surgery
oracknows | July 30, 2007Saturday, I thought that I knew what I'd be writing about for Monday, which, I've learned from my two and a half years of blogging, is a great thing when it happens. A certain Libertarian comic had decided that he wanted to argue some more about secondhand smoke and indoor smoking bans, starting a few days earlier with a rather specious analogy (which was handily shredded by you, my readers) and then finishing by annoying me with a comment and a post that implied that I didn't "care about the little guy." It looked like great fodder for a post to start out the week and a chance to apply a…
oracknows | July 24, 2007Normally, when I hear such a term as "homeopathic surgery" or of homeopaths doing surgery, I get the irresistable urge to make jokes about it, such as wondering if homeopathic surgery is surgery diluted down to the point where not a single cell in the body is injured or whether homeopathic surgeons make ultra-tiny incisions. Actually, that second quip risks confusing homeopathic surgeons with laparoscopic surgeons, and I'd never do that. I respect laparoscopic surgeons. Laparoscopic surgery is very difficult, and I have the utmost respect for my colleagues who can do complex operations…
oracknows | July 23, 2007The other day, Sid Schwab, surgeon blogger extraordinaire, brought up a question that, I'm guessing, most nonsurgeons wonder about from time to time when contemplating how it is that we surgeons do what we do.
What about bathroom breaks?
Given that most of the surgery that I do is breast surgery, my operations rarely take more than two or three hours. The only time a typical operation that I do takes longer than that is the uncommon times when I am doing a double mastectomy, and even then it's rarely more than a four hour affair. All I have to do is to make sure to hit the bathroom right…
oracknows | July 12, 2007Mike Adams is an idiot.
There, I said it.
Adams runs the NewsTarget website, a repository for all things "alternative" medicine. In it, he rails against "conventional" medicine as utterly useless and touts all manner of woo as the "cure" for a variety of diseases. I generally ignore his website these days because I fear that reading it regularly will cause me to lose too many neurons, and, as I get older, I want to hold on to my what neurons I have remaining for as long as possible, or, if I must lose them, to do so in a pleasurable way, perhaps as a result of a fine bottle of wine. But,…
oracknows | July 10, 2007I'm devastated.
Truly and totally devastated emotionally and intellectually. Indeed, I don't know how I'll ever be able to recover, how I'll ever be able to live down the shame and go on with my career.
What could bring me to this point, you ask? I'll tell you. Everybody's favorite creationist neurosurgeon and dualist Dr.Michael Egnor thinks I'm "unprofessional."
Worse, he does it while agreeing with Pat Sullivan's article in which Pat asserts that "Darwinism" has what he calls a "marketing problem," in essence seemingly saying that, because he can't understand "Darwinism" but can understand…
oracknows | June 18, 2007In blogging, there are some topics that I know that I really shouldn't bother with; yet, somehow they suck me in. A number of things can cause that. Perhaps it's a topic that just gets under my skin to the point where I can't hold back a commentary, even when I know that it might be wiser to remain quiet, be it because of the flak that my commentary will bring (antivaccination lunacy, HIV denialists, certain forms of quackery) or because of the threat to my sanity if I allow the irritation of them to go unanswered.
I address this topic because of the latter reason.
I've discussed why…
oracknows | June 17, 2007Via Modern Mechanix, an ad from 1938:
Does this make you think of something other than a medical ad? Maybe it's the whole thing about the "human hand" being placed on the groin as a truss.
Actually, the best "support" for a "rupture" (a.k.a. an inguinal hernia) these days is some polypropylene mesh sewn into place properly as either a sheet and/or plug to hold the "rupture" in. Back in 1938, the best "support" was some conjoined tendon sewn to the appropriate ligament, the most common of which when I was a resident, back in the days right before mesh became popular, was the Bassini repair…
oracknows | June 8, 2007It saddens people, but doesn't particularly surprise, when some professionals are killed in the line of duty. For professions such as soldier, police office, and firefighter, for example, it's expected that occasionally some will lose their lives in the line of duty because of the dangerous nature of the job. Less expected is when medical professionals suffer similar sacrifices. For example, a few days ago at my old alma mater, the University of Michigan, a Survival Flight air ambulance on the way back from Wisconsin after procuring organs for transplant crashed into Lake Michigan with no…
oracknows | June 6, 2007Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that it's been quite a while since I've featured the antics of a certain character who's become a bit of the bête noire of my fellow surgeons. I'm referring, of course, to Dr. Michael Egnor, a renowned neurosurgeon from SUNY Stony Brook who's made 2007 a very embarrassing year indeed for surgeons like me who accept evolution as a valid scientific theory, as, in fact, the entire underpinning of modern biological and medical sciences. Starting back in March, having whetted his appetite for looking foolish by jumping into the comments of a posts in…
oracknows | June 2, 2007Infophilia finds Dr. Michael Egnor's invocation of the Stalin Zombie from a couple of months ago and tears it apart.
