medicine
oracknows | June 22, 2008I could resist a brief mention of this. Remember yesterday's post, when I discussed how EpiWonk had deconstructed and demolished David Kirby's latest mangling of epidemiology and willful misreading of government reports? Apparently it had an effect. It would appear that Mr. Kirby may actually have read it and taken it to heart. (Either that, or his capable of shame after all.) How do I know? He's made major modifications of his original post and reposted them.
Out with the old (including the old title): CDC: Vaccine Study Design "Uninformative and Potentially Misleading"
In with the new (…
oracknows | June 21, 2008At this stage of the game, I almost feel sorry for David Kirby.
Think about it. He's made his name and what little fame he has (which isn't much outside of the tinhat crowd that thinks the guv'mint is intentionally poisoning their children with vaccines to make them all autistic) almost entirely on the basis of one book published over three years ago, Evidence of Harm: Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic: A Medical Controversy. Of course, the question of whether mercury from the thimerosal preservative that used to be in vaccines, or vaccines themselves, cause autism has not been a…
grrlscientist | June 21, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, quaternary ammonium compounds, fertility problems, repoductive problems, zoos, aviculture, medicine, disinfectants
I know a fair number of zoos and aviculturists who disinfect the premises occupied by their breeding flocks of birds with quaternary ammonium compounds to prevent the spread of diseases, especially viral disease. But according to a story that just appeared in the top-tier journal, Nature, exposure to the quaternary ammonium compounds, ADBAC (n-alkyl dimethyl benzyl ammonium chloride) and DDAC (didecyl dimethyl ammonium chloride), could cause a sharp…
oracknows | June 20, 2008...Orac might be in trouble:
(Click for the full comic.)
I wonder if I should hire a guard.
Actually, I think reading Respectful Insolence⢠might do Jenny McCarthy some good, especially this post (or maybe this post, too). Unfortunately, she's too deluded and arrogant to realize how scientifically ignorant she is; so it would probably just be a waste.
oracknows | June 20, 2008I know I like to say that woo is eternal, and it is. That doesn't, however, mean that individual examples of woo are necessarily eternal. Some, it seems, are. Does anyone doubt, for example, that homeopathy, which has been around for over two hundred years now, will still be around 200 years from now? I'd like to think it won't, but fear that it will, even though I know I won't be around to find out. Ditto for energy-based "healing" and naturopathy, among others. On the other hand, not all woo is eternal. Sometimes the reason is fashion, which, as we all know, is fickle. Sometimes the reason…
jstemwedel | June 19, 2008Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic. St. Martin's Press, 1987.
There are a few books on my shelf that I can read any given number of times without being bored or impatient. One of these is And the Band Played On, a painstaking work of journalism that never feels laborious in the reading -- despite being in excess of 600 pages.
Randy Shilts, who was a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle reporting on AIDS in the early 1980s, assembled an intricate chronological telling of the early unfolding of the AIDS epidemic, from the first glimmerings of…
oracknows | June 19, 2008...and his name is Edzard Ernst.
And here's the reason why.
Anyone who can rile up homeopaths that much is my kind of guy.
sb admin | June 19, 2008...instead of focusing on innovation. I've written about Pfizer and Lipitor a few times in the last year. Now, Pfizer has found a way to extend its patent on Lipitor, a very profitable drug used in the management of heart disease and high cholesterol.
Lipitor's a great drug. It treats high cholesterol very effectively, and is effective as both primary and secondary prevention for cardiovascular disease (there is much more to the story, but that's it in a nutshell). It's also costs about $120.00 for a month of therapy, and therapy is usually life-long.
In contrast, simvastatin, a generic…
oracknows | June 19, 2008I'm a cancer surgeon, and if there's one thing that drives me straight to the liquor cabinet it has to be quack cancer "cures." Very early in the history of this blog, I discussed one of the biggest quacks of all time, a woman who thinks that all cancer is caused by a liver fluke (but only if the patient has propyl alcohol in his body, which, according to her, allows the fluke to become established) and that she can cure all cancer with a combination of herbs and the use of a device that she calls a "Zapper" (which looks suspiciously like a Scientology E-meter). I'm referring, of course, to…
oracknows | June 19, 2008I just shook my head as I perused this item on Pharyngula earlier this morning. What else can you do? The irrationality and lunacy is beyond belief as I read a story about a mother named Colleen Leduc called into school because a report of sexual abuse was made about her autistic daughter Victoria:
The frightened mother rushed back to the campus and was stunned by what she heard - the principal, vice-principal and her daughter's teacher were all waiting for her in the office, telling her they'd received allegations that Victoria had been the victim of sexual abuse - and that the CAS had been…
oracknows | June 18, 2008Color me unimpressed.
