Medicine
oracknows | October 1, 2007One of the best retorts to the claims of faith healers is the simple question: If faith healing works such miracles, why has there never been a documented case of faith healing regrowing an amputated limb? Now that would be truly miraculous. That would make even a curmudgeonly old skeptic like me sit up an take notice.
Now, a woman named Carole Miller McCleery-Greene is claiming just that; so I had to check it out.
When I came across this Carole's site on a mailing list, I originally filed it away, thinking it would make a good installment of Your Friday Dose of Woo. Then I thought about it.…
sciencewoman | September 30, 2007Hat-tip to a reader for bringing this to my attention.
Should a breast-feeing woman be allowed extra long breaks during her nine-hour medical licensing exam?
That's been the question in the case of an MD/PhD student and her four month old baby.
The medical student, Sophie Currier, requested extra break time so that she could pump her breasts during the exam. The national Medical Board of Examiners denied her request, so she sued. On Wednesday, an appeals court overturned an earlier decision that denied her request.
A Superior Court judge last week rejected Currier's request to order the…
oracknows | September 28, 2007Because if you're going to make health claims and claim to treat patients, you should be held just as accountable as any physician:
A Carson City "anti-aging" doctor has pleaded guilty to malpractice for failing to diagnose an elderly patient with the cancer that ultimately killed him.
It is Dr. Frank Anthony Shallenberger's second discipline by the Nevada Board of Medical Examiners in 12 years.
Shallenberger's plea last week regarding patient David Horton's care came on the heels of the board's dismissal of another family's complaint related to Shallenberger's treatment of their sister,…
j7uy5 | September 24, 2007A new report on sleep disorders in pain patients reveals a
not-very-surprising finding: chronic opioid treatment is associated
with very high incidences of both obstructive and central sleep apnea.
href="http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/81771.php">Higher
Risk Of Sleep Apnea When Patients Use Opioid-Based Pain Medications
Opioid-based pain medications may cause sleep apnea, according to an
article in the September issue of Pain Medicine, the journal of the
American Academy of Pain Medicine.
"We found that sleep-disordered breathing was common when chronic pain
patients…
aardvarchaeology | September 24, 2007The excruciatingly witty and multi-talented David Nessle has been alerted by his erudite father to a long enthusiastic article about cannabis in the classic Swedish 1909 dictionary Nordisk Familjebok (uggleupplagan). This dictionary was in every home with any pretentions to literacy and social respectability. A stoner among the dictionary's contributors, pharmacology professor Oskar Teodor Sandahl (1829-1894), has clearly done a lot of pot to be able to report the way he does (note that he mentions the munchies), and the editorial board has then felt it proper to devote an entire page to the…
oracknows | September 24, 2007Pity poor John Ioannidis.
The man does provocative work about the reliability of scientific studies as published in the peer-reviewed literature, and his reward for trying to point out shortcomings in how we as scientists and clinical researchers do studies and evaluate evidence is to be turned into an icon for cranks and advocates of pseudoscience--or even antiscience. I first became aware of Ioannidis two years ago around the time of publication of a paper by him that caused a stir, entitled Contradicted and Initially Stronger Effects in Highly Cited Clinical Research. In that study,…
oracknows | September 22, 2007I have to tip my hat to Kevin Leitch. I really do. He's done something that I couldn't manage to force myself to do, at least not completely.
He's subjected himself to the entire episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show in which Jenny McCarthy showed up to plug her new book about her fight to "save" her child from autism, Louder Than Words: A Mother's Journey in Healing Autism.
Far be it from me to attack Jenny McCarthy for wanting to help her autistic son. Her devotion is admirable, and virtually all parents, other than crappy parents, want to help their children. The problem is that, in seeking to…
angrytoxicologist | September 21, 2007I've been AWOL this week on SB; life, apparently, is not concerned with what is convienent for you. Anywho...
The House on thursday passed the FDA reform bill (H.R. 3580) by a huge margin (405-7) and the Senate passed it last night by a voice vote. As an aside, Sen Burr (R-NC) placed a hold on it but obiviously that didn't end up stopping the passage. Pres. Bush will probably sign it today. And it's a good thing, too. The FDA said it would have to send permanent layoff notices to about 20% of it's workforce if the legislation didn't pass by today.
So, you might ask, what does any of this mean…
terrasig | September 20, 2007You read correctly. If the US Senate does not pass an FDA funding bill today, 2,000 employees, nearly one-quarter of the FDA staff, will be relieved of their duties. (There were 8,157 FDA employees in 2006 - source). The House has already passed the bill but there are concerns:
Senate staffers were poring over the bill's 400-page text, and leaders were hoping to be able to pass it by voice vote. But some Senate Republicans raised concerns. "We're getting a bill that has been mashed together at the last minute," said a GOP aide involved in negotiations with the House. "It's very worrisome…
oracknows | September 20, 2007Mike the Mad Biologist posts a link to and excerpt from an article that he seems to think will make "M.D.'s heads explode."
It didn't. At least, not in the case of this M.D.
