October 9th, 2011 by ChristopherChangMD in Research
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In one of the stranger research projects I’ve encountered in awhile, French scientists reported on why in the sport of discus throwing, athletes tend to feel more dizzy than those who hammer throw.
Whether discus or hammer throwing, both require spinning on part of the athlete before letting the discus/hammer go for long distances.
59% report dizziness with discus throwing, but none with hammer throwing. Why?
This occurred even among athletes who did both sports eliminating individual susceptibilities to dizziness.
Based on slow-motion video analysis, it was conjectured that Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Fauquier ENT Blog*
June 24th, 2010 by Harriet Hall, M.D. in Better Health Network, Health Policy, Opinion, Quackery Exposed, Research
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It’s boring to try to ferret out reliable health information from dry medical journals. It’s easier and more fun to watch a movie. A new movie promises to change the way you think about your health. To bring you breakthroughs that will transform your understanding of how to get well and stay well. To share the discoveries of leading researchers and health practitioners about miracle cures that traditional medicine can’t explain.
If this makes your baloney detector light up, good for you!
The Living Matrix: A Film on the New Science of Healing is an atrociously bad movie that falls squarely in the tradition of What the Bleep Do We Know? In his book Nonsense on Stilts, Massimo Pigliucci characterized the “Bleep” movie as “one of the most spectacular examples of a horribly tangled mess of science and nonsense,” and this new movie is more of the same. Bleep was just silly, but The Living Matrix is potentially dangerous because it might persuade patients to make poor decisions about their medical care. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Science-Based Medicine*
May 5th, 2010 by Edwin Leap, M.D. in Better Health Network, Opinion, True Stories
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It’s all too easy to try and quantify everything in medicine. We are, after all, under the widely held delusion that medicine is like physics. A thing that follows fixed, predictable mathematical models. A thing reproducible if only algorithm A is followed for this disease and algorithm B is followed for that disease.
This belief is also held by the government, which doesn’t want to pay for readmissions or mistakes. Because it is believed that all things in medicine can be known from an exam, some labs, some tests, and some studies.
Nevertheless, things happen. Disease are transmitted in public or by families. Medications don’t always work. Bodies change. Bodies age. Humans are non-compliant. Humans are suffering from physiologic phenomena we can’t yet comprehend. Viruses are synergistic with other diseases.
The immunity of our patients is affected by their happiness, their diet, their work history, their family. The algorithms necessary to make medicine anything like physics would be mathematically beyond comprehension. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at edwinleap.com*
September 29th, 2009 by Medgadget in Announcements, Better Health Network, News
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Next Monday, the Nobel Foundation will announce the winner(s) of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In the following two days, two more Nobels will be revealed: in Physics and in Chemistry. Because of the success of last year’s inaugural Guess-A-Nobel Contest, we decided we’ll repeat this event annually until there is no more science worthy of the prize. This year we’re giving out three 8GB Apple iPod Touch devices to those who correctly guess in each of the three science categories. Because we profile a good deal of apps for the iPhone/Touch platform, we thought this might be a useful tool beside all the fun it can provide on the off time. Furthermore, if someone does manage to guess all three correctly, he or she will be getting the souped-up 64 GB version of the iPod device with all the trimmings.
Here are the rules of the game: Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Medgadget*
