medicine
oracknows | January 22, 2008Three months ago, I wrote about vacuous legal threats issued by the Society of Homeopaths against one of the better skeptical bloggers, Le Canard Noir, who runs the excellent Quackometer Blog and created the infamous Quackometer, in order to intimidate him into silence. The attempt backfired spectacularly, as scores of bloggers reposted the article by Le Canard Noir that prompted the legal threats, in the face of which his ISP had caved.
Now it looks like it might be time to do it all again, this time with a different twit who has issued abusive threats against Le Canard Noir. This time…
oracknows | January 22, 2008...and ERV has the scoop, along with pictures.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about April Renée, the former President of The Autism Autoimmunity Project and a frequent speaker for Vaccine Injured Children, who was scheduled to speak in Oklahoma City on Saturday; so I'm not surprised at ERV's observation:
As for April Renée's presentation, I was shaking I was so angry. It was a hate speech against scientists that would make any Creationist proud. After ranting about how scientists and physicians get pleasure from killing children she said 'I dont mean to degrade any of the pediatricians in…
oracknows | January 22, 2008Let's face it. These days, research papers in the peer-reviewed biomedical scientific literature are becoming more and more complex and difficult to understand. For many journals, it seems, if you don't have at least seven meaty, dense, multipanel figures (preferably some of which with flashy color confocal microscopy), you don't have a prayer of getting published. Along with the requisite multiple figures, it seems, the prose has become more impenetrable even over the 23 years or so since I graduated from college and embarked upon my current career. Scientific papers in the old days (say, as…
oracknows | January 21, 2008In the mood for some great surgery blogging?
Then head on over to the latest edition of SurgeXperiences over at Counting Sheep. While you're at it, head on over to the SurgeXperiences archive site and peruse past editions.
purepedantry | January 21, 2008Although typically Americans have greater and more rapid access to surgical procedures than people in other countries, we do not possess a uniform superiority in the speed of health care access. One excellent example of this is visiting the Emergency Room. ER wait times have been increasing steadily over the last decade as indicated by Wilper et al. publishing in the journal Health Affairs.
Wilper et al. performed the best and most comprehensive analysis to date of wait-time in ERs around the country. The looked at wait-times from 1997 to 2004 using the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical…
choofnagle | January 21, 2008Bob Sullivan reports at MSNBC on the early developments of a medical privacy score by Fair Issac, the same company that invented the credit score for lenders. This is somewhat scary, because the entire point of credit scores is to make decision making easier, so easy that people very low on the totem pole can make decisions about you without really thinking, and because it is a number, it is imbued with an air of legitimacy. Credit scores arose after Congress forced consumer reporting agencies to open up their files; scoring allowed companies to put their analysis back into a black box so…
oracknows | January 21, 2008Along with Dr. R.W. and few others, I've made a bit of a name for myself in the medical blogosphere by bemoaning the infiltration of non-science- and non-evidence-based medicine into academia. It's not a particularly popular viewpoint. The prevailing attitude seems to be: Why be so negative? It's all good. Moreover, with a credulous media eager to publish stories of "healing" and "humanistic" medicine, those of us who remain skeptical of applying unproven and/or untested remedies in an academic setting, thus giving them the imprimatur of academic medicine and the respect associated with it,…
j7uy5 | January 20, 2008Usually when we think of
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_medical_record">electronic
medical records (EMR) as being
three-dimensional, we think of the relational aspect of databases.
Researchers at IBM, however, are testing a different concept.
The idea is to have a rendered 3D representation of the anatomy of the
patient, and to use that as a basis for the record. This is
reported in IEEE Spectrum.
href="http://spectrum.ieee.org/jan08/5854">Visualizing
Electronic Health Records With "Google-Earth for the Body"
By Robert N. Charette
January 2008
href="http…
oracknows | January 20, 2008Via a fascinating blog that was pointed out to me (Morbid Anatomy), I came across a story from last winter about how a Colorado nonprofit organization is reviving a Victorian custom about which I had been largely ignorant, namely the custom of taking photographs of recently deceased loved ones as mementos. Indeed, the photographs were known as "memento mori." The group, called Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, takes carefully posed photographs that are truly astonishing. Although the concept may sound morbid, the results are not (although I really, really wish the website would get rid of the sappy…
oracknows | January 19, 2008Things are crazy now for me, both at home and at work. I mean really, really crazy. So crazy that even I, one of the most verbose bloggers out there, am forced to take two or three days off from my little addiction--I mean habit. Consequently, having foreseen that this time would come around these dates, I, Orac, your benevolent (and, above all verbose) blogger have thought of you, my readers. I realize the cries and lamentations that the lack of fresh material inevitably causes. That, I cannot completely obviate. However, I can ease the pain somewhat, and I can do this by continuing my…
palmd | January 18, 2008I am often asked my opinion of chiropractic care. My usual answer (based on evidence) is that it can be somewhat helpful in the treatment of low back pain. That's it. Any further claims are complete and utter bullshit. Many chiropractors practice ethically, and recognize the correct scope of their abilities...many do not.
