Category: Neuroscience/Mental Health
Brain Research in the 21st Century
In April 2013 President Obama announced the BRAIN initiative – Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies – committing 100 million dollars to brain research. The goal of this initiative is to accomplish with the brain what the Human Genome Project accomplished with the human genome. The BRAIN project came after a similar, and larger, initiative in Europe – the European Union’s Human...
“Mystery” Illness in Colombia
It looks like we can file this one under “here we go again.” A small town in Colombia, El Carmen de Bolivar, has seen more than 200 girls hospitalized with a mysterious illness since May of this year. The symptoms include dizziness, headaches, and fainting. So far, all of the girls hospitalized have been found to be healthy and were quickly released...
Autism Prevalence Unchanged in 20 Years
That there is an “autism epidemic” is taken as a given by those who feel autism has a dominant environmental cause. The Age of Autism blog, for example, bills itself as a, “Daily Web Newspaper of the Autism Epidemic.” The term “epidemic” also implies an environmental factor, such as an infection. The epidemiology of autism and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has never...
CAM and Headaches
A recent editorial entitled “CAM in the Real World: You May Practice Evidence-Based Medicine, But Your Patients Don’t” published in Headache: The Journal of Head and Face Pain by Robert Cowan, a headache specialist, addresses the use of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) in the treatment of headaches. Unfortunately he propagates many common misconceptions about CAM in the article. I do agree...
A Statement on Cervical Manipulation and Dissections
The American Heart Association and the American Stroke Association recently published in the journal Stroke a thorough analysis of the evidence for an association between cervical manipulative therapy (CMT) and both vertebral artery dissection (VAD) and internal carotid artery dissection (ICAD). The full article is online: “Cervical Arterial Dissections and Association With Cervical Manipulative Therapy: A Statement for Healthcare Professionals From the...
Left Brain – Right Brain Myth
Years of analyzing popular but dubious claims leads to the impression that just about all knowledge that filters down to the popular consciousness is essentially wrong, at least as a first approximation. This may sound cynical, but think about any area in which you have specialized knowledge and compare that to what the average person believes about that area. Now extrapolate that...
Did Facebook and PNAS violate human research protections in an unethical experiment?
Ed. Note: NOTE ADDENDUM I daresay that I’m like a lot of you in that I spend a fair bit of time on Facebook. This blog has a Facebook page (which, by the way, you should head on over and Like immediately). I have a Facebook page, several of our bloggers, such as Harriet Hall, Steve Novella, Mark Crislip, Scott Gavura, Paul...
Surgery Under Hypnosis
The BBC recently reported that a Guinean singer, Alama Kante, sang through her surgery in order to protect her voice. The reporting is unfortunately typical in that it emphasizes the seemingly amazing aspects of the story without really trying to put them into proper context. Specifically, the story emphasizes that hypnosis was used during the surgery, since Kante could not be placed...
A formal request for retraction of a Cancer article
I am formally requesting that Cancer retract an article claiming that psychotherapy delays recurrence and extends survival time for breast cancer patients. Regardless of whether I succeed in getting a retraction, I hope I will prompt other efforts to retract such articles. My letter appears later in this post. In seeking retraction, I cite the standards of the Committee on Publication Ethics...
Autism prevalence: Now estimated to be one in 68, and the antivaccine movement goes wild
There used to be a time when I dreaded Autism Awareness Month, which begins tomorrow. The reason was simple. Several years ago to perhaps as recently as three years ago, I could always count on a flurry of stories about autism towards the end of March and the beginning of April about autism. That in and of itself isn’t bad. Sometimes the...