Bioethics
oracknows | October 28, 2008The other day, I thought it was about time that I did some of that cool and fancy ResearchBlogging.org stuff, you know, to keep this blog from being nothing more than a collection of not-so-Respectfully Insolent spleen venting at generalized stupidity. I realize that those are some of the funnest posts here and that people like them, but a little variety is required. No study, however, had quite floated my boat, and I was almost to the point of being desperate enough for blog fodder that I considered perusing Age of Autism or even NaturalNews.com (maybe later in the week) in search of that…
terrasig | October 24, 2008"Prescribing 'placebo treatments': results of national survey of US internists and rheumatologists," is the title of a newly-published article in the 23 October issue of BMJ (British Medical Journal). The full text article and PDF are available for free at the time of this posting.
In this study of 679 US physicians, Tilburt et al. reveal that 46-58% of those responding report regularly using some sort of placebo in their practice. The reason for the range is that questions were asked in a manner that did not use the word, "placebo," but instead took into account:
"Placebo treatment" is an…
oracknows | October 24, 2008There are times in every physician's career when he or she faces a patient with a serious, even life-threatening disease or condition, who, for whatever reason, does not want treatment. These can be incredibly frustrating and challenging patients. Most physicians try reason, cajoling, and persuasion. Believe it or not, physicians are still held in enough esteem that this will often work on the force of the regard in which patients hold physicians alone. However, it doesn't always. Then the question becomes: How far can a doctor legitimately go to persuade the patient?
Shadowfax has an idea.…
j7uy5 | September 23, 2008Ever since the inception of the Global and Perpetual War on Terror,
there has been concern about the role of professionals with training in
psychology and psychiatry in the design, conduct, and interpretation of
torture programs.
The American Psychiatric Association (APA) banned such participation in
May 2006. The American Medical Association (AMA) followed a
few weeks later.
These associations do not have any regulatory authority.
Nonetheless, their proclamations and highly influential.
Oddly, the American Psychological Association [the other APA,
call it AP'A, (p-prime)] did not follow…
sporte | August 27, 2008It's déjà vu all over again.
The first chapter in Arthur Allen's book "Vaccine" describes the history of smallpox vaccination in the United States. In 1721, in Boston, the prevailing belief was that to get vaccinated was to intervene with "divine providence." If you tried to protect yourself, it meant that you lacked faith in God.
Today, I read that a mumps outbreak is happening in Vancouver, Canada. So far 116 cases have been confirmed.
Why is mumps, a preventable and serious disease, causing problems in Canada?
photo of a child with mumps by by Barbara Rice, from the Public…
j7uy5 | August 26, 2008JAMA has an article on the history of continuing medical education
(CME). Annoyingly, they did not make it one of the
open-access articles, so they don't get a link. However,
there are some telling excerpts and some good commentary over at
href="http://carlatpsychiatry.blogspot.com/2008/08/new-jama-history-of-cme-when-will-we.html">The
Carlat Psychiatry Blog.
There was a time when families used to sit, all together, at the dinner
table, and eat dinner together. I grew up in those days.
Dad, an MD, would sit at the head of the table. My
little sisters would sit next to him. The idea…
oracknows | August 21, 2008I must be slipping.
Well, not really. It doesn't bother me that blog bud and fellow skeptical physician PalMD beat me to an important publication that came out a couple of days ago in the Annals of Internal Medicine. I'm a surgeon and a translational/basic scientist; so Annals is not usually one of the journals I read regularly. I usually read individual studies as I find out about them referenced elsewhere, usually Eureka Alert! or when an Annals study sufficiently interesting to motivate me to surf on over to the website and download the article. Be that as it may, this article is highly…
oracknows | August 19, 2008Late this afternoon, I happened to be sitting in my office perusing the websites for the latest batch of surgical journals, trying desperately to catch up on my reading, something that I, like most academic surgeons, am chronically behind in, when I happened upon the website of the Archives of Surgery. There, the lead article caught my eye, and I downloaded it for later reading. Then, as I perused a few news sites (yes, I was procrastinating; but who doesn't procrastinate from time to time?), and I came across a story about this very study:
CHICAGO - When it comes to saving lives, God trumps…
sporte | August 14, 2008Every year people adopt pet dogs, cats, birds, and other creatures and take them to their local veterinarians for all the usual vaccinations and exams. The usual vaccinations protect your pets from diseases like rabies, distemper, Feline Immunodeficiency Virus, and Feline Leukemia. But it's not just pets that get protected by vaccines. Agricultural creatures: fish, chickens, sheep, cows, pigs, and horses receive vaccines and increasingly, wild animals are getting vaccinated, too.
One example comes from the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis. They are looking at ways to…
oracknows | August 12, 2008It's been a long time, been a long time,
Been a long lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely time.- Led Zeppelin
Not nearly long enough.- Orac
Some rats never die, it would appear.
