medicine
oracknows | May 28, 2010The week is coming to a close, and the Memorial Day holiday beckons for those of us in the U.S. I've spent most of this week blogging about the anti-vaccine movement, and I do need a rest. Next week, I promise to try to stay away from this issue as much as possible, not just to keep you from getting bored with it but, more importantly, to give myself the periodic rest from the concentrated idiocy to preserve my sanity. True, I can never guarantee that something won't come up that will force me to break my self-imposed vacation from the craziness, but I think that a few days away from this…
ddobbs | May 28, 2010Danny Carlat reports a stimulating time at the recent American Psychiatric Association meeting in New Orleans:
She took a look at my name tag, and said, "Oh, I've heard about you."Since her expression was somewhere between stern and outright hostile, I queried, "In a good way or a bad way?""In a bad way, to tell you the truth." And then she was off on a high volume rant that went something (if memory serves) like this:"How DARE you write an article in the New York Times saying that your therapy training at Mass General was terrible, and then later having this GREAT AWAKENING that"--she…
palmd | May 28, 2010As summer approaches and people spend more time outdoors, many parts of the country will start to see cases of Lyme disease. It is carried by deer ticks and is especially common in the Northeast. Tick bites often go unnoticed, but the rash of Lyme disease is pretty characteristic and occurs in about 70-80% of those who are infected.
Erythema migrans, the typical rash of Lyme disease. Source.
It's easily cured with antibiotics, but if untreated can have significant complications, such as arthritis, and various neurologic problems. As most of my readers know, there is also a movement…
ddobbs | May 28, 2010Here's what I distracted myself with this morning. Don't mix these at home.
Wired Sci examines how Testosterone Makes People Suspicious of One Another. And that's a hell of a photo.
New Flu Vaccines Could Protect Against All Strains If all goes well, of course. Not to count on at this point, but an interesting look at one direction in vaccine development. I covered another approach in an Technology Review article last year, when I also looked at the weird history of adjuvants. (If you want, check out my complete vaccine coverage. You can find also some other good ones at the Technology…
oracknows | May 27, 2010After a week of some of the most amazing anti-vaccine craziness that I've seen in quite a while, a week that started with anti-vaccine hero Andrew Wakefield's name being struck off the list of licensed medical practitioners in the U.K. During the entire week, there was (and is ongoing) an anti-vaccine crank conference known as Autism One. By midweek, the anti-vaccine loons had their rally in Grant Park, a perfect storm of crankery in which the "health freedom" movement met the anti-vaccine movement. When Harry Met Sally, it wasn't. In any case, skeptics, despite short notice, still managed to…
oracknows | May 27, 2010I've written about the credulous mass of misinformation that is TV's The Doctors before. As you might imagine, I'm not impressed with the quality of the medical information that is dispensed on this show. It's everything I hate about glitzed up medicine as TV entertainment, particularly the vacuously beautiful hosts. I thought Dr. Stork and his merry band of bubble-brained doctors had hit their low point, but I was wrong. Earlier this week, they appeared to be extolling the claimed virtues of (or at least not treating particularly skeptically the claims for)--of all things--urine therapy. Don…
oracknows | May 27, 2010I don't mean to beat up on Dr. Michael Fitzpatrick. I really don't. I realize I rather harshly criticized him yesterday for being so hostile to the concept of "denialism," to the point where he characterized even the use of the term as a means of "suppressing" free speech. Normally, that criticism would have been enough. If Dr. Fitzpatrick answered, that would be all well and good; if he didn't, I'd move on and forget about it. Unfortunately, I was made aware of another article he published at his usual gig at Spiked Online entitled Censorship is not the answer to health scares.
Damn if it…
palmd | May 26, 2010As my regular readers know, I'm not a big fan of our current health care system. Our bloated, industry-driven system manages to deliver less effective care at a higher cost than most other industrialized nations. The system is Byzantine, unnavigable, and dangerous, and is kept that way in the name of the Holy Market. But health care can benefit from practices that are decidedly un-capitalist, at least in the Milton Friendman or Ron Paul sense.
Like aviation, health care must apply risky and expensive practices to large numbers of people in dangerous situations. This process is made safer by…
oracknows | May 26, 2010I love it when cranks write petitions.
They're hilarious. Usually, they're oh-so-serious and ominous, sprinkled with unintentionally, un-self-aware bits of pure comic gold. For example, check out this "petition" being circulated by the anti-vaccine activists, called The Chicago Principles on Vaccination Choice:
We, the people who affirm our belief in personal rights, in order to promote the general health and welfare for ourselves and our children and to establish justice, advocate the following principles:
1. Vaccination choice based on complete and accurate information is a fundamental…
ddobbs | May 26, 2010
Â
Two or three years ago, Emory neurologist Helen Mayberg, whose experiments using deep-brain stimulation for depression I check in on now and then, told me that Karl Deisseroth's work using light to fiddle with brain circuits had huge potential both as a replacement for DBS and for much else. As Lizzie Buchen ably reports in Nature, that potential is now being realized.
