health
gregladen | May 29, 2009Danny Hauser, 13 year old shaman with cancer, recently returned from foray from the courts with his mother, now in treatment, had a web site dedicated to raising money for his 'treatment' (seemingly for the CAM part of his treatment ... he is otherwise covered by insurance). That site was taken down early today or late yesterday, with the comment from the Hauser's lawyer that it would stay down until certain "ramifications" were explored.
So, I was poking around this afternoon looking for ramifications and stuff, and instead found that the site is back up.
Since the last site disappeared…
bioephemera | May 29, 2009
Thank goodness Science has finally given us protection against. . . Kooties!
Kootie Killer promises to "kill 99.9% of germs & Kooties without water!" This claim is clearly rigorously lab-tested and evidence-based, but although I wouldn't dream of questioning its veracity, it does invite the question. . . what the heck is a Kootie?
Personally, I always thought cooties (with a "c") were symbiotic, invisible organisms that spontaneously accrued on children, causing healthy developmental conflict with members of the opposite sex. Shows you what I know. Apparently, the Kootie is a yellow-…
gregladen | May 26, 2009It is funny how people play with history. If we talk about an important "first" that is viewed in a positive light ... the origin of beer for instance ... the slightest evidence will be used by the people of a given region to claim primacy. Also, since Africa almost always gets the shaft in this regard, all else being equal, an early African occurrence of something good will be assumed as not definitive, but vague evidence of the non-African first occurrence will be taken more seriously. Seriously.
Now, we have an important finding with the opposite effect: Whence did Leprosy first come…
aardvarchaeology | May 26, 2009[More blog entries about health, ears, cold; hälsa, öron, förkylning.]
When she has a cold, my 5-y-o daughter often suffers temporary hearing loss. Her ears don't get infected, there's no pain or fever -- she just can't hear very well, sometimes for weeks. The reason is that the lining of her eustachian tubes becomes swollen, obstructing them, and then fluid leaks out of the walls of the middle ear, flooding it and putting a damper on her audio. These days Swedish doctors try to avoid putting drainage pipes through kids' ear drums. Instead the excellent Dr. Claes Wibom (who's now treating…
gregladen | May 26, 2009Have you been reading Digital Rabbit? Please add this site that addresses safe drinking water and basic sanitation to your list of links to check or your RSS feed.
And, have a look at the Q-Drum, which is profiled at DR.
gregladen | May 21, 2009I was quite dissapointed this morning to hear the Minnesota Public Radio station interview a guy who had kept medical treatments from his son several years ago withoiut asking some of the truly critical questions that would be needed in this kind of situation. In that case, the father claims, doctors claimed that the boy had cancer, but the parents somehow knew that he did not, kept him from treatment, and he was fine. There was no great interest on their part in "alternative treatments" ... just a disbelief that the doctors were competent.
Which may well have been the case ... I have no…
esiegel | May 20, 2009When I was a teenager, my choice of food was basically determined by three criteria:
It needed to be ready in under 10 minutes.
It needed to have enough calories to make me not hungry anymore.
And it needed to be (marginally) edible.
That was really it. And so it won't surprise you to know that a portion of my diet at the time consisted of -- you guessed it -- Hot Pockets. And to be fair, they don't actually look so bad on the box.
For those of you who don't know, a Hot Pocket is a frozen Pop-tart filled -- instead of with fruit -- with nasty meat and sauce. You're supposed to stick it in a…
esiegel | May 15, 2009Rather than a real song this week, I instead point you to an internet classic, inspired by those Wilford Brimley commercials you see during The Price is Right. Yes, I watch The Price is Right when I can, and hence I know all about important products like Fibercon, the Scooter Store, Depends, and, of course, Liberty Medical. This video is one of the most bizarre things I've ever seen, and no, I never really noticed how oddly this man pronounces the word diabetes. There is a reason why some now call it "the beetis" in honor of him.
But on a slightly more serious note, even if you have health…
denialism | May 12, 2009In response to the conversation on "Obesity, Evolution and Delayed Gratification" on the main page and Razib's coverage of a fascinating new study on the relationship to the lactase gene and obesity, I thought now would be a good time to write about an important new study that helps define the boundaries of what normal and healthy weights are in humans.
This study, entitled Body-mass index and cause-specific mortality in 900 000 adults: collaborative analyses of 57 prospective studies is a whopper of a meta-analysis. That is, a study that increases the power of other similar studies by…
gregladen | May 6, 2009The press has been reporting that the swine flu is waning, and that it is not as serious as once thought. Well, they've got that totally wrong, as usual.
No one directly involved in this thought or asserted that the H1N1 swine flu was especially serious. They simply did not know. Being a very deadly disease that would spread quickly and kill easily was a possibility. Being like the seasonal flu in severity and pattern of spread was a possibility. For days now, people have been leaning towards the latter, and now that is pretty much where everyone is. The swine flu H1N1 virus is at present…
esiegel | May 4, 2009Last week, I wrote a little article trying to get people to calm down about the swine flu. Yes, it will get you sick, yes, it's contagious, and yes, if you get it you should seek medical attention. But as of today, the CDC has only three cases of swine flu in my state, and only one swine flu-related fatality in the US.
