terrasig | January 1, 2010To launch our 2010 blogging, here's a cultural take on our core theme of folk medicines and prescription drugs derived from natural sources (plants, fungi, marine creatures, and microorganisms terrestrial and aquatic).
I've lived in the southern United States for a combined 15 years but it was only when I married into a southern family that I was assimilated into the tradition of eating collard greens and black-eyed peas to kick off the New Year.
I'm told that the custom is a mashup of African American tradition adapted by southern whites that sustained all through the Civil War and the…
terrasig | December 31, 2009Note: If you've read all of this at the conference website and just want to pay, CLICK HERE.
For those of you attending ScienceOnline2010, I'm the one tending to the Saturday night banquet at the headquarters hotel, The Radisson at Research Triangle Park.
The banquet will be held following the Saturday 16 January sessions beginning at 7 pm.
The dinner was a great success last year with about 135 of the registrants attending and was a great way to unwind and continue some of the discussions we began.
This year, the supper will be followed by the Ignite session. For those who don't know, Ignite…
terrasig | December 29, 2009
In the light of the Northwest Airlines "pantsbomber" episode and America's penchant for quick but poorly-thought out theatrical responses to such incidents, some international colleagues planning to attend ScienceOnline2010 have expressed some concern about the hassles they might encounter flying into our beloved burg in two weeks.
Preliminary accounts from the RDU International Airport suggest, however, that our local TSA and customs officials have maintained reason and restraint while also keeping travelers as safe as possible:
Paul Beach, an Air Force communications officer who flew into…
terrasig | December 28, 2009
In discussing the Christmas birth of a son to ScienceBlogs launcher and science journalist Christopher Mims and his wife, I neglected to note another addition to our tribe of science, from a science blogger specifically.
ChemicalBiLOLogy blogger, Arlenna, gave birth on Christmas Eve to a beautiful girl, pictured here with Mr. Arlenna. In her brief post, "I had a baby!," Arlenna posited:
. . .whoever invented epidurals and started using them in childbirth should win the Nobel Prize.
Despite my lack of training in anesthesiology or obstetrics, I thought I might look into this a bit. I had…
terrasig | December 27, 2009Sitting back today looking at news and webcams in my former home of Colorado had me also reflecting on the events that conspired to put me in North Carolina. This unexpected turn in my life also opened me up to a local community of remarkably creative people with national and international reputations in their respective fields.
One of these people whom I am fortunate to call a local hero is journalist Barry Yeoman. Barry was described in the Columbia Journalism Review as, "(One of) the best unsung investigative journalists working in print in the United States.... Yeoman specializes in…
terrasig | December 26, 2009The other day, author pal and PharmFamily friend Rebecca Skloot sent out a Twitter request for iPhone app suggestions for her new gadget, particularly those that might be of greatest use on her upcoming, self-supported book tour for The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
Let me first congratulate Ms. Skloot on ditching that CrapBerry and adopting a technology that is as superior as her book.
Rebecca got me looking at my iPhone and made me realize that, well, it sort of has that not-so-fresh feeling. I've got a few tried-and-true apps that I've shared with our Twitter followers but I even feel…
terrasig | December 25, 2009To all of our readers, celebrating today or not, we wish you all the best of what this season means to you and your family.
I particularly like the sentiments shared by my colleague, PalMD, on what Jews and Muslims are doing today in Detroit, Michigan.
I also like the sentiments so nicely expressed by Greta Christina at Alternet.org on 7 Reasons for Atheists to Celebrate the Holidays.
We also send out a big congratulations to original ScienceBlogs editor and science journalist, Christopher Mims, and his family on the birth of their beautiful son, Ike.
Gifts come in all forms. Enjoy all you…
terrasig | December 24, 2009. . .or a spread in Playgirl.
Huh?
Orac has a nice essay today for your Christmas Eve reading about a USA Today article yesterday by Liz Szabo that called out celebrities for their pseudoscientific proclamations and advice entitled, "Are celebrities crossing the line on medical advice?"
So that's where I came up with this thought: it would be great if some folks who talked science-based sense became celebrities so they'd at least have the same platform to counter people like Jenny McCarthy. On his comment thread, I suggested that we can only hope that Orac someday gets a movie deal and…
terrasig | December 23, 2009On December 14 (last week), the US National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) released the findings on adolescent drug use and trends as determined from the 35th annual Monitoring the Future (MTF) survey (press release). The ambitious survey is conducted with NIDA funding* by the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Sciences led currently by Dr. Lloyd Johnston. The larger survey began in 1975 with only high-school seniors and was expanded in 1991 to include 8th and 10th graders to improve the ability to measure changes as a population progresses through school. A very detailed white…
terrasig | December 22, 2009Audio documentarian, local hero, and Pharmboy family friend, Richard Ziglar, let us know over the weekend of some employment opportunities for music and tech-minded folks at Zenph Studios in Research Triangle Park.
What is Zenph, you ask? Zenph takes classic piano recordings, often from long-departed performers, dissects them digitally to capture nuances of the live performance, and then "re-performs" them live in a recital hall on legendary Steinways driven by the software. These are *not* digital remasterings but recordings of an actual replaying of the original work.
