I have little to say about his death, except that generally I don’t care for surgeons (sorry, bro), but you know, every once in a while a cowboy is also an innovator, and I really admire that. DeBakey was one of those, and I can’t think how many people I know owe their lives to that combo of cowboy courage and great intelligence.
A loss.
or at least some kind of course in practical logic. this is part of the transcript of a conversation between a physician and Katie Couric about the recent jump in cases of melanoma among young women:
Downie: Tanning salons are huge. Let’s say an average of one million people tan per day. And of that, 71 percent of tanning salon patrons are young women age 16 to 29. So there’s the answer to your question because these new tanning booths, the ones with the high pressure tanning bulbs, they’re 12 to 15 times the strength of the sun. So it’s unbelievable the harm and the damage they can do. And if you expose yourself to tanning salons before the age of 39, you’ll increase your risk of getting melanoma by I think it’s 75 percent.
Couric: Well, we asked the Indoor Tanning Association for a statement or a reaction to this study and they said: “…[the] likely reason behind the rising melanoma rates is that more people are getting screened for the disease and that our ability to detect the cancer earlier and more often has improved.” What do you think of that explanation?
Downie: I completely disagree. Increased screening is leading to us catching melanomas earlier so people aren’t dying as frequently from melanomas as they used to. That’s what increased screening is doing. Increased screening is not bumping up the rates. I totally disagree with that.
Okay, so just because you need a break from work: how many problems can you find with the ITA statement and Downie’s response?
period.
VA psychologist says to hold back on PTSD dxs
why should she lose her license?
1) adjustment disorder is not an appropriate dx while ptsd is being ruled out
2) ptsd should be suspected whenever someone has been in a combat situation
3) most importantly, it’s one thing to be aware of economics. it’s another thing to make the economics a deciding causal factor in how a dx is made. note that her memo makes the causal link explicit.
and yeah, i doubt it’s really her. up top, someone’s probably trying to make this ongoing war (the one we supposedly won years ago, right after it wasn’t a war, remember?) palatable and pretty. yeah, she’s under pressure, probably. years ago, i would have thought she was just an idiot. but this war…it’s enough to make a sane person become a rabid conspiracy theorist.
we at some point bought this book called “boy, were we wrong about dinosaurs” - a lovely kids’ level tract on phil bio, disguised as a book about dinosaurs…
one thing used to bug the heck out of the spousal unit…that the book says that birds are living dinosaurs. there is of course a category problem with the statement (definitional), but it also seemed argumentatively incomplete. they jumped from, dinosaurs evolved feathers and may have been warmish blooded, to dinosaurs became birds.
now however we have something that looks more like evidence… soft tissue found in TRex bones that has proteins more similar to birds than living reptiles. of course that’s not the best evidence that we could reasonably get…i mean there could be intermediate, not-feather-bearing, now-dead, reptilian things that are the direct ancestors to birds, but regardless, this still narrows the branch (rather than keeping us on wide branching. sorry, this metaphor isn’t working. the kid has not been sleeping…so my metaphors as well as my brain are hibernating) on which the organisms might be related…it’s not some big wide bushy structure with the dinos and the birds existing on two branches that are nowhere near eachother.
in any case, i’m going to have to go look up the actual paper and see what proteins they’ve found and what extractions they used &c.
how cool is this?
I’m sad that he’s gone gary gygax, that is but i must say i find it funny that the news articles on his life/death were tucked not in google’s “entertainment” portion of their news page, but in “sci/tech.”
anyone else out there know now that they’re definitely a geek? 
well, everyone’s freaking out about super tuesday, which means everyone’s ignoring the other news. in fact, there’s so little freak out over the health news today that for a minute i thought google was putting me on - you know, a made up “health” news page to see if anyone was paying attention…
first, this story, which explains way more about mississippi than i really cared to know i still want to know what they’d do with my 6 foot tall weight lifter 250+ lb friend. i wouldn’t turn him down if he asked for a meal, no way. dude, i love him but even so his boots alone scare me.
possibly more interestingly, is this story. there are lots of ethicists (so called, at any rate) who went through various disasterous (so called) scenarios - 50 clones with one genetic parent (or progenitor, which is kind of my preferred term - long story there), one kid with two female parents, but the closest i’ve come to seeing more than two genetic parents is the idea of two male genetic parents with an egg donor to provide the “shell” for the nuclear material. of course in that last case, they weren’t considering the mitochondrial DNA as a benefit, just sort of a necessary accident. but how cool is that? should everyone have more than three parents? i don’t like the fact that the u.s. courts are so biased towards genetic relations (e.g. in custody suits), but if in fact it has to be that way, it would be nice to make sure lots of people were involved, if you know what i mean. and this would help with the whole gay couple thing, too. and it would be neat to be raised by a genetic village. and it’s massive all-in-one genetic diversity. okay,k so you get the point right - this totally freaked me out, but in a good way. i love this idea.
yes, cloned human embryo. “mature” in this case is misleading - especially with the cute picture of the fetus sucking its thumb - they mean to the blastocyst stage (that’s hollow inside, folks, with some differentiation between the ICM, which will become the fetus, and the outer tissues, which will become the chorion, amnion, and other good supportive stuff). implantable, in theory.
