Just the Facts
Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please. —Mark Twain There is an educational approach to becoming a doctor. It involves learning massive amounts of basic science, followed by massive amounts of pathophysiology, which barely prepares you for the clinical years of the last half of medical school and subsequent residency, with the massive knowledge...
Changing Climate, Changing Infections
I will state my bias up front. I am convinced by the preponderance of data in favor of man made global warming. At the most simplistic level, I can’t see how converting humongous tons of fossil fuel into C02 and dumping it into the the atmosphere cannot have effects on the climate. To my mind its like determining vaccine efficacy or evolution....
Changing Your Mind
Why is my mind so clean and pure? Because I am always changing it. In medical school the old saying is that half of everything you learn will not be true in 10 years, the problem being they do not tell which half. In medicine, the approach is, one hopes, that data leads to an opinion. You have to be careful not...
The Tamiflu Spin
I will start, for those of you who are new to the blog, with two disclaimers. First, I am an infectious disease doctor. It is a simple job: Me find bug. Me kill bug. Me go home. I spend all day taking care of patients with infections. My income comes from treating and preventing infections. So I must have some sort of...
$10,000 reward not offered for scientific proof of supplements and alternative medicine therapies and effectiveness
Inspired by a post today In conjunction with UNaturalNews, the non-profit Consumer UnWellness Center has publicly not offered a $10,000 reward for any person, company or institution who can provide trusted, scientific evidence proving that any of the supplements or alternative medical therapies being offered to Americans right now are both safe and effective. Supplement or alternative medical therapies promoters keep citing...
You. You. Who are you calling a You You?
The YOU Docs, for those of you (YOU?) who are unaware, are Doctors Mehmet Oz and Mike Roizen, authors of books about YOU and a weekly newspaper column called The YOU Docs. It’s all about YOU. There are two areas of the knowledge where I have more than passing understanding: infectious diseases and sCAMs. It always concerns me when I read nonsense...
Causation and Hill’s Criteria
Causation is not so simple to determine as one would think. A mantra at SBM is ‘association is not causation’ and much of the belief in the efficacy of a variety of quack nostrums occurs because improvement occurs after use of a nostrum, therefore improvement occurs because of use of a nostrum. It is why vaccines as a cause of autism are...
Measles
It looks like the H1N1 pandemic is fading fast. I am amazed at how lucky we were, at least in the hospitals where I work. A month ago all the ICU beds were full, most of the ventilators were in use and we were wondering how we were going to triage the next batch of patients who needed advanced life support and...
Lose those holiday pounds
Lose weight without diet or exercise? I guess that leaves cancer. –David Letterman. It is the day after Thanksgiving, and I have probably eaten enough calories to support the average family for at least three days. I am hesitant to comment on what my actual weight may be, but others have not been so reticent about discussing my appearance over at RDCT....
“Move along. Nothing to see Here”- F. Drebin
I am, I think, the slowest writer in the SBM stable. I start each entry about 10 days before it is due, and work diligently on it through the week. As such, I run the risk that events may make my work pointless. Case in point. I have been slogging away at this entry for the last week and had the final...