Finally. My week on call, including the entire holiday weekend, is over. It started out pretty bad and didn’t get all that much better. I suppose I should be grateful that at least I was getting sleep again by this weekend. In any case, I thought that one particular day was almost worth of a 24-style treatment. OK, it’s not as exciting as watching Jack Bauer kick terrorist butt, but, given that Jack isn’t coming back until January, it’ll have to do. So, without further ado, I present select episodes from: 24: The On Call Edition (a.k.a. a bad day …
Category: Medicine
Just a phone, dammit!
I’m a pretty big computer geek most of the time, and I do love gadgets. However, even I can sympathize with the consumers in this story: OVERLAND PARK, Kan. – Nathan Bales represents a troubling trend for cellular phone carriers. The Kansas City-area countertop installer recently traded in a number of feature-laden phones for a stripped-down model. He said he didn’t like using them to surf the Internet, rarely took pictures with them and couldn’t stand scrolling through seemingly endless menus to get the functions to work. “I want a phone that is tough and easy to use,” said Bales, …
Ah, the irony of it!
This is just too rich. As you know a few months ago, I commented about a British report that found high levels of mercury and other heavy metals in Chinese herbal medicines sold in the U.K. Some contained as much as 11% mercury by weight! It turns out that a JAMA paper from 2004 did the same thing for Ayurvedic medicines and found some of them also contaminated with mercury and other heavy metals, concluding: If taken as recommended by the manufacturers, each of these 14 could result in heavy metal intakes above published regulatory standards Indeed, in the compounds …
The rewards of being a physician
You know, sometimes medicine sucks, particularly oncology. Oh, it’s not so bad for surgeons, particularly breast surgeons, because we can cure many of the patients we operate on. But for solid tumor oncologists, who deal with diseases that current medicine can’t cure but only palliate day in and day out can, if you don’t get adequate rewards for it, be soul-crushing. (That’s one reason that I ultimately went into surgical oncology rather than medical oncology; I found I just wasn’t cut out to deal with the kinds of patients medical oncologists do.) Those of us in academics do it for …
It’s just a little decimal point
Here’s a scary error, reported by Abel Pharmboy: David Douglas of Reuters Health reported last Friday on the publication of a clinical trial revealing that a one-week trial of Benadryl (diphenhydramine HCl) was superior to Clarinex (desloratadine) in managing symptoms of moderate-to-severe allergic rhinitis, or hay fever. The article was published in the April 2006 issue of Annals of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology (2006;96:606-614) You can read the results here but Douglas misprinted the Benadryl dose as 500 mg! three times daily. The actual dose, 50 mg, t.i.d., is already high enough to make one so drowsy as to not …
Medicine and evolution, part 5: “Quit whining” about intelligent design?
One annoying thing about the blogosphere for someone like me is that a lot of things that I want to write about pop up during the day, when I’m at work. Blogging is all about immediacy and time. Wait too long to write about a topic, and the moment’s passed. For me, by the time I get home in the evening, even though someone may have e-mailed me an article that they thought I’d like to comment on, I often find myself refraining from jumping into the fray, simply because so many have already commented on it already. This problem …
How long before I run out of variations on the same lame joke about answering my Seed overlords?
It seems a reasonable question to ask, given my propensity for it. Unfortunately that’s not what our Seed overlords asked this week. This week, they ask: If you could shake the public and make them understand one scientific idea, what would it be? Predictably, some ScienceBloggers answered: evolution and what it really means, not the parody of evolution presented by creationists or the simplistic version of it that is often taught in school or discussed in the mainstream media. I can’t argue with that answer, but I’m a physician; so my answer will be different:
Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful
Wow, I wish I had the balls to make this retort to prisoners that used to be brought to the E.R. when I was still a resident. I just hope he had a security guard like the one we used to have at our county hospital when I was a resident. This guy was close to 7 feet tall and built like a tank. Whenever such patients got a bit frisky, we’d just have him stand in the doorway. It usually calmed them right down.
Battling quackery in “conventional” medicine
Grant crunch time again yesterday. That means it’s the perfect time once again to dig up something from the archives of old blog and repost it here. This particular piece originally appeared on January 12, 2005, just shy of one month after I started blogging. I’m guessing once again that, because not many people were reading back then, most of you probably haven’t seen this before, and that those of you who have probably don’t remember it. Once again, I’d be interested in feedback from those who haven’t seen this before now that my readership around 10-20 times what it …
Call for articles for The Skeptics’ Circle
The 35th Meeting of the Skeptics’ Circle is fast approaching. It will be published this Thursday, and the deadline is Wednesday evening. The host this time is skeptical blogging stalwart Skeptico, and his instructions regarding the deadline and how to submit can be found here. Overall guidelines and the schedule of past and future Skeptics’ Circles can be found here. So hurry up and get your best skeptical blogging to Richard by Wednesday evening and then join him on Thursday for the best examples of skepticism and critical thinking that the blogosphere has to offer.