As I mentioned last week, that opportunist who has apparently become a paid shill for the hardcore antivaccination movement (namely Generation Rescue, Autism Research Institute, National Autism Association, Coalition for SAFE MINDS, and Talk About Curing Autism, all of whom helped to fund his recent trip to the U.K. and, according to Kirby's announcements and advertisements, appear to be funding his speaking engagements), David Kirby, is making a tour of the Northeast to spew his special brand of credulous idiocy about vaccines and autism hither and yon. I listed his…
oracknows | June 18, 2008David L. Katz, MD, MPH, FACPM, FACP, Adjunct Associate Professor of Public Health at Yale University is not happy.
No, he is not happy at all. Specifically, he is not happy with the skeptical blogosphere. He apparently feels that we nasty, close-minded skeptics have been so very unfair in our discussions of him. Specifically, he is not happy how several of us have called him to task for his remarks at the 1st Annual Integrative Medicine Scientific Symposium held in April at Yale University. In particular, what stood out (and provoked the sarcasm and contempt of several bloggers devoted to…
j7uy5 | June 18, 2008Gardasil is the vaccine from Merck that greatly lowers the risk of
infection from some human papilloma virus (HPV) infections. The
href="http://scienceblogs.com/ethicsandscience/2006/06/hpv_vaccine_approved_daughters.php">first
big controversy had to do with the practice of giving the
vaccine to young girls. To be most effective, it should be
given prior to the commencement of sexual exposure. So the
recommendation is to give it to girls at age 12. This led
some persons to complain that it might encourage sexual activity in
contexts they deemed inappropriate.
The ethics of this have…
ddobbs | June 18, 2008
Nothing like that first cup of the day
Personally I am glad to read this:
First came the fine news that red wine may help prevent Alzheimer's. Now a 20-year study (admittedly a bit flabby) of 125.000 health-care in Spain found that drinking 2 or more cups of java a day may help prevent heart disease. I find this a good thing to contemplate as I drink my first cup today.
Catch it in the abstract of the paper by Esther Lopez-Garcia and colleagues in the Annals of Internal Medicine, a news story by Ewen Callaway at NewScientist, or the skeptic's take at Dana Blankenhorn's ZDNet Healthcare…
oracknows | June 17, 2008She was thin, white skin stretched over bones like worn parchment over old sticks being rhythmically blown in the wind as her chest rose and fell, each time with what seemed like a major effort. Incongruous with the rest of her body, her abdomen was distended, a balloon that looked dangerously close to popping, also rising and falling with each breath. She moaned softly and looked at me.
I introduced myself, told her I was a surgeon, and continued, "Your oncologist asked me to see you about your belly pain."
"Go ahead," she croaked, hardly acknowledging my presence in the way that patients…
tfk | June 16, 2008The Washington Post reports that the Red Cross has fallen on hard times:
The American Red Cross said yesterday that it has depleted its national disaster relief fund and is taking out loans to pay for shelters, food and other relief services across seven Midwestern states battered by floods.
The Bush economy and high gas prices have led people to reduce their donations as floods and tornados have swept across the nation. As a result "The disaster relief fund today is completely depleted. The balance is zero," according to Jeffrey Towers, chief development officer for the American Red Cross.…
oracknows | June 16, 2008The other day, in response to several e-mails asking me about the latest bit of bad science and epidemiology purporting to support the idea that mercury in the thimerosal preservative that used to be in many childhood vaccines is a major cause of autism, I posted links to EpiWonk's thee-part (so far) takedown of this execrable study, whose passage through the peer-review system unchallenged is evidence of just how screwed up peer review can be at some journals. I forgot at the time that there is another, equally, if not even more, detailed takedown of this new bit of pseudoscience posted at a…
sb admin | June 16, 2008Abel over at TerraSig dug up an interesting story about a man who was "murdered" killed rendered not-living (in the moral if not legal sense) by a "fake chiropractor" (although it's not clear to me what science separates a "real" from a "fake" chiropractor). One of the commenters wondered if lack of health insurance had driven the man away from standard medical care. Another bemoaned the inadequacy of treatment for chronic pain conditions.
This got me thinking...
In the case of the fake chiropractor, I'm guessing that many factors went into the decedent's seeking this particular care.…
sb admin | June 16, 2008In the course of reading the comments in the last several posts, I've come upon many mentions of the "placebo effect". Steve Novella has a few good posts on the placebo effect, but I'd like to take a look at the clinical view.
The placebo effect is a phenomenon often observed in clinical studies. When doing clinical studies, there is often a notable change in subjects response simply by being in the study. This effect is multifactorial, often due to such biases as a desire to please researches, better medical follow up, and others. It is most often a data artifact that arises when…
oracknows | June 16, 2008...is one of my favorite surgeon-bloggers Sid Schwab when he discusses what happens when naturopaths actually subject their "healing art" to scientific examination. In the wake of the rather--shall we say--vigorous discussion that ensued after my post last week about the recently passed law in the State of Minnesota to license and regulate naturopaths, today I can't resist taking a look at the widely publicized study of St. John's Wort for Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) that by coincidence was published in JAMA last week and that Sid discusses.
What he's discussing is a study…