Science
oracknows | August 21, 2015I've written more times than I can remember about the phenomenon of overdiagnosis and the phenomenon that is linked at the hip with it, overtreatment. Overdiagnosis is a problem that arises when large populations of asymptomatic, apparently healthy people are screened for a disease or a condition, the idea being that catching the disease at an earlier stage in its progression will allow for more successful treatment. Two prominent examples include—of course—screening for breast cancer with mammography and screening for prostate cancer with prostate-specific antigen (PSA) testing, and I've…
oracknows | August 20, 2015Acupuncture is a theatrical placebo, but it's hard not to grudgingly admire just how—shall we say?—malleable or adaptable a placebo it is. What I mean by this is that, if you believe its practitioners and adherents, acupuncture can treat almost literally any disease or health problem. Any! Pain? Acupuncture. Allergies? Acupuncture. Biliary colic? Acupuncture. Infertility? Acupuncture. Menstrual problems? Acupuncture. Prostate problems? Acupuncture. Asthma? Acupuncture.
Well, maybe not asthma, but that doesn't stop acupuncturists from claiming that acupuncture can treat it.
Oh, and if you're a…
oracknows | August 19, 2015Readers of this blog of a certain age and above are likely to remember a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin named William Proxmire. Sen. Proxmire made a name for himself in the late 1970s and throughout much of the 1980s by issuing what he dubbed "The Golden Fleece Award," which was meant to "honor" public officials who, in Proxmire's view, egregiously wasted taxpayer money. It was a popular and often headline-grabbing device to highlight wasteful spending. There was one big problem with the award, though, that I increasingly appreciated as time went on, to the point where I've referred to the…
oracknows | August 17, 2015A recurring topic on this blog involves my discussion of stories about children with cancer whose parents refuse chemotherapy, thus endangering the children's lives. These stories usually take this general form: The child is diagnosed with a deadly, but treatable cancer that has a high probability of cure with proper chemotherapy. The child receives the first round of chemotherapy. The parents can't deal with the side effects. If they are woo-prone, they make the decision to use "natural healing" or some form of alternative medicine. Sometimes it's in response to the child's request.…
drorzel | August 14, 2015I forgot to do this last week, because I was busy preparing for SteelyPalooza on Saturday, but here are links to my recent physics posts over at Forbes:
-- What 'Ant-Man' Gets Wrong About The Real Quantum Realm: On the way home from the Schrödinger Sessions, I had some time to kill so I stopped to watch a summer blockbuster. The movie was enjoyable enough, thanks to charming performances from the key players, but the premise is dippy even for a comic-book movie. It does, however, provide a hook to talk about quantum physics, so...
-- Great Books For Non-Physicists Who Want To Understand…
oracknows | August 14, 2015File this one under the category: You can't make stuff like this up. (At least, I can't.)
Let's say you're a die hard all-conspiracy conspiracy theorist and alternative medicine believer (a not uncommon combination). You love Alex Jones and Mike Adams and agree with their rants that there is a New World Order trying to suppress your rights. You strongly believe that vaccines not only cause autism, sudden infant death syndrome, a shaken baby-like syndrome, autoimmune diseases, sudden ovarian failure, and even outright death but are a depopulation plot hatched by Bill Gates and the Illuminati…
drorzel | August 12, 2015Over in Tumblr-land, Ben Lillie has an interesting post on all the stuff that goes on behind the scenes of a science talk. It's an intimidatingly long list of stuff, in quite a range of different areas. But this is a solved problem in other performance fields:
And that raises and interesting question, since aside from the science section (and not even all of that), all of these apply to any other performance or production. So how do those people master all of those things? The short answer is that they don’t. Almost any production that requires a long, and more importantly disparate, set of…
oracknows | August 10, 2015Alright, alright already! I get the message.
Over the course of the day yesterday I was bombarded by e-mails with a link to a New York Times article that shows a rather shocking lack of understanding of the science—more specifically, the lack of science—behind alternative medicine. Whenever something like this happens and I get so many requests to address a specific article, I'm always torn between my natural contrariness, which tempted me not to touch this article with the proverbial ten foot cattle prod (although something about this needs a cattle prod applied to it) and my desire to give…
oracknows | August 9, 2015I learned over the weekend that a historic figure in science-based medicine has died. If you know anything about the history of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), you will know this woman's name, Frances O. Kelsey, MD, PhD. It turns out that Dr. Kelsey died on Friday at the age of 101. Somehow I missed the news on Friday, but once the story showed up in my news feeds over the weekend, I knew I had to make her today's topic. Here's the short version:
The sedative was Kevadon, and the application to market it in America reached the new medical officer at the Food and Drug Administration…
drorzel | August 7, 2015Today is SteelyKid's seventh birthday, which she's been counting down to for a good while. It's a little hard to believe it's seven years since she was substantially smaller than her stuffed Appa toy.