Adapted from RationalWiki
Chiropractic is the theory and practice of correction of "vertebral subluxation processes" to treat and cure disease. It was developed in the late 19th century, just before the development of modern medical education in the United States.…
oracknows | January 18, 2008Things are crazy now for me, both at home and at work. I mean really, really crazy. So crazy that even I, one of the most verbose bloggers out there, am forced to take two or three days off from my little addiction--I mean habit. Consequently, having foreseen that this time would come around these dates, I, Orac, your benevolent (and, above all verbose) blogger have thought of you, my readers. I realize the cries and lamentations that the lack of fresh material inevitably causes. That, I cannot completely obviate. However, I can ease the pain somewhat, and I can do this by continuing my…
oracknows | January 18, 2008Things are crazy now for me, both at home and at work. I mean really, really crazy. So crazy that even I, one of the most verbose bloggers out there, am forced to take two or three days off from my little addiction--I mean habit. Consequently, having foreseen that this time would come around these dates, I, Orac, your benevolent (and, above all verbose) blogger have thought of you, my readers. I realize the cries and lamentations that the lack of fresh material inevitably causes. That, I cannot completely obviate. However, I can ease the pain somewhat, and I can do this by continuing my…
ddobbs | January 17, 2008
I've written before, both here and in print, about how FDA policy and drug company practices have allowed drug makers to publish (and the FDA to base approval on) only the most flattering drug-trial results while keeping less-flattering studies in the drawer. Today a New England Journal of Medicine report shows how things change when you include the results from the drawer: The effectiveness of many SSRIs dives to near placebo-level. This despite that the companies design and conduct most of these trials in a way calculated to produce positive results.
When I wrote on this for Scientific…
denialism | January 17, 2008Despite the best attempts of the New York Times Wellness Blog to get me fired, I'm still here and doing fine. Somehow a post about how impressed I was with surgery, the professionals that practice it, and how many of my preconceptions about surgeons were incorrect, got all turned around into some "peak behind the curtain" into the secrets of the medical profession. This is terribly absurd and the article made a hash out of what I was trying to say. I was trying to relate some of the shock one experiences going from an academic setting into a clinical one for the first time, as a reminder…
oracknows | January 16, 2008It's been a while since I've dealt with creationists trying to claim either that evolutionary theory is not relevant to the problem of microbial resistance to antibiotics or, even worse, making really bad medical recommendations on the basis of their interpretation of evolution.
This time around RPM has posted a nice article on Competitive Release and Antibiotic Resistance that suggests a possible way that we can use evolutionary theory to prolong the useful life of antibiotics before resistance evolves. The results explained by RPM remind me of an article I blogged about several months ago,…
oracknows | January 15, 2008
Today is a very sad day around my lab.
I've just been informed that one of my scientific heroes, the man whose work inspired me to enter the research area that I entered, namely tumor angiogenesis, died last night. Yes, sadly, Dr. Judah Folkman reportedly died of a heart attack last night.
I had the honor of meeting Dr. Folkman on two or three separate occasions, one of which was for a laboratory meeting that involved discussion of our lab's work. A self-effacing and humble man, he was a true scientist, always questioning, always thinking of new hypotheses to test based on answers that…
oracknows | January 15, 2008Perusing the skeptical medical blogosphere, I came across some rather amusing, but nonetheless informative, videos from the 1950s about medical quackery. There are a number of aspects of these videos that are a bit unsettling to modern viewers, such as the "doctor knows best" paternalism, naïve faith in the AMA and other medical organizations, the utter seriousness, the cheesy reading of lines, and a rah-rah cheerleading for science and technology über alles. On the other hand, as Steve Novella points out, there was a refreshing directness about how the government viewed dubious medical…
oracknows | January 14, 2008Sadly, today would have been the day that the new season of 24 would have started. Even though after the first five or six episodes last season stunk bad enough to knock the proverbial buzzard off a manure wagon, I'm still a sucker for the show and had high hopes that it could stage a turnaround this season. Unfortunately, the writer strike intervened. That doesn't mean, however, that we bereft 24 fans can't still have some fun. If Flying Spaghetti Monster worshipers can have Talk Like A Pirate Day, why can't we have Talk Like Jack Bauer Day? The rules are easy, and here are some samples:
Co-…