"I'm banned," he says. "By whom?" I ask. "My landlord," he says. "And the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority." Jon Ronson on
DIY science.
posted by fearfulsymmetry
on Feb 4, 2012 -
33 comments
"I would point out to you that medical explanations are modern. That Americans today want medical explanations for things that in the 19th century would have been explained by hysteria, and in the 18th century would have been explained by religious conversion experiences in the context of the Great Awakening, when people were having these types of fits, and in the 17th century by witchcraft."
posted by empath
on Jan 30, 2012 -
54 comments
Day at Night was an interview series on the public television station of the City University of New York that aired from 1973-4. CUNY TV is in the process of digitizing and uploading the 130 episodes that were produced, with 46 done so far. The episodes are just under half an hour in length. Among the people interviewed by host James Day are author
Ray Bradbury, actress
Myrna Loy, medical researcher
Jonas Salk, singer
Cab Calloway, writer
Christopher Isherwood, nuclear scientist
Edward Teller, comedian
Victor Borge, tennis player
Billie Jean King, linguist and activist
Noam Chomsky, composer
Aaron Copland, actor
Vincent Price and boxer
Muhammad Ali.
posted by Kattullus
on Jan 16, 2012 -
6 comments
Falling STAR*D?: It is common practice for psychiatrists to switch depressive patients between different antidepressants if their current drug does not evince a symptomatic response. Despite clinical wisdom supporting this, little empirical, controlled evidence exists to direct “switching” protocols (e.g. if a patient with Z characteristics is on drug X, is it usually better to switch to drug A, B, or C? Will switching help at all?) in the psychopharmacological treatment of depression. The NIMH-funded
STAR*D (Sequenced Alternatives to Relieve Depression) study aimed to address these questions of treatment direction in a very large (n>4000), “real-world” sample using a
multi-phase treatment plan with different drugs (and cognitive therapy) at every step to maximize chances of eventual remission. Overall, the NIMH reported that about
67% of patients eventually achieved remission,
with few differences in effectiveness between different types of treatment at each step. However, researchers and commentators have
raised concerns regarding inconsistent reporting of outcomes, after-the-fact changes in
study design and analysis, and other issues that may have inflated, partially invalidated, or misrepresented widely reported treatment outcomes. These inequities may also have implications for the secondary moderator analyses (i.e. does trait A predict switching to X or Y is better?) that were a major reason for the study.
[more inside]
posted by Keter
on Jan 14, 2012 -
12 comments
So you wake up tomorrow morning to find almost everyone on Earth missing.
The Internet will continue to work for a few hours: what information could you download to ensure your survival and rebuild civilization? A few suggestions:
The CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics.
Third Word Development (18 GB of information on agriculture, livestock, food processing, construction, water, sanitation, health and much more).
The Global Village Construction Set (previously). Copies of
Gray's Anatomy,
Where There Is No Doctor, and
The Ship Captain’s Medical Guide.
A few more that might be handy even in ordinary times: all of
Wikipedia, or perhaps
just a portion. (Ideally, of course, you’d already have a
bound, printed copy),
Offline Google Mail (Chrome) to save correspondence;
SiteSucker to download sites you’d like to keep around while offline.
posted by Bora Horza Gobuchul
on Jan 5, 2012 -
89 comments
AIDS information posters from around the world You can browse by country, topic, etc., and many of the posters have large linked images. Provided by UCLA's Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library.
(Much as it pains me to say it, while these are public health information posters hosted by a medical library, for some, the content will be NSFW.)
posted by carter
on Dec 21, 2011 -
1 comment
How can we better understand the interplay of nature and nurture in determining our personalities, behavior, and vulnerability to disease? Perhaps we should be looking at
identical twins.
(National Geographic January 2012 cover story) [more inside]
posted by zarq
on Dec 19, 2011 -
89 comments
Possibly NSFW.
The case of the Rabbet Woman (also known as Mary Toft) is a particularly interesting one. Toft, on the advice of an unnamed accomplice, decided to engage in a scam which would enter her into the annals of history: she pretended to give birth to a series of seventeen baby rabbits and three tabby-cat legs, apparently by pushing their dead corpses up her vagina when no one was looking. Over the course of her fraud, she managed to convince many of the leading scientific and medical lights of the day that she was, in fact, giving birth to these rabbits (and three tabby-cat legs), including
John Howard (pdf) (
and more, also pdf),
Cyriacus Ahlers (one of the King's surgeons), Nathaniel St. Andre (Anatomist to the King), Samuel Molyneux, and Sir Richard Manningham, male midwife to the Queen.
