medicine
oracknows | May 2, 2010It's a common tactic of suuporters of alternative medicine or other pseudoscience related to medicine to try to smear defenders of medical science as being hopelessly in the thrall of pharmaceutical companies, or, as they like to call it, "big pharma." For example, the anti-vaccine movement in general, and Generation Rescue in particular, love to use this gambit, for which I coined a phrase back in 2005 (at least I think I coined it), the pharma shill gambit.
I've always wondered what would happen if we defenders of science-based medicine attempted a "reverse pharma shill gambit," if you will…
palmd | April 30, 2010Dana Ullman is an idiot. Or maybe insane. I'm not sure which, but his latest article at the Huffington Post reveals such a severe defect in rational thought that it must be one or the other (charitably speaking). He calls it "Lies, Damn Lies (sic), and Medical Research," and the point of it is quite clear: Ullman calls himself an "expert in homeopathic medicine" (which is akin to being a unicorn veterinarian) and since he has never been able to show that his particular health religion has any validity, he lashes out futilely at reality.
His entire argument boils down to a profound…
oracknows | April 30, 2010Sometimes, when it comes to the anti-vaccine movement, I feel as though I'm bipolar. There are times when I'm incredibly depressed that pseudoscience and fear mongering are winning out, leaving our children vulnerable to infectious diseases not seen in decades and believing that it's only a matter of time before we start seeing really major outbreaks. This mood tends to strike me when I see actual stories about plummeting vaccination rates and, well, small outbreaks of diseases associated with low vaccination rates and unvaccinated children.
There's a condition in surgery known as a "sentinel…
clock | April 29, 2010Introducing Beaker, inspired by our panel at AAAS a couple of months ago. Go take a look.
palmd | April 29, 2010I've never liked Gary Null. Early in my blogging "career" I wasted thousands of words expressing my incredulity at his horrible health advice, his paranoid rants, and his shameless hucksterism. Then I saw something shiny and forgot about him for a while. But now blog bud Orac has ruined my reverie. He informs me that Gary Null took a dose of his own medicine---and nearly died.
As a compassionate human being, I can only hope he recovers quickly with no serious sequelae. As a physician, educator, and writer, I hope we can use this as an object lesson in the dangers of idiotic medical…
oracknows | April 29, 2010
In the wake of FRONTLINE's The Vaccine War, I was going to have a bit of fun with the reactions of the anti-vaccine fringe. After all, the spokescelebrity of the anti-vaccine movement, Jenny McCarthy, has posted yet another brain dead screed at--where else?--The Huffington Post. So has everybody's favorite pediatrician to the stars and apologist for the anti-vaccine movement, Dr. Jay Gordon. Both are incredibly target-rich environments, each worthy of its very own heapin', helpin' of not-so-Respectful Insolence. Truly, we have an embarrassment of riches here as far as blogging material…
oracknows | April 28, 2010People who have read my review of FRONTLINE's The Vaccine War may have noticed that the comments have featured someone who may or may not be a concern troll but is definitely at the very least very naive about the anti-vaccine movement. This commenter thinks that being harsh in my assessment of anti-vaccinationists will never reach anyone and only turn off the undecided. This commenter wrote:
Anti-vacciners' view is in many cases just as strongly held as yours, and their data is just as compelling to them as yours is to you. Tell me, how many idiots yelling at you that you are stupid for…
palmd | April 28, 2010Thanks for all of your help since yesterday. Here's some of the data I've culled out from the first 24 hours:
Blogpost visits: 654
Visitor sources:
24% of entrances to the post were from Greg Laden's blog.
Feedburner (probably multiple sources): 165
facebook: 98
Retweets: 83 (probably)
rationalwiki: 88
other
oracknows | April 27, 2010Yesterday, I expressed concern about a FRONTLINE episode that was scheduled to air tonight entitled The Vaccine War (which, by the time you read this, should be available for online viewing in case you missed it). My concern was that there was going to be a heapin' helpin' of false balance, based on the promotional materials. My concerns were later somewhat assuaged based on the pre-airing reaction of the anti-vaccine movement, which was fairly wary, if not hostile even. Of course, any television show that doesn't conclude that their view that vaccines cause autism is at plausible or even…
palmd | April 27, 2010Next week I'm going to be giving a talk at the 2010 Great Lakes Homeland Security Training Conference & Expo. The title of the talk will be "Medical Blogs: An Under-Recognized Resource for Public Health Awareness and Communication", but I'll probably speak more broadly about web 2.0. In preparation for the talk, I'd like you to help me with an exercise.
One possible ways to enlist blogs and social media in disaster response is to direct people to a specific link where official information can be found. As an experiment, I'd like use this post to see how disaster information might be…
cagapakis | April 27, 2010Silks are incredible protein fibers produced by many different species of insects. Besides their use in making versatile textiles, silks are currently used in many different medical and engineering applications, from sutures to tissue engineering scaffolds to flexible electrode brain implants. Since I love fabrics and I'm interested in what biological engineers can do with biomaterials, I recently started working on a fun side project to raise and engineer silkworms, the animals used in industrial silk production around the world. We're having a lot of fun learning about silk and how to raise…
oracknows | April 27, 2010I never would have thought it possible, but it's happened.
