One of the things I like and will miss about newspapers is the systematic way they separate news and features from op-ed pieces. And while the op-ed pages give people a voice, they were distinct from the stories gathered by staff writers who were paid not to voice their opinions but to go out and check into things...
Category: Health & Medicine Stories
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One of the things I like and will miss about newspapers is the systematic way they separate news and features from op-ed pieces. And while the op-ed pages give people a voice, they were distinct from the stories gathered by staff writers who were paid not to voice their opinions but to go out and check into things. And if you had an agenda or something you wanted to sell, you could pay to take out an ad.
Enter The Huffington Post, which last week featured this offering by Joseph Mercola: Harvard Study Confirms Fluoride Reduces Children’s IQ.
I first came across Mercola – apparently medical doctor - a few years ago when someone started sending me spam emails promoting his medical advice. Mercola has advocated various forms of alternative medicine – homeopathy, acupuncture and the like, and he speaks out against vaccines, GMOs and just...
Maybe it's just me, but I can't get enough of Sandra G. Boodman's medical mysteries in The Washington Post. I'd like to see a collection of these, maybe as a Kindle single, so I could have them all in one place.
Boodman was...
Maybe it's just me, but I can't get enough of Sandra G. Boodman's medical mysteries in The Washington Post. I'd like to see a collection of these, maybe as a Kindle single, so I could have them all in one place.
Boodman was back again yesterday with a tale that was not only a mystery, but an outrage. I'm tempted to use a familiar vulgar phrase to describe my reaction, but that would be impolite. The doctors who saw 16-year-old Allison Partridge let her down, and there ought to be some sort of punishment for that. Maybe require them to attend 10-week remedial sessions to watch videos of her condition before they are allowed to practice again?
Even specialists failed to recognize what was going on....
Chemical & Engineering News, known for its coverage of research, business, the chemical industry, and related industries, is not known for 10,000-word stories looking at social issues. In the current issue, however, Lisa M. Jarvis tackles the orphan drug problem in...
Chemical & Engineering News, known for its coverage of research, business, the chemical industry, and related industries, is not known for 10,000-word stories looking at social issues. In the current issue, however, Lisa M. Jarvis tackles the orphan drug problem in a long, comprehensive piece with a surprising turn: Orphan drugs, it seems, are no longer orphans. The headline on the piece is "Orphans Find a Home."
That's not true for all of them, but it's true for a growing number, as pharmaceutical and biotech companies, and investors, suddenly see that producing drugs for a disease that affects only a few thousand patients can be a potent money maker. This has not always been true, which is why orphan drugs were orphaned. Pharmaceutical companies were looking for drugs such as Lipitor that they could sell to millions of people. Now,...
Laura Beil at Science News begins her helpful survey of fructose research with an interesting historical footnote. She reports that two chemists found an enzyme that could turn...
Laura Beil at Science News begins her helpful survey of fructose research with an interesting historical footnote. She reports that two chemists found an enzyme that could turn glucose from cornstarch into fructose, which is sweeter. What's interesting is that the discovery was published in Science in 1957, Beil reports, and largely ignored. It was not until the 1970s that Japanese researchers learned how to use the finding to produce fructose on an industrial scale. And it was not until 2004, she writes, that consumers began to be concerned.
Beil does a nice job of looking over the research on whether fructose might be, as critics, claim, particularly harmful to health--worse than sugar, or sucrose, produced from sugar cane. As I read the story, it seems to say that there is evidence of harm from fructose, because of how it affects the...
"I expected lots of blog posts about Angelina Jolie's double mastectomy," Tabitha M. Powledge writes at On Science Blogs. "I didn't expect the torrent we're getting. My unscientific...
"I expected lots of blog posts about Angelina Jolie's double mastectomy," Tabitha M. Powledge writes at On Science Blogs. "I didn't expect the torrent we're getting. My unscientific impression is that this is the single most-blogged-about medical topic I've looked at since I began writing On Science Blogs in 2009, going on 5 years ago."
