medicine
oracknows | October 30, 2007...at least, that was my first reaction when I first read this reaction by the Karen Malec of the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer to posts by Mark Chu-Carroll and myself pointing out the numerous flaws in the latest "study" being circulated to "support" a link between abortion and breast cancer.
Then I thought about it. That post was one of my more ambitious posts, and it reached a length even greater than the usual Orac-ian standard of logorrhea to match its ambition. Indeed, the post took me two or three times longer to put together than the typical heapin' helpin' of Respectful…
clock | October 30, 2007Rockridge Institute published a set of articles (and a video ad) that I found quite interesting about the way to frame health care. See for yourself:
Introduction to Rockridge's Health Care Campaign:
Framing for Rockridge is about the honest expression of the progressive moral view based upon empathy and responsibility for oneself and others. It is about recognizing government's role to protect and empower citizens. In other words, we want to communicate our moral view as directly as possible. We want to make sure the moral view is not lost in the fog of complex policy proposals.
The Logic…
oracknows | October 30, 2007
Dave Munger and others have been spearheading an effort to promote the acceptance of a specific logo that science bloggers (ScienceBloggers, included) can use to let the reader know that the topic of a blog post is a discussion of real, peer-reviewed research. Use of the logo, which I've used for this post, means a blogger is not just commenting on research that's been reported in the media, but rather has gone, so to speak, straight to the horse's mouth to look up the original peer-reviewed journal article. It's a worthy effort, and I plan on going back through the last few months of…
clock | October 28, 2007The Triangle Malaria Symposium will be on Thursday, November 15, 2007, at 1-7 pm at the Duke University Searle Center. At first I thought it was this week, but now I see it is the week after, so perhaps I can make it to it. Even if I don't, Anton is going for sure and intends to liveblog it. So far, the speakers include Peter Agre, Margaret Humphreys and Steve Meshnick so the symposium looks VERY promising.
oracknows | October 28, 2007These days, pretty much everyone, smokers included, knows that smoking is bad for you. It promotes lung cancer (and several other varieties of cancer as well), heart disease, emphysema, and a number of other health problems. If you ask most smokers, they will tell you that they'd like to quit but have found it very difficult. Indeed, we are now starting to appreciate that secondhand smoke is a health hazard, leading some states and localities to ban smoking in public spaces.
This is a huge change in the 43 years since the original Surgeon General's report on the danger of smoking was released…
clock | October 27, 2007Since I was gone to two meetings and nobody else can walk the dog as regularly as I can, the dog spent the week at Grandma's in Raleigh. Today I went to pick her up (the dog, that is) which placed me in the car at precisely the time of NPR's Talk of the Nation Science Friday (OK, I intentionally timed it that way). And lo and behold, there was Gavin Yamey on the radio! Hey, I thought, I know this guy! We had lunch together and we exchange at least a dozen e-mails every week.
Gavin is editor at PLoS Medicine and, as part of the Global Theme Issue on Poverty and Human Development, he…
oracknows | October 27, 2007A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a favorite topic for amusement among general surgeons, rectal foreign bodies, particularly the strange things people like to stick up their bottoms for whatever reason. I pointed out at the time that sometimes the excuses such patients make when seeking medical attention are a bit--shall we say?--hard to believe. It figures that a mere three weeks later someone would send me an example of something different, a hospital administrator not accepting what seems like an absolutely honest explanation for how a foreign object got up there:
Doctors in central…
oracknows | October 26, 2007As usual, Cectic nails it (click on comic for the full-size version):
Although I find it odd that the "mark" in the above comic would be calling for his checkbook rather than his credit card, it never ceases to amaze me how skeptical some people can be when dealing with financial matters while at the same time being so prone to magical thinking when it comes to "alternative" medicine.
denialism | October 26, 2007Are placebo's really effective? So asks Darshak Sanghavi in Slate, citing this study from 2001 that shows the placebo effect, compared to passive observation, to be relatively minor for improvements in pain or objective measures of health.
This is an interesting topic, but unfortunately, a really bad article. Given how many alties love to stress the role of placebo and its apparent proof of the benefit of positive thinking, we should critically re-evaluate the evidence that placebos on their own can do anything more than improve subjective symptoms. Although there is a fair amount of proof…
oracknows | October 26, 2007Some woo is very, very complicated. The reason, of course, is that the often self-contradicting complexity of this sort of woo serves to make it harder for people without specialized training to figure out easily that it makes no sense scientifically. It's more a matter of baffling 'em with bullshit than because such complexity is actually needed. (No one that I can think of personifies this better than Lionel Milgrom, a man who's a veritable poet of woo.) Other times, the concept behind the woo is simple. In fact, it's usually just one idea. In fact, this one idea is usually based on an…
sb admin | October 26, 2007In time for Halloween:
Trailer for Central State: Asylum for the Insane. A filmmaker prowls a closed mental institution to "...uncover the mysteries left behind when the facilities closed in 1994." There's lots of shaky handheld camerawork in poorly lit tunnels, and shakier rumours of ghosts, but no exploration into the disappearance of former patients. Homelessness and prisons, that's scary, not the supposed ghosts that a supposed psychic says are "like a tornado" in the building.
