Archive | July 2011
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Linkage 7/29: Debt & Doctors, New Hearts, and Brain Models
One of the sectors closely monitoring the debt debate in Washington is the medical world, where hospitals, physicians, and patients anxiously await the final agreement on cuts to Medicare and Medicaid. Of particular concern to academic medical centers [pdf] are proposed cuts to graduate medical education, funding used to pay the salary of residents and […]
A $5 Billion Study Takes Its Baby Steps
Being a parent these days is anxious business, with an onslaught of news reports telling you what might be good or bad for your child’s health and development. In many cases, these claims are based on scientific evidence that is preliminary at best, studied only in small subject pools or retrospectively. To comprehensively confirm a […]
A Face Only a Biologist Could Love
In evolutionary biology today, it’s the ugly guys who get famous. But that hasn’t always been the case. When paleontologists were assembling a library of prehistoric life in the 19th century, they wanted to find the fossils they could easily categorize. The freaks, the weirdos, and the oddities were less well received, square pegs that […]
Linkage 7/22: Smarter Dosing and Fossil Diaries
A large portion of medical research is dedicated to designing and testing new and better drugs for treating disease. But what if we could improve treatments with the drugs we already have – and potentially cut costs at the same time? That’s the proposal made in an editorial this week in the Journal of the […]
Genes Versus The Environment Inside
The odds of acquiring a disease are often portrayed as a tug of war between two foes: genes and environment. The battle is not always evenly matched. A disease such as cystic fibrosis is entirely genetic – if a child inherits the mutated CFTR gene from both parents, no environment will prevent the condition. On […]
Reversals of Fortune and Misfortune
Salt is bad for you. According to a 2010 article in the New England Journal of Medicine, lowering dietary salt intake by 3 grams per day could “reduce the annual number of deaths from any cause by 44,000 to 92,000.” Or maybe not. A 2011 meta-analysis of seven clinical studies of salt reduction, published this […]
Cancer Treatment Dollars and Sense
In a typical clinical trial, the results are reported in purely medical or biological terms. Did the patients in the treatment group live longer than those in the control group? Did the drug shrink the tumor or reduce symptoms? Were clinical measures such as blood pressure or cell counts affected? These are the details that […]
Linkage 7/15: Chest Scan Caution & Under the Influence of Flags
Cancer used to be a black box, a disease that physicians could only monitor through surgical biopsies and indirect measures. But for the last thirty years, the use of computed tomography imaging, better known as CT scans, has allowed oncologists and cancer researchers to keep close watch on the growth or shrinkage of a tumor […]
Spiritual Benefits at the Bedside
A patient in the hospital receives a long line of visitors, from physicians to nurses to medical students to other staff members. The conversations with most of these personnel tends to be mostly business – answering clinical questions or following instructions, with maybe a little bit of small talk squeezed in between temperature measurements and […]
