medicine
oracknows | November 6, 2007Two of my favorite blog carnivals have made their regular appearance today:
The History Carnival #58 (hosted by fellow ScienceBlogger Aardvarchaeology)
Grand Rounds, vol. 4, no. 7
Go forth and enjoy!
purepedantry | November 6, 2007I don't know if people heard about this, but a participant in the Olympic trials prior to the NY marathon died suddenly:
A triumphant United States Olympic trials marathon turned somber yesterday morning when Ryan Shay, a 28-year-old veteran marathoner, collapsed during the race in Central Park and was pronounced dead at Lenox Hill Hospital.
It put a terrible twist on the victory by Ryan Hall, who exulted in the emotion of winning the race and capturing an Olympic berth. But he had no idea that the ambulance that had passed him on the course was carrying Shay, his good friend and occasional…
oracknows | November 6, 2007Over the weekend, it appears that a post of mine, in which I included a link to a video of comic Tim Slagle doing the comedy routine that, in my never-ending effort to live up to the stereotype of the humorless skeptic that the credulous like so much, I castigated for its misrepresentations of science in the pursuit of a punchline, has been invaded by a number of "skeptics" of anthropogenic global warming. Indeed, it makes me wonder if someone e-mailed the link to my post to a Libertarian mailing list or something, given that, as of this writing, no one that I can detect has linked to the…
oracknows | November 5, 2007For those who argue that homeopathy is harmless, here's a story that shows what can happen when faith in quackery results in parents eschewing effective evdience-based medicine:
NINE-MONTH-OLD Gloria Thomas was in such distress that her crying alarmed some passengers on a plane trip from India to Sydney.
She had been overseas for two months receiving medical treatment, and homeopathic medication from an uncle for severe eczema.
But in that time she missed two appointments which separate doctors had made for her at specialist dermatologists.
In May 2002, less than 10 days after her return, she…
oracknows | November 5, 2007This is true with respect to chiropractic, anyway. Just get a load of this ad from 1922:
(Click on picture for a larger image.)
You know, tart this ad up with some color and better graphics, and it wouldn't be out of place today making claims like this:
Fastest growing healing profession, outstripping all others. CHIROPRACTIC is today far in the lead of all other drug-less methods. In greater numbers than ever before intelligent people are seeing the light; they know that CHIROPRACTIC is practical, sane and gets results in treatment of disease. Endorsed by leading educators. Demand for…
clock | November 5, 2007My friend Franz, who runs a delightful blog Mikrob(io)log (in Slovenian) alerted me that the team of undergraduates from the University of Ljubljana won the iGEM 2007 at MIT the other day. They did it for the second year in a row (all brand new students, of course). The Ljubljana team won in the Health & Medicine category for their work on HIV-1 virus. One member of the team is Franz's student. Congratulations to the Slovenian team!
oracknows | November 5, 2007About a month and a half ago, I discussed an e-mail that was being propagated far and wide that described the case of the mother of a 17 year old male who, or so the e-mail claimed, cured her son of stage IV melanoma using "natural means" and was supposedly thrown in maximum security prison by the Department of Child Services in California for "failing to properly care for her child." The e-mail, which was being used by an organization called Natural Solutions USA or Health Freedom USA (I was never quite sure), reproduced here, described what seemed on the surface to be a truly horrific abuse…
denialism | November 5, 2007The mainstream media has been reporting on this paper (open access at PNAS) on the hunt for the origin of HIV in the Americas.
The surprising result was the finding that HIV first came to the United States from Haiti (rather than the previous origin which was thought to be a flight attendant from Canada) between 1966 and 1972, and flew under the radar of public health authorities for over a decade. The infection, spread initially by heterosexuals from Haiti, went undetected from as early as 1966 until 1981 and then only because it had jumped into a highly susceptible population. This…
oracknows | November 4, 2007The latest edition of Pedatrics Grand Rounds has been posted at Aetiology. Enjoy!
oracknows | November 4, 2007I've written before about how animal rights cranks have started resorting to terroristic tactics in order to intimidate or frighten researchers into ceasing to do animal research. As you may guess, I have little but contempt for the Animal Liberation Front (is that anything like the People's Front of Judea or the Judean People's Front?) and their ilk, who routinely use lies such as the claim that no good has ever come of animal research or the utterly risible claim that we can now somehow replace the use of animals with computer or cell culture models, coupled with vandalism and intimidation…
oracknows | November 3, 2007If you think Orac's insolence doesn't live up to the name of this blog, at least when it comes to lamenting the infiltration of unscientific, non-evidence-based modalities into academic medicine, such as the use of reiki in a top academic trauma hospital, woo finding its way into the mandatory curriculum of a prestigious medical center and becoming more prevalent in the elective curriculum of others (even to the point of credulous acceptance of quackery such as homeopathy), woo being trumpeted by the largest medical student organization in the U.S., and even what I thought to be the most…
oracknows | November 2, 2007
Amazing.
