It’s time for a change of pace on Your Friday Dose of Woo. I’m getting the feeling that you my readers may have gotten tired of the theme I’ve been doing the last three weeks. I can relate somewhat but I think it served a purpose (other than giving me free rein to indulge in a lot of bathroom humor, that is). First, I subjected you to a rather disgusting foray into the bowels (if you’ll excuse the term) of colon cleansing, complete with links to some truly disgusting websites where people not only enthusiastically discuss their poop, but take …
Category: Medicine
It’s a nursing thing…
The latest Change of Shift, the blog carnival for nursing, has been posted at It’s a nursing thing.
Health care blogger survey
I got this request the other day and finally decided to take the survey that it asked me to. It was relatively painless and it might gather useful information (although obviously it’s not a scientific survey); so I thought I’d help publicize it. If you’re a health care/ medical blogger, this survey is looking for you.
Katie Wernecke: I have a bad feeling about this
As you probably remember, the case that first got me discussing the issue of children and minors opting for “alternative therapy” rather than conventional medicine was not Starchild Abraham Cherrix (Abraham’s personal website). Rather, this is a topic that I first approached nine months ago, even before I moved over to ScienceBlogs. With the prominence of the Cherrix case, the Wernecke case has dropped off the map more or less. Basically, her parents won the right to refuse the recommended radiation therapy for her, a treatment with a good chance of rendering her disease-free, and instead took her from her …
Grand Rounds, vol. 2, no. 46
Grand Rounds, vol. 2, no 46 has been posted at Mexico Medical Student. Enjoy!
Cinema science
Our Seed overlords beckon: What movie do you think does something admirable (though not necessarily accurate) regarding science? Bonus points for answering whether the chosen movie is any good generally….
Psychics at the Atlanta Zoo
Via Advice Goddess, I find that the Atlanta Zoo is using psychics to predict whether their prize Panda is actually pregnant. One of them predicted that the Panda is definitely pregnant and will bear a male cub before September 4. I’ll give her credit for putting herself out there with a definite prediction. Of course, if she’s wrong, it’s likely that no one will remember. The other psychic was more cagey; she only estimated a 65% chance that the Panda is pregant. (I wonder how she came up with those odds?) Of course, if she’s wrong, she can just say …
Medicine and Evolution, part 6: Ivan Schwab on eye evolution
It occurred to me over the weekend that I hadn’t updated my Medicine and Evolution series in a while. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a couple of clueless creationists who had wildly misinterpreted a recent paper about how the cornea prevents blood vessels from growing into it from the surrounding sclera as “evidence” against evolution, basing his conclusion on, in essence, a single sentence from the abstract of the paper. It turns out that my humble efforts attracted the attention of an editor for American Academy of Ophthalmology, who was kind enough to forward to me a …
Some Saturday morning links with my coffee
Here are a few links that I didn’t get around to mentioning during the week that are, in this blogger’s humble opinion, worth a read by my readers:
Your Friday Dose of Woo: Gonna wash those (heavy metal) toxins right out of your blood!
After the last couple of weeks of Your Friday Dose of Woo, I was in a bind. You see, people were telling me that they really enjoyed the last couple of weeks, particularly last week. For some reason, they were amused by my discussion of various liver cleansing regimens, hot on the heals of having discussed colon cleansing regimens. (Must be the bathroom humor; it gets ’em every time.) Some of you were surprised at the real obsession that alties have with “purifying” their insides from various “poisons” or “toxins.” As I discussed, some of these folks seem to believe …