Neural Gourmet Archives | Feed Your Brain
Neural Gourmet Archives | Feed Your BrainWho knew!? Orac reports on how when autism-mercury fear mongerer grifter David Kirby goes up against Rosie O'Donnell, it's O'Donnell who comes out on the side of reason. But donchaknow, it's a conspiracy? That's right, Big Pharma has somehow managed to silence Rosie!
Of course, that's not enough for Kirby:
During the breaks, however, I could hear women in the audience murmuring to each other: "But what causes it? Why so many children? What about mercury? How can I get more information?"During the final break, I asked Rosie when the question of causation would come up.
"We're not doing that," she said, bluntly. "We're focusing on families and their kids."
"Rosie," I replied, "I think a lot of people are wondering about what's causing this."
"We don't know what causes it," she said. "You just want me to ask so you can talk about mercury."
Stung, I explained that her audience members were asking, and that production staff had also asked me about causation privately backstage.
"We're not doing causation," Rosie repeated. "In fact, I told them not to book you."
My head spun as the show wrapped up. Had The View finally squelched Rosie O'Donnell? Did mercury trump Trump? Was this the heavy metal that dare not speak its name, at least on a network flush with Pharma ads?
It's hard to say for sure. Last year, former host Star Jones posed the vaccine-autism question on the air, (but then again, look what happened to her).
Damn. Sometimes I actually miss not owning a television anymore.read more »
Gene Expression mentions what has to be the most frightening article in a "medical" journal I've ever read. So, if you want to dip your toes into the waters of post-modern medicine, you surely won't want to miss "Deconstructing The Evidence-Based Discourse In Health Sciences: Truth, Power And Fascism" [PDF] in the latest edition of the International Journal of Evidence-Based Healthcare. With such revolutionary ideas as these who can deny the essential fascistic nature of modern medicine (bolding mine):
Rather than risk being alienated from their colleagues, many scientists find themselves interpellated by hegemonic discourses and come to disregard all others. Unfortunately, privileging a single discourse (evidence-based medicine (EBM)) situated within a single scientific paradigm (postpositivism) confines the researcher to a yoke of exactly reproducing the established order. To a large degree, the dominant discourse represents the ladder of success in academic and research milieus where it establishes itself as a weapon used against those who praise the freedom of scientific inquiry and the free debate of ideas. . . .
Accordingly, we believe that a postmodernist critique of this prevailing mode of thinking is indispensable. Those who are wedded to the idea of 'evidence' in the health sciences maintain what is essentially a Newtonian, mechanistic world view: they tend to believe that reality is objective, which is to say that it exists, 'out there', absolutely independent of the human observer, and of the observer's intentions and observations. They fondly point to 'facts', while they are forced to dismiss 'values' as somehow unscientific. For them, this reality (an ensemble of facts) corresponds to an objectively real and mechanical world. But this form of empiricism, we would argue, fetishises the object at the expense of the human subject, for whom this world has a vital significance and meaning in the first place. An evidence-based, empirical world view is dangerously reductive insofar as it negates the personal and interpersonal significance and meaning of a world that is first and foremost a relational world, and not a fixed set of objects, partes extra partes. . . .
It's time we overthrew our evidence based overlords! Viva la revolution! Now who's with me?
I don't know about you all, but people who think like this scare the living crap out of me. What's more is that they're not even saying anything new. You can get this level of "analysis" in just about any woo-woo publication. This is just cloaking it in post-modernist pseudo-academic nonsense.
Well, don't let anyone tell you there's nothing interesting in the blogosphere, because we've got proof right here that anyone who says that is full of it. So, in no particular order and I hope I haven't forgotten anyone, here's the notable blog carnivals for the past week.
Over at Brainshrub, Paul was proudly showing off his birthday suit in the 17th Carnival of the Liberals.
Tangled Bank has become a grand old science blog carnival, with #58 hosted by Martin at Salto Sobrius.
And there's a hot, hot, hot Carnival of Education#76 down in Texas at the Education in Texas blog.
If you think the Texas heat is for the birds, then you're wrong because they've all flown across the Atlantic to do I and the Bird #28 with Katie over at Bogbumper.
If you're looking for a bite to eat, then maybe the skeptics will give you a Scooby Snack if you ask nicely. For it's 39th meeting, the Skeptics' Circle has taken a field trip to Franken Castle (aka Mike's Weekly Skeptic Rant).
The brainy people are engaging in Pure Pedantry with Encephalon #2.
Finally, if you're feeling overwhelmed by all this great reading, then maybe you want to join everyone else Powering Down in Carnival of the Green #36.