what i find weird about the whole thing is that they ask the scientist to say how it feels to look at the embryo that’s just like him…but of course it’s not. the protein components may be significantly different. and even the DNA components are not the same as those he had as an embryo himself (e.g. the immune system genetic changes are already in place, as they are in an adult). and goodness knows silly little things that the egg carries like, oh, say, mitochrondria - yeah that sort of trivia - are not his. nor is the mitochondrial DNA. so as usual the nuclear DNA is given serious consideration, the contribution of the egg, notosomuch.
enough to make me want to vote for h.c. girls ought to win SOMEWHERE.
i never know what motivates FDA decisions. Given that the structure (for example) of muscle is the same whatever the organism’s provenance, it makes that meat from cloned organisms is pretty much like non-cloned ones. but at this little
news story mentions, the average layperson is going to have heebee jeebees about it.
but, what if we could start cloning parts, in some kind of relatively energy efficient way - so that we have fewer cows hurting the environment (methane), fewer being killed, or cooped up in horrible places, or being fed tons of antibiotics (less resistance) or animal body parts (no more zombie cows…well, at least mad cows).
that works for me…
okay, how totally cool is this - my husband and i saw the 2003 one, but this is still pretty good - have a look out your window…
mars closer than will be again till 2016
of course we’re getting grey and cloudy, so all we’re doing is watching law and order re-runs
my long-standing beef: that docs (and other healthcare workers) are the primary purveyors and maintainers of health, and are thus the most important (read: legitimate) targets of ethical consideration.
not so fast. the people next door to us, the businesses using our town rivers, and the people driving in our town are probably more influential on health and lifespan. case in point:
http://www.voanews.com/english/2007-11-08-voa81.cfm
people, if your doctor gives you an antibiotic, take the whole course - don’t stop when you “feel better”
don’t run red lights, i don’t care how empty the street looks
wash your hands before leaving the bathroom
don’t flush cat litter (even the flushable kind)
don’t double the dose of tylenol your kid is supposed to get
don’t put pesticides on your lawn, especially if your gutter runs off into a local lake, river, or (in my case) ocean
a la austin powers, oh, behave.
al gore gets a nobel peace prize for making people aware of something that was fairly obvious to most people who can read scientific reporting.
merck’s integrase inhibitor is approved with the weirdest name ever - isentress sounds like a disney princess.
that’s okay; right now it feels like the good guys are, if not winning, at least being given a look-in, which wasn’t so obvious a year ago.
al gore gets a nobel peace prize for making people aware of something that was fairly obvious to most people who can read scientific reporting.
merck’s integrase inhibitor is approved with the weirdest name ever - isentress sounds like a disney princess.
that’s okay; right now it feels like the good guys are, if not winning, at least being given a look-in, which wasn’t so obvious a year ago.
i need to find the original study from oregon showing that there’s no disproportionate use of physician-assisted suicide among the poor, elderly or otherwise disadvantaged. i’mnot at all surprised (i’d imagine if anything that the wealthy with a long waiting list for inheritance would be at more risk…sorry, cynical of me), but i would like to know how much of it is simply that the p values were low because sample size was too low to detect trends.
the spouse adds that he finds it odd that there wouldn’tbe more people in those groups considering these options just because they are more likely to develop terminal conditions at an earlier date and/or be poor/disadvantaged BECAUSE of severe illness.
ah, right, because condom manufacturers are the agents of the devil…
i do not understand these conspiracy theories…i understand that there’s some legitimate concern about how the west views the non-west, and particularly how “white” people view “non-white” people. believe me, i know all about the latter. and i also understand that as a prominent catholic he has, let’s call it a predisposition, to be negative about condoms.
but let’s be practical - if it was a conspiracy, there are SO MANY better diseases to give people to kill them. HIV would be a really stupid disease to do it with. but then again, the friend who sent me this link said it all when he added his one line comment to the email.
i am really starting to feel depressed by the state of current medical research, particularly in relation to the “bottom line” - that’s money, folks, not health.
merck had what was considered a “promising” vaccine in trials from the time it was still preclinical (being tested on animals). that vaccine has now been pulled from trial on humanssince
it doesn’t seem to have any protective effect against the virus at all. i guess i’m suffering from a bad case of “oh, i knew it.” the mechanism seemed implausible, and the hype seemed out of proportion to the theory behind the vaccine.
what strikes me about this case is how data-driven the medical profession has become with respect to new drugs. yes, of course, if you have no data showing it works, of course you dump the drug, no matter how nice it looked in theory. BUT…if there isn’t much theory, and there’s not tons of pre-trial evidence that the drug/vaccine/etc works, it’s more intelligent to keep your hopes modest.
it is true that some drugs we use (aspirin is the classic example) are used based on empirical evidence alone…hundreds of years after first use (literally)” and we still don’t really know how aspirin works. but drug companies can get extreme with this - they create thousands and thousands of compounds, testing the ones that might have some activity, and then starting the hype.
but the truth is, i’m more inclined to bet on the drugs that were designed intelligently (e.g. Gleevec, the cancer drug targeted very specifically to certain cancers with certain genetic and molecular characteristics) or where there’s some very specific theory about why the drug will work (e.g. more than, “well, it seems to activate x receptor”). less to get excited about, so less to keep share-holders excited. but i’d rather have that, and have more rigour in spending money to test drugs that have good reason to work. and taking the extra money and doing basic research so we know diseases well enough to know how to work on them intelligently.
but there. that makes me some kinda communist or something doesn’t it?