Why would that be, we might ask? "Even in mad mediaworld this is an extraordinarily potent mix, involving a super-celebrity superstar who always makes news and sometimes scandal (and whose equally high-profile partner, here somewhat in the background, does ditto), plus women's breasts (two of them), plus breast reconstructive surgery, plus a cancer that is irrationally terrifying, and all of this soaked in a subtext of sex sex sex." Trenchant, n'est-ce pas? By the way, Powledge titles...
Gary Schwitzer is confused, as he explains in HealthNewsReview.org. And I don't blame him; I'm confused myself. ...
Gary Schwitzer is confused, as he explains in HealthNewsReview.org. And I don't blame him; I'm confused myself.
Was this week's human cloning story a "major medical breakthrough," as Fox called it (the b-word!)? Or not?
Scanning the coverage doesn't help; you can find either point of view well represented.
First, FoxNews.com: "In a major medical breakthrough, researchers at the Oregon National Primate Research Center (ONPRC) have for the first time ever successfully converted human skin cells into embryonic stem cells – via a technique called...
A strange kind of time shifting is going on at The New York Times, which I guess I'm not complaining about, because the result is more coverage of science.
Last week, the science writer Carl Zimmer began a weekly column in the Times, but not...
A strange kind of time shifting is going on at The New York Times, which I guess I'm not complaining about, because the result is more coverage of science.
Last week, the science writer Carl Zimmer began a weekly column in the Times, but not in Tuesday's Science Times. Instead, it appears on Thursdays, when it is less likely to be seen, I would wager. Last week's debut column concerned the 17-year cicadas, now appearing on fence posts and in trees in the Northeast and as far south as North Carolina. Today's is on some of the genes that were crucial in the transformation from wolves to dogs. The column leads the science page on the...
On Monday, the generic-drug-maker Ranbaxy pleaded guilty to federal drug safety violations and was ordered to pay a fine of $500 million to "resolve claims that it sold subpar drugs and made false statements to the Food and Drug Administration about its manufacturing practices at two factories in India,...
On Monday, the generic-drug-maker Ranbaxy pleaded guilty to federal drug safety violations and was ordered to pay a fine of $500 million to "resolve claims that it sold subpar drugs and made false statements to the Food and Drug Administration about its manufacturing practices at two factories in India," according to a story by Katie Thomas in The New York Times.
Thomas reported that Ranbaxy "acknowledged that it failed to conduct proper safety and quality tests of several drugs manufactured at the Indian plants, including generic versions of many common medicines, like gabapentin, which treats epilepsy and nerve pain, and the antibiotic ciprofloxacin."
That's disturbing, but it sounds like the kind of thing that can be corrected with proper oversight.
But I didn'...
People hate it when the doctors and medical reporters give them conflicting signals on what they should or shouldn’t eat. The press certainly met the public’s low expectations this week, with Healthday admonishing us that “Most Americans Should Eat Less Salt,” The New York Times...
People hate it when the doctors and medical reporters give them conflicting signals on what they should or shouldn’t eat. The press certainly met the public’s low expectations this week, with Healthday admonishing us that “Most Americans Should Eat Less Salt,” The New York Times reporting that there’s "No Benefit Seen in Sharp Limits on Salt in Diet,” and The New York Daily News advising us to “Go Ahead and Order that Side of Fries.” All these, remarkably, stemmed from the very same Institute of Medicine report.
Many stories quoted “experts” saying they stand by old recommendations that we should aim for no more than 1500 mg a day, but the Times actually quotes the chair of the IOM report saying that some people may suffer risks if they get less than 2,300 mg a day. Those risks include “...
Last week, I chastised New Scientist for describing...
Last week, I chastised New Scientist for describing a blog post from the National Institute of Mental Health as "a bombshell."
Andy Coughlan and Sara Reardon wrote the following lede off of the post, written by the NIMH director, Thomas Insel:
The world's biggest mental health research institute is abandoning the new version of psychiatry's "bible" – the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, questioning its validity and stating that "patients with mental...
