medicine
grrlscientist | June 23, 2010tags: Great Microbiologists, Lego, brickfilm, animation, technology, scientists, history, microbiology, animalcule, streaming video
This is yet another Lego animation. This time, instead of recreating highlights of the World Cup 2010 games, this one shows highlights for the history of the field of microbiology. It's actually good enough to show as an intro to a microbiology course.
More Lego films can be found at Brickfilms.
oracknows | June 22, 2010(NOTE ADDED 12/7/2010: Kim Tinkham has died of what was almost certainly metastatic breast cancer. Also note that, when it was publicized on the Internet and on the blogosphere that Tinkham's cancer gave every indication of having recurred and she was dying, her "practitioner" Robert O. Young removed the videos embedded below from YouTube.)
Remember Kim Tinkham?
She's the woman who was diagnosed with Stage III breast cancer about three years ago. At the time, she became infamous because she showed up on Oprah Winfrey's show, back when Oprah was in her "Secret" phase and proceeded to alarm…
mpendergrast | June 21, 2010Mark Pendergrast writes: To kick off this book club discussion of Inside the Outbreaks, I thought I would explain briefly how I came to write the book and then suggest some possible topics for discussion.
The origin of the book goes back to an email I got in 2004 from my old high school and college friend, Andy Vernon, who wrote that I should consider writing the history of the EIS. I emailed back to say that I was honored, but what was the EIS? I had never heard of it. I knew Andy worked on tuberculosis at the CDC, but I didn't know that he had been a state-based EIS officer from 1978…
oracknows | June 21, 2010Coming soon: Penn & Teller take on the anti-vaccine movement on an upcoming episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit! No doubt it will resemble this little preview that Penn himself has taped:
Note: Lots of NSFW language. It is, after all, Penn.
I will mention one thing. Penn's wrong when he says that Wakefield is no longer a doctor. He still has the degree; he's still a doctor. It's just with his having had his license to practice in the U.K. stripped from him he is no longer a licensed physician. He can no longer treat patients. I understand why Penn keeps repeating the "not a doctor"…
oracknows | June 21, 2010Over the last few decades, there has been a veritable explosion in the quantity of scientific journals and published papers. It's a veritable avalanche. Some of the reason for this is simply the increase in the number of scientific researchers that has occurred over the last few decades. Another reason I'd suggest is that there are now numerous whole fields of science that didn't exist 30 years ago, fields such as genomics, HIV/AIDS, angiogenesis, and various technologies that have come into their own in the last decade or so. It's not surprising that these disciplines would spawn their own…
oracknows | June 18, 2010In the wake of President Obama's election, there was a great deal of hope that he would take science-based medicine seriously and, as he promised in his inaugural speech, "restore science to its rightful place." Shortly before Obama's inauguration, in fact, Steve Salzberg proposed that the Obama administration should defund the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM).
NCCAM, as you may recall, is a center in the National Institutes of Health largely dedicated to funding pseudoscience. True, there is some legitimate research mixed in with the pseudoscience, but it's…
oracknows | June 17, 2010If there's one thing that the loons over at the anti-vaccine crank blog Age of Autism might actually be somewhat good at, it's leaping on a news story and trying to liken it to their unshakable pseudoscientific belief that vaccines cause autism. Unfortunately for them (and fortunately for our our amusement), the merry band of anti-vaccine activists over there is so utterly, irredeemably bad at constructing a coherent and logical metaphor that whenever they try the result comes out something like these two posts:
If President Obama Had Been Talking About the Autism "Spill"
Olmsted on Autism…
oracknows | June 17, 2010Ozzy Osbourne is, like many rock stars of his advancing age, an amazing creature. Having subjected his body to abuse beyond the ability of most normal people to understand in terms of booze, drugs, and crazy living on the road, like the Energizer Bunny he just keeps going and going and going along. Naturally, given that, against all probability, Ozzy has somehow managed to make it past 60, scientists wonder why he is still alive.
Now some scientists want to find out; they plan on sequencing Ozzy's genome.
Next up, Keith Richards!
The problem I see with this is that we don't necessarily have…
oracknows | June 17, 2010Back in the 1990s when I first dipped my toe into the pool that was Usenet, that massive, wild, and untamed frontier where most online discussion occurred before the rise of the web and later the blogosphere, I was truly a naif. I had no idea--no inkling--of the depths of quackery to which people would sink. If Usenet was my bootcamp that opened my eyes to the seemingly endless varieties of quackery and, in particular, the flavor of quackery that represents anti-vaccine lunacy and "biomedical treatments" for autism, then my graduate education in the battle for science-based medicine began in…
palmd | June 16, 2010I've been teaching internal medicine for a number of years now. The practice of internal medicine falls into two broad categories; inpatient medicine, and outpatient medicine. Because of certain historical imperatives, internal medicine training is heavily biased toward inpatient education, and these days, inpatients are sick. To qualify for hospital care a patient must be receiving care that cannot be given outside the hospital; they must meet criteria for intensity of service and severity of illness. Ask any old-timer doc and they will tell you that hospitalized patients are much sicker…
oracknows | June 16, 2010I think the message may finally getting through.
