Denialism

Category: Medicine

  • Syphilis!

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    MarkH
    in

    Southeast Michigan’s Genesee county is experiencing an outbreak of syphilis. The largest city in the county is Flint, made (in)famous in Michael Moore’s film Roger and Me. Syphilis is a nasty sexually transmitted disease with an interesting history. It may have originated in the New World. It was the subject of the infamous “Tuskegee Experiment”.…

  • Homeopathy Awareness Week?

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    MarkH
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    Skepchick has apparently discovered that, as of yesterday, this is World Homeopathy Awareness Week. (Yes, starts on a Thursday…they were going to start on Monday, but the succussion took a while.) Well, I can get behind a public service like this. My contribution will be a side-to-side comparison of a homeopathic treatment and a real…

  • Bill Maher is a crank

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    MarkH
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    I must admit I have a love-hate relationship with Bill Maher. He is a funny guy, he is good at mocking some of the more ludicrous aspects of politics, and he has been an effective critic of this administration and some of its more egregious policies. However, I’ve also long held the position that both…

  • The message and the messenger

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    MarkH
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    I’m not sure what to make of this. An article in the latest Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) reports some potentially good news for type II diabetics. Type II diabetes has been extensively studied (detailed post to follow), and one area of difficulty has been reducing the incidence of macrovascular disease (heart attack…

  • I love bacon

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    MarkH
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    A reader, who happens to write one of the best-named blogs on teh tubes, pointed me toward an article I never would have seen. This parallels a news story we had here in the States late last year. So, since the story is getting press overseas (albeit late), it’s time to dust off the old…

  • Hey! Look! Science works! Zetia, not so much.

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    MarkH
    in

    I love this story because it shows how evidence-based medicine works, even in the face of corporate greed. A while back I told you about a cholesterol study with negative results; that is, it failed to show a drug to be helpful. Intimately entwined with the study design was a potential conflict of interest on…

  • Cell Phones and Cancer – Scaremongering from the Independent

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    MarkH
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    The Independent has yet another hysterical article about the potential link between cell phones and brain cancer. And I’ve been asked, what are we seeing here? Is this the early reporting of a potential public health threat? Or is it just more nonsense from a newspaper that wouldn’t know good science if it sat on…

  • Sexually transmitted diseases—they’re successful, we’re not

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    MarkH
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    Sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) are frighteningly common, as highlighted by a study released by the CDC earlier this month. The U.S. is in a unique position: few countries have the resources we do to prevent and treat STDs, and few countries squander such resources so effectively. Let me give you a brief front-line perspective.

  • Some skills in medicine are harder to teach

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    MarkH
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    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…

  • War Games!

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    MarkH
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    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…