I learned from a couple of colleagues (who I won't name) a couple of facts that reinforce just how hypocritical, hateful, and inane animal rights activists can be. First, the terrorists are still targeting researcher Dario Ringach. Ringach, a former primate researcher, left the field due to violent pressure from these assholes. He's done. He is a former primate researcher. But for these goatfuckers, it has never been about helping animals but hurting people. The Houston Press is reporting that those charged with participating in a large dogfighting ring in Texas served little or no…
Mark Crislip has a nice piece up at Science-Based Medicine about the battle against the medical "de-lightenment". In his post, he looks at some data about what sorts of criteria anti-vaccinationists use in their propaganda. Not surprisingly, appeals to emotion and to pre-existing beliefs are much more common than actual facts. The question then becomes, "Why bother?" We on the side of science-based medical humanism tend to believe that education is the best solution to problems such as implausible health claims, but since these things function more as belief systems than as opinions…
Our beloved, beat-up laptop is ill--very ill. The family is considering consenting to a Do Not Resuscitate order. Symptoms of this grave illness include inability to exit the start up screen and freezing up in "safe mode". The agonal Blue Screen of Death has not yet appeared, but is believed to be immanent.
A few months ago, attorney Ames Grawert and I wrote about a defamation case filed by noted anti-vaccine crank Barbara Loe Fisher against respected journalist Amy Wallace, vaccine expert Dr. Paul Offit, and Conde Nast. The suit arose from a statement by Offit in an excellent article by Wallace. At one point in the lengthy article, Offit is quoted as saying, regarding Loe Fisher, "She lies." Loe Fisher launched the defamation suit based on these two words, claiming they made her appear "odious, infamous, and ridiculous." Anyone who has read Loe Fisher's writing at her National Vaccine…
The other day I told you about a doctor promoting a dietary supplement for the treatment of HIV, despite the lack of any significant data to support his claims. If there's anything medical bloggers have found over the years is that woo rarely walks alone. In my post I expressed some incredulity at the fact that Kaiser promotes himself as an internist and HIV expert despite any of the usual formal education required for these designations. Examination of his website reveals that he is also an expert in "longevity", cancer, chronic fatigue, autoimmune disease, and intestinal parasites.…
I was pleased to see that Dr. Kaiser responded to post from earlier this week. If you'll recall, Dr. Jon Kaiser is a doctor in California who is promoting a nutritional supplement to help treat HIV disease. I was hoping his response would be substantive, containing references to data I had missed in my research of the story. In this I was disappointed. Dr. Lipson, I was surprised when I read your recent blog about my career, expertise and perspective on HIV treatment. Facts and science can be manipulated to support any opinion, so it is a fruitless exercise to engage in a point by point…
I get all sorts of mail. I get mail from whining Scientologists, suffering patients, angry quacks---and I get lots of promotional material. I get letters from publishers wanting me to review books, letters from pseudo-bloggers wanting me to plug their advertiblog---really, just about anything you can imagine. Most of the time I just hit "delete"; it's obvious that they've never read my blog and they're just casting a wide net for some link love. But a recent email from a PR firm piqued my interest: (it's a long letter, and I won't be offended if you simply reference it rather than read the…
For some reason I'm really excited about tomorrow's post. I don't usually write very far ahead of time, but this one took a little bit of extra research. You see, I got this letter from a PR firm hyping some altmed doc, and it was much more interesting than the usual similar things I get. It highlights some of the subtleties at the intersection of science-based medicine and the other stuff. The post is going up here tomorrow morning, and at Science-Based Medicine in the afternoon. One thing I've found about blogging, though, is a piece I really work hard on and like a lot may go over like…
Things have been rather busy at Pal's place. For whatever reason, the complexity of patients has been pretty high lately, so I haven't had a chance to get in my usual once or twice a day post. I'm told that "back in the day" internal medicine patients were a bit less complicated. These days, to get admitted to the hospital, you have to be pretty damned sick. The hospital has to be able to justify your admission based on "severity of illness" and "intensity of service". In simple terms, you have to be sick enough to need care that cannot be provided elsewhere. The days of being admitted…
Sexual violence is a huge problem in the US.  Among college-age women, for example, 20-25% report an attempted or completed rape while in college.  Assault itself is prevalent enough to constitute a major public health problem, but add to that the sequelae---STIs, PTSD, fear, etc.---and sexual assault isn't just a major public health problem; it's one of our most common and devastating public health problems. Given that most perpetrators of sexual violence are men, we have a target population for prevention.  Now, some might argue that focusing on preventing sexual violence by educating men…