Basically, it's about physician reimbursement, a topic guaranteed provoke controversy, divided between those who think doctors are already overpaid (most non-physicians) and those who do not (most doctors). The article is by Shannon Brownlee and makes a proposal that is breathtakingly naive and poorly thought out:
...we don't end up saving any money by tightening reimbursements. But we do end up pissing off doctors, who…
denialism | September 19, 2007This time it's Steve McIntyre representing for the anti-global warming cranks following the HIV/AIDS denialist lead and using John Ioannidis' study to suggest science is bunk. Never mind that this research is primarily focused on medical studies. Never mind that the study wouldn't even exist if replication in science didn't identify in the first place. Cranks like to latch onto anything that they think is embarrassing to science out of the mistaken belief that it makes their nonsense more believable.
It's funny, I was sure they would have picked up on this stuff years ago, but the…
oracknows | September 19, 2007Last week, upon arriving back at my office after a day in clinic, I noticed an odd box sitting in my "in" box. I didn't recall having ordered anything recently, and my first thought was that an order for the laboratory had somehow been delivered to my office instead of my lab by mistake. It's uncommon, but it occasionally happens. Curiosity piqued, I picked up the box. It was small, only a few inches high, and lighter than I had expected. I couldn't hear any swishing that might indicated a powdered reagent in a bottle in the box. Moreover, upon closer inspection, I noticed that the box had no…
j7uy5 | September 19, 2007
One of the essential skills a medical student has to
learn is the ability to take a list of symptoms, exam findings, and lab
results and determine which diagnosis is consistent with that
data. For example, when seeing a patient like the gorgeous
and brilliant woman pictured above, you should immediately think that
this patient may in fact be a pirate. If so, she should be
quickly referred to the Comprehensive Pirate Clinic. (There
the pirate specialists can manage issues like scurvy, splinters from
planks, prosthesis fitting, and deck-swabbing-related repetitive-motion
injuries.) …
jstemwedel | September 18, 2007Via Ed Cone I found one of those stories that makes me love the Wall Street Journal: "In the Philippines, Ex-Judge Consults Three Wee Friends":
As a trial-court judge, Florentino V. Floro Jr. acknowledged that he regularly sought the counsel of three elves only he could see. The Supreme Court deemed him unfit to serve and fired him last year. ...
Helping him, he says, are his three invisible companions. "Angel" is the neutral force, he says. "Armand" is a benign influence. "Luis," whom Mr. Floro describes as the "king of kings," is an avenger.
Oh my.
While it's not common in these parts for…
signout | September 17, 2007Over the weekend, I got an email from Thomas over at Hope for Pandora. Thomas blogs about science and society from a lefty point of view. Now that he's about to start in on clinical medicine, he's hoping to blog about his patient experiences, too.
Not without reason, he is fraught with panic (OK, it's really just mild anxiety) over the potential for disaster:
I was wondering if you could offer me any suggestions about blogging experiences on the wards such that I am not out of compliance with HIPAA, but more importantly, I respect patients' privacy.
He has some of his own ideas, to which I…
oracknows | September 17, 2007
It would appear that there's finally some good news in the strange and sad case of Starchild Abraham Cherrix. The AP reports that he and his doctor are reporting that his lymphoma is in remission again:
FLOYD, Va. -- A 17-year-old who won a court battle against state officials who tried to force him to undergo chemotherapy for his lymphatic cancer is in remission following radiation treatments over the past year, the teen and his doctor said.
Starchild Abraham Cherrix's case spurred debate on whether the government should get involved in family medical decisions. It also led to a state law…
sb admin | September 14, 2007Â By Susan F. Wood, PhD
 Two things appear to be major bones of contention in determining the final version of what is now named the "FDA Revitalization Act of 2007" (FDARA). And they both related to public transparency and public accountability.Â
The first is the limitation of financial conflicts of interest by FDA Advisory Committee members. The House has adopted language that limits the ability of FDA to grant waivers to members of Advisory Committees (AC) who have financial conflicts to only 1 waiver per meeting of a committee. This was identical to an amendment offered on the…
tsmith | September 13, 2007Clostridium difficile is an emergent bacterium. A close relative of the bacteria that cause tetanus and botulilsm (Clostridium tetani and Clostridium botulinum, respectively), C. difficile is an intestinal bacterium that can cause colitis. C. difficile has until recently been a fairly rare cause of disease, and then only typically within a hospital setting. However, the emergence of a new, highly virulent strain of the bacterium a few years ago, coinciding with an increase in the rate of serious infections it caused, put this pathogen on the map. And like methicillin-resistant…
neurophilosophy | September 12, 2007On March 4th 1991, four days after the end of the Persian Gulf War, ground troops from the U.S. 37th Engineering Battalion destroyed large caches of weapons found at the Khamisiyah Ammunitions Storage Facility, a site approximately 25 square kilometres in size, located some 350km south east of Baghdad.
The U.S. Department of Defense initially denied that its troops may have been exposed to nerve agents during the demolitions at Khamisiyah, but following an inspection of the site by the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) in 1997, it emerged that the munitions destroyed on that day…
oracknows | September 12, 2007I'm away from regular blogging for a couple of weeks, and what do I find when I finally get back into the swing of things?
Dangerous cancer quackery published on Mike Adams' Newstarget site, that's what.
I know, I know. I shouldn't be surprised, and I'm not. It's all par for the course for Newstarget, where evidence-based medicine is viewed as nothing but a conspiracy of big pharma, evil scientific doctors, and the FDA to poison patients against their will. Truly, Mike Adams has decided to go head-to-head with Whale.to and Dr. Mercola for the title of most ridiculous website ostensibly about…