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Archive of "health" Category
Smokescreen
I wish I could be surprised by this news, but instead I am simply resignedly outraged:
Drug adviser sacked for comments.
The man has criticised the government – not just policy, but ministers themselves – based on their handling of the evidence regarding drugs such as cannabis, LSD, and ecstasy. They are hopelessly blinkered into a negative view of these narcotics, despite reliable and repetitive evidence to the contrary. I won’t go into great detail here because this is certain to hit the blogs written by those with far more knowledge and time to spend on research and writing these things up.
Suffice it to say I am once more disappointed in our government, though far from surprised. The only good I see coming of this is that perhaps – just perhaps – they will lose more votes in the impending election, and maybe even raise awareness of the hopelessly ignorant drug policies in effect in this country.
BCA vs Singh update
On the offchance any of my readers do not also read the great bloggings of my friend Jack of Kent, I recommend that you take a gander at his new update on the preliminary hearing of the libel case brought against Simon Singh by the British Chiropractic Association (to be found here).
I have nothing to add, except in echoing Jack’s sentiment that this is an astonishing, bizarre and horrendously illiberal ruling.
MP ignorant, offensive
MP brands dyslexia a ‘fiction’
I accept that Graham Stringer MP has the best interests of children at heart, and wants to improve standards of education by introducing a system of synthetic phonics, something that has show promise in trials in Scotland. I’m all for that.
But to do this by attacking dyslexia as nothing but a myth is misinformed, misguided, and wrong. There have been studies conducted using FMRI which apparently show clear evidence of differences in physiology (referenced here); the evidence is not yet incontrovertible, by any means, but it is far from being a myth.
Mr Stringer needs to shut the hell up and listen to the evidence before shooting his mouth off and dismissing a troubling condition which affects millions of people. There are better ways to promote more efficient teaching methods – the trials speak for themselves in this regard. If there are funding issues, you can’t just call a costly condition a myth and divert its section of the budget. Yes it’s a simple solution to a complex problem, but that’s not always what we need. In fact, it’s quite rare that that would suffice.
BCA vs Simon Singh
You may or may not be aware of the libel action being brought against Simon Singh by the British Chiropractic Association. But if you’re interested in finding out more, the current best sources are Holford Watch and the ongoing coverage at Jack of Kent.
The bad news is that the BCA aren’t backing off. The good news (as I understand it) is that this means that, as part of the “fair comment” defence, the evidence for and against chiropractic – in respect to the six named child health conditions – is centrally relevant to the case, and will be well and truly put in the spotlight.
An important point to keep in mind, however, is whether this is the correct arena for this matter. Should it really be a matter decided legally, when the legal concept of evidence is so far removed from the scientific one as to be almost indistinguishable? Sadly, it seems to be a symptom of the horrific state of defamation legislation in this country.
Rebel without an advertising campaign
There has been an advertising campaign over here recently, in the style of the classic American road movie – girl meets boy, girl gets pregnant, mother doesn’t approve of boy, boy and girl shout “screw you!” and run away together. Oh, and in this particular case, the boy is made of cactus.
I was generally uninterested in this, as I am with most advertising campaigns. Until the advert was pulled, after a series of complaints about its content and message:BBC News: Cactus kid advert ordered off air.
Apparently this is because it depicts teenage pregnancy in a less than demonising light, and its hookline, “for people who don’t like water”, discourages a healthy diet. Let’s take the latter first, because it’s easier to deal with.
Discourages a healthy diet. Unlike, for instance, adverts for McDonalds, Galaxy chocolate, Haribo, and every other advert on television? I’m sorry, but that just doesn’t wash. At all. If anyone can see sense in that proposition, please tell me, because it entirely escapes my grasp.
The pregnancy is the more interesting part; as far as I can see, it’s there as part of the spoof/homage referring to the classic genre of American road movies. I don’t think there is any danger that anyone watching it would take away from the advert the message that “teenage pregnancy is desirable” – it doesn’t play a significant enough role in the advert for it to be anything more than a plot device.
Did it “condone teenage pregnancy and underage sex”? Not that I could see. The girl didn’t seem to be underage, though she may have been in her late teens. Underage sex (in this country at least) would imply under 16 – and she certainly didn’t look that young. As for the pregnancy, all it did was acknowledge that these things happen; if that’s enough for some people to claim that it condones the action, then they should be complaining until they’re blue in the face about soap operas.
Poor Cactus Kid. They’ll never stop persecuting rebels.
