Results for: evolution
Baby Translating Technology: Revolutionary Parenting Tool or Confirmation Bias Bonanza
Caring for a young infant, although a potentially rewarding means of producing a labor force for chores and minor home repairs, can be a trying ordeal for both new and experienced parents. The peaks and valleys of parental experience can leave a caregiver both exhilarated and agonizingly frustrated during a single hour of childcare, let alone the first few months. It is...
NCCIH and the true evolution of integrative medicine
There can be no doubt that, when it comes to medicine, The Atlantic has an enormous blind spot. Under the guise of being seemingly “skeptical,” the magazine has, over the last few years, published some truly atrocious articles about medicine. I first noticed this during the H1N1 pandemic, when The Atlantic published an article lionizing flu vaccine “skeptic” Tom Jefferson, who, unfortunately,...
The Windi: Revolutionary Relief for Colic or a Pain in the Butt
We tend to cover some very serious topics here on Science-Based Medicine. In fact, most of our posts are downright depressing. This will hopefully not be one of them. In just the past few weeks we have written about the public health menace of anti-vaccine pseudoscience, autistic children being subjected to dangerous bleach enemas, and chiropractic-induced stroke in children. Unsurprisingly, there is...
The Buzzy: Revolutionary Acute Pain Management or Simple Distraction…
I’ve written about the management of acute pain in children in the past, and unfortunately my feelings haven’t changed in the interim. Acute pain, particularly pain related to procedures such as venipuncture for blood sampling and intravenous access, and intramuscular administration of medications such as antibiotics and vaccines, is commonly undertreated, downplayed and even ignored altogether by medical professionals and even caregivers....
Learning from Animals: Evolutionary Medicine with a Twist
In 2005, cardiologist Barbara Natterson-Horowitz was called to the zoo to examine a non-human patient, an emperor tamarin with heart failure. She was surprised when the veterinarian told her not to look her patient in the eyes because eye contact could cause capture myopathy. In this condition, when an animal is captured, restrained, and feels threatened, there is a catastrophic surge of...
Do We Need “Evolutionary Medicine”?
3 years ago I wrote an article critical of “evolutionary medicine” as it was presented in a new book. Recently a correspondent asked me if I thought another book, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine, by Randolph M. Nesse, MD and George C. Williams, PhD, was a more reasonable approach to the subject. It was published in 1994...
Why haven’t we cured cancer yet? (Revisited): Personalized medicine versus evolution
About a year ago, I addressed what might seem to the average reader to be a very simple question: Why haven’t we cured cancer yet? As I pointed out at the time, it’s a question that I sometimes even ask myself, particularly given that cancer has touched my life. Three years ago, my mother-in-law died of a particularly nasty form of breast...
Evolution in Medicine
A recent series of article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) discusses the role of evolutionary biology in modern medicine. The authors collectively make a forceful point – medicine is an applied science. It is based upon a number of basic sciences, and one of those basic sciences is evolution. The most obvious example is bacterial antibiotic resistance....
Applying evolutionary principles to cancer treatment
EDITOR’S NOTE: Unfortunately, this weekend, I was forced to get my slides together for the upcoming SBM Conference, plus editing a manuscript for resubmission, plus working on a manuscript that I should have submitted six months ago, plus reading over some grants, plus…well, you get the idea. What this means is that, alas, I didn’t have any time to prepare one of...
Another Kind of Evolutionary Medicine
Last month I wrote about a book on evolutionary medicine that I could not recommend. Now I’ve found one I can recommend. Marlene Zuk, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Riverside, has written a delightful book entitled Riddled with Life: Friendly Worms, Ladybug Sex, and the Parasites That Make Us Who We Are. She describes how our parasites and diseases...