I didn't actually expect this, but it appears that some knuckleheads have actually nominated Respectful Insolence again for the Best Medical/Health Issues Blog in the 2007 Weblog Awards, and, even more oddly, I somehow managed to be finalist. It turns out that P.Z. Myers is also a finalist in the Best Science Blog category as well.
I was actually a finalist in 2005 and--shock of shocks--won the category last year. I don't really have any idea who nominated me or how I ended up being a finalist, but thanks to all. The only question is: Can I make it a repeat? It's probably too much…
jstemwedel | November 2, 2007People with concerns about the use of animals in biomedical research should also be concerned about the actions of the Animal Liberation Front and other "animal rights" groups -- at least if they want other people to take their concerns seriously.
It seems that ALF views actions like the attack of the home of UCLA scientist Edythe London last week as somehow advancing its cause. This in itself makes it pretty clear to me that they have set aside reasoned discourse as a tool and gone straight to violence and intimidation.
Here's how the "Animal Liberation Press Office" describes the incident…
oracknows | November 2, 2007Arguing with cranks can be an extremely frustrating experience, which is why I don't do it very often anymore except on my terms on this blog. Yes, I did cut my skeptical teeth, so to speak, for several years doing just that in the totally unmoderated and wild free-for-all known as Usenet before I dipped my toe into the blogosphere on a whim one cold December afternoon, but these days blogging has gotten me far more satisfaction, visibility, and influence than I could ever have dreamed possible. Consequently, I rarely visit my old stomping grounds anymore.
If you want to see the difference…
oracknows | November 2, 2007In retrospect, I feel a little guilty about last week's edition of Your Friday Dose of Woo. As a couple of commenters pointed out, the guy responsible for the woo seems as though he's a bit disturbed, as evidenced by the ransom note-style literature on his website and the news story that mentioned how his family didn't take him seriously and he was divorced. On the other hand, the woo was truly top notch. As I pointed out, it also illustrated how a woo-meister can take a single erroneous idea about human physiology and run with it far beyond what anyone would think possible. Such woo can be…
moleculeoftheday | November 1, 2007I've already talked about lead acetate and the fact that it was almost certainly the first artificial sweetener before, and I've been reading about it again lately. Here's something I didn't know - it may have helped cause the fall of Rome.
Here's how it worked. Roman households loved a condiment called defrutum - a reduction of grape juice or crushed grapes, sort of a demi-glace. The syrup, like molasses or honey, was used as a source of intense sweetness that wasn't prone to spoiling like fruit.
Grape juice, like any other acidic liquid, will dissolve a small amount of many metals - copper…
oracknows | November 1, 2007Despite the diatribes that appear here on a regular basis bemoaning the unscientific and sometimes dangerous claims made for so-called "alternative medicine" modalities, I'll be among the first to admit that in some cases it's not always clear what is "alternative" about some therapies. Indeed, there seems to be an intentional effort to "rebrand" some aspects of conventional medicine as being "alternative." Because these methods have a scientific rationale and at least some evidence that they work, by successfully marketing them as "alternative," woo-meisters can then point to them as…
clock | October 31, 2007These last couple of days were very exciting here at PLoS. After months of preparation and hard work, PLoS presents the latest addition to its collection of top-notch scientific journals. PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases went live yesterday at 6:42pm EDT. This journal will be
...the first open-access journal devoted to the world's most neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), such as elephantiasis, river blindness, leprosy, hookworm, schistosomiasis, and African sleeping sickness. The journal publishes high-quality, peer-reviewed research on all scientific, medical, and public-health aspects…
oracknows | October 31, 2007Having gotten into the whole idea of blogging about peer-reviewed research yesterday and even using a spiffy new icon to denote that that's what I'm doing, originally I had planned on looking up another interesting article or pulling one from my recent reading list and blogging about it. Then, realizing that Breast Cancer Awareness Month is over after today, I happened to come across an article that reminds me of something that's appropriate for today, namely Halloween. Yes, it's that mercury maven of mavens, that tireless crusader who thinks he found that the Amish don't get autism and,…
tqa | October 30, 2007
President Bush announced today that he has (finally) named a nominee to replace Jim Nicholson as head of the Veterans administration. His choice, retired Lt. General James Peake, is probably one of the more qualified people that this President has ever nominated to do anything. That's the good news. The bad news is that's not a very high bar to clear.
Seriously, though, Peake certainly has the qualifications to run the VA. He's a West Pointer, he is a combat veteran who served in the infantry and was wounded twice in Vietnam, he's a medical doctor, and he was the Surgeon General of the…