Repentance
It has recently come to my attention that I have been terribly disingenuous to you all. I have been repeating the poisoned lies of Big Pharma and misleading people in their honest pursuit of wellness.
Homeopathy can and does work. The anecdotal evidence is enough to void the claims of any so-called “scientific trial”. This doesn’t mean, however, that I have ceased to have any problem with homeopathy. I still think there are better alternatives.
I mean, it’s just so expensive isn’t it? Do we really want to pay that much for sugar (and lactose) pills?
My solution to this problem is something I like to call Haribology. I, like the homeopaths, make no claims that the treatment contains even a molecule of active ingredient; rather, the healing powers of Haribo™ come from the spirit of joy and wellness embodied by the smiling face on the packaging. This instills the very same essence into the tasty, sugary goodness within, and leads to optimal health – at a fraction of the cost of homeopathic remedies.
Not suitable for vegetarians.
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Hopefully back to regular (and moderately serious) posting within a couple of weeks. As a taste of what’s to come, I already have two entries in the making – both quite large, hence not having the time to work on them at the moment. One is another in my “Fictional Sceptics in Popular Culture” series, and the other concerns an interesting and amusing email I received this weekend. Stay tuned.
Alternative Flight and our Gappy Friend.
In a recent QuackCast, Dr Mark Crislip put together a rather amusing satire on the topic of “alternative flight”, taken largely from his earlier blog post at Science-Based Medicine. The jist of it is that we should be introducing more alternative modalities into aeronautics just as they have been introduced to medicine; if there’s a problem with the plane, don’t necessarily just call the engineers – get some Reiki Masters and Tarot readers in there. Crislip’s actual satire is far more involved and entertaining than that brief summary, but you get the idea.Now I do hope I’ll be forgiven if I’m wrong in this assessment, but I got the impression that the general point of the satire was to say “you wouldn’t apply these crazy unscientific methods to something like aeronautical engineering, so why would you do so with medicine and the science of human biology? It’s a fair question up to a point: if the scientific method is good enough for flight, why do people go elsewhere when it comes to their own bodies?
It is a fair question, but the analogy is limited in its scope; a cursory probing will actually adequately answer the question it poses. We created aircraft; the science of aeronautics is pretty complete – we (or at least, those qualified in the necessary fields) know how every last bit of an aircraft works, because we came up with the damned things and have been developing them for over a century now. The same can hardly be said of the human body; we certainly didn’t design them ourselves and had only an “ignition” role to play in their actual creation. As for the expertise, even the most qualified and knowledgeable in the medical profession don’t know everything there is to know about the function of the human body – certainly not to the extent that aeronautical engineers understand that of aircraft.This isn’t to say either a) that we never will or b) that there is any other way to get the answers than the tried-and-true scientific method. But it does explain why people are far more willing to look into “alternatives” in medicine than in aeronautics: there are far more unknowns. SCAMs are just another God of the Gaps.
Concussion versus Compression
Something new and exciting today, dear reader. This is the first guest post on A Sceptical I, brought to you by my friend who goes by the name Asclepius. Asclepius authors a medical blog over at Hippocrates Got Lost, described as the account of “a Nursing student staggering through the mundane and the insane”. He’s here today to help dispel a medical myth which is, in my experience, very widespread. So without further ado, here are the words of Asclepius:
“He’s taken a knock to the head. You’ve got to keep him awake, the concussion might kill him!”
This is a misconception held by almost everyone I have ever met, including a few healthcare professionals. Its not easy to challenge an idea that has been reinforced with every generation.
Concussion is by far the least dangerous of all brain trauma. The word says it all. The brain has been shaken, it doesnt like being shaken. The result may be felt throughout the body. Nausea, Dizziness, Slurring, Difficulty Concentrating. The brain will restabilise from a concussion. Assuming the trauma hasnt caused any other problems there is no reason their condition should deteriorate.
A much greater threat is commonly referred to as Compression. Anything from a major to a very minor blood vessel in the brain may have ruptured. It may be so minor the patient doesnt show any stroke symptoms. However when the blood that has leaked out of its conduits coagulates (usually against the lining of the meninges) it becomes harder and denser this pushes the brain away from the side of the skull and compresses it. This is a medical emergency and can only be treated with surgery.