Here in the U.S. our rich are very rich and all but our poorest live better than most Haitians. In this context it's easy to lose perspective and to be a bit naive about the survival needs of the people in post-quake Haiti.  Or maybe that's being too generous. How hard could it be for an adult to realize that finding food, water, shelter, and basic medical care for yourself and your family take precedence over any other needs?  Does it really take being subjected to life-threatening conditions yourself to have such a basic level of empathy?   The hordes of medical cultists descending on…
Ambivalent Academic made a fascinating observation today about certain parts of the animal rights movement: What really strikes me is that a lot of this rhetoric reads like snuff-porn. [...] There is an undercurrent of appetite for the kind of violence they describe. It reads as if they take pleasure in imagining the violence they describe,... and they are inviting the reader to join in that sadistic pleasure. You can almost hear the drool. I'm sure any sophisticated psychiatrist might have made this sort of observation, but I'm not even an unsophisticated psychiatrist. The images and…
I have this friend. She used to be a scientist, but changed fields, earning a Ph.D. in philosophy. She now studies and teaches the ethics of the practice of science. I'm sure most of my readers understand how important this is. Without transparent, thoughtful, and informed discussions of ethics, the practice of science and medicine would be a disaster. The past has seen many egregious practices, such as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, Nazi medical experimentation, and the historical abuse of the poor and minorities by science, but ethical dilemmas and disasters are not a detail of history…
Several months ago, Dr. Val Jones wrote about a growing fad in the treatment of musculoskeletal disorders. The therapy, called platelet rich plasma (PRP) injection, involves taking a small amount of blood from a patient, spinning it down in a centrifuge, and then injecting the plasma component into...somewhere. This treatment is becoming increasingly popular, and can be very lucrative for doctors. But does it work? Blood platelets are very biologically active particles and plasma is not a bland fluid. Platelets and plasma contain many biologically active molecules, some of which may be…
I've written previously about my decision not to assist patients in obtaining medical marijuana. My decision is based on my interpretation of the data and of medical ethics. This decision is independent of any opinion I may have about legalization. But other doctors may see things differently. The data are clear to me, but the plausible nature of many of the claims made about marijuana make it anything but a no-brainer. That's one of the reasons why a story out of New Mexico is disturbing. New Mexico has a medical marijuana program. Doctors who work for the Veterans' Administration are…
Human beings are fundamentally narcissistic, and this narcissism can be antithetical to good science and good medicine. We place far too much confidence in our individual abilities to understand what happens to us, and we place far too much importance on our own experiences, inappropriately generalizing them. That's why science is so important in medicine---to avoid basing life-or-death decisions on something some guy thinks he might have heard once. In my recent piece on medical marijuana in Forbes, commenters took me to task for what they perceived to be a host of errors in my reasoning…
Every morning I get to wake up my daughter and get her ready for school, but often that's the last time I see her until the next day. The other day, my wife took her out of school to go to the dentist (apparently the entire school became aware of this just after my daughter). Despite her initial boisterous objections, she did quite well at the dentist, and thanks to technology, I was able to share in the experience---my wife sent me an MMS of my daughter showing me her three loose teeth. My baby. Losing her baby teeth. This. Isn't. Cool. But she's excited, and she should be. No matter…
There are plenty of bloggers who consider themselves to be serving a larger social purpose. How much of a service they actually provide depends very much on your own ideology. I'm sure RedState thinks they are providing vital, timely political analysis, while I think they're a waste of bandwidth. Similarly, there are countless quacks offering all sorts of bad medical advice (in fact, one of Pal's Laws is that the internet is 90% porn and 10% bad medical advice). Some of this bad medical advice serves an active "anti-public health" purpose, discouraging vaccination or claiming that the…
The story of the Texas nurses who were fired and prosecuted for reporting a flaky doctor just keeps getting better. This case was surprising in that it at first seemed to be a clear abuse of power by local officials but on deeper exploration involved a whole army of unorthodox medical thinkers (my prior coverage of the case is here).  This case was surprising in that it at first seemed to be a clear abuse of power by local officials  but on deeper exploration involved a whole army of unorthodox medical thinkers. In Kermit, TX, two nurses at a small community hospital registered complaints…
I'm crabby. Normally I'm a pretty easy-going dude, but right now I'm crabby and some of the stuff I'm reading on the internet lately is so stultifyingly stupid, I just can't contain myself any longer. It's not unexpected for Dr. Communication-is-My-Field to belie his title with every word he writes, but last week's post of his is truly a new level of dumbassery. Nisbet, who revels in telling the rest of the world how poorly they communicate, lobbed a shit-bomb into the blogosphere when he declared: Much of the incivility online can be attributed to anonymity. And with a rare few exceptions…