Month: March 2008
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Wifi Woo Strikes in Sebastopol
By way of AP and BoingBoing, one can find this post by Dale Daugherty on O’Reilly Radar about the newest attack of the tinfoil-hat-wifi-radiation brigade: Our town, Sebastopol, had passed a resolution in November to permit a local Internet provider to provide public wireless access. This week, fourteen people showed up at a City Council…
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Quack Miranda Warning
“These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.” This “Quack Miranda Warning” is on every just about every woo-meister’s website. I see dozens of patients every day, and I never Mirandize them, so whats the deal? There are…
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Some skills in medicine are harder to teach
Teaching facts is easy. Medical students eat facts like Cheetos, and regurgitate them like…well, use your imagination. Ask them the details of the Krebs cycle, they deliver. Ask them the attachments of the extensor pollicis brevis, and they’re likely to describe the entire hand to you. Facts, and the learning of them, has traditionally been…
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A history of denialism – the ancients
This week I think I’m going to spend some time discussing denialism throughout history. In part inspired by the recent attacks on some of the most effective scientific communicators we have by by Mooney and Matthew Nisbet, and PalMD’s post on some modern thinking by “ancients” I feel like it’s time to provide some more…
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War Games!
One of the problems with medical education is that while you are intellectually trained to deal with medical problems and emergencies, actual experience with how to respond to emergent clinical situations is difficult to teach and usually only comes with experience. Further, real clinical experts make medical decisions almost by reflex. You see this in…
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Were the ancients fools?
Often in the discussion of cult medicines such as homeopathy, acupuncture, and reiki, supporters fall back on “the wisdom of the ancients”. This raises a question. Since “the ancients” had it wrong (i.e. their belief systems could not effectively treat disease), were they just stupid? Any of my historian readers already know the answer, but…
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Morgellons—cranks in search of a disease
I’m trying to understand “morgellons syndrome”. Based on Morgellons Research Foundation reports, there are a lot of people out there who believe they have this so-called disease. But what is it? I decided to dig deeper on the research end of things. I went to the MRF website, and to MedLine, looking for something, anything,…
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Why am I here? To bother you, of course
When I use the word “scientist”, I mean something pretty specific—someone actually doing experiments and publishing the results. Some physicians are scientists. In fact, the MSTP that Mark H is a part of exists specifically to train doctors to do research and bring the results to the bedside. Most doctors aren’t scientists, by my definition.…
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Another victim of cult medicine
This is another one migrated from my old blog. It is the first in a series that generated an unusually large number of comments. Thanks, PalMD This particular woo-encounter was non-fatal. A patient came to see me. He’s middle-aged, generally quite healthy, and physically active. After a recent return to physical activity, his elbow began…
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How listening to my wife CAN SAVE YOUR LIFE!!!!
Most of us around here know about internet memes, hoax emails, and other sources of scientific and medical rumor. After all, we’re geeks (or at least, I am). My wife, however, is not. She is a typical (and wonderful) woman, from a particular ethnic group, and particular part of town (and well-educated). I’m a fairly…