Medicine and Science (2011)

© 2012 Peter Free

 

 

Sneaking Out the Back Door with Its Cowardly Tail between Its Legs — the Food and Drug Administration Declines to Regulate Antibiotic Use in Agriculture, despite Increases in Antimicrobial Drug Resistance that Harms Human Health (29 December 2011)

 

 

Scientific Honor and Elegance in Physics — when Avarice and Self-Glorification Take a Vacation and Neutrinos Come Out to Play — Some People Who Still Do It the Way It’s “Spozed” to Be Done (28 December 2011)

 

 

An Obvious Phenomenon that Most of Us Don’t Recognize Often Enough — the Structural Funneling of Knowledge, including Science and Medicine, through Somebody Else’s Self-Interest and Often Uninformed Opinion Means that “Truth” Is Only Rarely Found (16 December 2011)

 

 

Breathless Reporting about “Bad” Things (Like Fukushima Daiichi’s Escaped Radiation) Is Often Sensationalized due to Ignorance  — Illustrating the Information Problem Posed by Living among “Science Barbarians” (29 November 2011)

 

 

Another Good Example of “Worse than Useless” American Government — Inadequate Safety Testing of Imported Seafood and the Failure to Document Contaminant Results in a Scientifically Meaningful Way (09 November 2011)

 

 

Conflicts of Financial Interest Have Arguably Captured Medicine’s Clinical Practice Guidelines Panels — According to a New Study (12 October 2011)

 

 

Do Self-Regulated Quality Monitoring Systems in Health Care Work? — One Survey Suggests, “Not Very Well” (05 October 2011)

 

 

Illustrating One Aspect of Big Pharma’s Grip on Medical Practice — Physicians Writing Prescriptions for Brand Name Statins, Instead of Generic Statins — This Reportedly Costs America $5.8 Billion per Year(03 October 2011)

 

 

Prostate Biopsies — Rate of Serious Infections Has Risen — Another Example of the Need to Be Aware of Medical Risks (30 September 2011)

 

 

Relentlessly Evolving Microbial Drug Resistance May Take Us Back to Pre-Antibiotic Days — Other People’s Sexual Liasons Now Affect Everyone’s Vulnerability to Non-Sexually Transmitted Bacterial Diseases(20 September 2011)

 

 

Walking as Soon as Possible Appears to Shorten Hospital Stays among People 70 and Older (09 September 2011)

 

 

 

Medical Authorship Guidelines (Provided by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors) Actually Facilitate Deceptively Presented Medical Research — says Industry Expert, Alastair Matheson (08 September 2011)

 

 

Radical Prostatectomy May often Defeat Men’s Unrealistic Hopes for Evading Surgical Side-Effects — Says a Small University of Michigan Study (07 September 2011)

 

 

New Study Highlights Misleading Pharmaceutical Research — the High Prevalence of Scientifically Meaningless Endpoints and Deliberately Confusing Risk Analysis (26 August 2011)

 

 

A Good Example of Medical and Environmental Mystery — Disappearing Malaria Mosquitoes and the Paradoxical Concern for Children’s Future Health (25 August 211)

 

 

A Genetically Engineered Vaccine against Chikungunya Fever Shows Promise in Laboratory Mice — the Research Illustrates apparently Sound Scientific Reasoning and Methods — but It Serves Equally Well as a Warning regarding the Potentially Distorting Effect of Financial Self-Interest in Medicine (16 August 2011)

 

 

Eating Processed Red Meat Every Day Apparently Increases the Risk for Developing Type 2 Diabetes by 51 Percent — according to a Large Study by the Harvard School of Public Health (12 August 2011)

 

 

Another Example of Medicine Getting It Wrong with Deadly Effects — Contrary to Previously Accepted Medical Practice, Young African-American Patients Do Significantly Worse than Whites on Kidney Dialysis — the Power of Asking the Right Questions (10 August 2011)

 

 

Inventing Bogus Mental Illnesses and Drugs for Profit — the Pharmaceutical Industry and the Self-Interested Physicians Who Help It Lie (18 July 2011)

 

 

Poor Communication Weakens a New Study’s Public Safety Message about Drinking and Driving — Are There No Scientifically-Minded Editors Anywhere? (21 June 2011)

 

 

Living in America’s Never-Never Land — the Optimistic Nonsense that Americans Are Asked to Swallow about Traumatic Brain Injury (16 June 2011)

