Category: Medicine
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As if I needed another reason to love Barbara Ehrenreich
Writing for HuffPo, Charlottesville’s own Barbara Ehrenreich takes on positive psychology. I have to remember to drop by sometime with a cake and welcome her to the city, even if it is a year too late. She addresses something very annoying about the belief that positive thinking is a universal good (and provides a backhanded…
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Hire Google for your denialist campaign!
An alert reader noticed that when he performed a Google search on ‘Sicko’, guess who pops up in the sponsored links? Why, our good friends at AEI, a denialist organization second only to CEI, but since they have a lot of the same people working for both it’s really just academic which one you’re arguing…
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Michael Moore’s Sicko (or why Orac should relent and go see this movie)
I went to see Michael Moore’s Sicko last night and it is truly worthy of being seen by every American. I say that knowing how many feel about Michael Moore and his tendency towards spectacle. I hope that people can set aside whatever prejudice they have towards Moore and see this movie. This is a…
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Want to hear a dirty little secret?
The New York Times writes an editorial about hospital rankings based on mortality of medicare patients from cardiac disease, and not surprisingly, misses the point on metrics of patient survival comparisons between hospitals. Famed medical institutions like Johns Hopkins, the Cleveland Clinic and Massachusetts General Hospital are lumped into the broad national average category when…
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Victory over a parasite – the global eradication of Guinea Worm
Hooray for science! The New England Journal reports on the imminent eradication of the Guinea worm. For those who haven’t heard of this nasty little parasite, it is a really horrible infection to get. It starts with the ingestion of Dracunculus medinensis infected water. The larvae, when freed from their copepod carriers, migrate from the…