Archive for Medicine
October 6, 2008 at 6:00 pm · Filed under Medicine
Sometimes I have to look for blog ideas, trolling through various alternative medicine sites, medical news sites, or science news feeds or my medical and science journals. Sometimes ideas fall on me seemingly out of the blue. This is one of the latter situations. This time around, as I do twice a month I was perusing the very latest issue of Cancer Research, hot off the presses October 1. As I did so, it didn’t take me long to come across an article from the Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and the Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center at Columbia entitled Vitamin C Antagonizes the Cytotoxic Effects of Antineoplastic Drugs, whose first author is Dr. Mark Heaney.
I didn’t think I’d be revisiting this topic again so soon. After all, I wrote one of my characteristic magnum opuses (opi?) less than two months ago, when I asked whether a recent animal study had […]
Original post by Orac none@example.com
October 5, 2008 at 1:04 am · Filed under Medicine
In my earlier post about HIV therapy (a post I strongly recommend), I wrote, “After entering a cell (never mind how for now), HIV needs to find a way to makes copies of itself, which requires DNA.” Because of some recently released data, it’s time to look at how HIV enters the cell, and to expand a bit on the biology of HIV infection (but this is really a “Part II” so please refer to the above-linked post, even though this should stand on its own). This will also allow us another glimpse into how real science works. proceeding from observation, though hypothesis, and hypothesis testing.
Once again, as in all of my science-y posts, please forgive any oversimplification.
Read the rest of this post… | Read the comments on this post…
Original post by PalMD none@example.com
October 4, 2008 at 9:09 pm · Filed under Medicine, Car & Vehicle
It started as what is probably the most embarrassing moment of their lives, but something good came out of it. When a flight attendant approached Jan Coupe and her husband, she thought that the stewardess was going to check on their seatbelt. Instead, she told them that they were too heavy for the plane to take off!
That spurred the couple to go on a diet - between them, they have since lost 172 lb (78 kg):
Following the plane ordeal, and also to help with her MS, Mrs Coupe joined a Slimming World club. She persuaded her husband to attend and in the first week Mrs Coupe lost 8lb and Mr Coupe lost 9lb.
Instead of takeaways at night, the couple had pasta, vegetable curries or steak salads.
Now Mrs Coupe has lost 6st 5lb and her 54-year-old husband 5st 13lb. Mrs Coupe, who has also dropped six dress sizes to a 14, […]
Original post by Alex
October 3, 2008 at 5:00 pm · Filed under Medicine
You can tell I’m really busy when I fall behind my reading of the scientific literature to the point where I miss an article highly relevant to topics I’m interested in, be they my laboratory research, clinical interests, or just general interests, such as translational research. As you know, I like to think of myself as a translational researcher. Translational research is research that (or so we try to do) spans both basic science and clinical science; i.e., bridges the gap between basic and clinical science. Now don’t get me wrong; I don’t devalue basic science, and I’ve said so many times before. Without a robust pipeline of basic science developments to try to translate, translational research grinds to a halt. On the other hand, the NIH emphasizes translational research these days. In any grant, if the applicant can’t articulate a reasonable (or at least reasonable-sounding) rationale by which the […]
Original post by Orac none@example.com
October 2, 2008 at 10:36 pm · Filed under Medicine, Science & Tech
Scientists studying decades-old tissue samples from African hospital samples have found a preserved specimen of HIV that let them estimate when the virus first evolved:
Using a technique called molecular clock analysis, they were able to plot the two viral sequences’ evolutionary path back in time to determine when they diverged.
They concluded the strains evolved from a common ancestor that emerged in Africa near the beginning of the twentieth century around 80 years before the disease appeared in western populations.
Link
Original post by Alex
October 1, 2008 at 5:00 pm · Filed under Medicine
When I first started blogging, I liked to refer to myself as a booster of evidence-based medicine (EBM). These days, I’m not nearly as likely to refer to myself this way. It’s not because I’ve become a woo-meister of course. Even a cursory reading of this blog would show that that is most definitely not the case.
So what’s changed? Basically, I’ve come to the realization that EBM is an imperfect tool. Don’t get me wrong, EBM goes a long way towards systematizing how we approach clinical data, but there’s one huge flaw in it. (I can just see a quack somewhere quote-mining that sentence: “Orac says EBM has a huge flaw!”) That flaw is that it devalues basic science. In any hierarchy of evidence in the commonly used EBM systems, at the very top is, as they should be, are randomized, double-blind studies. Such studies control for the most potentially […]
Original post by Orac none@example.com
October 1, 2008 at 2:20 am · Filed under Medicine
If you’ve spent any time at all reading science and medicine blogs, you know that many of us are quite critical of the way the traditional media covers science. The economics of the business allows for fewer and fewer dedicated science and medical journalists. In the blogosphere, writers have a certain freedom—-the freedom not to be paid, which means that the financial fortunes of our medium (the web) are not directly tied to how many readers I bring in with a headline. But all this is just a lot of words introducing my critique of a recent New York Times article.
The article is titled “Using Science to Sort Claims of Alternative Medicine”. It’s well-written and interesting, but suffers from a fatal flaw (or perhaps just recapitulates it)—like most of us, it fails to take into account how likely (or unlikely) a bizarre medical claim is when evaluating […]
Original post by PalMD none@example.com
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