That message is that it's not always the best strategy to treat cancer aggressively. Don't get me wrong. If I have acute leukemia, I know I'll need the big guns, every bit of chemotherapy appropriate to the disease that modern oncology can throw at it up to and including a bone marrow transplant. But what about prostate cancer? Breast cancer? Thyroid cancer? It turns out that more treatment isn't always better for these diseases, depending on the subtype, and in some cases, such as early stage prostate cancer of low aggressiveness, it is quite…
oracknows | June 15, 2010Time and time again, anti-vaccine activists respond to charges of being "anti-vaccine" with a self-righteous wounded whine that goes something like this: "We aren't 'anti-vaccine.' We're pro-safe vaccine." Alternative claims are that they are "vaccine safety watchdogs" and that they'd vaccinate if only the government would "green our vaccines" or "space them out" or that they think the government isn't listening to them or whatever. Of course, all of these are smokescreens for their true agenda, which, at least among the activists, is anti-vaccine to the core.
In fact, so engrained are anti-…
palmd | June 15, 2010My wife is an accomplished professional. She loves her profession, and she's damned good at it. But she is officially "unemployed", and it kills her every time she has to put that down on a form. So how is it that she came to be unemployed?
When we met, MrsPal and I were both working full time---more than full time, actually. I'd have to say she was actually working quite a bit harder than I was. After we were engaged, an opportunity arose for her to cut back on her grueling schedule, but to do it she would have to quit her job entirely. For a variety of reasons, that is what she chose…
oracknows | June 15, 2010I don't know if I need to get out the infamous paper bag or--even worse--the Doctor Doom mask out yet. As you may recall (if you are a long time reader, anyway) is that the mind-numbing stupidity of certain MDs has driven me to want to hide my face in utter shame at the embarrassment caused by my fellow physicians. Most frequently, it has been everyone's not-so-favorite creationist neurosurgeon with dualist tendencies, Dr. Michael Egnor. So bad was he that I compared him one time to Deepak Chopra.
Damned if P.Z. hasn't led me to another highly embarrassing physician woo-meister. Worse, it's…
palmd | June 14, 2010One of the questions addressed in this space is, "what makes a particular condition susceptible to quackery?" Some of the common features we've seen over time are:
Diverse and protean symptoms: fatigue, "brain fog", diffuse pain, and other vague symptoms are often used as diagnostic criteria for controversial entities such as morgellons and chronic Lyme disease.
Lack of diagnostic certainty: there are no definitive tests to make the diagnosis of chronic Lyme disease or morgellons (or fibromyalgia for that matter) making objective diagnosis difficult.
Children affected: autism affects…
oracknows | June 14, 2010I've had the immense good fortune to have trained and ultimately become a physician-scientist during a time when the pace of discovery and the paradigm changes in science have occurred just over the course of my career in medicine and science has been staggering. microRNA, the shift from single gene studies to genomics, the development of targeted therapies, the completion of the Human Genome Project, these are but a few examples. Of course, arguably the Human Genome Project is the granddaddy of all of the huge changes and paradigm shifts that has occurred to revolutionize biomedical research…
oracknows | June 13, 2010Remember my post about the genetics of autism last week? Remember how I predicted that the knives would come out from anti-vaccine loons? My original prediction was that Mark "Not a Doctor Not a Scientist" Blaxill would pull one of his usual brain dead attacks on genetic studies, such as his " immaculate mutations" gambit.
I guessed wrong, apparently. It wasn't Mark Blaxill who went on the attack first. Although Blaxill hadn't tried his hand at a pseudoscientific deconstruction of this study as of Sunday afternoon, John Stone over at the anti-vaccine propaganda blog Age of Autism has already…
jstemwedel | June 11, 2010This is a blog post that I more or less composed in my mind early this morning when, at 5 AM, I awoke with a runny nose and started sneezing.
Just like I have every morning at 5 AM for the past month and a half.
I do not, as far as I can tell, have a cold.
I do not experience the same runny nose or sneezing at other times of day.
Is it possible that I'm allergic to 5 AM? (People can't actually be allergic to a time of day, can they?)
Or, more plausibly (if only marginally so), is it possible that something about my circadian rhythms makes me more vulnerable to allergens in my environment…
oracknows | June 11, 2010I wonder what the loons at Age of Autism will say about this.
Actually, I know what they'll say. Whenever a scientific study like the one just published earlier this week the top tier journal Nature, which examines genetic variations (CNVs) associated with autism and autism spectrum disorders (ASDs), comes out, they have a standard reply. Even though, as of this writing, I haven't seen yet seen a reply on the anti-vaccine crank blog Age of Autism to the study I'm about to describe, I'm sure it's coming and I'm sure it will look something like this article from a year ago by Mark "Not A…
oracknows | June 10, 2010Let's see. Now that I'm back from Chicago, having recently attended a major cancer meeting, not to mention having already blogged about the meeting, what to do next? Sure, the whole thing about Andrew Wakefield finding himself just one step away from appearing on Jeff Rense's or Alex Jones's radio show was amusing in the extreme to me, and no doubt there will be much more blogging material to mine in that vein, but if you really want to bring home the crazy there's only one place shy of Whale.to to visit.
That's right, I'm talking about that wretched hive of medical scum and villainy, Mike…