medicine
oracknows | April 25, 2006I had wanted to proceed to part 5 of my Medicine and Evolution series, but, frankly, I wasn't much in the mood for anything serious over the weekend, and, let's face it, that case of the blog blahs continued even into yesterday. Otherwise I would have done my blog buds Abel Pharmboy and Bora more of a solid and tackled this a bit earlier, rather than posting about Jack Chick parodies and fluff about a possible new Star Trek movie.
Spurred on by Bora over at Science and Politics, Abel Pharmboy at Terra Sigillata has been discussing scienceblogging, whether it would be a good idea for science…
oracknows | April 25, 2006Grand Rounds, vol. 2, no. 31 has been posted at Health Business Blog. Check it out.!
oracknows | April 24, 2006As a surgical oncologist whose practice is made up largely of treating breast cancer, I really hate guys like this:
MIAMI - A 76-year-old man claiming to be a doctor went door-to-door in a Florida neighborhood offering free breast exams and was charged with sexually assaulting two women who accepted the offer, police said Thursday.
One woman became suspicious after the man asked her to remove all her clothes and began conducting a purported genital exam without donning rubber gloves, investigators said.
The woman then phoned the Broward County Sheriff's Office, and the suspect fled. He was…
oracknows | April 24, 2006I'm actually surprised to find this out, but up until now there was a noticeable lack as far as medical blog carnivals go. Sure, we have Grand Rounds, but that's a general medical carnival that covers every specialty and all issues that relate to medicine. Although it's usually chock full of great blog material, Grand Rounds sometimes to be too big and unwieldy.
Fellow skepticClark Bartram (who also happens to be a pediatrician) has jumped into the fray by starting a new blog carnival, Pediatric Grand Rounds. He's posted the First Pediatric Grand Rounds, and plans on making it a biweekly…
oracknows | April 21, 2006OK, skeptics, listen up! Bora's set to host the 33rd Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle over at Science and Politics on next Thursday, April 27. If you haven't already done so, this weekend is the perfect opportunity to submit your best skeptical blogging to Bora before 5 PM EDST on Wednesday, April 26. Bora has posted instructions here.
Bora's an old hand at blog carnival hosting, as well as a big afficianado of blog carnivals; so I expect that this Circle will be only of the highest quality.
lee billings | April 21, 2006So, yesterday, politics trumped science yet again. The FDA rejected medical marijuana, again. I'm sure the FDA's decision to say so on April 20th is entirely coincidental.
The Times has an excellent summary, and you can read the FDA's original press release here.
In essence, the FDA appears to be throwing a very clean baby out with slightly dirty bathwater: It says smoking marijuana is harmful, and then somehow leaps from there to the blanket statement that marijuana, regardless of administration method, has no medicinal use whatsoever.
This is a well-worn issue, and there's not really much…
oracknows | April 21, 2006Via an incoming link, over at The White Coat Rack, I've found a rather amusing description of the twelve types of medical students one is likely to encounter in medical school. Looking at the description, I realize that I probably was the Overly Academic, the one who "came into med school with plenty of research experience, but hardly any clinical experience."
I do have a little quibble with Joshua, though, about his description of the Gunner. At my medical school in the 1980's, no gunner was complete without the multi-colored pen that allows him or her to pick different color pens by…
sb admin | April 20, 2006The New York Times reported yesterday that many of the authors of the DSM-IV, the sine qua non diagnostic manual (I'm 300.00, thanks for asking) for mental health professionals had ties, either before or after their involvement in creating the manual, with the pharmaceutical industry. The implication being that there was something wrong with this.
Now, I realize there is a potential conflict of interest here. But don't we want the DSM consulting people who know about drugs that can treat mental health problems? And don't we want drug makers consulting experts on mental health? How do we…
oracknows | April 20, 2006Wow. There was quite a response to yesterday's piece about why doctors are seduced by the pseudoscience of "intelligent design" creationism, more so than I expected from what I thought might be a dry topic.
A couple of the comments provoked by the post are worth discussing briefly in a separate post, rather than my diving into the comments more, where my response would get buried. For example, Flex commented that many physicians are acting as technicians more than anything else. While agreeing with him that most doctors don't need to be scientists, I would quibble with him about how much his…
ksharpe | April 19, 2006An interesting piece posted on Slate.com yesterday called attention to the results of a NIMH study that might help rank existing antidepressant medications in order of effectiveness.
