May 2nd, 2011 by RyanDuBosar in Humor, Research
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Swearing really can relieve pain, but only if one doesn’t do it daily.
Researchers at Keele University in England have considered this topic before, and most recently, they studied whether people who swear more often in everyday life get as much pain relief from cursing as those who swear less frequently.
Researchers recruited 71 participants who completed a questionnaire that assessed how often they swore. Pain tolerance was assessed by how long participants could keep their unclenched hand in icy water (5° C, capped at 5 minutes) while repeating a chosen word. The word was either a swear word (self-selected from a list of five words the person might use after hitting their thumb with a hammer) or a control word (one of five they might use to describe a table). Interestingly, one person was excluded from the study because they did not list a swear word among their five choices.
Results appeared in NeuroReport.
Swearing increased pain tolerance and heart rate, and decreased perceived pain compared with not swearing. But, the more often people swear in daily life, the less time they were able to hold their hand in the icy water when swearing compared with when not swearing. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*
April 25th, 2011 by RyanDuBosar in News
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Drug-resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureus were found in nearly half of meat and poultry samples, and were likely from the animal themselves, a study reported.
Researchers collected and analyzed 136 samples of 80 brands of beef, chicken, pork and turkey from 26 retail grocery stores in Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and Flagstaff, Ariz. Among the samples, 47% were contaminated with S. aureus, and 52% of the strains were resistant to at least three classes of antibiotics–and some to nine antibiotics.
Translational Genomics Research Institute, a non-profit research organization, conducted the study and published results in Clinical Infectious Diseases.
DNA testing suggested that the food animals themselves were the major source of contamination. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*
April 23rd, 2011 by RyanDuBosar in Quackery Exposed
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A handful of physicians are collaborating to take Mehmet Oz, MD, to task on what they’re calling outlandish claims and bad medical advice. Their suggestion is to no longer pay attention to that man behind the curtain.
David H. Gorski, MD, PhD, at the blog Science-Based Medicine went after Dr. Oz for hosting segments about faith healing and consulting psychics. Dr. Gorski pulls no punches, saying, “Dr. Oz has in some ways imitated Oprah and in some ways gone her one better (one worse, really) in promoting the Oprah-fication of medicine. And this season has been a particularly bad one for science-based medicine on The Dr. Oz Show.”
(Dr. Mehmet Oz may be using his “Degree in Thinkology” to come up with some of his show topics.)
Val Jones, MD, the woman behind the curtain at GetBetterHealth.com, joined the crusade against Dr. Oz, saying that he’d descended from “competent and caring cardiothoracic surgeon whose research interest was reducing preoperative stress” to “America’s chief snake oil salesman.” She is organizing a campaign to drown out the bad information with better messages. (As a disclosure, ACP Internist‘s blog contributes to and draws posts from GetBetterHealth.com.)
ACP Member Peter A. Lipson, MD, also wanted to clear the air about primary and secondary prevention of heart attacks, “one of an internist’s most important tasks, given that heart disease is one of the three top killers of North Americans.” Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*
April 18th, 2011 by RyanDuBosar in Research
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Physicians recommend treatments with higher survival rates for their patients, but they make more mental mistakes when they are the patient and have to choose for themselves.
Psychologists know that when people make decisions for others, they are dispassionate enough to be less swayed by extraneous factors. Even toddlers make less impulsive decisions for others than they do for themselves.
Researchers surveyed general internists and family medicine specialists about two scenarios, each with two treatment alternatives. Both outcomes involved a choice between surviving a fatal illness but with sometimes crippling outcomes. Physicians were randomized to groups in which they imagined themselves as the patient facing the decision, or in which they were recommending an option to a patient. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at ACP Internist*
April 16th, 2011 by RyanDuBosar in Research
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Chronically-ill Medicare patients spent fewer days in the hospital and received more hospice care in 2007 than they did in 2003, but their intensity of care increased as well, according to a report by the Dartmouth Atlas Project.
While in the hospital less, patients had many more visits from physicians, particularly specialists, and spent more days in intensive care units, as result of growth in intensive care and specialist capacity, the researchers said.
Intensive interventions can lower a patients’ quality of life and cost more, the researchers noted. About one-fourth of all Medicare spending stems from the last year of life, and much of the growth in Medicare spending is the result of the high cost of treating chronic disease, the authors noted. Following patient preferences for end-of-life care may reduce such spending. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at ACP Hospitalist*
Researchers recruited 71 participants who completed a questionnaire that assessed how often they swore. Pain tolerance was assessed by how long participants could keep their unclenched hand in icy water (5° C, capped at 5 minutes) while repeating a chosen word. The word was either a swear word (self-selected from a list of five words the person might use after hitting their thumb with a hammer) or a control word (one of five they might use to describe a table). Interestingly, one person was excluded from the study because they did not list a swear word among their five choices.
