palmd | March 9, 2009This morning was rough---daylight savings time messed with the whole household. PalKid was not real happy about getting up, but she did. I brought her waffles in bed (real maple syrup, as always). Mrs. Pal packed most of her lunch the night before--I heated up the soup and put the thermos in the lunch bag.
This is how I usually see my daughter when I get home:
Tonight I got lucky (although we'll pay for it in the morning). She was lying in bed with Mrs. Pal, sleepy but awake. She dismissed mommy, and gestured me into the bed. We cuddled until she was fast asleep.
palmd | March 9, 2009Just a reminder that PalCast #7 is up.
Carnival of the Elitist Bastards is up at En Tequila es Verdad. I'm happy to say that I am a featured mamzer.
I'm remiss in announcing the launch of the Diversity in Science.
There is also a disturbing thread over at Isis's place, in which she receives rather nasty email. I, for some reason, was also singled out for scorn. Apparently I'm a closet mohel who loves to destroy teh masculiniteh.
palmd | March 9, 2009A pastor in Illinois was shot and killed over the weekend. A similar tragedy happened in my community many years ago. Religious leaders are very public figures and have an emotional connection with members of their communities, so I suppose it's not so strange that they should be targets. Many of the cases I have read about over the years involved a mentally ill assailant, as it appears the Illinois case did. Mental illness doesn't usually lead to violence, but one can certainly imagine how a particularly disturbing delusion could lead someone to violence. The American mental health…
palmd | March 9, 2009Most of my readers know that I'm a dad, but I don't write all that much about fatherhood. We have some great bloggers here who talk about being a mommy and the difficulties of being a mom and a scientist.
I'd like to add a voice about fatherhood. Every couple and every individual approaches parenthood differently. My writings, needless to say, are my experiences.
The way my wife and I have ended up doing things has a lot to do with our earning potential---mine as a physician is much higher than hers as a teacher, so she is the primary at-home parent. This isn't to say that my wife isn't…
palmd | March 6, 2009If someone were to write a biography of the Creationist neurosurgeon, "Unhinged" would be an apt title. He used to content himself with rants against philosophical materialism, and evangelize for dualism with a zealous religiosity. But that wasn't enough. The "forces of secularism" seemed to keep growing, despite his desire to see some heavenly smiting. In his latest rants, the gloves are off---it's scalpels at twenty paces.
Let's see what's got Egnor so exercised.
First came the announcement by Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) that they would boycott Louisiana…
palmd | March 5, 2009This is a cross-post from Science-Based Medicine. Go there! --PalMD
There are many ways in which cult medicine believers try to insinuate themselves into the health care system. As Dr. Gorski has pointed out, "prevention" is one of their metaphorical feet in the door. The cult medicine literature often says things like, "mainstream medicine is fine for treating acute illness, but what we do is prevention." What they often leave out is the question of what "prevention" means, what the data on prevention is, and how to properly approach prevention. It's likely that one of my co-editors…
palmd | March 5, 2009So, Open Lab 2008 is now available, and you must buy a copy. Open Lab collects the best writing from the blogosphere and (ironically) captures them in print. It's a nice chance to read some great stuff that you knew you'd love, and some great stuff you've never even seen. The cover art by Dave Ng and The Flying Trilobite is awesome. The proceeds go toward ScienceOnline10, next year's online science writing conference, which totally rocks. Lot's of the attendees are graduate students, academics, high school students, and other types of hungry people who could really use a subsidy to come…
palmd | March 4, 2009OK, the title is inaccurate. Kirby is not bound by the same code of ethics as researchers and doctors, so perhaps he's not unethical. But his latest rant in HuffPo encourages unethical behavior. Honestly, I'm getting tired of writing about this guy, but he just keeps bringing the stupid, and something about that just calls out for a response.
So what's so horrible about his latest hunk of drivel? Well, first he starts with a blatant misinterpretation of the truth:
It is not accurate for members of the media to report that the link between vaccines and autism has been "disproven."…
palmd | March 3, 2009I need a pick-me-up today.
She loves Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald.
But not as much as she loves her daddy!
palmd | March 3, 2009The blogosphere is doing a reasonably good job of covering this, but I'm still fuming over Senator Tom Harkin's (D-IA) health care policy hearings. Each morsel of the hearing contains more idiocy than the last. In my attempt to shed some light into Harkin's guano-filled cave, I'm going to examine some of the specific testimony, starting with that of Dr. Dean Ornish.
