medicine
oracknows | April 28, 2008Over the weekend there was a very good article in the Concord Monitor about Kathleen Seidel and her legal battle with Clifford Shoemaker, whose intrusive "fishing expedition" subpoena recently drew condemnation even from prominent antivaccination activists such as David Kirby and Dan Olmsted and was ultimately quashed with the possibility of sanctions. What this article does a good job for those new to the debate is to put things in some perspective in a relatively brief treatment; I encourage you to read the whole thing, and I will focus mostly on a couple of interesting tidbits in the…
oracknows | April 26, 2008Ah, a lazy Saturday morning. So here I am in the late morning, perusing my e-mail (including e-mail notifications of blog posts) after purposely not having checked them at all last night (and, in fact, even having gone to see a movie for the first time in many months), and what should a reader send me but a bit of very good news:
RALEIGH --A panel of the N.C. Medical Board recommended Thursday that Huntersville's Dr. Rashid Buttar be prohibited from treating children or patients with cancer because his alternative medicine practice is below accepted medical standards in North Carolina.
The…
sb admin | April 25, 2008The World Health Organization has declared today World Malaria Day. Why "World Malaria Day"?
World Malaria Day is an opportunity for malaria-free countries to learn about the devastating consequences of the disease and for new donors to join a global partnership against malaria.
World-wide there are about a million deaths yearly from malaria, mostly in young children. Here in the States, we almost never see malaria. That wasn't always true. When Franklin Roosevelt founded the Tennessee Valley Authority in 1933, malaria affected about 30% of the population in the TVA region. With the use…
oracknows | April 25, 2008
There's a new woo in town. Unfortunately, it's the same as the old woo.
I first noticed it around Christmas. Inexplicably, I started getting a greatly increased amount of traffic to an old Your Friday Dose of Woo post of mine. The post to which I'm referring is one that I did a year and a half ago about some fabulously silly woo that claimed to remove toxins through the soles of your feet through a special foot pad, which inspired me to entitle the post These boots were made for detoxifyin'. This product in question was called "Miracle Patches" and, it was claimed, can remove all manner of…
terrasig | April 25, 2008Okay, some people are smoking some bad dope.
Whilst helping the PharmKid get down to the car for school this morning, I came upon PharmGirl, MD, in a rage while sitting in front of her laptop. The object of her vitriol was a 17 April article in BusinessWeek entitled, "Are There Too Many Women Doctors?: As an MD shortage looms, female physicians and their flexible hours are taking some of the blame." The article derives from a point/counterpoint pair of essays in the 5 April issue of BMJ (British Medical Journal) entitled, "Are there too many female medical graduates?" ("Yes" position, "No"…
scientificactivist | April 25, 2008Molecule of the Day has a post up about isotopically-enriched food that caught my eye for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the idea is wildly outrageous, and, secondly, this is something that actually gets joked about quite a bit in an NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) lab.
Any given element can come in various isotopes, which differ in the composition of their nuclei. The nuclei of different isotopes of the same element have the same number of protons, but they vary in their number of neutrons. Because the number of neutrons in a nucleus does not significantly affect the chemical properties…
terrasig | April 24, 2008Doctor Anonymous has a killer web radio show scheduled for tonight at 9 pm EDT with Kevin, M.D., and Dr Val Jones of Dr Val and The Voice of Reason blog at Revolution Health. (Got your name right this time, Val.)
Here's how to listen and participate in the accompanying chat.
According to the Good Doctor Pho:
We will be talking about yesterday's USA Today op-ed and how doctors can engage the media to better express relevant health issues from a physician's viewpoint.
Doc Anon really does a terrific job and I don't watch/listen/participate as much as I should - I even missed Sid Schwab and Doug…
clock | April 23, 2008OK, I posted a lot of pictures of Belgrade and my Mom's food so far, but the real business was on Tuesday, when I gave two talks about Open Access, PLoS, Science 2.0, the future of the scientific paper, Open Notebook Science and science blogging.
In the morning, I gave a talk in the gallery of the Museum of Contemporary Art in front of about 20 people, mostly specialist librarians. That session was recorded and, as soon as the podcast is available, I will link to it. There were many good questions asked at the end and the excitement was palpable.
Afterwards I gave an interview for Radio…
moleculeoftheday | April 23, 2008Is paying $5/liter for Fiji water not cutting it? Trying to come up with a more environmentally abhorrent, gauche hydration accessory? How would you feel about $1,000/liter, along with some iffy health benefits?
Gerolsteiner? H2O? What are you, a subprime borrower? The Gulfstream+Carbon Credit set are drinking deuterium oxide. Evian facial spray? Do you drive a hybrid or something? Only D2O facial spray will do.
That's not all! Merely regioselectively deuterating say, guanine, may reduce its tendency to oxidize (assuming you don't synthesize any purine de novo)
If you thought it was difficult…
sb admin | April 23, 2008One of my duties involves teaching nurse practitioner students. Nursing is quite different from medicine, and many of the linguistic markers of nursing differ significantly from medicine. As more physicians' assistants and nurse practitioners enter the primary care world there will be a bit of a culture clash. For instance, my NP students often refer to a physical exam as an "assessment", a misnomer which I do not allow them to use with me. Assessments come after you have spoken to and examined a patient. Another difference is in the common use of "client" in referring to patients. This…
sb admin | April 23, 2008A new study this month in The Lancet examined the health impact of domestic violence (of women by men). This was a very large WHO-funded study looking at multiple physical and mental health problems in abused vs. non-abused women. This is necessarily an observational study, but appears to be well done, and included a large and diverse sample of women.