Sir Richard Manninghan (Man Midwife!), although originally taken in by the fraud, eventually discovers the truth when a porter admits that he had been going to the market to buy baby rabbits for Toft.
His Diary provides a pretty good summary of the case. When the fraud was discovered, Toft was charged, although the charges were eventually dropped; more lasting were the effects on some of the medical professionals, whose reputations were permanently ruined. You can read a nice summary in
A Cabinet of Curiosities (google books).
The case of the Rabbet Woman took the English world by storm. Scores of pamphlets--in this case the 18th century equivalent to tabloids--circulated, as the public devoured case depositions, scientific publications, satirical doggerel, and semi-erotic prints of rabbits bursting forth from Toft's nether regions (
sanitized prints here)*. (
previously (pay special attention to the comments),
previously)
[more inside]
posted by kittenmarlowe
on Dec 9, 2011 -
91 comments
It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little.
How Doctors Die.
posted by Foci for Analysis
on Dec 5, 2011 -
54 comments
Serum hemoglobin is related to endurance running performance. Smoking is known to enhance serum hemoglobin levels ... alcohol may further enhance this beneficial adaptation.
A
recent paper by Kenneth Myers in the
Canadian Medical Association Journal reviews the potential benefits of smoking for endurance atheletes.
[more inside]
posted by nangar
on Nov 26, 2011 -
35 comments
"Every day in the U.S., about 500 people lose a limb. About 1,800 amputation surgeries are performed each year in Oklahoma. More than 1,600 of those — about 90 percent — are lower body amputations. So every day in Oklahoma, four people lose part or all of a leg." (Nationally, the most common procedure is toe amputation.) "These are the stories of four people living in Oklahoma — a mother, a senior, a Marine and a student — all living life on at least one prosthetic leg":
Standing Tall [more inside]
posted by zarq
on Nov 7, 2011 -
21 comments
A new malaria vaccine has been shown effective in large-scale field trials. After decades of disappointment, researchers think they're finally on track to unleash the first practical vaccine against malaria, one of mankind's ancient scourges.
In the world's first large field trial of an experimental malaria vaccine, several thousand young children who got three doses had about 55 percent less risk of getting the disease over a year than those who got a control vaccine against rabies or meningitis. [more inside]
posted by BobbyVan
on Oct 18, 2011 -
21 comments
At first, nothing happened. But after 10 days, hell broke loose in his hospital room. He began shaking with chills. His temperature shot up. His blood pressure shot down. He became so ill that doctors moved him into intensive care and warned that he might die. His family gathered at the hospital, fearing the worst.
A few weeks later, the fevers were gone. And so was the leukemia. - (NYT Link)
posted by Slap*Happy
on Sep 14, 2011 -
63 comments
Biomedical Ephemera, or, a Frog for your Boils is "A blog for all biological and medical ephemera, from the age of Abraham through the era of medical quackery and cure-all nostrums. Sometimes featuring illustrations of diseases and conditions of the times, sometimes fascinating ephemeral medical equipment, and sometimes clippings and information about the theories themselves." The
archive page is also a useful starting point.
via Things Magazine.
posted by Rumple
on Aug 29, 2011 -
8 comments
Last week Johnson & Johnson
announced that it is lowering the maximum daily dose for single-ingredient Extra Strength Tylenol from 8 to 6 pills per day (from 4,000 to 3,000 mg).
[more inside]
posted by hat_eater
on Aug 4, 2011 -
54 comments
The Hardest Cases: When Children Die, Justice Can Be Elusive A joint investigation by PBS Frontline, ProPublica and NPR has found that medical examiners and coroners have repeatedly mishandled cases of infant and child deaths, helping to put innocent people behind bars. (
Via. (Article contains descriptions of children that have been killed by abuse. May be disturbing / triggering to some readers.) [more inside]
posted by zarq
on Jun 28, 2011 -
20 comments
