It’s an anniversary!

Ten years ago today, the Lancet issued a formal retraction of Andrew Wakefield’s notorious bogus paper claiming a link between MMR vaccinations and autism. The paper was wrong, it was shoddily done, and the work hasn’t been replicated.

Ever since, Wakefield has been living in shame, no one treats him as an authority anymore, and of course no one would claim that vaccines cause autism anymore.

Why didn’t she get vaccinated?

Now I’ve got the heebie-jeebies. A woman undergoing safety training for a lab tech job was offered a smallpox vaccination because she’d be working with Vaccinia virus, and she turned it down. She didn’t understand the possible consequences at the time of training.

Naturally, what happens next? She’s trying to inject a mouse and accidentally pokes herself with the syringe needle. There are graphic photos at the link! It looks like some nasty ulceration of her finger and some systemic problems as well.

Although she continued to be treated, by day 10 her finger was looking very swollen, and she wasn’t feeling well.

“On day 12, she was treated at a university-based emergency department for fever (100.9°F or 38.3°C), left axillary lymphadenopathy [swollen lymph nodes], malaise, pain, and worsening edema of her finger,” a case report explains.

“Health care providers were concerned about progression to compartment syndrome (excessive pressure in an enclosed muscle space, resulting from swelling after an injury), joint infection, or further spread.”

She survived and is healing.

Vaccinations are important for people dealing with dangerous pathogens, but also for everyone else. Have you gotten your flu shot? If not, what’s your excuse?

Lack of access to health care does lifelong harm

Well, if this isn’t the most horrifying story to start my morning ever.

After three decades of progressive symptoms, a 43-year-old man from Panama was rushed into emergency surgery with a massively swollen scrotum that hung past the level of his knees and had begun to rot and ooze foul-smelling pus, a team of Texas doctors report.

I’m not so much hung up on the clinical symptoms as on the fact that this man suffered for 30 years, for most of his life, with a condition that would have crippled his social options and destroyed his opportunity to be a productive part of his community, and that would have been a painful, constant reminder of his state. It wouldn’t be something he could ever get away from.

And it was treatable, especially if it could have been caught early. This is precisely why health care ought to be a human right.

Doctors advising doctors

Hey, I guess people have known about that cutting entry in the index to an obstetrics text for a good long while. Here’s an article on the book and general ob-gyn attitudes, in which we learn that the indexer was … the author’s wife! I guess she’d know. But doctors know better now, right?

Recall that preeclampsia was once called toxemia because it was thought to be a build-up of toxins in the maternal blood that had not been secreted through the normal monthly purification of the menstrual cycle. Miscarriages must be caused by the woman doing something she shouldn’t have done, like picking up a bag of groceries. Bottle feeding was superior to breast feeding because men had used science to outsmart the female breast. In fact, for about half of the twentieth century, obstetrics consisted of rendering pregnant women unconscious, cutting a procto-episiotomy, and ripping the child out with forceps. Sounds very efficient and modern. [Yikes. That’s how I was born.]

But surely we don’t think this way today. Have you ever recommended that a woman be on bed rest for any condition in pregnancy? Have you ever mocked a woman with a birth plan? Have you ever told a woman to “take it easy”? Do you believe that a Cesarean delivery is an improvement over vaginal delivery? Do you believe that when women suffer from depression or anxiety it is related to abnormal hormone levels? Much of the worldview of modern obstetric practiced was formed with the belief that women were inept and incapable and that science needed to fix them. Think about that next time you integrate old myths into your practice.

Ritualized child abuse: circumcision

Want to spend an hour cringing and twitching? This is the abridged version of “Cut: Slicing Through the Myths of Circumcision“, and you will suffer if you watch it. It is a wasteful, terrible thing to do to a child.

One rabbi interviewed is at least honest about circumcision: “It’s painful, it’s abusive, it’s traumatic, and if anybody does it who isn’t in a covenant ought to be put in prison…I do abusive things because I’m in covenant with god.” What nonsense. What a wretched excuse for abusing children.