In other words, the swine flu hasn't affected me or anyone that I know. Until, that is, I went to the hardware store this weekend. I've just moved into a house, and it needs a lot of work. And by that, I mean there are rooms that are unfit for a human presence just yet. So,…
gregladen | May 3, 2009Lithium has long been used as a psychotherapeutic drug, and treatment with lithium demonstrably reduces incidence of suicide. Lithium also occurs naturally in groundwater to varying degrees. This study explores the relative amount of Lithium in groundwater and suicide in 18 municipalities in Oita prefecture, Japan over a period running from 2002 to 2006. There are two principle findings:
1) There is a negative correlation between standardized (adjusted) suicide rates and the amount of lithium in the water; and
2) It does not take much lithium to produce this effect.
The study reports…
gregladen | May 1, 2009I have a handful of comments, mostly about how what you are seeing on the news is unimportant, and one comment about why you actually should worry. Within reason.
The new Swine Flu has now been verified in nineteen US states, with 141 cases. Technically there is 1 death, but since the young girl who died actually caught the flu in Mexico (and came to Texas for treatment) it is hard to say how that should be counted.
WHO characterizes the global spread of the flu as a "rapidly evolving" situation. As of an early morning update from WHO, the swine flu has been confirmed in Mexico (156…
thusspakezuska | April 30, 2009What's a good citizen to do if he or she thinks that cough and sneeze is swine flu? The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends:
Stay home if you get sick. CDC recommends that you stay home from work or school and limit contact with others to keep from infecting them.
This afternoon I've been reading Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich - which is ever so more relevant now, if that were possible, than when it was originally released. Near the end she notes:
It is common, among the nonpoor, to think of poverty as a sustainable condition -…
omnibrain | April 30, 2009I think it's a bit like terrorism. It scares the shit out of you but there's next to zero chance it will actually happen to you. Seriously... you have a much much higher chance of choking on a twinky (even if you've never eaten one) than catching the swine flu and dying or being or even seeing a terrorist attack. Talk about a great case of the Availability Heuristic...
Here's a demo for you to try out (I use this to teach Psych 100). The correct answers are below the fold.
Which is the more common cause of death in the USA?
1.
A) Asthma
B) Meningitis
2.
A) Breast Cancer
B) Stomach Cancer
3…
bioephemera | April 29, 2009Let etsy seller foliage help you fight swine flu with this bagful of handmade soaps in "skin-ish colors"!
I vascillate between finding them cute, and thinking they resemble a crowd of damned souls reaching out for help from my soap dish. Weird.
Dedicated to John O., who truly appreciates disembodied hands. Via DailyArtMuse.
gregladen | April 29, 2009 photograph of some grapefruit Grapefruit juice contains enzymes that break down common types of compounds of which pharmaceuticals are made. This means that if you drink grapefruit juice along with some drugs, the effect of the drug will be enhanced.
(That was a slight oversimplification.)
So great, you say, why not just take all drugs with a glass of grapefruit juice? Well, I can think of two reasons. One, grapefruit juice tastes like ape-piss, so why would you ever drink it. Two, drug experts feel that they have more control over your dosage if you just leave the grapefruit juice…
gregladen | April 29, 2009
The swine flu maneno in the 1970s was actually a key moment in the history of epidemiology politics. It also relates to the history of anti-vaccine activism in important and interesting ways. I should probably write a whole post about it. For now, suffice it to say that the government reaction to the sudden appearance of swine flu on the scene was somewhat bungled, it is probably true that the wrong people got screwed, and the swine flu itself turned out to be a false start. But please also note that the epidemiology of the present swine flu is very different from what we had then. And…
gregladen | April 28, 2009While it is still true that no deaths have been reported for the new swine flu outside of Mexico, the virus has been identified in additional countries.
Here is the current breakdown:
Mexico: Over 1,000 unconfirmed cases; 152 suspected deaths - 20 confirmed cases
US: 51 confirmed cases
Canada: 6 confirmed cases
New Zealand: 3 confirmed cases
United Kingdom: 2 confirmed cases
Spain: 2 confirmed cases
Israel: 2 confirmed cases
Spain: 2 confirmed cases
Suspected cases are reported in about seven other countries.
Do no assume that we are seeing a spread of the disease as much as we are…
gregladen | April 26, 2009The most significant thing that has happened over the last 24 hours or so is that the CDC has confirmed a handful of Influenza A (H1N1) Swine Flu cases in new locations. Previously, cases were only identified in Texas and California. Now, there are cases in Ohio (1 case), New York (8 cases), and Kansas (2 cases). In at least some cases, there is a Mexico connection. I think it is reasonable to assume that new cases will start showing up in other locations over the next day or two.
WHO has some updated information on the situation in Mexico:
...as of 26 April, the Government of Mexico has…