Medicine today focuses primarily on drugs and surgery, genes and germs, microbes and molecules, but we are so much more than that.
When I hear statements like this, my bullshit detector asplodes. Sure, it's only one sentence…
palmd | March 1, 2009Remember when President Obama said something about returning science to it's rightful place? Well, our new president has a real tough climb ahead of him. The previous administration shoved science aside for political expediency and religious ideology. Now, forces in the president's own party are trying to insert their own quasi-religious beliefs into health care reform, leaving science in a whole different place altogether.
Here's the deal. Some years back, Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) helped set up the National Center on Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). The whole idea of…
palmd | February 28, 2009It's up and ready! It's maybe not my best, but I'm getting used to my new equipment and I've been out of the podcasting biz for a while.
Feel free to come back here and discuss.
palmd | February 27, 2009MTV news is reporting that Bow Wow is coming to Chris Brown's defense. For those of you who have been too busy worrying about the economy to follow the personal lives of celebrities, Chris Brown is a young singer who beat the shit out of his girlfriend Rihanna, another young singer (I'm sorry--"allegedly" beat the shit out of). The up side of this is that it may actually affect his livelihood---he has reportedly lost some advertising deals. But as Kobe Bryant showed us, if you're a celebrity you can rape whomever you wish and you will probably not end up in jail or the poor house.
So…
palmd | February 26, 2009Yesterday, a fellow medical blogger suffered a blow most of us cannot imagine. She goes by the name "drsmak" and was a great writer before her son fell ill, but when her son fell ill, her document of the struggle showed us how good the blogosphere can be. She allowed us a view of what it is like to love, and how that love is sometimes distilled into a painfully small elixir.
Drsmak did us all a great favor---she showed us how it is possible to survive the unsurvivable, and she has done it with great dignity and art. The blogosphere owes her a debt.
And you can help memorialize Henry, and…
palmd | February 25, 2009It's really early, but I've been up for a while. The leg pain caused by the disk pushing into my L5 nerve root is turning me into a cranky insomniac. So this morning I'm giving in. I'm giving up on tossing and turning, grinding some good coffee beans, boiling some water, combining them in a coffee press, and sitting by the computer. My wife's office downstairs is a peaceful room. (Hold on, time to press the coffee---that reminds me. A couple of years ago, I was pressing the coffee and I accidentally sent the press flying, coffee and grounds painting the family room. My 4 year old…
palmd | February 25, 2009The Autism Omnibus Trial is a conundrum for the infectious disease promotion movement. Still, their ability to pick up the goalposts and run is unmatched, and that is just what David Kirby and Robert Kennedy, Jr. have done in today's Huffington Post.
To review, the recent Omnibus decision looked at a few test cases for the "vaccine causes autism" hypothesis, and tossed them for being inconsistent with reality. This correlates well with what science has to say about the issue.
But of course the overwhelming evidence isn't going to deter these superheroes. They know the answer, and they're…
palmd | February 25, 2009HP feels really, really bad, and they are sending me a brand new tablet pc, apparently a newer, shinier, happier one. Yea!!
palmd | February 23, 2009A while back I wrote about a naturopathic "physician" who was specifically preying on the Latino community. This is troubling for a number of reasons, some of which I mentioned. In my zeal to rant about the quackery, I may have not delved deeply enough into some of the other important issues.
For example, Hispanics have rates of diabetes and stroke well above the white Anglo population. These are conditions for which we have very effective science-based treatment. Proper treatment of high blood pressure in diabetics reduces the rate of heart attack and stroke by 35-50%. Proper foot care,…
palmd | February 23, 2009So I've been dealing with a sick computer for a while now. It died ungracefully during ScienceOnline09, first giving me the dread blue screen of death, then giving me a black startup screen that said the pc equivalent of "piss off".
My other computer is a mac, but the hospital's system isn't mac-compatible, and my wife needs it, so I'm in a bit of trouble. As far as I know, I don't keep a lot of irreplaceable data on it, so I'm not too worried about that, but I really, really want my computer back.
It's a lovely little hp tc4400 tablet pc. I don't use it in "tablet mode" very often, but…