 

 

Does the Shortage of Generic Cancer Drugs Suggest an Argument for Government Subsidies, Reworked Tax Policy, or Sponsored Manufacturing? (11 June 2011)

 

 

Escaping Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) — What the Industry and the USDA Disingenuously Deny (29 May 2011)

 

 

Pliocene Epoch Arctic Air Temperatures Probably Were 11 to 16 Degrees Celsius Higher than Today — A View of Our Not too Distant Weather Future? (11 April 2011)

 

 

High Expectations for the Progress of Genomic Medicine Did Not Pan Out — Is It Time to Reallocate Research Funding? (02 April 2011)

 

 

Climate Change and Positive Feedback Mechanisms — Russia’s Northern Forest Composition Is Changing to More Warmth-Tolerant, Needle-Retaining Species, thereby Increasing Ground Heat Retention (27 March 2011)

 

 

A Cochrane Collaboration Review Confirms that People Overestimate the Benefits of Medical Interventions, When those Are Expressed Solely in Relative Terms — Using Absolute Numbers Enhances Understanding among Patients and Doctors(22 March 2011)

 

 

An Infectious Disease with an Initial 30 Percent Mortality Rate Identified in China — an Impressive Piece of Epidemiology (17 March 2011)

 

 

U.S. Department of Agriculture Decided against Regulating the Planting of Genetically Modified Alfalfa — Possibly a Very Big Deal (09 March 2011)

 

 

Automated Blood Pressure Measurement of Systolic Hypertension Is More Accurate than Manual Measurement and Helps to Overcome White Coat Hypertension in Primary Care Physicians’ Offices — a Finding with Potentially Significant Impact on Medical Practice (07 March 2011)

 

 

Dosing Instructions Confuse Older Patients on Multiple Drugs — Would Standardized Names for Periods of the Day Help? (04 March 2011)

 

 

Pew Research Center Opinion Poll Regarding Demographics of Pro and Anti-Gun Control Is Detailed Enough to Be Illuminating (03 March 2011)

 

 

Coming Trend — Pharmaceutical Companies as Research Parasites (02 March 2011)

 

 

Prostate-Specific Antigen (PSA) Velocity of Change Is Not a Good Indicator for Biopsy in the Absence of Other Risk Factors Says New Research (26 February 2011)

 

 

An Updated Very Long Baseline Array (of Linked Radio Telescopes) Is Back in the News — Farthest Distance Yet Calculated with Reportedly Only a 9 Percent Error (24 February 2011)

 

 

Possible Changes in Patient Priority for Kidney Transplants — Highlights the Inescapable Rationing Element in Medicine (24 February 2011)

 

An Interesting Natural Experiment in Disease Resistance Is Underway — Will Hibernating Bats Evolve the Ability to Resist White-Nose Syndrome?(23 February 2011)

 

Aerosolized Prions Efficiently Transmit Scrapie (and Presumably other Spongiform Encephalopathies Like Mad Cow Disease) in Mice — a New Finding and Possible Warning for Researchers and Slaughterhouse Workers (14 January 2011)

 

 

Politically Liberal Over-Representation in the Social Sciences Is So Extreme that One Wonders How Many of the Field’s Findings Are Accurate (12 February 2011)

 

 

Gale Scott’s Outstanding Piece of Lay Science and Medical Writing: “Scientists Discover Mechanism Involved in Breast Cancer’s Spread to Bone” — a Model of How It Should Be Done (04 February 2011)

 

 

The Challenge of Drilling into a Previously Untapped Sub-Antarctic Lake, without Contaminating It — Caution, Recklessness, and Philosophical Balance in Science (24 January 2011)

 

 

Small Study Finds that Decision-Makers Take 40 Percent Longer to Discontinue Life Support in the Absence of Previous Health Care Discussions with Affected Patients — the Importance of Advance Health Care Directives and Agents (21 January 2011)

 

 

Medical Science — the Difficulty of Knowing Anything for Sure (19 January 2011)

 

 

The February 2011 Issue of Technology Review Shows Most Everyone Else How to Write Good Lay Medical Science — the Human Genome, Cancer, and the Revolution in Genomic Mechanics (11 January 2011)

 

 

Distinguishing Crazy from Sane in Science Is Often Difficult — Dr. Luc Montagnier and DNA “Water Memory” (08 January 2011)