shadiahm 's List: Medical

• But "this is relative peanuts compared to Dr P. Trey Sunderland III, a senior psychiatric researcher at the NIH, who took $508,500 in fees from Pfizer, Inc. whilst collaborating with them and endorsing their drug [Lipitor],"
• Returning to Goozner's story, did the letter his group wrote to the NHLBI in 2004, spark public discussion about the new cholesterol guidelines? No. "We released the letter to the press, but the mainstream of the national press ignored us," Goozner recalls.
• In 2008, Goozner is happy to see the statin controversy hit Business Week's cover -- though he can't help but wonder, "Where were these guys three years ago? Now, call me a cynic, but why does my perverted mind think to itself as I watch this coverage: Yeah, now we hear, just when the world's best-selling drug [Lipitor] is about to go off patent."
• The New York Times, to its credit, was quick to respond, noting that "what the [American Heart Association] did not note in its statement ... was that the group receives nearly $2 million a year from Merck/Schering-Plough Pharmaceuticals, the joint venture that markets Vytorin.

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• Anslinger's other theme was that white girls would be ruined once they'd experienced the lurid pleasures of having a black man's joint in their mouth. "Colored students at the Univ. of Minn. partying with female students (white) smoking and getting their sympathy with stories of racial persecution," he noted. "Result, pregnancy."
• . From the 19th-century campaigns against opium and alcohol to the crack panic of the 1980s, they have all been fueled by racism and cultural war, conflated with fear of crime and occasionally abetted by well-intentioned reform impulses.
• The rural puritans were abetted by middle-class do-gooders who, when they saw a slum-dwelling factory hand come home drunk and beat his wife, would blame the saloon instead of the pressures of capitalist exploitation or the license of misogyny
• Marijuana was used mainly by Mexican immigrants and African-Americans.
• The Nixon-era escalation of the war on drugs was one of the few times in U.S. history when white users were a prime target, as marijuana and LSD provided legal pretexts to attack the '60s counterculture.
• In the early 1990s, the U.S. Attorney's office in Southern California went more than five years without prosecuting a white person for crack.
• secret cabals are simpler and sexier villains than sociopolitical forces
• Among the 360,000 arrests for marijuana possession in New York City between 1997 and 2006, the decade when mayors Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg turned the city into the nation's pot-bust capital, 84 percent of the people popped were black or Latino, mostly young men.

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• we postulated that vitronectin  binds fungal beta-glucans and subsequently augments macrophage TNF-alpha  release in response to this fungal component
• whereas higher  concentrations of beta-glucan (> or = 500 micrograms/ml) caused apparent  suppression of the TNF-alpha activity released.
• These findings demonstrate that fungal beta-glucan can  directly modulate TNF-alpha release from macrophages.
• the host adhesive glycoprotein vitronectin  specifically binds beta-glucan and augments macrophage cytokine release in  response to this fungal element

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• New research suggesting that vitamin C can be effective in curing cancer will renew interest in the "alternative" treatment for the terminal disease.

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  Three cancer patients who were given large intravenous doses over a period of several months had their lives extended and their tumours shrunk, doctors reported yesterday.

• For the 19th Century moderns, doctors in a way replaced the increasingly-discredited medieval clergy; instead of saving souls, medical professionals saved the body. This myth, according to Foucault, was part of a larger discourse of the humanist and Enlightenment schools of thought that believed the human body to be the sum of a person. This notion, known as biological reductionism, became a powerful tool of the new sages: Through thorough examination (or gazing) of a body, a doctor deduces symptom, illness, and cause, therefore reaching an unparalleled understanding of the patient.

• Lead researcher Dr Katherine Flegal says she wouldn't make recommendations to the public "that differ in any way from current public health recommendations to eat right, get some exercise and not smoke". But she admits that "the relation of weight to mortality is a fairly complex issue".
• Now, Flegal's research suggests that "normal" may not be optimum in terms of life expectancy.
• But there does seem some acknowledgement that, for the mildly overweight, living healthily may be more important than frantically slimming.
• Dr Mitchell Gail, another CDC report author, is less equivocal. "If you are in the pink and feeling well and getting a good amount of exercise," he told The New York Times, "and if your doctor is happy with your lab values and other test results, then I am not sure there is any urgency to change your weight."

