As you’ve likely heard, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) died tonight of a malignant brain tumor at age 77.
I’m thinking that his death may be the impetus to get health reform passed this year. Whether that means liberals will try to ram something through without GOP support or Kennedy’s friends on the Republican side [...]

Over the years we’ve written quite a bit (well over 3000 posts) here and on the old site at blogger.com. Some of them have been ephemeral comments, some of them whimsical and but many of them dealing with serious topics that couldn’t be accommodated in the format of a single blog post. The ones explaining [...]

In a press release issued last week, the national anti-smoking group Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) warned the public of the dangers not only of electronic cigarette use but also of “secondhand electronic cigarette smoke.”
The press release warns the public of the dangers of exposure to carcinogens it alleges are present in the exhaled [...]

Source: University of Wisconsin-MadisonAugust 24, 2009
Summary:
MADISON — A team of scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health has successfully grown multiple types of retina cells from two types of stem cells — suggesting a future in which damaged retinas could be repaired by cells grown from the patient’s own [...]

While we fritter away our last week at the beach, here’s another installment of past posts on flu science. There are three subjects, but one of them took three installments to relate. That’s because these involve cutting edge science papers in influenza science and we wanted to take enough time to explain them in ways [...]

In the differential diagnosis of masses within the dural sinus it is important to consider dural sinus thrombosis which is potentially dangerous and needs immediate management. Thrombosis usually involves an entire segment of a sinus or multiple sinuses and can extend to cortical veins, whereas arachnoid granulations produce focal, well-defined nodular defects in the sinuses. [...]

Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not dead. Instead I’ve been working hard as a new surgical intern and sadly not finding the time to write for the denialism blog. However, now more than ever, it seems that we need to talk about the problem of denialism.
Two major new issues for denialism [...]

This week the New York Times reported on the problem of drug company-sponsored ghostwriting of articles in the scientific literature:

A growing body of evidence suggests that doctors at some of the nation’s top medical schools have been attaching their names and lending their reputations to scientific papers that were drafted by ghostwriters working for drug [...]

An article published last week on the Wall Street Journal’s Health Blog quotes Cleveland Clinic CEO Toby Cosgrove as lamenting the fact that he cannot legally refuse to hire morbidly obese individuals and as supporting stigmatization of, and discrimination against, overweight individuals.
As I reported here in July 2007, the Cleveland Clinic has deemed smokers to [...]

Sci will go ahead and put it out there: she hates smoking (I mean tobacco). It’s gross. It smells. You NEVER get that freakin’ smell out of your hair. And your teeth get all nasty. Not to mention to horrendous side effects, things like cancer and cardiovascular problems and [...]