medicine
oracknows | July 13, 2010Finally, I'm winging my way back home after TAM8 plus a couple of days. It seems as though I've been away a long time, even though it's only been less than six days. While I'm on a travel day, check out this video that a few of you have been sending me:
Not bad. Not bad at all. How'd I miss it a couple of months ago when it first popped up on YouTube?
oracknows | July 13, 2010Remember Doctors Data? It's the highly dubious medical laboratory that Trine Tsouderos exposed in her series on the quackery that is the "autism biomed" movement. A couple of weeks ago, Doctors Data also decided to launch what appears to be frivolous lawsuit against the creator and maintainer of the Quackwatch website, Steve Barrett; i.e. a SLAPP lawsuit.
Apparently unsatisfied with its legal thuggery against Steve Barrett, Doctors Data has apparently decided to plumb new depths by using new media to threaten other bloggers. This time around, Doctors Data has actually Tweeted a cease and…
oracknows | July 12, 2010Although The Amazing Meeting is now over, my vacation is not, at least not yet. My wife and I decided to take an extra couple of days off before winging our way home tomorrow. Originally I had planned on posting "reruns" for a couple of days, but something popped up that I felt obligated to comment on. I knew this was coming, thanks to the inimitable Australian skeptic and promoter of science-based medicine Dr. Rachie, with whom I shared the podium both for the Science-Based Medicine Workshop and on a panel on Saturday at TAM. She told me that something would be coming on Monday (Australian…
oracknows | July 12, 2010...then how come there are so many believers in homeopathy?
Truly, a scientific mystery...
palmd | July 12, 2010Yes, this is a repost, sort of. I first put this up on denialism blog in December of 2008. For various reasons, I haven't had a chance to crank out anything fresh this weekend, but this is still a good one, and I've edited it to freshen it up a bit, so don't complain until you read it. --PalMD
It's July again, and that means I have a crop of new interns. I love new interns, because every topic is fresh, every moment a teaching moment. I'm sobered by the statistic that predicts that only about 4% of American medical grads will chose primary care, but even when I work with the…
oracknows | July 8, 2010I've been a critic of Arianna Huffington's massive group blog, The Huffington Post, since three weeks after it first blighted the blogosphere. That's when I first noticed that the "health" section (such as it is) of HuffPo had already become a wretched hive of scum and anti-vaccine quackery, something I began documenting again and again and again and again and again over five years ago, before Salon.com and Rolling Stone flushed their credibility right down the crapper with Robert F. Kennedy's infamous conspiracy mongering about thimerosal in vaccines. Indeed, I continue to document the…
palmd | July 8, 2010This article is going to be about sex. I promise. But first, some reflections.
Well, Pepsipocalypse continues. The Management pulled the ill-conceived PepsiCo nutrition blog, which is a Good Thing. This doesn't change my misgivings about what has happened. As many other bloggers have already stated, the Pepsi fiasco is a single, highly-public event, but there are non-public problems that are important to some bloggers, including me.
Removing the "advertorial" blog was the right thing for SEED to do. It removes a clear ethical conflict (remember, this isn't about PepsiCo, it's about…
oracknows | July 6, 2010There's a problem brewing and ScienceBlogs, a disturbance in the Force, if you will, and it's a doozy. It's a darkness that's distubed several of my fellow ScienceBloggers to the point where I fear that some of them may leave. Indeed, it's a spectacularly tin-eared and idiotic decision on the part of management that is leading me to start to wonder about my continued relationship with ScienceBlogs.
All in all, this is most definitely not good.
It all started when PalMD and I noticed something popping up on the ScienceBlogs newsfeed. It was a new blog in the collective announcing itself thusly…
oracknows | July 6, 2010Oh, goody.
It looks as though the fall is going to be a repeat of the spring as far as anti-vaccine lunacy goes. This spring, we had the release of a book by the now disgraced granddaddy of the most recent incarnation of the anti-vaccine movement, Andrew Wakefield. The book, entitled Callous Disregard: Autism and Vaccines--The Truth Behind a Tragedy, was released to great fanfare by the antivaccine movement and then promptly tanked. This is not surprising, given how bad it apparently was. Only the die hards would want a copy, and it's currently languishing around number 23,576 on the Amazon…
palmd | July 6, 2010First, I'd like to thank you all on commenting on the weekend's de-lurking post. I really appreciate your taking the time to leave a note. While I write what I feel like, it's nice to get an idea about what sort of things people are reading. For various reasons, I've preferred to write on diverse topics, and it turns out that this attracts readers with diverse interests.