This is a very slick tool that seems almost too far out to actually work. It lets you use light to turn brain circuits on and off at will, and with great precision. It's not simple to construct. But once constructed, it…
oracknows | May 26, 2010As I've pointed out numerous times this week, anti-vaccine loons, led by Generation Rescue and a "health freedom" group, have organized an anti-vaccine rally in Grant Park in Chicago from 3 PM to 5 PM CDT. Anti-vaccine martyr Andrew Wakefield himself will be the keynote speaker, and there will even be very bad music promoting the anti-vaccine message. The rally, with its wonderfully Orwellian title, The American Rally for Personal Rights, will be pure crankery on display.
Those supporting science-based medicine plan, led by Skepchick Elyse Anders, to be there to promote science over the…
oracknows | May 26, 2010I've had a lot of fun thus far this week expressing more than a bit of schadenfreude over Andrew Wakefield's being ignominiously stripped of his medical license in the U.K. by the General Medical Council, not to mention pointing out the quackfest that is Autism One, I feel the need for a brief break from the anti-vaccine craziness. This is as good a time as any to take care of some leftover business from last week that I had planned on writing about but gotten distracted by all the deliciously bad news for the anti-vaccine movement. Besides, what will be going on in Grant Park in Chicago this…
cagapakis | May 25, 2010A recent New York Times article tells us that what many people call food allergies are actually simple intolerances, and that allergies are being dangerously overdiagnosed. What is a true food allergy, and what can be done to fix them besides banning peanuts from schools and avoiding foods that make us itchy?
Allergies are caused by an inappropriate immune response to common things in the environment. Usually the offending allergen is a protein that comes from plants or animals like pollen or dander. Instead of the immune system recognizing that these proteins are harmless, it instead…
oracknows | May 25, 2010It figures.
I've written a couple of times about a rally to be held tomorrow in Grant Park that would be hilarious were it not an indication of the threat to public health that the anti-vaccine movement represents. Actually, it is to some extent hilarious, mainly due to the anti-vaccine Poe-worthy "music" that will be the featured entertainment.
It was bad enough that the fair city of Chicago would be blighted with this nonsense--and Andrew Wakefield, too--but now the "American Rally for Personal Rights" (a.k.a. the Autism One anti-vaccine rally featuring disgraced and unethical British…
palmd | May 25, 2010A few news items of import:
Andrew Wakefield, formerly a licensed to practice medicine in England, has officially lost that privilege. Others have covered this more comprehensively than I'd ever be able to, but this is big news. Wakefield is the father of the modern anti-vaccine movement. His study of a putative relationship between the MMR vaccine and autism led to mass rejection of vaccination and a resurgence in many vaccine-preventable diseases. After decades of relative quiescence, anti-vaccination ideas became popular again, especially among the rich and famous, but also among…
oracknows | May 24, 2010Regular readers know that I have a tendency every so often to whine about when writing about the antics of the anti-vaccine movement seems to engulf this blog. Yes, it's true. Every so often I get really, really tired of the bad science, pseudoscience, magical thinking, misinformation, and even outright lies that emanate from various anti-vaccine websites and blogs. This week, I promised myself I would try not to do it. There are times when duty calls, and this is one of those times. For better or for worse, as hard as I still find it to believe, somehow I've become one of the top bloggers…
palmd | May 24, 2010Too many too soon: that's Jenny McCarthy's rallying cry. The disingenuous activists of the antivaccine movement use this motto as a foot in the door, claiming that they are not truly "anti-vaccine", just pro-"safe vaccines". This is despite the fact that vaccines have proved themselves to be one of the safest and most effective medical interventions in human history.
Pediatricians in the community are struggling with the fallout of the antivaccine propaganda, having to spend their finite patient-care hours trying to explain to parents why they should vaccinate their children properly. …
oracknows | May 24, 2010It's been a long time comin'
It's goin' to be a Long Time Gone.
And it appears to be a long,
appears to be a long,
appears to be a long
time, yes, a long, long, long ,long time before the dawn.
- from "Long Time Gone" by Crosby, Stills & Nash
Oh, happy day!
It's finally happened, more than six years after investigative reporter Brian Deer first reported Wakefield's massive conflicts of interest and dubious activities related to his "research" suggesting a link between the measles strain in the MMR vaccine and inflammation of the gut in autistic children, nearly three years after the…
oracknows | May 23, 2010
An old Chinese combined proverb and curse is said to be, "May you live in interesting times." Certainly, with respect to vaccines, the last few years have been "interesting times." Unfortunately, this week times are about to get a lot more "interesting" as the Autism One quackfest descends upon Chicago beginning today. Featuring prominently in this quackfest will be an anti-vaccine rally in Grant Park on Wednesday featuring some really bad, anti-vaccine fundamentalist Poe-worthy "music" and a keynote speech by Andrew Wakefield himself. If you want evidence that Andrew Wakefield is being…
oracknows | May 23, 2010Andrew Wakefield's back, and he's sure trying to come back big.
I knew when I last wrote about his utter humiliation and disrepute that he wouldn't stay away for long. In fact, he stayed away longer than I thought--a whole three months. Unfortunately, though, he appears to be on a full media blitz to try to rehabilitate his image in the wake of his having been found to have committed research misconduct, leading to The Lancet retracting his article that started the anti=vaccine MMR scare back in 1998, which further led to NeuroToxicology withdrawing his execrably bad "monkey business" study…