This article by Kimball Atwood called Smallpox and Pseudomedicine needs no further explanation from me. It’s an eloquent and complete evaluation of the anti-vaccination movement of then and now.
Jim
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Category Archives: health
Impulse Control
I’ve thought a lot about impulse control lately. Having a daughter move in with you who has ADHD will have that kind of effect on a person. I’ve been thinking about the brain chemistry behind it, the free will behind it, the brain chemistry of free will… it’s been a blast of distinct but inter-related thoughts, and just now I got another jolt from another distinct area.
What the hell are we doing to our children? Dear God, think of the children!
I just read an article in the Calgary Herald called How many teens have “Internet addiction”, a condition I am now lovingly calling the Tube Sweats. It’s an interesting notion, that teens are experiencing what they call problematic internet use, and whether or not that ties to teenage depression and drug use. For the record, they didn’t find a relationship.
Insite
I will never forget my first drive down Vancouver’s East Hastings. My cousin asked if I’d ever been, and I said that no, I hadn’t, but I was well aware of the stories that went with it. We drove along, and suddenly we were on Hastings. It started off not too badly, looking a little run down but undeserving of the hype. That quickly changed as we progressed, eventually driving past some of the most sad and disgusting images I have ever encountered first-hand. The drug problem on Hastings is one of the most obvious and painful to witness things in North America, and leads to a huge number of problems.
It is clear that our current drug policies are not working. Prohibiting drugs has resulted in nothing more than an underground economy that feeds upon itself and continues to spread. Arresting drug users has not in any way deterred them, it has simply encouraged them to be more cunning about where they use.
The China Study
Sometimes I read the Huffington Post. I do it mostly to try to find fodder for my blog, but also out of a morbid fascination with the minds of others. At the HuffPo, you can find really interesting articles by legitimate experts in their fields sharing copy space with wacky articles by lunatics. And honestly, I’m not sure what I just found. The article, Forks Over Knives: How A Plant-Based Diet Can Save America contains all the hallmarks of lunacy so often found at the HuffPo. But its author, T. Colin Campbell Ph.D. appears, at least from what I have quickly looked up, to be a legitimate character.
The article, amid the usual “BIG PHARMA WILL KILL U” and “TEH GOVERMINT HATEZ U” comments, attests that getting everyone to eat a plant-based diet is the only way we will survive. Of course, there are no links to his backing information, and this is normally a perspective I would consider just more laughable propaganda from the denialists, but I am curious given the impressive credentials of Dr. Campbell. So I guess I need to dig a little deeper.
Magic Shoes
Shoes. Between the Lovely Lady and the twelve year old, I have enough shoes to hide three bodies. I do not understand this. I own exactly three pairs of shoes. One are my “good shoes”, actually a pair of boots that I pretend I can pass off as dress shoes, and the others are my current everyday shoes and my old, slightly falling apart everyday shoes. What can I say, I am a simple creature.
I get that some women (and I certainly don’t want to imply the sexist OMG ALL WOMYN LIEK SHOOZ) really like shoes. And I get that shoemakers, elves or otherwise, will take advantage of that desire to sell all manner of shoes. But magic exercise shoes are a little hard for a skeptic like me to take.
Parasites (And The Parasites That Treat Them)
Mark Crislip has a really excellent (if rambling) article up at Science-Based Medicine called Parasites that I thought I’d share. It is interesting to me because he is talking about a range of topics at the same time, from a particular set of symptoms to the relationship of CAM to medicine and all sorts of topics in between. It’s definitely worth the read, and it isn’t gross despite being on a topic that would generally make the skin crawl.
Parasites, as Dr. Crislip points out, are a very strange diagnosis in the West, but I’ve heard in the alt med world a lot of people who have claimed to have had them. I honestly never really considered the logic of that before; you hear someone say, “Hey, I have parasites!” and you have to assume that they got this information from some valid source. But is that the case? I guess the next time I hear someone make this sort of allegation, I’ll ask how they wound up with their diagnosis.
Cancer Might Just Be In Some Trouble
Great news on some research from a group in Boston! Essentially, what the researchers did was a successful Phase I trial of something called adoptive T-cell therapy, which means that they took T-cells from some people who had advanced melanoma. They then used some genetically engineered antigens that are similar to the ones that the tumor cells possess, and altered the T-cells accordingly. They then increased the number of those T-cells and gave them back to the patient. The end result was extremely promising. You can read the link above, which is a review in greater detail of the process and what it means from the Discovery blog 80beats, or you can read the abstract of the research here.
But the short and skinny of it is that we’re looking at ways to essentially take someone’s T-cells, set the up to beat the hello jello out of their cancer cells, and giving them a boost of their own (slightly modified) immune system cells to fight it off. If this works, then they may well have come up with a concept that can fight off any number of really serious diseases. Of course, we’re hardly out of the woods yet.
Queen Of The Fruit Flies
I just read an interesting bit of news and thought I would share it. It turns out that researcher Masaki Kamakura has isolated a protein within royal jelly that is integral in the formation of queen bees. Royal jelly, aside from being a major fixture in the alt med community, claiming to boost the immune system, lower cholesterol, and help with inflammatory diseases, is made by and for bees. All bee larvae eat it for the first few days of development, but the queen bee gets it all the time.
Kamakura has published a paper in Nature which describes how he isolated the protein in question, and what happened when he gave it to fruit fly larvae. Essentially, the fruit fly got big. Real big. And he was able to evaluate what genetic trigger he was pushing by exposing the larvae to the protein.
Viral Life On The Enemy’s Payroll
Viruses are jerks. I mean, deep down, that’s their job. They exist solely to infect us. Some of them are theoretically harmless, while others, left unchecked, spell certain doom. However, there have long been theories put forward about friendly viruses, a concept that makes sense on the surface. What if a virus were capable of actually making us fight off other more harmful diseases? What if a virus were used as a delivery mechanism for something beneficial? Where some minds shine is in making the best of a bad situation, and there are plenty of scientists seeking ways to make happy helpers of our viral enemies.
An article I just read from Discovery Magazine’s 80beats blog shows an example of such a possibility. The article, Viruses Show Promise for Creating Drugs By Doing What They Do Best: Evolving explains the work of some researchers at Harvard who are using viruses to optimize proteins to fight particular conditions. That sounds really strange, but as they point out, this is not new science:
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The Root Of Testimonial Is Testes
As in balls. Or, as the English put it, bollocks. Testimonial evidence is bollocks.
Okay, I’m oversimplifying. Testimonial evidence is a great starting point for evaluation and critical analysis. If someone says that they had a lump on their hand and they rubbed a Supreme Court Judge’s wig sweat on it three times a day and the lump disappeared, then there may be some reason to try to find out why. It hardly means that we should start treating lumps with wig sweat, ignoring all previous lump treatment modalities. Also, I must apologize for the grossness of that anecdote, and I hope nobody with a lump on their hand actually runs out and starts harassing Supreme Court Judges for access to their wig sweat.
In the alt-med world, testimony is king. We tend to have a certain magical thinking when it comes to alternative medicine, infusing it with a respect for age-old medicinal traditions and cutting edge maverick science that it does not deserve. When people tell you that Saint John’s Wort will cure sinusitis, we instantly believe it could because Saint John’s Wort has a long history of use for lots of things, and is even in some regards backed up by valid science, such as the treatment of depression. However, while saint john’s wort depression triggers a lot of responses on pubmed, saint john’s wort sinusitis does not. For good reason.