She's become quite a handful in that time, with boundless energy apparently derived from photosynthesis (since she hardly eats anything), and intense interests in Minecraft and Pokemon, math and taekwondo. She's a red belt now, which is only a few short of black, and this summer has started doing the "Elite Team" sparring classes. I'm pretty sure that if she really wanted to, she could kick my…
drorzel | August 7, 2015There's a new Science Express paper on interfering clocks today, which is written up in Physics World, with comments from yours truly. The quote is from a much longer message I sent-- with no expectation that it would end up as anything other than a pull quote, I might add, but I thought the background would be helpful. Since I ended up doing a back-of-the-envelope estimate for that, though, I thought I would reproduce some of the reasoning here.
The basic proposal idea here is to do an atom interferometer inside a Ramsey interferometer for making an atomic clock. That is, before sending the…
drorzel | August 6, 2015Last weekend was our APS-funded outreach workshop The Schrödinger Sessions: Science for Science Fiction, held at the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland. The workshop offered a three-day "crash course" on quantum physics to 17 science fiction writers from a variety of media-- we had novelists, short-story writers, screenwriters, and at least one poet. The goal was to provide a basic grounding in quantum physics and a look at current research in hopes of informing and inspiring new stories that will, in turn, inspire the audience for those stories to look more deeply into the…
oracknows | July 31, 2015I frequently discuss a disturbing phenomenon known as "quackademic medicine." Basically, quackademic medicine is a phenomenon that has taken hold over the last two decades in medical academia in which once ostensibly science-based medical schools and academic medical centers embrace quackery. This embrace was once called "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM) but among quackademics the preferred term is now "integrative medicine." Of course, when looked at objectively, integrative medicine is far more a brand than a specialty. Specifically, it's a combination of rebranding some…
pharyngula | July 27, 2015This bird may be doomed. It's genome has been sequenced, and there is very little genetic diversity in the remaining populations.
oracknows | July 26, 2015Many are the lies and epic is the misinformation spread by the antivaccine movement. For instance, they claim that vaccines cause autism, autoimmune diseases, sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), cancer, and a wide variety of other conditions and diseases when there is no credible evidence that they do and lots of evidence that they don't. One particularly pernicious myth, designed to appeal (if you can call it that) to religious fundamentalists, is the claim that vaccines are made using fetal parts. This particular claim reared its ugly head again in the context of a propaganda campaign…
pharyngula | July 26, 2015You may have seen the hype. GAME-CHANGING CURE FOR ALZHEIMER: THE NEW DRUG, NEW BREAKTHROUGH. Next Best Thing To Alzheimer's Cure: Solanezumab May Delay Onset Of Dementia By 30%. Have scientists found a drug to stop Alzheimer's disease?
I'm going to have to pop your balloon. Someone knowledgeable actually looked at the study.
I searched the internet; there was a conference in the United States. I searched the website and found a press release: it seems that Lilly has funded research. EXPEDITION and EXPEDITION2 are published placebo controlled trials of solanezumab, which did not reach…
oracknows | July 23, 2015Back when I started this blog, I hadn't yet become aware of the phenomenon known as quackademic medicine. This phenomenon, as you recall, is the infiltration of academic medical institutions that should be bastions of science- and evidence-based medicine by outright quackery. In quackademic medicine, we see Very Respectable Academic Physicians and Scientists wasting their time studying faith healing like healing touch and reiki, prescientific medicine based on primitive vitalism such as traditional Chinese medicine and (of course) acupuncture, and even sympathetic magic like homeopathy. It's…
drorzel | July 22, 2015Having mentioned in yesterday's post that I'll be on sabbatical for the next academic year, this would probably be a good time to point out that this means I'm somewhat more flexible than usual in terms of going places and giving talks. And I enjoy going places and giving talks. About lots of different things.
So, if you're at a place that might be interested in a science-y speaker on quantum physics, relativity, science communication, science in general, or something related to those, drop me a line. I'd be happy to talk about the possibility of visiting new places and talking to people…
oracknows | July 19, 2015Mammography is a topic that, as a breast surgeon, I can't get away from. It's a useful tool that those of us who treat breast cancer patients have used for over 30 years to detect breast cancer in asymptomatic women and thus (or so we hope) decrease their risk of dying of breast cancer through early intervention. We have always known, however, that mammography is an imperfect tool. Oddly enough, its imperfections come from two different directions. On the one hand, in women with dense breasts its sensitivity can be maddeningly low, leading it to miss breast cancers camouflaged by the…
drorzel | July 17, 2015Another week, another set of posts at Forbes to link here:
-- Why Do Solids Have Energy Bands? A conceptual explanation of why putting together lots of atoms with electrons in well-defined energy levels leads to a solid with electrons filling broad energy bands.
-- This Is The Key Distinction Between Magic And Advanced Technology: Following up a fun panel at Readercon, and how the "magical thinking" involved in my grad school lab is distinct from real magic.
-- What Submarine Navigation Can Teach Us About Building Luxury Prison Tunnels: The editor at Forbes sent email asking if anybody could…