Survey Says… Infectious Disease Docs and CAM
Surveys are evidently a popular way to get a paper published. Put “complementary alternative medicine survey” into Pubmed and get 2,353 hits. I would have trouble coming up with a hundred groups about whom I would be interested in their use of SCAMs, but I tend to be a lumper rather than a splitter. But if you want to know about SCAM...
A Different Perspective: Placebo, SCAM, and Advertising
Summertime, time, time Child, the living’s easy. Fish are jumping out And the handicap, Lord Handicaps high, Lord so high ~ Janis Joplin It is summer. Time for the kids and the outside, not the computer. What follows is a summertime blog entry, for which I admit to feeling guilty for the comparatively little time I have spent on it, but as...
Religion and SCAM
I do not worry much about being dead although the process of getting there gives me pause. I have witnessed a few unpleasant deaths and I hope to never see the Grim Reaper coming my way. One of the more awful and pointless deaths occurred early in my career. I had a patient with hepatitis C and cirrhosis. He had low platelets,...
Who you gonna believe, me or you own eyes?
Mrs. Teasdale: Your Excellency, I thought you’d left! Chicolini: Oh no, I no leave. Mrs. Teasdale: But I saw you with my own eyes! Chicolini: Well, who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes? Duck Soup. Funniest movie ever. If I could choose a super power, it would be neither flight nor invisibility, but the ability, like Triad, to separate into...
Homeopathy Ramblings
There needs to be a SCAM index, some quantitative tool, a formula for ranking the SCAMs, so one SCAM could reign supreme, to be definitely declared the the goofiest of all SCAMs. Perhaps (number of adherents)x(number of Pubmed publications)x(age of SCAM) all divided by a plausibility factor. Homeopathy would win and any SCAM index that did not rank homeopathy at number one...
Two Viewpoints
Most of what I read professionally is directed towards reality-based medicine. I spend my professional energies thinking about the application of reality to killing various and sundry microscopic pathogens. The conceptual framework I use, and that used by others in medicine, does not concern itself with the application of the Supplements, Complementary and Alternative Medicines that occupy the attention of this blog....
People Encouraging Turtle Agony*: Animal Acupuncture
Lest anyone think I am a heartless bastard, I would like it to be known that I do not like to see any creature suffer or die. I am the kind of person who, when finding a spider in the house, is likely to catch it and toss it outside. I always think, “I can’t squish the end result of 6 billion...
Whack em hard/Whack em once and Stroke. On chiropractic induced trauma
There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it. ~ George Bernard Shaw I work in a 5-hospital system and many of us practice at several hospitals. The residents rotate through at least three of the hospitals and the peripatetic nature of health care allows word of curious cases to percolate through the system. My current resident...
Animal Therapy
Animal-assisted therapy is a huge topic: almost 1500 hits using those terms alone. There is no way I am going to cover all of them and do them justice. Instead I am going to cherry pick, er, I mean, select references of interest to illustrate issues surrounding animals in the hospital. Sometimes I get the impression that readers of the blog expect...
Uneasy Lies the Head That Wears the Flu
Infectious diseases (ID), as those who read my not-so-secret other blog know, is without a doubt the most interesting speciality of medicine. Every interesting disease is infectious in etiology. What is cool about ID is that it has connections into almost every facet of human culture and history. I note that at some point I have gone from being the young whippersnapper...