January 30, 2012

See Post 18...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/101439146#post18

Also see:

The unconscionable consequences of conscience exemptions
http://ncronline.org/blogs/grace-margins/unconscionable-consequences-conscience-exemptions

Catholics hear protests of Obama health ruling at Mass
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/30/us-catholics-contraception-idUSTRE80T06K20120130

Catholics rally against Obama contraception mandate
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-faith/catholics-rally-against-obama-contraception-mandate/2012/01/30/gIQAEZbscQ_story.html

Bishops out of touch with masses on birth control coverage
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20120130/OPINION04/301300010/Bishops-out-of-touch-with-masses-on-birth-control-coverage

The story appears to be everywhere.

January 29, 2012

Vaccination program credited in fight against whooping cough

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-whooping-cough-20120125,0,5035953.story

"Facing an epidemic of whooping cough that led to the deaths of 10 infants in 2010, California public health officials launched a massive vaccination effort and public awareness campaign about the disease.

And on Tuesday, they announced the payoff: no deaths in 2011, a first in two decades. The number of whooping cough, or pertussis, cases also plummeted from about 9,154 in 2010 to 2,795 in 2011, according to the California Department of Public Health.

In Los Angeles County, the number of cases dropped from 1,395 in 2010 to 520 in 2011. Four of the deaths in the state occurred locally.

"Controlling an outbreak is huge," said Dr. Gil Chavez, deputy director of infectious diseases for the state. "It really happens in a partnership."

..."

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FYI.

January 29, 2012

What's the best car/vehicle on the market today, dollar to value?

Here are my candidates:

Hyundai Elantra
Chevrolet Equinox
Ford Focus
Chevrolet Cruze

What would you add to the list of candidates?

What's your winner!?

January 20, 2012

New Definition of Autism Will Exclude Many, Study Suggests

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/20/health/research/new-autism-definition-would-exclude-many-study-suggests.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=general

"Proposed changes in the definition of autism would sharply reduce the skyrocketing rate at which the disorder is diagnosed and might make it harder for many people who would no longer meet the criteria to get health, educational and social services, a new analysis suggests.

The definition is now being reassessed by an expert panel appointed by the American Psychiatric Association, which is completing work on the fifth edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the first major revision in 17 years. The D.S.M., as the manual is known, is the standard reference for mental disorders, driving research, treatment and insurance decisions. Most experts expect that the new manual will narrow the criteria for autism; the question is how sharply.

The results of the new analysis are preliminary, but they offer the most drastic estimate of how tightening the criteria for autism could affect the rate of diagnosis. For years, many experts have privately contended that the vagueness of the current criteria for autism and related disorders like Asperger syndrome was contributing to the increase in the rate of diagnoses — which has ballooned to one child in 100, according to some estimates.

The psychiatrists’ association is wrestling with one of the most agonizing questions in mental health — where to draw the line between unusual and abnormal — and its decisions are sure to be wrenching for some families. At a time when school budgets for special education are stretched, the new diagnosis could herald more pitched battles. Tens of thousands of people receive state-backed services to help offset the disorders’ disabling effects, which include sometimes severe learning and social problems, and the diagnosis is in many ways central to their lives. Close networks of parents have bonded over common experiences with children; and the children, too, may grow to find a sense of their own identity in their struggle with the disorder.

..."


FYI...

January 13, 2012

Autistic Advocacy Group Condemns Presidential Appointment of Anti-Vaccine Activist Peter Bell

http://leftbrainrightbrain.co.uk/2012/01/autistic-advocacy-group-condemns-presidential-appointment-of-anti-vaccine-activist-peter-bell/

"Peter Bell of Autism Speaks has been appointed to the President’s Committee for People with Intellectual Disabilities. As I read about the appointment I felt that there would be some reaction. Perhaps even a strong reaction. And, as you will see, I was correct. The Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN) has issued a press release condemning the appointment.

... (from the press release) ...

The Autistic Self Advocacy Network, the nation’s leading advocacy group run by and for Autistic adults, today expressed concern and disappointment over President Obama’s announcement Tuesday of his intent to appoint anti-vaccine activist Peter H. Bell as a member of the President’s Committee for People with Intellectual Disabilities.

“Bell’s appointment shows such contrast to the forward motion the Obama administration has shown in the areas of autism and disability as a whole,” said Melody Latimer, ASAN Director of Community Engagement and an autistic parent of autistic children herself.

Bell, Executive Vice President of Programs at Autism Speaks, has a long history of supporting anti-vaccination related causes, dating back to his time as President and CEO of Cure Autism Now, which merged with Autism Speaks in 2007. Despite wide ranging scientific evidence to the contrary, Bell and others in the anti-vaccine movement have long maintained the existence of a link, a position viewed as irresponsible by many public health advocates.

..."

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Very interesting.