The study, which goes by the awkward moniker of STAR*D (Sequenced Treatment Alternatives to Relieve Depression), focused "on the common clinical question of what to do next when patients fail to respond to a standard trial of treatment with an antidepressant medication," according to the study's website. The study, the website continues, aimed "at defining which subsequent treatment strategies, in what order or…
oracknows | April 19, 2006I've been meaning to write about this topic for a long time.
In fact, ever since our illustrious Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who also happens to be a Harvard-educated cardiac surgeon, came out in favor of teaching "intelligent design" creationism alongside evolution in public school science classes back in August, I've been meaning to write a bit about a tendency that, as both a surgeon and a scientist, I find disturbing. That tendency is for physicians to be far more susceptible than one would think they should be to the siren call of the pseudoscience known as "intelligent design."…
oracknows | April 18, 2006A few days ago, I fisked the antivaccination posturings of a certain "Libertarian Christian commenator" regarding the Geiers' claim that mercury in the thimerosal used as a preservative in vaccines is a major cause of autism. Many of the comments predicted that Vox wouldn't respond. (Personally, I was hoping that he would but, based on his nonresponse to my earlier fisking of his antivaccination nonsense, figured that he probably wouldn't.)
Guess what? He actually did respond. Although I don't want this to turn into a prolonged blog exchange, I figured that, since Vox went through the bother…
oracknows | April 14, 2006Who needs malpractice insurance, when you could have Sharia law? Check out this question to an Imam by a Canadian doctor regarding his culpability if a patient of his dies, and the Imam's answer:
Here's the question (typos not corrected):
Im a doctor and i want to ask about if i make a mistake that leads to the death of a patient .. is it considered as killing by mistake ? ... or just a professional mistake
what i want to ask that if i caused the death of a patient - by mistake - do i need to pay fedia anf fast for tow consequent months ? .. or it is enough to take the punishment stated by…
oracknows | April 13, 2006With all the nuttiness coming out of Tom Cruise in the name of Scientology, it's often forgotten that there are a lot of other Scientologists out there in Hollywood. One of the other most prominent ones is John Travolta. Compared to Tom Cruise, John Travolta seems, superficially at least, the height of reason. Certainly he's a lot less obnoxious about his religion than Cruise is, and he always seems like a likable guy whenever he shows up on the talk show circuit. And, heck, anyone who can earn a commercial pilot's license and fly a 707 around the country has to have something upstairs.…
oracknows | April 13, 2006I have to hand it to Matt (a.k.a. The Pooflinger). When he hosts a Skeptics' Circle, he does it up right. Last time, he envisioned the 21st Meeting of the Skeptics' Circle as a Shakespearean play. This time around, he envisions a very frightening future world in which credulity and religious fanaticism have been dominant for hundreds of years.
And then an archaelogist is made aware of an ancient and mysterious object:
Unlike most anybody, Dr. Ivanoa didn't consider unexpected late-night phone calls to be a bad thing at all. With no surviving relatives and less than a few friends (even at her…
oracknows | April 12, 2006Tangled Bank #51 has been posted over at Discovering Biology in a Digital World. Get your fix of science blogging all in one neat package.
oracknows | April 11, 2006Grand Rounds Vol. 2 No. 29 has been posted over at Anxiety, Addiction, and Depression Treatments. As always, there's lots of good stuff over there for your reading pleasure.
And don't forget that tomorrow there's a new Tangled Bank--and the day after that a brand spanking-new Skeptics' Circle to look forward to.
oracknows | April 10, 2006Recently, I mentioned a case of fishing line inserted in a patient's urethra that had to be removed by a urologist.
Now I've become aware of an even odder case, of a woman who managed to hide a loaded pistol in her vagina. She managed to go through a pat-down:
Move over, Bond girls.
A Ross County jail inmate hid a gun so well that not even the guards who did an extensive pat-down found it.
The Cleveland woman hid a loaded handgun inside her body and smuggled it all the way to her jail cell, where it accidentally fired when she was trying to hide it.
"While in the holding cell, she removed a .…