yet again. It's been a long time--months, actually--and, quite frankly I found the break from his specious…
oracknows | June 25, 2008It's rare that the mainstream media gets it right about vaccines and autism, and when they do I feel obligated to point it out. Such is the case with Sam Wang's article The Autism Myth Lives On. It's well worth reading, even though it's a couple of months old. (How I missed it when it first appeared, I don't know.) Wang even nails some of the reasons why this myth persists:
Although her [Jenny McCarthy's] concept of evidence is flawed, I don't blame her. The error highlights how our brains are wired to think. Like the authors of the 1998 study, she concluded that two events happening around…
oracknows | June 25, 2008I was perusing the feeds of my fellow ScienceBloggers the other night when I came across a post by ERV that really resonated with me. In it, she expounds on the benefits of doing things "old school" in the lab, specifically with respect to having hard evidence to defend oneself if ever accused of scientific misconduct. She has a point, but that's not why the post caught my attention. I've actually been struggling with the conflict between "old school" and "new school" recently.
You see, I've recently been in the position where I've had to add people to my lab, and in fact the entire staff of…
j7uy5 | June 25, 2008Radio Frequency IDentification tags (
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_frequency_identification">RFIDs)
are little devices that communicate with other devices, sending an
identification signal. You've probably seen them on various
items purched in stores. They commonly are used for inventory
control and theft prevention. They are increasingly used in a
wide variety of applications.
Now, they have been found to interfere with medical devices.
This includes critical items such as mechanical ventilators
and external pacemakers.
The study was published in JAMA ($ for full access…
oracknows | June 24, 2008Remember the case of Clifford Shoemaker, lawyer for the antivaccinationist mercury militia who tried to subpoena Kathleen Seidel under incredibly dubious legal reasoning in order to harass and intimidate her? Remember how the subpoena was quashed?
One word: Sanctioned!
Woo-hoo!
Quoth Judge James R. Muirhead:
Clifford J. Shoemaker's action is an abuse of legal process, a waste of judicial resources and an unnecessary waste of the time and expense to the purported deponent.
The Clerk of Court is directed to forward a certified copy of this order, the motion to quash, the show cause order, and…
oracknows | June 23, 2008
If you happen to be a blogger, has there ever been anything that you meant to blog about, but it totally slipped your mind? This is just such an item for me.
Yes, multiple people e-mailed me about this on Friday, and for some reason in my amusement at David Kirby's antics over the weekend twisting a CDC report and then looking even more clueless as he modified his post in response to his errors being pointed out, producing a mangled mess that made even less sense than before, in all the fun, I totally forgot about the item.
And my blog mascot is not at all pleased. Here's why:
MOSCOW - A…
oracknows | June 23, 2008If there's one thing that lay people (and, indeed, many physicians) don't understand about screening for cancer is that it is anything but a simple matter. Intuitively, it seems that earlier detection should always be better, and it can be. However, as I explained in two lengthy posts last year, such is not always the case. To understand why requires an understanding of cancer biology. The reason is the extreme heterogeneity of tumor behavior and prognosis. This variability was well described in a study from about a month ago, in which it was observed that the doubling time of breast cancers…