Those of us who live in New York and read the papers can easily be overwhelmed by the science and medical...
Paul Raeburn's Tracker
Those of us who live in New York and read the papers can easily be overwhelmed by the science and medical coverage of the New York Times. But the Times not only floods us with copy, it limits what we see, too. It rarely publishes medical or science reporting done by anyone else. So New Yorkers--who are, as any of us will readily tell you, the most sophisticated consumers of news in the world--are missing news that's read by the other 300 million or so Americans who don't happen to live on this island.
Among the pleasures enjoyed by Americans, and rarely by New Yorkers, are the stories published by The Associated Press (my former employer, I should add). And some of the best medical reporting at the AP is done by Marilynn Marchione. So it's a delight to...
Blogger Bora Zivkovic...
Blogger Bora Zivkovic alerted me via Facebook to an interesting post by Sheril Kirshenbaum (left) on her Discover Magazine blog, The Intersection. She asked her Facebook friends what they thought about the future of science writing, and she reprints their comments in her post, entitled "The Science Writing Renaissance."
Take a look at the discussion, and the additional comments that the post attracted.
I was happy to see the discussion, because I think we are in the midst of a science-writing...
How many stories do we have to read about overmedicated kids? And why on earth, if the New...
How many stories do we have to read about overmedicated kids? And why on earth, if the New York Times felt the need to do yet another one, would it feature the thing so prominently?
I'm referring to Duff Wilson's "Child's Ordeal Shows Risk of Psychosis Drugs for Young" in today's paper.
I'll save you the trouble of reading this 2,000-word monster. Here's what it says: Some doctors are too quick to give drugs to kids who don't need them.
Is that front-page news? Some doctors are too quick to give drugs to 80-year-olds, too, or to middle-aged New York Times reporters who have sore joints because they just got divorced,...
In most branches of medicine, illnesses are things that doctors...
In most branches of medicine, illnesses are things that doctors have encountered over the millenia, tried to understand, and sometimes learned to treat. In psychiatry, illnesses are decided by committees. No matter how bad you feel, you can't have one unless you meet the requirements the committees have established.
I'm talking, of course, about the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. You might think you're depressed, but if you don't meet the criteria in the manual, nobody else will think so--including, notably, your physician and your insurance company.
I could go on--I've written about this cookbook-recipe approach to medicine before, and I always enjoy it. But I learned something today that I didn...
The notion that drug-company sponsorship of a clinical trial might affect the...
The notion that drug-company sponsorship of a clinical trial might affect the outcome will come as no surprise to most Tracker readers. Numerous studies have shown that drug-company studies are more likely to show favorable results than are studies sponsored by the government.
Many of us, as a result, might have lapsed into a sort of reflexive view that drug-company-sponsored trials are always problematic. Dr. Daniel Carlat (left), a psychiatrist in private practice in Newburyport, Massachusetts, takes a more nuanced view in The Carlat Psychiatry Blog. He's a sharp critic of many drug-industry practices, but one who's willing to probe the details and correct himself when he's...
20Aug 2010
In...
In a post yesterday, Phil Hilts mentioned that Matthew Nesbit of American University, yet another refugee from ScienceBlogs, was setting up shop on Big Think, which, as Phil noted, has been described as "YouTube for smart people." (That delicately leaves unanswered the question of whom YouTube is for.)
I've been meaning to take a look at Big Think, after subscribing to its weekly newsletter for a month or two. Phil's post now gives me the occasion to do so.
This week's Big Think newsletter certainly makes the site sound as if it's for smart people. The lead item is about...
"Researchers report that a spinal fluid test can be 100 percent...
"Researchers report that a spinal fluid test can be 100 percent accurate in identifying patients with significant memory loss who are on their way to developing Alzheimer's disease," Gina Kolata writes on the front page of today's New York Times.
One hundred percent accurate. That's a startling figure in medicine and medical research. Can it possibly be correct? [Elsewhere in the same issue of the Times, as my colleague Charlie Petit points out in his Science Times review, a DNA test for colon cancer is also described as 100 percent accurate.]
Lauran Neergaard of the ...
I saw a couple of teasers on the web, heard a few seconds of a report on the radio, and...