January 9, 2012

The Rebranding Of CAM As “Harnessing The Power Of Placebo” - Illuminating Ted Kaptchuk's Sales Pitch

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/the-rebranding-of-cam/#more-18610

"...


There was a time not so long ago when proponents of unscientific medicine tried very, very hard to argue that their nostrums have real effects on symptoms and disease above and beyond placebo effects. They would usually base such arguments on small, less rigorously designed clinical trials, mainly because, if there’s another thing I knew before from my medical education but that has been particularly reinforced in me since I started blogging, it’s that small clinical trials are very prone to false positives. Often they’d come up with some handwaving physiological or biological explanation, which, in the case of something like homeopathy, often violated the laws of chemistry and physics. Be that as it may, the larger and more rigorously designed the clinical trial, the less apparent effects become until, in the case of CAM therapies that do nothing (like homeopathy), they collapse into no effect detectable above that of placebo. Even so, there are often enough apparently “positive” clinical trials of water (homeopathy) that homeopaths can still cling to them as evidence that homeopathy works. Personally, I think that Kimball Atwood put it better when he cited a homeopath who said bluntly, “Either homeopathy works, or clinical trials don’t!” and concluded that, for highly implausible treatments like homeopathy, clinical trials as currently constituted under the paradigm of evidence-based, as opposed to science-based, medicine don’t work very well. Indeed, contrasting SBM with EBM has been a major theme of this blog over the last four years. In any case, for a long time, CAM enthusiasts argued that CAM really, really works, that it does better than placebo, just like real medicine.

Over the last few years, however, some CAM practitioners and quackademics have started to recognize that, no, when tested in rigorous clinical trials their nostrums really don’t have any detectable effects above and beyond that of placebo. A real scientist, when faced with such resoundingly negative results, would abandon such therapies as, by definition, a placebo therapy is a therapy that doesn’t do anything for the disease or condition being treated. CAM “scientists,” on the other hand, do not abandon therapies that have been demonstrated not to work. Instead, some of them have found a way to keep using such therapies. The way they justify that is to argue that placebo medicine is not just useful medicine but “powerful” medicine. Indeed, an article by Henry K. Beecher from 1955 referred to the “powerful placebo.” This construct allows them then to “rebrand” CAM unashamedly as “harnessing the power of placebo” as a way of defending its usefulness and relevance. In doing so, they like to ascribe magical powers to placebos, implying that placebos can do more than just decrease the perception of pain or other subjective symptoms but in fact can lead to objective improvements in a whole host of diseases and conditions. Some even go so far as to claim that there can be placebo effects without deception, citing a paper in which the investigators — you guessed it! — used deception to convince their patients that their placebos would relieve their symptoms. Increasingly, placebos are invoked as a means of “harnessing the power of the mind” over the body in order to relieve symptoms and cure disease in what at times seems like a magical mystery tour of the brain.

Part of what allows CAM practitioners to get away with this is that placebo effects are poorly understood even by most physicians and, not surprisingly, even more poorly understood by the public. Moreover, we all like to think that we have more control than we do over our bodies and, in particular, illnesses and symptoms, which is why the selling of placebo effects as a means of harnessing some innate hidden power we have to control our own bodies through the power of mind is so attractive to so many, including some scientists and physicians. Exhibit A is Ted Kaptchuk, the researcher from Harvard University responsible for spinning an interesting study of placebo effects in asthma into the invocation of the power of placebo. Kimball Atwood has written extensively about Kaptchuk recently, revealing his rather dubious background and arguments. More recently, however, Kaptchuk seems to be everywhere, appearing in articles and interviews, promoting just the argument I’m talking about, that CAM is a way of harnessing placebo effects, so much so that I felt it was time to take a look at this argument.

...

Michael Specter quotes Ted Kaptchuk as asking, “Do you think this entire field is based on a foundation of magical thinking, or do you not?” That is the wrong question, a massive strawman in fact. No one, least of all myself, that I’m aware of is arguing that the entire field of placebo medicine is based on magical thinking. In fact, I find studies of placebo effects intriguing and often worthwhile. I am, however, arguing that the way that people like Ted Kaptchuk co-opt placebo effects as evidence for “powerful mind-body healing” or as a rationale for using placebos like acupuncture, homeopathy, or “energy healing” is based on magical thinking. After all, we already know that empathy and paying attention to patients improves their perception of their symptoms and treatment with SBM also has a placebo component. We don’t have to invoke magic or pseudoscience or deceive patients paternalistically in order to maximize these effects; yet that is what Kaptchuk and his fellow travelers are implicitly doing by rebranding CAM as placebo. In the end, all too much of the rebranding of CAM as placebo and the selling of placebos as some sort of powerful “mind-body healing” strikes me as being much like The Secret, in which wishing makes it so."

...


