Month: October 2012

Patients Still Respect Evidence

A recent survey about patient attitudes and desires with regard to health care demonstrate that respect for scientific evidence is still the dominant factor in preferring treatments. (Full study) This is good news, although the numbers could be better. Researchers asked subjects what factors were important in determining which treatments they would prefer, the scientific evidence, the experience of the clinician, or...

/ October 3, 2012

Thumbthing Worth Reading

I intended to read Sam Kean’s new book The Violinist’s Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius as Written by our Genetic Code  just for fun. I was expecting a miscellany of trivia loosely gathered around the theme of DNA. But I found something much more worthwhile that I thought merited a book review to bring it to the attention...

/ October 2, 2012

Mouse “avatars”: New predictors of response to chemotherapy?

Over the years, I’ve written a lot about “personalized medicine, mainly in the context of how the breakthroughs in genomic medicine and data pouring in from the Cancer Genome Atlas is providing the raw information necessary for developing truly personalized cancer therapy. The problem, of course, is analyzing it and figuring out how to apply it. Another problem, of course, is developing...

/ October 1, 2012

Antivaccine versus anti-GMO: Different goals, same methods

Countering ideologically motivated bad science, pseudoscience, misinformation, and lies is one of the main purposes of this blog. Specifically, we try to combat such misinformation in medicine; elsewhere Steve and I, as well as some of our other “partners in crime” combat other forms of pseudoscience. During the nearly five year existence of this blog, we’ve covered a lot of topics in...

/ October 1, 2012