I'm sure most of you have heard of Dr. Andrew Weil, that champion of quackademic medicine who has made it his life's mission to bring the woo into academia in the form of training programs to "integrate" quackery with science-based medicine. From his home base at the University of Arizona, he spreads the woo hither and yon throughout academia, racking up big speaking fees wherever he goes and building a multimedia empire of books, DVDs, TV appearances, and Internet presence. Not satistfied, last year in the early stages of the debate…
j7uy5 | April 26, 2010National Geographic
href="http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/04/100421-new-fungus-cryptococcus-gattii-deadly-health-science/">reports:
A new strain of hypervirulent, deadly Cryptococcus gattii
fungus has been discovered in the United States, a new study says.
The outbreak has already killed six people in Oregon, and it will
likely creep into northern California and possibly farther, experts
say...
Cryptococcus infections in humans are hardly new. And so
far, the public health impact of the outbreak has been very low
(understanding, of course, that the personal impact has…
oracknows | April 25, 2010I haven't mentioned this before. The reason is not because I don't find it interesting or potentially blog-worthy, but rather because it slipped my mind and other things caught my interest last week. Given that the show is going to air beginning tomorrow, I thought that a few thoughts were in order. PBS's Frontline is going to air a show entitled The Vaccine War, and here's a preview:
The press release describing the episode gives me reason for concern:
Vaccines have changed the world, largely eradicating a series of terrible diseases, from smallpox to polio to diphtheria, and likely adding…
oracknows | April 24, 2010Oh, no. I think we have another reason to be afraid--very afraid--of homeopathy/ Apparently New Agers have developed a homeopathic bomb:
The world has been placed on a heightened security alert following reports that New Age terrorists have harnessed the power of homeopathy for evil. 'Homeopathic weapons represent a major threat to world peace,' said President Barack Obama, 'they might not cause any actual damage but the placebo effect could be quite devastating.'
The H2O-bomb has been developed by the radical New Age group, The Axis of Aquarius. In a taped message to the world, their leader…
oracknows | April 23, 2010If there's one thing that has irritated me (one might even say, irritated me enough to start this blog), it's ideology or religion trumping science. Perhaps the most annoying form of this disease is the tendency of the right wing whackosphere to do everything and anything it can to distort and twist science to agree with its ideology, in particular its religion. One area that I used to write about a lot but don't so much anymore (we bloggers have to subspecialize, I guess, and these days my subspecialty is science-based medicine with only the occasional forays against forms of unreason other…
oracknows | April 22, 2010It's good to be home.
True, while I was away for five days, first to NECSS and then to the AACR Meeting, mail piled up, and I had to go through it last night. Also, just for the heck of it, my wife and I went out to dinner at a local diner. Finally, to complete the unwinding process, last night I sat on my posterior and watched a couple of shows that I had missed during my absence, while lazily searching the web for material to get me back into the blogging thing. Yes, I know I spent a fair amount of verbiage yesterday taking down a mountain of burning stupid by everybody's favorite science…
oracknows | April 21, 2010I tell ya, I go away for a few days, let the blogging slow down, decrease the usual logorrhea. Heck, I even go for the lazy blogger trick of an open thread. In the meantime, while I was busy learning about real science at the 2010 AACR Meeting, the forces of pseudoscience have not been quiet. No, they've been active; indeed, there is so much that requires Orac's not-so-Respectful Insolence and so little time for me to apply it. That means that, almost certainly, "deserving" candidates will be missed. That is a shame, but even Orac needs his rest from time to time.
None of this means that I…
oracknows | April 20, 2010The following is a rather curious promotional video that was shown at the plenary sessions of the AACR 2010 meeting. I first saw it yesterday, and thought my readers might be interested in it while I'm winding my way home:
It's basically a compendium of various facts about cancer and cancer research with a rather obnoxious techno soundtrack to make it "hip" in the way that middle-aged white guys think is "hip." (Believe it or not, the AACR actually played this loud enough to feel the bass.) Annoying music aside, though, the graphics in the video compellingly boil down a large amount of…
grrlscientist | April 20, 2010tags: Eyjafjallajökull, volcanic particulate material, ash clouds, airborne-particle deposition, respiratory physiology, respiratory toxicology, medicine, veterinary medicine, birds, avian health, bioassay, anatomy, researchblogging.org,peer-reviewed research, journal club
Figure 1: The eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, photographed by a farmer in Iceland. This eruption sent massive billowing clouds of volcanic ash several miles into the atmosphere.
Image: Ãlafur Eggertsson (Newscom/Zuma) [larger view]
April is the peak month of spring migration for millions of birds, so the ongoing…