Listen to this…
terrasig | December 18, 2009I wanted to issue a great big thank-you to all of you who came by to comment on the 4th anniversary of this blog and share with us who you are and why you read. After a slow start, a few blog links and Twitter-prodding by my colleagues got the commenting going full bore. I intend to respond to each of you in the comment thread but it may take a couple of days.
I have been very pleasantly surprised by how many of our readers are not trained as scientists but are simply interested in science or in the scientific topics we present here. That is completely AWESOME because one of my concerns…
terrasig | December 17, 2009
If you think that the H1N1 pandemic is slowing down and have grown complacent with vaccination now that vaccines are more widely available, please learn something from last night's tragic loss of local college student from Rhode Island, Lillian Chason:
A University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill student, who friends said was battling complications from the H1N1 virus, died Wednesday evening, according to UNC Hospitals and a Facebook post made by her father.
Freshman Lillian Chason had been in critical condition at UNC Hospitals for weeks. Friends told WRAL News on Tuesday that she started…
terrasig | December 15, 2009The Preamble
Four years ago today, I wrote my first post in the blogosphere over at the old Blogger version of Terra Sigillata. The post, entitled, "A Humble PharmBoy Begins to Sow," set out my mission to be an objective source for information on natural health remedies and drugs that come from nature, whether used as single agent prescription drugs or as botanical mixtures and supplements.
I read blogs for about six months before setting off on my own, primarily because I wanted to be sure my efforts were not redundant with others. Because I am academic and paid by a combination of federal…
terrasig | December 14, 2009Update: New ScienceBlogs colleague, Sharon Astyk at Casaubon's Book, brought my attention to the fact that this local southern Colorado story has been picked up by CNN.
Although I originally wrote this post rather tongue-in-cheek, some scientific evidence has accumulated for the benefits of cannabis in neuropathic pain, cancer pain and nausea, as well as muscle spasticity in multiple sclerosis. For what appears to be a subset of individuals, marijuana is superior to prescription drugs in terms of efficacy and side effect profile. Equivocal results with a standardized cannabis extract…
terrasig | December 14, 2009Last week in Stockholm (and Oslo), the 2009 Nobel Prize winners were gloriously hosted while giving their lectures and receiving their medals and diplomas. In Chemistry this year, the Nobel was shared by Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, Thomas A Steitz, and Ada E Yonath for their studies on the structure and function of the ribosome, a remarkable nucleoprotein complex that catalyzes the rapid, coordinated formation of peptide bonds as instructed by messenger RNA. My post on the day of the announcement in October was designed to counter the inevitable (and now realized) criticisms that the prize was…
terrasig | December 11, 2009In an article by Wayne Heilman of the Colorado Springs Gazette, I learned of a US FDA action against contract drug manufacturer Provident Pharmaceuticals. The company has been cited for good manufacturing practices (GMP) violations as well as the manufacture of unapproved drugs. The GMP violations are of a magnitude that FDA requested that Provident hire a GMP training consultant to bring the facility up to snuff.
However, Heilman seized upon an interesting side light in the warning: the names of the unapproved drugs apparently made by the company are missing from the detailed warning letter…
terrasig | December 10, 2009
As I have said on occasion, the health care insurance reform debate seems to have underestimated the role of the clinically-trained pharmacist in improving care and cutting health care costs. Hands-on community-based drug management models have been operating around the US with far less fanfare than cut-rate prescriptions at Wal-Mart or CVS Caremark.
So I was delighted to learn via Phoenix pharmacist commenter, Michael Guzzo, that El Rio Community Health Center in Tucson, Arizona, was recognized this past summer with a 2009 Pinnacle Award from the American Pharmacists Association (APhA)…
terrasig | December 9, 2009By way of my substance abuse blogger colleague, The Discovering Alcoholic, I learned of yesterday's New York Times article by Sarah Kershaw on Dr. A. Thomas McLellan. McLellan is a psychologist and drug abuse researcher with over 400 peer-reviewed publications to his credit. He held an academic appointment at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and was scientific director of the Treatment Research Institute which he co-founded in 1992 with Jack Durell, MD, and other researchers from Penn's Center for the Studies of Addiction.
However, McLellan is not a career bureaucrat like…
terrasig | December 7, 2009Alexa Ray Joel, the daughter of Billy Joel and Christie Brinkley, was hospitalized Saturday with what I originally thought was an overdose of some type of sedative.
However, today's Newsday and MTV are reporting that the family is calling this an overdose of a homeopathic medication called Traumeel. Traumeel is manufacturer by an Albuquerque-based company called Heel USA, a company founded by a German physician in the 1920s.
If Traumeel is truly homeopathic, there is absolutely no way this product could have caused Joel's hospitalization.
If you are new to our blog, you may not know the…
terrasig | December 7, 2009
An article by Paul Davidson in this morning's USA Today reminded me of another reason why we need health care reform in the United States, or at least a move away from employment-linked health coverage: temporary employees may soon comprise 25% of the national workforce.
An encouraging jobs report Friday underscored the growing prominence of temporary workers who some experts predict could constitute up to a quarter of the workforce in a few years.
A big reason employers shed a far-less-than-expected 11,000 jobs last month is that temporary staffing agencies found slots for 52,000 additional…