Category: Science and Medicine

AI as a Diagnostic Tool

Using AI systems for pattern recognition in early diagnosis of dementia shows the potential of this tool.

/ May 17, 2023

“Subscription science”: Physician-influencers, social media, and conflicts of interest

Antivaccine activists and quacks often weaponize legitimate concerns about industry conflicts of interest in medicine into the "shill gambit," in which they accuse critics and defenders of science-based medicine of being in the pay of big pharma. However, the rise of physician-influencers and, in particular, Substack show that not all conflicts of interest are from industry or even financial.

/ May 15, 2023

Detransition, Retransition, and What Everyone Gets Wrong

A article published in The Atlantic implored people to take detransitioners seriously but did so by perpetuating non-evidence-based tropes that harm both detransitioners and transgender people

More Marijuana More Problems for Young Children Part 2: Additional Problems for the Aforementioned Children

A recent study found that young children are increasingly being harmed by accidental ingestion of cannabis in the form of edibles.

/ May 12, 2023

An Absurd Thought Experiment

How would you have reacted on 1/1/2020 if a doctor claimed that a virus that killed zero children was "truly dangerous" compared to one that kill 2,000?

/ May 9, 2023
ProtocolKills.com: Misinformed refusal

ProtocolKills.com: Misinformed refusal on steroids

Back in the day, I used to refer to something I dubbed "misinformed refusal," a term that refers to how antivaxxers had weaponized "informed consent" by inverting it to frighten parents against vaccinated. In the age of the pandemic, ProtocolKills.com generalizes misinformed refusal to all COVID-19 treatments with the help of "hospital hostage negotiator" Laura Bartlett, who views COVID-19 treatments in hospitals...

/ May 8, 2023

Letter to a Medical Student: There Is No Elite RCT Strike Force

None of us have to fantasize what we would have done during a pandemic. What you actually did the past three years is exactly what you would have done.

/ May 5, 2023
Study flow

Retracted papers about COVID-19 are more highly cited than they should be

Earlier this month a study showed that papers about COVID-19 that are retracted tend to be cited far more than average and continue to be heavily cited after retraction. Clearly, scientific publishing and the scientific community need to do better.

/ May 1, 2023

Children and COVID-19: A Few Facts and Figures from the Pandemic’s First Three Years

After three solid years of the pandemic, here is an admittedly incomplete rundown of how it has affected children in the United States.

/ April 28, 2023

It Was Misinformation When I Said Vaccines Are 100% Effective at Preventing Bad Outcomes & Will End the Pandemic

In 2019, Drs. John Mandrola, Adam Cifu, Vinay Prasad, and Andrew Foy wrote an article titled The Case for Being a Medical Conservative. They wrote that the “choice of the term ‘medical conservative’ does not imply a political philosophy.”  Instead, they recognized “that many developments promoted as medical advances offer, at best, marginal benefits”.  The crux of their article was that: The medical...

/ April 25, 2023