I saw a couple of teasers on the web, heard a few seconds of a report on the radio, and over the past day or so, this is what I gleaned: Fructose is a particularly high-energy fuel for the growth of cancer cells.
When I dug into the coverage, what I found was quite different.
Here was David W. Freeman in the health blog on CBSnews.com:
Afraid of fructose? You may have good reason to be, as an alarming new study shows that the popular sweetener can fuel the growth of cancer.
We've heard plenty in recent years about high-fructose corn syrup being a special threat for...
In her...
In her column in Sunday's New York Times Magazine, "Unnatural Science," Virginia Heffernan cites three examples from science blogs and comes to the following conclusion:
Under cover of intellectual rigor, the science bloggers — or many of the most visible ones, anyway — prosecute agendas so charged with bigotry that it doesn’t take a pun-happy French critic or a rapier-witted Cambridge atheist to call this whole ScienceBlogs enterprise what it is, or has become: class-war claptrap.
Do you hear that, science bloggers? That's you she's talking about.
Under the guise of reporting on...
The coverage of yoga by The New York Times this week has been nothing if not...
The coverage of yoga by The New York Times this week has been nothing if not comprehensive. As I wrote earlier this week, the Times had three stories on yoga in last Sunday's paper. It had another yesterday, and yet another today--five stories this week on yoga!
My earlier post noted that all three Sunday stories treated yoga flippantly or negatively, leading me to wonder why the Times seemed so frightened of yoga--or, at best, uninformed.
I'm happy to say that the two most recent stories are quite different. Yesterday, Sam Dolnick...
For about $15 or $20, anybody can sign up for a yoga class, and spend 60-...
For about $15 or $20, anybody can sign up for a yoga class, and spend 60-90 minutes bending, twisting, and sometimes chanting.
Some like it; some don't. For some, it's exercise. For others, the exercise is a prelude to meditation, and perhaps even part of a voyage of self-discovery or a spiritual search. I've practiced yoga for 10 years, and I'm pretty sure I figured this out after my first few classes. It's not that complicated.
For the New York Times, however, yoga seems to be something of an occult art, riddled with danger and badly contaminated by greed and corruption, more about fashion and fads than fitness.
On Sunday, July 25th, the Times carried no fewer than three articles on yoga--...
Update: As I was putting up this post, Adam Bly, CEO of ScienceBlogs, announced that he was removing Food Frontiers from the site. The corporate blogs by ...
Update: As I was putting up this post, Adam Bly, CEO of ScienceBlogs, announced that he was removing Food Frontiers from the site. The corporate blogs by Invitrogen, Shell Oil, and General Electric are still there, although only General Electric's appears to be active.
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Responding to...
Outrage over the decision by ScienceBlogs to run a blog produced by Pepsi--see...
Outrage over the decision by ScienceBlogs to run a blog produced by Pepsi--see my post earlier today--continues to grow. Best-selling author Rebecca Skloot has now announced her resignation from the site; her Culture Dish will reappear elsewhere. And the Guardian has published a confidential letter from Adam Bly, Seed's founder and CEO, in which he attempts to justify the decision to give Pepsi a blog.
Excerpts from Bly's letter to his bloggers...
Update: A confidential response from Seed CEO...
Update: A confidential response from Seed CEO Adam Bly was leaked and published by the Guardian. Check my update above.
If you cover such things as heart disease, obesity, food, and nutrition, you'd probably be interested in a blog called Food Frontiers that promises this, in its first post:
The focus will be on innovations in science, nutrition and health policy...We have some exciting things planned for this project, including a...
"Methylmercury Cuts Could Save the U.S. Millions of Dollars,"...
"Methylmercury Cuts Could Save the U.S. Millions of Dollars," says a recent headline in Chemical & Engineering News.
The reason? Mostly that reducing mercury in the environment could reduce the number of heart attacks.
Sounds good--I vote yes! Or I would have, if I hadn't kept reading...
Writer Naomi Lubick starts backpedalling even before the ink is dry on the lede. The connection between mercury and heart attacks "remains weak," she writes, because "the studies relied on small sample sizes." If mercury doesn't cause heart attacks--and we're apparently far from confirming it--then methylmercury cuts could...
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