You can have a concussion without having compression. This is the case for most people. However If you knocked your head hard enough to blow a vessel you will have experienced a concussion (assuming the patient isnt on thrombolytics such as warfarin or has just been treated with streptokinese. The idea of keeping a patient awake for as long as possible after a head trauma is to assess any deterioration in their state. They may descend into diminished awareness, they may demonstrate extreme behavioral changes. This deterioration is a good indicator of one of two things –
1. A compression.
2. Some fat bastard has kept you awake for 18 hours and all you want to do is sleep off your headache.To conclude –
Concussion = Non-Life Threatening.
Compression = Brown Trousers Time.I make no apologies for any technical precision lost in making this post ready for the general public. I also realise I may have misspelt a few of the words unique to my profession.
I would like to thank Darkwinter for giving me the opportunity to act as a guest author on his blog.
Fictional Sceptics #2: House, M.D.
House is one of my favourite shows of all time, one of those rare instances of greatness on the otherwise-wearying Box of Blight. I won’t bother giving you a thorough synopsis of the general idea behind the show – I’m sure you’re skilled enough at the intertubes to track down the information if you require it. Suffice it to say that my entry today regards the eponymous character, Doctor Gregory House – flawlessly played by fellow sceptic Hugh Laurie.
It’s hard to know where to begin with House; there is so much about him that simply screams “sceptic”. He is a champion of deductive reasoning and the scientific method, a great critic of religion and anything remotely false or non-evidence based. Perhaps, as with my examination of Lisa Simpson, it would be best to take a look at a typically illustrative episode as an example.Season 2, Episode 19: House vs. God. A young preacher is brought in after collapsing during a faith healing session (itself a great scene, he asks for a doctor after praising the healing power of Jesus). God apparently talks to this particular teenager, prompting House to consider psychosis as a possible symptom. “If you talk to God, you’re religious; God talks to you and you’re psychotic.”
The kid’s first trick is claiming that God had spoken to him of a female physician harbouring vengeful thoughts about a co-worker. This is true of Doctor Cameron, and both she and Doctor Foreman (the co-worker in question) are somewhat impressed by this. House is not, as he could see for himself the body language the boy had picked up on. It’s a classic trick of psychics and the like, and though a useful thing to bring attention to it’s hardly difficult to debunk.Slightly more impressive at first glance is when Boyd, the patient, tells House that God wants him to invite Doctor Wilson to his poker game. House’s first reaction is to tell Wilson to stop talking to his patient, but Wilson denies having done so. It remains a mystery until it is revealed that Boyd has been talking to Grace, Wilson’s liver cancer patient; Wilson has been seeing her socially for a short while and has kept it a secret. Nevertheless, it is she who has passed on the information about House’s poker game.
The big mystery, however, is the “miracle” that takes place in this episode. Boyd was wandering the halls in a daze after a complex partial seizure, and came across Grace. He told her not to worry, and asked God to make her whole again. Nothing much is thought of this, until Wilson scans her liver and finds that the tumour is shrinking. The team gets to work trying to diagnose some medical reason for this, but get nowhere.Until, that is, House reaches one of his trademark epiphanies. All Boyd’s symptoms are explained by the virus herpes encephalitis, which he transmitted to Grace when he “healed” her. The virus attacked her tumour first, shrinking it temporarily. Rare, yes, but not unheard of. This is the traditional medical fare of the show. As House asserts, “There is nothing in the universe that can’t be explained – eventually.”
This is not to say that House is the perfect sceptic, of course – a man with so many problems is hardly a candidate for being the perfect anything. While he always makes diagnoses based on the evidence available, he is reckless and will often skip over further testing and move straight onto treatment – or trust his instincts rather more than a doctor probably should. He will also make assumptions based on his less-than-generous view of human nature; while this often works in his favour, it does sometimes obstruct the diagnosis process.He is, after all, and like us real sceptics, a flawed human being. But he remains a great example of rational thought and critical thinking on television.
Blink 6: Beaten to it.
I was planning a nice short entry in my “In the Blink of a Sceptical I” series to start me back after being MIA in Essayland – this one about the preposterous claim that vaccines cause autism. They don’t. The “rise” in autism is a statistical anomaly caused by broadening definitions, greater vigilance and improving detection methods.
However, while reading through my week’s worth of RSS updates, I found that I had been beaten to it on this score. Rebbecca Watson of Skepchick.org – a woman with whom, it seems, I am more deeply enamoured every time she blogs – explains it all on her parody Crap-Based Medicine blog:
She has such a way with words.
Substantial post to follow sometime in the next few days.
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