medicine
ddobbs | October 20, 2006
Image from the "For Family and Friends" page of Eli Lilly's Xigris website.
_________________________________________________________
Even among the other scandals the drug industry has produced lately, the behavior described in the latest New England Journal of Medicine stands out as particularly stunning. According to a Perspective written by Peter Q. Eichacker, a National Institute of Health senior investigator in critical care, the drug giant Eli Lilly, seeking to incrrease sales of an anti-sepsis drug, Xigris, that had fallen short of its blockbuster expectations (in 2002, e.g., Lilly…
j7uy5 | October 20, 2006One of the most hotly marketed supplements in
the
Complimentary/Alternative Medicine arena is
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DHEA" rel="tag">DHEA
(dehydroepiandrosterone). Just as a quick index, a Yahoo
search for DHEA turns up over three million hits, and an impressive
array of advertisements.
Many of the sites that promote the sale of DHEA state or imply that it
is a "life-extension" product.
It sure would be nice if someone would do a definitive study to show
whether or not it really can extend the life of humans.
However, such a study would be very costly to do. The…
oracknows | October 20, 2006I had considered putting Your Friday Dose of Woo on hiatus this week. It seemed rather superfluous. After all, for whatever reason, whatever confluence of strangeness, this blog has read like Your Friday Dose of Woo for nearly the entire week. I mean, come on. I started out fisking that über-woo Deepak Chopra on Monday, and then, not satisfied with one deconstruction of Choprawoo, I took him on again on Tuesday! Then, not content that enough woo had been dealt with on the blog this week, for whatever reason, yesterday I decided to write about what is arguably the ultimate in woo (at least in…
clock | October 19, 2006Shorter Nightly Sleep In Childhood May Help Explain Obesity Epidemic:
------------------snip-----------------------
This research shows that shorter sleep duration disturbs normal metabolism, which may contribute to obesity, insulin resistance, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. Even two to three nights of shortened sleep can have profound effects, the laboratory data suggest.
One study indicated that insufficient sleep at the age of 30 months was associated with obesity at the age of 7, suggesting that this could programme the part of the brain regulating appetite and energy expenditure,…
oracknows | October 19, 2006A while ago, I pointed out some cool plush toys depicting giant microbes. Apparently, though, urologists and colorectal surgeons want in on the action.
Are you ready for...Pee & Poo?
oracknows | October 19, 2006Well, this is encouraging to see: A scientific journal publishing an article debunking pseudoscience, in this case the pseudoscience of homeopathy. (Grrrlscientist might object to the use of Hogwarts in the title, in essence comparing homeopathy to the wizardry of Harry Potter's world. So would I, actually. Such a comparison is an insult to Hogwarts.) In any case, I thought it'd be a nice little tidbit, a warmup for tomorrow's Your Friday Dose of Woo, if you will, to discuss it briefly.
It starts out with a quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes:
Do you think I don't understand the hydrostatic…
clock | October 18, 2006This week's Ask a ScienceBlogger question is:
A reader asks: Is severely regulating your diet for a month each year, as Muslims do during Ramadan, good for you?
There is no way I can get out of this one! As far as I know, I am the only one here who actually did research on fasting! Mind you, it's been about 5 years since I last delved deep into the literature on the effects of fasting and feeding on various body functions, mainly body temperature and circadian rhythms, but I can try to pull something out of my heels now.
I'll try to somehow systematize this, by breaking the problem down…
terrasig | October 18, 2006SAHA, or suberoylanilide hydroxamic acid, was recently granted orphan drug approval by the US FDA for skin lesions resulting from cutaneous T-cell lymphoma.
SAHA (vorinostat, Zolinza) will be marketed by Merck as they acquired in 2004 Aton Pharma, who had been developing the compound. (This free Nature Biotechnology article, while dated, gives background on the acquisition and the then-development of other similar compounds.) Merck's press release is farily detailed and available in PDF format.
I'm somewhat surprised that more has not been made of this approval since histone deacetylase…
j7uy5 | October 18, 2006There has been talk of this for a while. At first, I did not
think it would be feasible, but it appears that progress is being made:
Doc
at a Distance
By Jacob Rosen and Blake Hannaford
Robot surgeons promise to save lives in remote communities, war zones,
and disaster-stricken areas
On a hot morning this past June, our research group at the University
of Washington, in Seattle, crammed into two cargo vans and drove 2000
kilometers south to the rangeland north of Simi Valley, in southwestern
California. In the back of one of the vans was our latest creation: a
prototype surgical robot…
clock | October 17, 2006Kim of Emergiblog has assembled a wonderfully caffeinated edition of Grand Rounds. Hurry over before she falls asleep after her night shift! And she follows with some good advice on hosting a carnival.
