As noted here in the past, I had horrible stomach problems for a good chunk of last year. This was diagnosed as “Gastro-Esophageal Reflux Disease” or “GERD,” which basically amounts to “Your stomach hurts.” After a number of deeply unsatisfactory appointments with a gastroenterologist, and some tests about which the less said the better, it […]
Category: Medicine
Trust Me About the Sunscreen
Just in time to drive parents into a panic for the rest of the summer, the New York Times has a big article about sunscreen: Dr. [James] Spencer [a dermatologist in Florida] said that an S.P.F. 15 product screens about 94 percent of UVB rays while an S.P.F. 30 product screens 97 percent. Manufacturers determine […]
Wake Me When You Have Something Surprising to Say
Bora’s probably already aware of this, but the annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies is currently underway in Minnesota. Like many professional society meeting, this has led to a giant blort of press releases on EurekAlert, as the PR office for the conference tries to drum up some attention. The press releases in […]
Notes From the World’s Best Health Care System
I came home Wednesday night to find a message on the answering machine. This is somewhat unusual, as most of the people who call us are trying to get us to donate money to some cause or another, and they don’t leave messages. I hit play: Hi, this is [Name] from [Gastroenterology Practice]. This message […]
Want to Be a Doctor? Major in Physics
Somebody at work had printed out a table of MCAT scores by major, compiled by the AIP. I couldn’t find it on the web, but I found the original source, and made my own version of the relevant bit. This shows the average numerical scores on the three sections of the MCAT test for students […]
Extended Shifts Lead to Medical Errors
Surprising approximately no-one outside the medical profession, Eurekalert today features a press release about a paper showing that doctors on long shifts make more mistakes: The study, published in PLoS Medicine, which was led by Charles Czeisler and Laura Barger from Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, included 2737 medical residents, who completed […]
Shorter Hours for Doctors
Via Inside Higher Ed‘s Quick Takes, some good news about the medical profession: The proportion of medical residents who said they had worked more than 80 hours a week in the previous four weeks at any point during the 2005-6 academic year fell to 2.4 percent, spread among 18.7 percent of all residency programs, the […]
Ontological Epidemiology
I was up far too late last night watching football, and our DSL was down during the crucial hours between work and Monday Night Football, so I couldn’t pre-write any blog posts. Which means you get sleep-deprived idle thoughts as blog posts this morning. I blame Verizon. So here’s a question about medicine, or rather […]
Falsify Data, Go to Jail
The New York Times Magazine this week has a troubling story of scientific misconduct, involving the fraudulent research of Eric Poehlman: Before his fall from grace, Poehlman oversaw a lab where nearly a dozen students and postdoctoral researchers carried out his projects. His research earned him recognition among his peers and invitations to speak at […]
Bad Graphs
The silliest graph I’ve ever seen presented in public looked something like this: It was an after-dinner talk at a DAMOP meeting a few years back, and the speaker was somebody associated with the Hubble Space Telescope. I don’t recall what was being plotted, but he talked for a while about ho proud they were […]