Now down to some serious business. I'm sure that many of you remember the Simon Singh case. Simon is a well-known and well-respected science journalist in England. Last year, the British Chiropractic Association…
clock | July 6, 2010If you picked up The Poisoner's Handbook (amazon.com) looking for a fool-proof recipe, I hope you have read the book through and realized at the end that such a thing does not exist: you'll get busted. If they could figure it all out back in 1930s, can you imagine how much easier they can figure out a case of poisoning today, with modern sensitive techniques? And if you have read the book through, I hope you found it as fascinating as I did. Perhaps you should use your fascination with poisons to do good instead, perhaps become a forensic toxicologist?
My SciBling Deborah Blum (blog, Twitter…
oracknows | July 6, 2010Remember Dr. David Katz? Fellow skeptic and supporter of science-based medicine Dr. Steve Novella is unfortunate to be saddle with Dr. Katz on the same faculty as him at Yale. He achieved some notoriety a couple of years ago when at a Yale conference on complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), he laid down this gem:
I think we have to look beyond the results of RCTs in order to address patient needs today, and to do that I've arrived at the concept of a more fluid form of evidence than many of us have imbibed from our medical educations.
In one fell swoop, Dr. Katz rallied supporters of…
oracknows | July 5, 2010Today is the third day of the three day weekend cobbled together from happenstance that the Fourth of July fell on the weekend this year. In any case, I'm still in a bit of vacation mode; so this post won't be as voluminous as you are used to. (Some of you are probably rejoicing at the lack of logorrhea.) I'm also working on my talk for the Science-Based Medicine workshops at TAM8. In fact, while working on my talk, I came across a little tidbit that forms the basis of this post.
Blog bud PalMD once coined a truly apt term to describe a certain form of disclaimer that's found on quack…
oracknows | July 4, 2010Happy Fourth of July, everyone! Since it is a holiday here in the States, I'm chilling out and recovering. I'll try to be back tomorrow, but, worst case scenario, I'll be back for sure on Tuesday. (Monday just so happens to be a holiday, too, this year. Gotta have those three day weekends.) In the meantime, here's a little something you might want to know about, particularly if you live in New York City..
The skeptics in Chicago did a truly excellent job countering what fortunately turned out to be not much of an anti-vaccine "protest." Now here's a chance for NYC skeptics (both belonging to…
oracknows | July 2, 2010Every so often, real life intrudes on blogging, preventing the creation of fresh Insolence, at least Insolence of the quality that you've come to expect. This is one of those times. So enjoy this bit of Classic Insolence from almost exactly four years ago, in July 2006. Also remember that, if you've been reading less than four years, it's probably new to you, and, even if you have been reading more than four years, it's fun to see how posts like this have aged. (Sometimes I shudder when I go back to read stuff that I wrote four or five years ago.)
Come to think of it, if you have been reading…
oracknows | July 1, 2010Status report: I'm in the home stretch of writing my grant. It will be finished by 8 AM, when I have to be at work again, in tip top mental condition for the meetings I'll have to endure all morning. (What the heck happened to not doing anything substantive the day before a holiday weekend? At least I don't have to operate or see patients.) Whether it will take an all nighter to do it I am not yet sure. Whatever the case, here is the perfect mood music for late night science and grant writing.
"We're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine, and the machine is bleeding to death."
Yeah,…
oracknows | July 1, 2010Regular readers may have noticed something happening around ScienceBlogs. As PZ pointed out, a little malware somehow infiltrated the ScienceBlogs collective, and many of us appear to have turned into zombies. It's a veritable Zombie Day, complete with illustrations by Joseph Hewitt, creator of Gearhead.
Obviously, with anything having to do with zombies, there's only one thing for this blog, namely a certain undead German dictator with an insatiable thirst for human brains, who leaves idiotic analogies in his wake. Unfortunately, with the 2008 election being behind us, there was a dearth of…
palmd | July 1, 2010In February, a young woman visited an urgent care clinic complaining of painful vaginal ulcers. The differential diagnosis of genital ulcers is interesting. Common sexually transmitted infections such as gonorrhea and chlamydia don't cause ulcers, but syphilis, herpes, chanchroid do (as do other diseases, but they are not common in the U.S.). Syphilis is typically painless, so most painful genital ulcers turn out to be herpes, and sometimes chanchroid. She revealed to the doctors that she had recently had sex with her boyfriend, a soldier who had just been vaccinated against smallpox. …
grrlscientist | July 1, 2010tags: vultures, Gyps species, conservation biology, endangered species, veterinary medicine, toxicology, physiology, evolutionary biology, pharmaceutical chemistry, epidemiology, mathematical modeling, researchblogging.org,peer-reviewed research, journal club
Only thirty years ago, tens of millions of White-rumped Vultures, Gyps bengalensis,
were flying the skies of Asia. They are now classified as Critically Endangered.
Image: Marek Jobda / rarebirdsyearbook.com [larger view]
A zombie is another name for The Walking Dead -- those who are lifeless, apathetic, or totally lacking in…