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A fairly thorough, very fair response to yet another attempt to rebrand CAM by distorting what the science says.

January 8, 2012

The Fallacy Of Relying On Anecdotes In Medicine

http://getbetterhealth.com/the-fallacy-of-relying-on-anecdotes-in-medicine/2012.01.06

"...

Gawler decided to embark on an alternative treatment regimen, involving coffee enemas, a vegetarian diet, and meditation. Eventually he was completely cured of his terminal metastatic cancer. He has since become Australia’s most famous cancer survivor, promoting his alternative approach to cancer treatment, has published five books, and now runs the Gawler Foundation.

At least, that is the story he believes. There is one major problem with this medical tale, however – while the original cancer was confirmed by biopsy, the subsequent lesions were not. His oncologist at the time, Dr. John Doyle, assumed the new lesions were metastatic disease and never performed a biopsy. It was highly probable – the timing and the location of the new lumps following a highly aggressive cancer. But even a diagnosis that is 95% likely will be wrong in 1 patient out of 20 – which means a working physician will have patients with the 5% diagnosis about once a week. The standard of practice today would be to do a biopsy to get tissue confirmation of the diagnosis, and rule out the less likely alternatives.

...

Gawler has believed for the last three decades that diet and meditation can cure cancer. He has spent that time writing books and promoting his personal story, convincing many others of his beliefs. While he may mean well, the far better course of action would have been to study the hypotheses that stemmed from his dramatic experience, not to conclude that he must be correct and proceed with premature conviction. That is the difference between a crank and a scientist.

In medicine well-meaning (and not-so-well-meaning, for that matter) cranks can do a lot of harm. It’s good to see mainstream doctors recognizing the risk and doing something about it."


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A nice illustration of this common fallacy.

January 7, 2012

Why Do We Really Need Clinical Trials?

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/why-do-we-really-need-clinical-trials/

"A point I make over and over again when talking about new or alternative therapies that are not supported by good clinical trial evidence is that lower-level evidence, such as theoretical justifications, anecdotes, and pre-clinical research like in vitro studies and animal model testing, can only be suggestive, never reliable proof of safety or efficacy. It is necessary to begin evaluating a new therapy that does not yet have clinical evidence to support it by showing a plausible theory for why it might work and then moving on to demonstrate that it actually could work through pre-clinical research, which includes biochemistry, cell culture, and animal models. These sorts of supporting preclinical evidence are what we refer to when we refer to the “prior plausibility” of a clinical study. But this kind of evidence alone is not sufficient to support using the therapy in real patients except under experimental conditions, or when the urgency to intervene is great enough to balance the significant uncertainty about the effects of the intervention.

In support of this conclusion, we can consider the inherent unreliability of individual human judgments and all the many ways in which inadequately controlled research can mislead us. And we can reflect on how promising results in early trials often melt away when better, larger, more rigorous studies are done that better control for bias (the so-called Decline Effect). And it is not at all difficult to compile a large list of examples of the harm inadequately studied medical interventions can cause.

But what I’d like to do here is focus on a particularly good specific example of why thorough clinical trial evaluation of promising ideas is not just a nice extra to confirm what we already believe is true, it is the only way to genuinely know whether our treatments to more good than harm.

...

I think much of the success of the “integrative medicine” meme has been based on the lack of an adequate understanding among health professionals about the serious limitations of low-level evidence. The SELECT illustrates nicely how even a plausible intervention with enough low-level evidence to justify a major clinical trial can prove not only less helpful than originally hoped but even actively harmful. The same principle applies to an even greater degree to less plausible hypotheses. High-quality clinical trials are not simply icing on the cake confirming what we already know, they are the cake without which we know a lot less than we usually think."


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A worthy read, IMO.

January 7, 2012

Indeed, it is.

Sleep disorders are something that should be explored with anyone who is coming in with anxiety symptoms.

On a more behavioral aspect, it's amazing how many kids I have known who struggled with anxiety, and either had it turn around because they chose to get good sleep, or continued to struggle with it, because "everyone else is up late, so I have to be up late, too!"

http://childrenwithanxiety.com/articles-resources/sleep-habits-can-affect-levels-of-stress-and-anxiety-in-children-and-teens

January 7, 2012

Sleep issues need to be the focus of more research.

They may be undermining huge swaths of the population.

Here's another recent study on the matter:

Naps cut anxiety, up problem solving in tots
http://scienceblog.com/51377/naps-cut-anxiety-up-problem-solving-in-tots/

From the article: “Many young children today are not getting enough sleep, and for toddlers, daytime naps are one way of making sure their ‘sleep tanks’ are set to full each day,” she said. “This study shows insufficient sleep in the form of missing a nap taxes the way toddlers express different feelings, and, over time, may shape their developing emotional brains and put them at risk for lifelong, mood-related problems.”