The Chilean government showed good medical sense in refusing to provide an insufficient number of blow-up dolls to 33 miners trapped underground, if a February 16, 2011 report in The Mirror is accurate. The newspaper says: [A new book called 33 Men, by Jonathan Franklin, a New York Times journalist] reveals that a request for […]
Tag: medical
Headlines: Wine, Drugs, and Soup
Today’s Headline of the Day is a two-fer. 1. “Red Wine Rivals Diabetes Drug in Lab Tests,” says a February 1 headline in Wine Spectator, going on to say, “Researchers working in biotechnology laboratories in Vienna have found that red wine contains favorable levels of a chemical [rosiglitazone, marketed under the name Avandia] currently used […]
Curses! Rats! Ordered the wrong mice!
The Retraction Watch blog reports: The authors of a 2006 Journal of Immunology study have retracted it after it dawned on them that they used the wrong mice….
Press release: Seen in a new light (Hamman)
This week’s Press Release of the Month was released more than a year ago. But it shines anew thanks to today’s news that the protagonist, Dr. William Hamman, turns out not to be a doctor (see the Associated Press report “Pilot duped AMA with fake M.D. claim“). Here’s the beginning of the press release: WMU […]
Gov’t Falling Coconut Advice Underscored
Knowingly or not, Indian government officials acted in accord with published medical advice when they ordered recently that coconuts be removed from the trees at Mumbai’s Gandhi museum for fear that a nut would descend on to the head of President Obama. Should those officials wish to more fully educate the public, they could distribute […]
Indiscriminate expectoration
Indiscriminate expectoration — newly recognized as a prime, yet preventable means of spreading tuberculosis — gets the once-over in the essay “Indiscriminate Expectoration,” British Medical Journal, vol. 2, no. 2120, August 17, 1901, pp. 422-3. Two excerpts: “In America, where expectoration seems, if report be true, to be a kind of mental solace, laws have […]
The ethics of eating a drug-company donut
Philosophy and medicine join forces because of a donut, in the study: “The ethics of eating a drug-company donut,” Karl Broznitsky, Canadian Medical Association Journal, 1996 March 15; 154(6): 899–900. It concludes with this passage: “He bit into the donut, as content with his rationalization as his staffmen were with theirs. A blob of grape […]
The Man Who Dissects Medical Statistics
In The Atlantic magazine David Freedman profiles John Ioannidis, the scourge of queasy medical statistics: He was unusually well armed: he had been a math prodigy of near-celebrity status in high school in Greece, and had followed his parents, who were both physician-researchers, into medicine. Now he’d have a chance to combine math and medicine […]
How to remove the unmentionable
Nurses must acquire some skills that non-medical people find embarrassing, disgusting, maybe even childish. Such knowledge can be difficult to obtain from the standard medical books and journals. A monograph called How to Perform a Digital Removal of Faeces aims to remedy one such gap in the literature. Gaye Kyle, a senior lecturer at the […]
Some medical hazards of/re pizza
Pizza is dangerous. Pizza is beneficial. If you hold either of these opinions, published research agrees with you, especially research in England and Italy. Two British studies highlight, darkly, some dangers that accompany pizza that’s served too speedily or too heartily. One, a monograph in the journal Traffic Injury Prevention, explains that, whatever the good […]