(Warning: lots of shots of babies getting chopped, as well as closeups of adult penises.)

The arguments for circumcision are pathetic and awful.

  • “You either believe [in the covenant of circumcision] or else nothing is true”. I’ve heard that before: it’s the argument creationists use to defend the absolute literal truth of the book of Genesis, because if that’s not true, the story of Jesus falls apart, and therefore the whole of Christianity is false. Yeah, so? Then it’s false.

  • “The mystery of circumcision is profound”. Ignorance should not inspire the kind of awe that motivates one to mutilate another person’s body.

  • The health benefits. Total bullshit. As one of the speakers in the movie explains, there have been progressive excuses: from it prevents masturbation to it prevents cancer to it prevents AIDS. The benefits all vanish with further studies and are all promoted by pro-circumcision organizations. It doesn’t even make sense: let’s not pretend people have been hacking at penises for millennia because there was a clinical study. Hey, let’s chop off our pinkie toes and then go looking for medical correlations!

  • It’s tradition. Grandpa and great-grandpa and great-great-grandpa did it, so I’ll perpetuate the cycle of abuse to my children. I have to reject that: it reduces a decision to do irreparable damage to a child to repetitive, superstitious, mindless behavior.

There is no reason, other than certain rare and specific medical conditions, for maiming anyone’s genitalia. Don’t do it to your children.

(Also on FtB)

What killed Steve Jobs?

You’ve probably heard the story going around that Steve Jobs’ death was avoidable, if only he hadn’t been so gullible as to steep himself in quack medicine. It turns out, though, that the story is a lot more complicated than that: David Gorski has written the best summary I’ve seen so far.

In short (because it is Gorski, after all, so it’s exhaustively long), there was an element of woo in Jobs’ early response. After his pancreatic cancer was first diagnosed, he delayed surgery for 9 months to try out some improbably dietary approaches. It was a massive operation that was strongly recommended, so it’s a little bit understandable that he wanted to avoid it, but surgery was also the best and most demonstrably successful approach to take. So first point goes to the verdict of gullibility against Jobs.

However, his cancer was a slow-going kind with a reasonable prognosis, so the delay can only be said to have possibly contributed to the worsening of his condition. Jobs made a poor decision, but not necessarily a fatal one. And subsequently, once he saw that the diet nonsense wasn’t working, he threw himself thoroughly into science-based medicine, getting the best treatment oodles of money could buy, getting the surgeries recommended to him, and even trying out some experimental therapies (real experimental therapies, the stuff where scientists monitor and evaluate the results honestly, not the random shenanigans quacks like to flatter with the word “experimental”).

So the final result is that real science kept him alive and healthy as long as possible, and that an early flirtation with ‘alternative’ medicine might have contributed somewhat to lowering the odds of survival, but that what killed him is cancer. And cancer is a bastard.

(Also on FtB)

Some students should not go into a health profession

I’m afraid Ben Cochran is one of them. He’s a nursing student who wrote a column in a newspaper because he was upset at the time it took for the emergency medical services at his local clinic to help him with his sneezy, phlegmy cold (which, I would have told him, is going to put a low priority on something they can’t really treat anyway). He places the blame: the clinic offers women’s reproductive services, and they were busy helping a “gaggle of preemie sluts [] get a free pass on harlotry” and treating their “cunt problems”.

But he really doesn’t have a problem with these women, he says. He just wants to end women’s medical services and the distribution of condoms on campus.

I don’t take issue with sex mongers. They serve their place. Hell, according to the bible, it’s
the oldest known profession on earth. So you sultry sex fiends are clearly established, but
this is a place of higher being. Please take your gaping holes elsewhere for medical services,
and leave the real health issues to those that actually belong on a college campus.

Yeah, he’s going to make a greeeeeat nurse. He’s already an expert on triage: men with runny noses must be treated before sluts with gynecological issues.

He’s going to have a tough time doing the work, though, with all the holes Ema ripped into him.