You may recall last year, when I spend a considerable amount of verbiage writing about a promising cancer drug called dichloroacetate (DCA). There were many reasons. One reason was that the drug was being represented as a "cure" for cancer that big pharma wouldn't fund because it was outside of its patent. There was also plenty of fascinating cancer biology there to discuss, given the mechanism by which this drug…
sporte | August 11, 2008The first lab mouse I touched had soft white fur and a light pink tail. It looked cute enough to snuggle and take home as a pet and I was smitten. I slipped my hand into the cage, thinking the mouse would respond like my pet gerbils or my brother's pet rat. As my hand closed around its belly, that sweet little mouse sunk its teeth deep in my thumb. I screamed and shook my hand, smashing the mouse on the cement floor and killing it in an instant.
It's been many years now since I've been doing anything with mice or rats. There's much more oversight these days, as DrugMonkey has been…
oracknows | August 7, 2008This is disturbing.
No, it's not disturbing because it's a story potentially about autism. It's not even disturbing because it indicates that Jenny McCarthy might soon have some competition in the brain dead antivaccinationist autism mom competition. It's disturbing because of who Jenny's new competition might be:
Britney has a whole new problem on her hands to deal with. According to In Touch, she fears that her youngest son Jayden James may be autistic.
Family friends say he often seems to be off in his own little world, playing by himself, and he starts crying for no reason.
Britney and…
sporte | August 7, 2008"Did you know," my friend whispered, "that the Humane Society funds terrorists?"
I was stunned. What? That's crazy! I've adopted pets from there. No way! How could those be the same people??
My friend and I were suffering from "brand confusion." In business, this happens when different companies use similar names for their products in order to confuse the marketplace. In the animal rights movement, brand confusion is used to misdirect the funds that would otherwise help groups who do genuine humanitarian work.
As I learned in "The Animal Research War" by P. Micheal Conn and James Parker…
sporte | August 6, 2008When female bloggers get death threats for comparing a Batman movie to a poor business plan, and friends can have their lab fire bombed for doing plant genetics, it's sometimes a little scary to step into the fray and take a stand on controversial issues.
But that's the point. We have to speak out. Scary or not, unless we speak out against the animal rights terrorists who firebomb people's homes and harass researchers, we will lose any chance to save our loved ones from diseases like cancer, HIV, Alzheimer's, or many others.
Let's think about just one of these.
According to an article from…
oracknows | August 5, 2008Bizarrely enough, Suzanne Somers has been a common topic of discussion on this blog since the very beginning. Indeed, in one of my earliest substantive posts, way back in December 2004 when I had just started this blog on Blogger, I used her as an example of how misleading breast cancer testimonials can be. At the time, I only knew Somers as a breast cancer survivor who had decided to turn to "alternative" therapy. What she really meant was that she had undergone surgery and radiation but had decided not to undergo chemotherapy, opting instead for mistletoe extract
I also explained at the…
terrasig | August 4, 2008It's a lovely crescent moon this evening up here in the Northern Hemisphere so I can't blame the latest unbelievable and irrational happenings on a full moon (which would be unscientific, of course). Okay, maybe sunspots?
First, the Bush administration was proposing draft legislation to grant medical professionals the right to withhold care, prescriptions, etc., based upon religious beliefs or other objections by reclassifying birth control pills and IUDs as "abortion." PalMD covered this among others, but reminded me of several of my old posts on my objections to pharmacists refusing to…
oracknows | July 25, 2008I'm very puzzled.
Now, I know that my being puzzled isn't particularly unusual. I'm frequently puzzled. I can't figure out how, for example, anyone with the slightest bit of reasoning ability can do anything other than laugh when informed what homeopathy is and how it supposedly "works." I can't figure out why American Idol or Survivor is so amazingly popular.
And I can't figure out why the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Center released this warning about cell phones:
PITTSBURGH July 24, 2008, 07:13 am ET · The head of a prominent cancer research institute issued an unprecedented warning to…
oracknows | July 9, 2008I've said it before, and I'll say it again. J.B. Handley, that bull-in-a-china-shop general in the mercury militia who detests me intensely, is about as ignorant as they come when it comes to science and clinical trials. Yesterday, he provided yet more evidence of his cluelessness in his latest piece posted to that repository for all things antivaccine, Age of Autism.
Mr. Handley's all in a lather because the Associate Press published a story yesterday about a proposed NIH-sponsored clinical trial of chelation therapy for autism entitled Fringe autism treatment could get federal study.…
oracknows | July 7, 2008Last week, The New York Times started a rather unusual series in its medical section entitled, The Evidence Gap, described thusly:
Articles in this series will explore medical treatments used despite scant proof they work and will consider steps toward medicine based on evidence.
When I first saw the series, I was prepared for a crapfest. My experience has generally been that when reporters start examining the evidence for and against a treatment they usually do a pretty lousy job. This is most obvious when it comes to "complementary and alternative medicine" (CAM), where we are routinely…
oracknows | July 3, 2008
One of the main issues that I've written about quite a bit is the issue of what the state should have the power to do when a child has cancer or another life-threatening disease and the parents choose quackery over scientific medicine when the disease is potentially (or even highly) treatable or curable with standard treatment. Most of the time, this has come in the context of patients like Abraham Cherrix, who, with his parents support chose the quackery that is the Hoxsey therapy over chemotherapy, or Katie Wernecke, whose parents chose high dose vitamin C and other woo, over effective…