Seth's Blog

• Drug industry now the biggest defrauder of the US government, as measured by False Claims Act payments.
• CT scans linked with cancer. Even worse, “doses of radiation from the scans varied wildly, according to the study, even within the same procedure at the same hospital. Some patients got only one-tenth the radiation that others got.” As if the concepts of calibration and maintenance are foreign to the operators of this exceedingly dangerous equipment.
• Fermentation in Montreal.
• Edward Jay Epstein on Hollywood’s Pirates of the Internet.

Thanks to Hal Pashler and Anne Weiss.

• omega-3 blood levels correlated with better mental performance in the elderly. “The team found that people who had higher blood levels of vitamins B, C, D and E and omega-3 fatty acids scored higher on the mental-function tests, including attention tasks and visual and spatial skills, than those with lower levels of these nutrients.”
• “Inflammation, atherosclerosis, and coronary artery disease.” An influential New England Journal of Medicine article from 2005. The next time someone tells you that heart disease is due to high cholesterol, refer them to this article.
• Weak evidence that bacteria in food stimulate the immune system. Indian women who ate yogurt to which a probiotic had been added had more of an immune-related molecule in their feces than before and after that ingestion.
• Speaking of India, do medical students who gain admission by fraud become dangerous doctors? India has a problem.

Thanks to Tim Beneke.

• Comparing one elbow to the other. I have no idea what “clinical epidemiology” is. The level of self-deprecation is remarkable. From the BMJ Christmas issue.
• The value of cod liver oil. From the BMJ Christmas issue.
• More evidence for radiation hormesis (beneficial effects of small amounts of radiation).
• Evolutionary medicine reaches the BMJ. The word paleo does not appear.
• Medical journals: “information-laundering operations for drug companies”

Thanks to Robin Barooah and Mike Bowerman.

In America, I often hear praise for “Chinese Medicine”. By this they mean Traditional Chinese Medicine, which includes acupuncture and techniques that harness hormesis. I tend to agree. Medicine as now practiced in China is a different story.

Last night, I had dinner with some of my students. I asked them what their parents thought of their decision to major in psychology. One of them had a surprising answer. Her mom was happy that she was majoring in psychology because among the required courses was a human anatomy and physiology class. If her daughter took this class, her mom believed, it would be harder for doctors to cheat us.

Chinese doctors “cheating” patients is a big problem, in other words. They prescribe drugs that don’t work, said my student, and perform useless surgeries. Little different than Western medicine, except perhaps the drugs are less dangerous. Just as in Western medicine, drug reps try to bribe doctors to request their drugs. Unlike Western medicine, doctors steal the drugs of hospitalized patients, my student said, which they then sell. After a friend of mine was badly burned, she had (wisely) turned down the recommendation of a skin transplant. This angered her doctor, who would have made money from the operation. Later, when he changed her bandages, he did so roughly, which was very painful. Revenge.

“Don’t see the doctors at Tsinghua hospital [the campus hospital],” said my student. She had had a bad experience. She had gotten injured and gone to the hospital. She had had to wait half an hour to see a doctor; who had taken a mere 30 seconds to prescribe a cream that did almost nothing. That evening I watched The Poseidon Adventure. A doctor visits a sick woman in bed in her cabin. After a long wait, he gives her cursory treatment.

HUSBAND (to doctor) Hold it, hold it. You mean to tell me we had to wait all this time just for you to come in here and kiss her off with a couple of pills and some crap about staying in bed? How do you know she’s just seasick? Look at her! It could be something else! You didn’t even examine her.

Same complaint.

Joseph Biederman is a professor of psychiatry at Harvard. He recently received a far-too-mild sanction for behavior that included this:

Biederman was then placed in charge of the institute and began a study of 40 children between 4 and 6 years old who were given Risperdal [made by Johnson & Johnson] and Lilly’s Zyprexa, another antipsychotic. At the time, Harvard and MGH [Massachusetts General Hospital] rules forbid researchers from running trials with [drugs] if they receive more than $10,000 from a company that makes the drug.