Yesterday, the actress Angelina Jolie, in a smart bit of public relations, revealed in an op-ed in The New York Times that she recently had a double mastectomy because she carries a gene known to...
Yesterday, the actress Angelina Jolie, in a smart bit of public relations, revealed in an op-ed in The New York Times that she recently had a double mastectomy because she carries a gene known to confer a particularly high risk of developing breast cancer.
It was smart because it allowed her to control the story, to reach doctors and healthcare groups, and to avoid public appearances. (Although I'm sure we're all eagerly waiting for the Oprah interview.) Jolie has attempted a tough balancing act. The public-health challenge here is to alert women to the importance of knowing their risks without causing undue concern or prompting some women to get treatment they don't need.
Her mother, she wrote (or somebody wrote under her name),"fought cancer for almost a decade and died at 56." She then notes that she carried "a 'faulty...
14May 2013
Nearly two years ago, Andrew C. Revkin, author of the Dot Earth blog at The New York Times and one of the most respected reporters on the environment beat, interrupted his "nonstop journalistic pursuit of paths toward sustainable human progress to focus on sustaining...
Nearly two years ago, Andrew C. Revkin, author of the Dot Earth blog at The New York Times and one of the most respected reporters on the environment beat, interrupted his "nonstop journalistic pursuit of paths toward sustainable human progress to focus on sustaining myself." He went for a run in the woods with his son when, short of breath, he stopped to take a rest.
"Then I realize that through my left eye, the world appears paisley--as if I were looking through a patterned curtain," he writes. "Something is really wrong."
In a post on the Times's Well blog, Revkin narrates the story of that day during the July 4th weekend, 2011. In his telling, the partial loss of vision is the first in a series of events that unfold slowly and only gradually lead to the conclusion that he is having a...
When researchers first proposed that athletes suffering repeated head blows might face a real risk of long-term brain damage, both players and athletic associations dismissed the idea. But over the last few years, an ongoing wave of deaths, injuries, and evidence (such as...
When researchers first proposed that athletes suffering repeated head blows might face a real risk of long-term brain damage, both players and athletic associations dismissed the idea. But over the last few years, an ongoing wave of deaths, injuries, and evidence (such as this 2009 report revealing a consistent pattern of damage in the brains of dead athletes) has begun to erode such resistance.
It's in the context of the attitude shift that I want to call attention to an outstandingly good set of stories on the subject in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, home paper to a city that is home of a football team famed for its aggressive style of play. The series, by the paper's senior science writer, Mark Roth, is called The Tragedy of CTE (which stands for chronic traumatic...
When the science writer Christie Aschwanden spotted a study last week in the Canadian Medical Association Journal saying that treatment with naturopathic medicine "shows reduction in cardiovascular risk...
When the science writer Christie Aschwanden spotted a study last week in the Canadian Medical Association Journal saying that treatment with naturopathic medicine "shows reduction in cardiovascular risk factors," she decided to take a close look at it.
"This would be big news if it were true," she wrote in a post at The Last Word on Nothing. And it would be a big boost for naturopaths, who, Aschwanden pointed out, claim to "work with nature to restore people's health." Critics, including the American Cancer Society, say there is little scientific evidence to show that naturopathic medicine is effective. "So if the CMAJ study truly showed that naturopathic medicine was effective for something,...
Curtis Brainard, the science-news critic at the Columbia Journalism Review, is among several editors laid off or being threatened with layoffs following the departure of the magazine's editor, according to a report at...
Curtis Brainard, the science-news critic at the Columbia Journalism Review, is among several editors laid off or being threatened with layoffs following the departure of the magazine's editor, according to a report at capitalnewyork.com. Brainard directs and writes for CJR's The Observatory, which describes itself as "a lens on the science press."
AOL's Chris Grosso announced last Thursday in a blog post that Cyndi Stivers, CJR's editor, would become editor-in-chief of AOL.com. Joe Pompeo of...
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