What's actually "menacing and still threatening" is not an old hospital but the stigma attached to mental…
oracknows | October 25, 2007This has been a bad week at skeptics' school. Apparently, skeptical bloggers have been misbehaving left and right. Apparently we as the skeptical blogosphere have been very, very naughty indeed. Worse, the essays that we've handed in are apparently not pleasing to the teacher. Worst of all, we've been mischievously copying a screed against homeopaths and dispersing it far and wide across the blogosphere. Fortunately, Le Canard Noir is there to oversee detention in the 72nd Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle over at the quackometer blog. Head on over to detention and see what's going on.
Also,…
oracknows | October 25, 2007I approach this topic with a bit of trepidation. I say this not because I'm unsure that I'm correct in my assessment of the article that I'm about to apply some Respectful Insolence⢠to. Rather, it's because the last time I brought up anything having to do with abortion, it got ugly. The topic is such a polarized one that virtually anything one says is sure to attract vitriol. Regardless, though, this article by Dennis Byrne, a columnist for the Chicago Tribune and the "study" to which it refers, are so appallingly idiotic that even fear of touching the third rail of American politics will…
clock | October 24, 2007Global Theme Issue on Poverty and Human Development (which I mentioned a few days ago here) was a great success. You can see all the articles associated with it here.
PLoS has collected all the poverty-related articles from its Journals on this nifty collections page.
A PLoS Medicine article - Food Insufficiency Is Associated with High-Risk Sexual Behavior among Women in Botswana and Swaziland - was one of the few that were highlighted at the event at NIH. Gavin has the details. Nick Anthis gives his angle.
scientificactivist | October 24, 2007On Monday, Mike the Mad Biologist posted about the sheer idiocy of "choice-based health care," which seems to be so en vogue today in the Republican party and elsewhere. He writes:
One of the most ridiculous ideas to come down the pike is the notion that most people, who are woefully ignorant of medicine and biology (e.g., the massive misunderstandings about antibiotics and infectious disease), will actually make intelligent decisions regarding their own healthcare. In fact, I bet most people would do worse than flipping a coin in many situations. That's before you get to the roughly…
oracknows | October 24, 2007Wow, after my post about Le Canard Noir's being threatened with legal action for criticizing the Society of Homeopaths, I'm glad to know that I won't be being sued for having reposted his criticism.
Whines the Society of Homeopaths:
The Society of Homeopaths took the content of the 2006 BBC Newsnight programme on malaria very seriously and responded via press statements and media interviews promising action if it were required. We contacted the programme makers directly to ask for their evidence that any Society members had given dangerous or misleading advice to members of the public. They…
grrlscientist | October 24, 2007tags: Tangled Bank, blog carnival
The 91st edition of my favorite blog carnival, Tangled Bank, is now available for your enjoyment. This blog carnival is devoted to linking the best blog essays about science, nature and medicine. The editor included two of my submissions, so you should go there to show them some support!
j7uy5 | October 24, 2007The Medicare
Evidence Development and Coverage Advisory Committee
currently is in the process of examining the question of whether to pay
for in-home testing for the diagnosis of
href="http://www.sleepapnea.org/" rel="tag">sleep
apnea. If approved, this could lead to a
significant loss of income for sleep specialists.
Pulmonologists can't get a break, can they? In the 1980's
many lung specialists faced declining income, because of the reduction
in the number of cases of tuberculosis. Then the number of
smokers began to decline, leading to reduction in smoking-related
illness. Many…
denialism | October 24, 2007I'd love to see what the angry toxicologist thinks of this scary article from CNN Tests reveal high chemical levels in kids' bodies.
Michelle Hammond and Jeremiah Holland were intrigued when a friend at the Oakland Tribune asked them and their two young children to take part in a cutting-edge study to measure the industrial chemicals in their bodies.
"In the beginning, I wasn't worried at all; I was fascinated," Hammond, 37, recalled.
But that fascination soon changed to fear, as tests revealed that their children -- Rowan, then 18 months, and Mikaela, then 5 -- had chemical exposure…