(Also on FtB)

Crowdsourcing for a good cancer text

Among the many joys plaguing me recently is learning that I get to teach, for the first time for me and for the first time at my university, I get to teach a course in cancer biology this spring term. I’m not totally unprepared for this — I was on a cancer training grant for about 5 years, got some basic education in clinical oncology as well as the basic science of the processes, and really, it’s all about gene regulation, cell cycle control, signal transduction, and specification and commitment, all stuff that is eminently familiar to a developmental biologist. But still, you can guess what I’ll be doing over Christmas break: cramming for one of the most depressing subjects in the world.

Anyway, here’s what I need. I’m going to have to order books for the students next month: the prerequisite for the course is simply cell biology and major status, so I need something that’s not too advanced, but has a good overview of mechanisms. This will not be a course in clinical oncology, but on the cell biology of cancer…but still, students will expect at least a little bit of direct medical relevance (I’ll probably ask around to find a local doctor who’d be willing to give a guest lecture, too). I am not a medical doctor, and this will not be a course to give out medical advice at all.

So, request #1 is for a good solid intermediate level cancer textbook.

Request #2 is for me: I’m going to have to dive into a crash cramming event in December/January to bring myself up to speed on current developments in the field, so I can be smarter than the students. What are some good review texts for a guy who knows a fair amount of biology but took his last course in oncology about 15 years ago?

(Also on FtB)

Michele Bachmann: pseudo-scientist and anti-vaxxer

There was another Republican debate (I skipped it; there are limits to the horrors I can endure), and apparently, many people think Michele Bachmann trumped Rick Perry by jumping on his ‘liberal’ endorsement of using the HPV vaccine to prevent cancers in women. Bachmann ranted about the federal government forcing innocent little girls to get mental retardation injections, and the teabaggers loved it. They loved it almost as much as they loved Rick Perry’s record of executions.

Orac rips her apart. It’s great fun, and informative, too.

As I’ve pointed out time and time again, Gardasil is incredibly safe by any measure. Also by any measure, it’s been very heavily tested and monitored. Of course, there is no evidence at all that the HPV vaccine can cause mental retardation. I’ve also pointed out how the vast majority of the reports of adverse reactions after the HPV vaccine made to the VAERS database were almost certainly not due to Gardasil and have castigated Medscape, of all publications, for buying into anti-vaccine myths about Gardasil. Meanwhile the American Academy of Pediatrics immediately issued a press release to correct Michelle Bachmann’s false statements about Gardasil. What Bachmann is peddling is pure pseudoscience. I suppose I shouldn’t be in the least bit surprised, given how gullible she is when it comes to science in general and how much she allows ideology to trump science.

Once again, the Republicans step forward as the anti-human, anti-science, anti-health party.

(Also on FtB)

No Jerry, no cure

We’re finally rid of Jerry Lewis and his smarmy, condescending sponsorship of a telethon for muscular dystrophy. I think he meant well, but he had the wrong ideas: this article celebrating his absence makes a significant point. There are many diseases for which there can be no cure short of magically rebuilding entire bodies and brains — that is, no cure short of changing essentially the entirety of who the person is.

All that money was supposed to find what Jerry called “a cure.” Every year he said “We’re closer than ever to a cure.” But every doctor and nurse will tell you the same thing: there is no cure. In the program for the 2011 annual meeting of the Muscular Dystrophy Coordinating Committee, the word “cure” does not appear.

What people with the disability need is help with their symptoms and with mobility. Their quality of life can be improved, their symptoms can be reduced. They also need “accessible public transportation and housing, employment opportunities and other civil rights that a democratic society should ensure for all its citizens.” That’s what Mike Ervin says–he calls himself “a renegade Jerry’s Kid” who was an official telethon poster child in the 1960s.

That’s not a message of hopelessness. To the contrary, it’s saying there are positive improvements that can be made that don’t involve relegating the disabled to the rubbish bin of ‘God’s mistakes’.

(Also on FtB)