My pseudonymous colleague Orac makes it part of his mission to lampoon “alternative medicine” wherever he encounters it, so this may well piss him off: For the last several weeks, I’ve been taking a daily dose of pseudoscience. Why? I blame the medical establishment, but you’re going to have to click below the fold to… Continue reading The Path to Woo
Category: Medicine
Death and Body Mass Index
In the comments to the recent post on BMI, commenter Colst pointed to another study of mortality and BMI that found significantly higher risks for overweight people. Today, I see that Kevin Beck at Dr. Bushwell’s Chimpanzee refuge has a post describing what I think is the same study, with the title Risk of death… Continue reading Death and Body Mass Index
What Do You Mean by Normal?
Over at Pure Pedantry, Jake has a nice post about a study showing that the ever-popular Body Mass Index measure is not a good predictor of the risk of heart disease. He’s got a lot of details about the study, including this graph of risk vs. BMI: Now, here’s the thing. This is the second… Continue reading What Do You Mean by Normal?
Ask a ScienceBlogger: Unhappy Anniversary
This year marks 25 years since the identification of AIDS as a disease, and Seed is going with blanket coverage. The latest print issue is devoted to AIDS coverage, there’s a temporary group blog covering the International AIDS conference, and this week’s Ask a ScienceBlogger is AIDS-related: To what extent do you worry about AIDS,… Continue reading Ask a ScienceBlogger: Unhappy Anniversary
Correlation, Causation, and Sleep
Over at the Examining Room of Dr. Charles, one of the newer ScienceBlogs, there’s a post reminding me that I want nothing to do with medical research. I mean, how do you sort out what’s a cause, and what’s an effect in data like this: Another recent study, published in Diabetes Care this past March,… Continue reading Correlation, Causation, and Sleep