Come to think of it, Egnor's been laying down some silliness about evolution lately. I had been restraining myself from commenting due to my previous oversaturation blogging about his antics, but I think I've given the blog a suitably long Egnor-free interval that it might be time to have some dismayed fun with our creationist neurosurgeon again...
oracknows | May 7, 2007Readers who don't like me might think that the title of this post refers to what I am about to write. I know, the title perfectly encapsulates the verbose style that is my stock and trade. In reality, though, it's referring to a couple of articles floating around the blogosphere of which I've become aware and about which I've been meaning discuss because of their similarities. One is a pretty worthless piece of conspiracy-mongering; the other, although it makes some appropriate criticisms of how we go about cancer research, comes to a wildly incorrect conclusion about what we should be doing…
oracknows | April 26, 2007When I saw this, I thought it had to be a joke. But it's not:
Doctors in New York have removed a woman's gallbladder with instruments passed through her vagina, a technique they hope will cause less pain and scarring than the usual operation, and allow a quicker recovery. The technique can eliminate the need to cut through abdominal muscles, a major source of pain after surgery.
The operation was experimental, part of a study that is being done to find out whether people will fare better if abdominal surgery is performed through natural openings in the body rather than cuts in the belly. The…
oracknows | April 23, 2007Mike, Mike, Mike...
What did I ever do to deserve this? Specifically, your remarks about our creationist neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Egnor:
In his "response," "Egnor" manages to completely distort pretty much everything about my article, in a way that is so ham-fistedly inept that it is simply impossible for me to continue to believe that the "Michael Egnor" articles are being written by a real person who really believes what he (or she) writes...It's been fun while it lasted, but the game's over now. Would whoever is really writing this stuff please take this opportunity to own up to it? Please…
oracknows | April 20, 2007I'm confused again about what appear to be mutually conflicting statements.
The Discovery Institute's favorite creationist neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Egnor two months ago on Pharyngula:
Perhaps a fable (not a just-so story!) will illustrate. Imagine that you, P.Z., were a student in 1925. You would study Darwinism fairly intensively as a high school student, undergrad, and med student (it's a hypothetical!). In high school you'd read Hunter's 'A Civic Biology' (unless you lived in Dayton, Tennessee), which taught the Darwinian superiority of the Nordic races and the need to eliminate the lesser…
oracknows | April 16, 2007...because he's sure as heck doing his best to cause it damage with his latest antievolution "broadsides," even to the point where it needs the loving ministrations of a neurosurgeon! His latest screeds produce in me a nearly irresistible urge to pound my head against the nearest hard surface to make the psychic pain stop. He's placing me in danger of real, physical pain, from epidural hematoma (in fact, I wonder if I'm in the middle of a lucid interval right now) to subdural hematoma to cerebral contusions.
First of all, regular readers may have noted that I haven't yet responded to the…
oracknows | April 15, 2007Granted, it is the print media, rather than the bubble-headed TV doctors that I railed against a couple of days ago, but even so I had a hard time believing this article in the Washington Post when it was forwarded to me.
Compare:
Washington Post articlePart 1 and Part 2 of Early Detection of Cancer, by me.
It's like a distilled version of what I wrote and excellent--dare I say it around here these days?--framing of a complex medical/scientific issue for a lay audience. Remember, as you read this, the term "overdiagnosis," which I should have discussed. Also remember that I (and the authors…
oracknows | April 13, 2007Having done a lot of trauma coverage in my time (although the last time I covered trauma call was nearly eight years ago), I have to admit that, when I first heard of the motor vehicle collision (I never call such crashes "accidents" because they rarely are) in which New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine was seriously injured, the first question that popped into my mind after "How did this happen?" was:
Was the Governor wearing seatbelts?
Of course, I strongly suspected that I already knew the answer, and, indeed, I did. The answer was no. Here's what apparently happened:
Gov. Jon S. Corzine was…
oracknows | April 10, 2007I don't want to make this blog "all Egnor all the time." I know it's hard to believe, given my posting behavior recently, but really I don't. No matter how much the Discovery Institute's creationist neurosurgeon may embarrass the hell out of me as (I shudder to have to admit) a fellow surgeon, I've recently been trying to ration the rebuttals of his nonsense about evolution, and I note that I took one swipe at him yesterday. Even so, I hope you'll forgive me for this brief lapse. I had to do it because my irony meter is building up to a meltdown and explosion because of what Dr. Michael Egnor…
oracknows | April 5, 2007[Note: If you haven't already, you should read PART 1 of this two-part series. It defines several terms that I will be using in this post, and I don't plan on explaining them again, given that they were explained in detail in Part 1. Of course, if you're a medical professional and already know what lead time bias, length bias, and stage migration are, then you should still read Part 1 for its scintillating writing.]
I hadn't expected that it would take me this long to get around to part 2 of my post from Monday, but, alas, other matters intervened. Better late than never, and besides, we…
oracknows | April 4, 2007Well, well, well, well.
I hadn't expected it. I really hadn't. After just shy of three weeks since I first made my challenge to Dr. Egnor to put up or shut up regarding certain claims of his that the "design inference" has been "of great value" in medicine and results in "the best medical research," I had pretty much given up trying to get an answer out of him. I had come to assume that either (1) Dr. Egnor had been either unaware of my challenge (although I tended to doubt it, given how many echoed it, or (2) he was simply ignoring it in favor of posting some amazingly bad reasoning. To…