The prospect of infections spreading from animals to humans has become all too real with the onset of the current swine flu pandemic, and the threat of a bird flu still looming. But infections can jump the other way too. Decades before the world’s media were gripped with panic over bird flu, humans transferred a [...]

An op-ed that appears in today’s New York Daily News exposes the widespread misleading claims being made by anti-smoking groups about the acute cardiovascular effects of secondhand smoke. The unsupported and biased conclusions of the IOM report about smoking bans and heart attacks are only one example of the loss of scientific integrity of the [...]

You know things are bad when Obama’s Mayo can’t survive on Medicare.  That’s just a travesty.  And your democratically controlled Congress wants to expand Medicare for all?

Providers who do fewer unnecessary tests and services are paid the least, and they are the doctors and hospitals which will go out of business first if we don’t [...]

I try not to overbook at my office. I have about 16 slots every morning for returning patients (fewer if I have new patients booked, which I usually do). I usually schedule, counting new and old patients, 12 patients every morning. If I were to cut my appointment slots down to 10 [...]

I sure hope so. Recently, I have said that I don’t believe in capital punishment; anyway, Canada does not have it any more.
Note: I am not in any way soft on crime or inclined to make excuses for serious perps. I’ve dealt with enough perps in my own life that I have zero interest in [...]

I find one of the most difficult aspects of my day is not dealing with patients who live in the age of immediate gratification and entitlement but rather doctors who don’t.  The patients are easy to deal with.  I tell them the hospital runs on a mysterious just in time schedule where they could be [...]

An excellent post from DBs Medical Rants about the conflicts of today’s money driven medicine.  What should be patient driven decision making, is in fact everything but.  The reality is as long as someone other than the patient pays their health care bills the doctor will always respond to outside forces that pay their bills.  [...]

President Barack Obama signed an order last night declaring that the swine flu is a national emergency. This allows the implementation of emergency plans. So, what is an emergency plan?
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Here’s a great reason for rejecting pop neuroscience, titled “We are neuroscientists and we come in peace”:

Hmmm. Just try coming to war here and see what happens.
Just when it seemed things could get no worse, Hank Greely of Stanford Law School pointed to several areas of potential friction between neuroscience research and widely held religious [...]

Source: Society for NeuroscienceDate: October 20, 2009
Summary:
Animal research is suggesting new ways to aid recovery after spinal cord injury. New studies demonstrate that diet affects recovery rate and show how to make stem cell therapies safer for spinal injury patients. The findings were presented at Neuroscience 2009, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience [...]