Coming up Sunday we've got every infidel's delight, the Carnival of the Godless at Beware the Dogma and Synapse, the other neuroscience carnival at The Neurophilosopher's Blog, who coincidentally runs Encephalon.
Wow! A must read blog post by J.R. over at Don't Floss With Tinsel on the death of Syd Barrett and the portrayal (or rather lack thereof) of his mental illness in the media. Either dismissing or glamorizing Barrett's schizophrenia the media does a disservice to Barrett's creative genius while betraying our incapacity as a society to accept mental illness as a physical malady. I really recommend this one gang.
I love it when science stories reaffirm my existing beliefs. Especially when those beliefs are about my favorite beverage/drug -- coffee. [...]read more »
I will agree with pro-life-minded individuals on one thing: abortion is a tragedy. I am not a female, so I know I cannot speak to that aspect of it, but for my part I will always wonder what could have been. Every anniversary, I always wonder what his fifth, sixth, and seventh birthdays would have been like: friends and cake and clowns and wrapping paper. What would he of been when he grew up? Would he have studied medicine? Law? Would he have become a criminal? A drug addict? Would he be religious? Would he have become a politician? Would he have become a preist?
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Now this is something I never would have expected. New Scientist is reporting that researchers led by Piero Anversa at New York Medical College discovered in 2003 that mature heart muscle cells were hiding a surprise -- stem cells. In the subsequent time, Dr. Anversa along with her colleague Annarosa Leri, have shown that the stem cells are likely to originate in the heart and have conducted several experiments that show great promise that cardiac stem cells may be used to repair damaged heart tissue.
Dr. Leri says, “We think that these are the cells that normally provide new heart tissue and will most likely be better suited for repair of diseased hearts.”
While the New Scientist article is brief, the impression given is that this is still work that's on the edge and much needs to be done. Even if this line of research doesn't pan out though, I would expect that there is much to be learned here about the heart, and perhaps more generally the whole body from this research.
I find this more than a little unsettling. New Federal guidelines that are designed to encourage women to be more conscious of their health, take better care of themselves and advocates for better health care for women seems to me to have taken a decidedly Orwellian turn.
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This is, especially if you've ever known someone who needed a new liver, a controversial topic. It's a moral dillemma, as on one hand there is the ideal of caring for individuals and alleviating suffering but you have to square that with extremely limited resources (in the case of liver transplants, the data I've seen show that fewer than 2,000 are performed each year while the number of people suffering end-stage liver disease is several magnitudes beyond that number).
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Today is Blogging Against Disablism Day. Disablism might not be a word that many of you know, but basically it refers to prejudice against those with disabilities. While we have the Americans With Disabilities Act here in the U.S., it is only a start toward making disablism a thing of the past.
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A new bacteria-fighting compound has been found in Tammar Wallaby milk that scientists say is 100 times more effective than penicillin: read more »
Great, a health and medicine forum. Thanks Leo. 
I have been a bit busy lately, a general and vascular surgeon, but would like to post about my experiences with modern health care. The current system is inadequate, to say the least. The patient suffers, the doctor suffers, society can do much better. I will blog on my experiences, as I find the time, and any feed back, questions or concerns are appreciated. As a start. Medical insurance? How should we achieve universal coverage. I treat a number of uninsured a year. Mostly foreign nationals from Mexico who come to the U.S. for better care. Being born on the other side of the U.S. border is not a crime, if I lived in Mexico and a family member became ill, I would try to get my loved one across the border. I cannot fault the motivation. I also see a large number of people who qualify for state aid, called ACCESS in my state. Basically people who do not have health insurance and earn below the poverty level. There are a number of people who make too much money to qualify for state aid, but lack insurance. This group suffers enormous medical bills in the event of illness. We are the richest nation on earth, yet a large portion of the population lives without medical insurance. What is the best solution? Socialize medicine? Cut costs by cutting access to certain treatments, drugs, procedures etc. Cut reimbursement to doctors, greedy bastards. Or, provide a federal net to catch all those which lack insurance, keeping the present system intact for the health care provider and the currently insured? Any suggestions?
You have to read this post by Orac at Respectful Insolence looking at the alarming number of doctors and med students who reject evolution:
Biologists and other strong opponents of ID often express puzzlement or disbelief that so many doctors could be so ambivalent about ID or even downright sympathetic to it. To them the fact that so many physicians have such a poor understanding of evolutionary biology is hard to swallow. Perhaps this is where I can help the science-minded out there who read my blog. Even though I straddle two worlds, the world of the clinical surgeon and the world of the practicing physician, sometimes I don't udnerstand how so many physicians can be so easily seduced by this pseudoscience. Nonetheless, I'll give it a shot at explaining some of the reasons why this may be so.