terrasig | October 16, 2006Please alert your diabetic friends, family, colleagues, and students as to this alert from the US FDA:
LifeScan and FDA notified healthcare professionals and the public of counterfeit blood glucose test strips being sold in the United States for use with various models of the One Touch Brand Blood Glucose Monitors used by people with diabetes to measure their blood glucose. The counterfeit test strips potentially could give incorrect blood glucose values--either too high or too low--which might result in a patient taking either too much or too little insulin and lead to serious injury or…
oracknows | October 16, 2006Alright, I'll come right out and admit it up front. There was no part one to this piece. Well, there was, but it wasn't on this blog, and I didn't write it. PZ did in response to some really idiotic arguments from ignorance that Deepak Chopra (or, less pleasing to Dr. C, here) displayed as part of an "argument" (and I use the term loosely) that there is some mystical other quality that explains life other than genes. He paraded a litany of arguments that so conclusively demonstrated that he had no clue about even the basics of molecular biology that I as a physician cringed and hid my head in…
oracknows | October 15, 2006While I'm on the topic of tacky design in a Christian website, what about tacky religious art? Everyone knows that He comes in many guises. One in particular that interests me as a surgeon is this one:
As a surgeon, I'd have to hope that Jesus is somehow completely sterile, because he's contaminating the surgical field in the photo above.
But the following is one of my all-time favorites:
I didn't realize that Jesus was such a bad-ass.
(Via Hokum-Balderdash Assay.)
oracknows | October 13, 2006I tried not to write about the altie obsession with "detoxification" again. Really, I did. It gets repetitive, and I don't want Your Friday Dose of Woo (YFDoW) to become to repetitive. Of course, a certain amount of repetitiveness is unavoidable, given that there are only a few major themes running through medical woo. First, there's the belief that "toxins" (rarely specified and almost never with any hard evidence linking them to any specific diseases) are causing disease and that you--yes, you!--need to be "detoxified," whether this "detoxification" is supposedly accomplished through enemas…
j7uy5 | October 13, 2006I ran across a press release (
href="http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-10/uoa-ltf100606.php">1
href="http://www.brightsurf.com/news/headlines/26739/LSD_treatment_for_alcoholism_gets_new_look.html">2)
pertaining to a journal article (‘Hitting Highs at
Rock Bottom’: LSD Treatment for Alcoholism,
1950–1970)
on the use of LSD for treatment of alcoholism. When I saw it,
I
thought I'd blog about it. As it happens, several people beat
me
to it.
Anyway, the topic is sufficiently compelling that I am going to post it
anyway, and try to add a little to what has already been said…
purepedantry | October 11, 2006Unbelievable:
Not even a medical emergency can pull some men away from a television showing their favorite sports teams, a U.S. study has determined.
University of Maryland emergency physician David Jerrard tracked nearly 800 regular season college and professional football, baseball and basketball games in the state over three years and found there always was an increase in the number of men who checked into emergency rooms after these events.
Jerrard's study, to be presented on Sunday at the annual meeting of the American College of Emergency Physicians Research Forum in New Orleans, showed…
oracknows | October 11, 2006One of the favorite gambits that alternative medicine mavens like to use to defend their favorite remedies when a skeptic starts asking uncomfortably pointed and specific questions their scientific and evidentiary basis is to accuse said skeptic of being "in the pocket of big pharma." Indeed, I've written before of the "pharma shill gambit," where alties accuse skeptics of being nothing more than shills for the pharmaceutical industry (to which I always respond that it would be a dream come true to be paid for doing nothing more than posting skepticism about non-evidence-based medicine to a…
purepedantry | October 10, 2006I was sorry to hear this story. A high school student in Colorado Springs, CO died suddenly on the football field. There was no apparent cause. Autopsy revealed that the boy had an enlarged heart:
A preliminary autopsy conducted by the El Paso County Coroner on Saturday said Vialpando died as a result of a cardiac condition.
"They told us he had an enlarged heart," said J.R. Vialpando. "They don't know if the heart attack caused the heart to enlarge, or if the heart was already enlarged and caused the heart attack. They're going to do more tests."
No drugs were present in Vialpando's…
oracknows | October 10, 2006It figures.
After posting yesterday about whose responsibility it is when a cancer patient rejects evidence-based effective treatments in favor of quackery and then progresses, I would have to be made aware of an update in the case of Starchild Abraham Cherrix.
Ever since Cherrix's story first rose to national prominence a few months ago, I've been periodically blogging about it. Cherrix, as you may recall, is the the teenager diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma late last year who underwent chemotherapy, went into remission, and then relapsed a few months ago. At that point, he refused to…
oracknows | October 9, 2006One of the more onerous duties I have as faculty at our cancer center is to "show the flag" at our various affiliates by attending their tumor boards. I say "onerous" not so much because the tumor boards themselves are onerous but rather because traveling to them cuts into my already limited time for research given that these tumor boards are always scheduled on days on which I don't have to be in clinic or the operating room. One of our affiliates is nearly an hour and a half away, and many of them are close to an hour away. When you add up travel time and the tumor board, that's easily more…