A few findings are worth a specific mention.
First, intimate partner violence is very common across cultures, with numbers ranging from 15-71% of women who had ever been partnered with a man.
Next, mental health problems, which were self-…
hrynyshyn | April 23, 2008Defenders of science and reason everywhere are shocked and appalled that Obama and Clinton have bought into the bogus notion that the science on autism and vaccines is "inconclusive." As plenty of other SciBlings have pointed out, the science is most definitely not inconclusive. (Aetiology Tara's take is straight to the point, but see also Orac and PZ.) There is no link between the two. So now all three presidential contenders have joined the ranks of the irrational fear-mongers. Or have they?
The story that added the two Democrats to the list came from the Washington Post's Fact Checker…
oracknows | April 23, 2008I knew there was a reason why I like bioethicist Art Caplan.
Leave it to him not to be afraid not only to wander a bit afield of medicine than usual but also to call it as he sees it, mainly his argument for why Expelled! and its claim that "Darwinism" led directly to the Holocaust is not only historically incorrect but a form of Holocaust denial. I don't quite agree with him, but he makes a compelling argument:
The movie seeks to explain why, as a matter of freedom of speech, intelligent design should be taught in America's science classrooms and presented in America's publicly funded…
oracknows | April 22, 2008Ack!
Well, so much for Hillary Clinton's and Barack Obama's reputations for supposedly being well-informed about scientific issues. True, they didn't sink as far into the stupid as John McCain did about vaccines and autism, but what they said was bad enough. Let's put it this way: If David Kirby thinks what they said about vaccines and autism is just great, they seriously need to fire all their medical advisors and get new ones who know how to evaluate evidence:
No matter who wins in Pennsylvania today, the next President of the United States will support research into the growing evidence of…
terrasig | April 22, 2008So says Dr Val Jones at Dr Val's Revolution Health Blog, host of this week's Grand Rounds medical blog carnival. The good doctor classified the posts as follows:
[:-)] = A post that demonstrates literary excellence
[{] = Early bird - an author who got his/her submission in early, which is really convenient for the host(ess)
[:-/] = Naughty - an author who forgot to submit an entry to Grand Rounds but who was included nonetheless
Hence, Val classifies me as naughty because she was kind enough to include my post, "Must people die before DSHEA is repealed?," even though I was so inconsiderate…
hrynyshyn | April 22, 2008Just in case you needed a reminder of what's wrong with America:
For the first time since the Spanish influenza of 1918, life expectancy is falling for a significant number of American women.
In nearly 1,000 counties that together are home to about 12 percent of the nation's women, life expectancy is now shorter than it was in the early 1980s, according to a study published today.
The downward trend is evident in places in the Deep South, Appalachia, the lower Midwest and in one county in Maine. It is not limited to one race or ethnicity but it is more common in rural and low-income areas.…
oracknows | April 22, 2008Yesterday I came across a blog exchange between Dr. Jekyll & Mrs. Hydeand fellow SBer Physioprof about principal investigators (PIs) who still do experiments in the lab. For those not in the science business, a "principal investigator" is in general the faculty member who runs the lab and whose grants fund the salaries of the postdocs, graduate students, and technicians working in the lab. J&H pointed out (correctly) that few PIs who have been faculty more than five years do any actual lab work anymore and described the case of a PI who persists in doing experiments himself,…
oracknows | April 21, 2008Just reported by Kathleen Seidel:
From the United States District Court for the District of New Hampshire, Case No. 1:08-mc-00013-JM:
ENDORSED ORDER granting MOTION to Quash Subpoena.
Text of Order: "Granted. Attorney Clifford Shoemaker is ordered to show cause within 10 days why he should not be sanctioned under Fed R Civ P 11 - see Fed R Civ P 45(a)(2)(B) which requires that a deposition subpoena be issued from the court in which the deposition is to occur and Fed R Civ P 45 (c)(1) commanding counsel to avoid burdensome subpoenas. A failure to appear will result in notification of Mr…
oracknows | April 21, 2008... are here.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure that Paul quite understands how homeopathy supposedly works. He's gotten the claim that dilution and succussation make a substance more potent right, but I think he's misinterpreted the homeopathic principle of "like cures like." (As I've pointed out before, this concept is no more than an adaptation of sympathetic magic.) Instead, he's generalized in homeopathy that the diluted substance causes the opposite of its usual effect. This is not quite the full story. In homeopathy, the cure for a symptom or illness is indeed usually something that causes…
oracknows | April 21, 2008A couple of weeks ago, I commented about a frivolous, SLAPP-style subpoena directed at one of the most thorough, rational bloggers about autism out there, Kathleen Seidel by Clifford Shoemaker, the attorney for Rev. Lisa Sykes and her husband Seth Sikes, both of whom who are suing Bayer for alleged "vaccine damage" as a cause of their child's autism. The subpoena in question, issued mere hours after Seidel published a well-researched but particularly unflattering post about Clifford Shoemaker's activities suing vaccine manufacturers, was so obviously a fishing expedition designed to…