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• In summary, almost all bilingual German-French speaking people who came down
  the Rhine were either the Alsatian speaking people of Alsace and the Mosel
  region of Lorraine, or French Hugenots, some of whom could speak German. Both
  Catholic and Protestants emigrants came from the Alsatian speaking group.
• Thus, it is seen that the name Strausbaugh is probably an American invention or
  an evolutionary derivation from the original, whatever that may have been. The
  names Strausbaugh and Strasbach appear to be typical German names, but it is
  doubtful that Nicholas was even German. He did settle in an area of
  Pennsylvania which soon became predominately German in heritage. Thus it is
  possible that with time the original name became Germanized as well as
  Americanized in both pronunciation and spelling.
  

• nderstanding the physiological changes that accompany CFS, however, has been difficult, but a new study accepted for publication in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism (JCEM) reveals that abnormally low morning concentrations of the hormone cortisol may be correlated with more severe fatigue in CFS patients, especially in women.
• “People with CFS have reduced overall cortisol output within the first hour after they wake up in the morning, which is actually one of the most stressful times for the body,” Dr. Reeves said. “We need further studies to better understand the relationship between morning cortisol levels and functional status of a patient suffering from CFS.”

• The multidimensional descriptive pattern characterizing  the fatigue of individuals with CFS differs dramatically from the  experienced fatigue of healthy individuals, suggesting their  "language of fatigue" has a distinctive quality.

• These data indicated that under conditions of chronic pain, endogenous opioid compounds prevent morphine from causing tolerance, inferring that the use of peripherally acting opioids for the prolonged treatment of inflammatory diseases such as chronic arthritis, inflammatory neuropathy, and cancer is not necessarily accompanied by opioid tolerance.

• When a person performs a task, this network quiets down, he said, but not in people with chronic pain.

  Instead, a front region of the cortex mostly associated with emotion is constantly active, disrupting the normal equilibrium.

  To study this activity, Chialvo did a type of brain scan known as functional magnetic resonance imaging on 15 people with chronic back pain and 15 healthy people.

  They gave their volunteers a simple attention task — tracking a moving bar on a computer screen — to observe the brain shifting out of default mode to handle the task.

  Both groups performed the task well but when they measured areas of the brain activated, differences emerged.

• Some worry about people who go to the doctor too much. Personally, I am more concerned about people who don't go to the doctor when they need to or should because of insurance or financial barriers.^[2] Since we know time is money, is it hard to imagine that people who don't have enough money also don't have enough time? Are we surprised when patients run out of patience?

• How do we fulfill the desire for healthy and sustainably produced food that is increasingly shared by all?
• There are two general directions that have shown promise in closing this food gap: one is through private, largely non-profit projects and the other is through public policy.

• Medicine is littered with false beliefs because doctors assume that if they have been held for long enough they do not need re-examination. The power of belief is one of the most important reasons why medicine works

• Chocolate contains as many as 400 different compounds that promote a better mood and alleviate anxiety, which helps to explain why so many people experience cravings for it.

• funding agencies like to support studies that will give positive results, and they like to support studies that themselves support the beliefs of the funding agents -- i.e., the dogma.
• The result is a world in which, in general, the funding helps to assure that only established beliefs are tested, and when they are, that they're confirmed -- whether they're actually right or not.
• the positive-caloric-balance/overeating hypothesis has taken such hold because both the public (or at least the lean public) and the doctors can't imagine that obesity isn't caused by gluttony and/or sloth. It seems obvious, and the first law of thermodynamics seems to insist it's true -- even though it doesn't.
• One of the things I do in the book is point out that it is relatively easy to find populations prior to the 1960s that were living in extreme poverty, eating substandard diets, low in calories and fats, which had extremely high rates of obesity, within the range that we're seeing today.

• Martin: What would you target as the three biggest myths currently held about obesity?

  Taubes: That the difference between calories consumed and calories expended tells us anything meaningful about why we get fat. That eating less or exercising more are viable treatments for obesity and overweight. That all nutrients -- fat, carbohydrates and proteins -- have equal effects on our propensity to gain weight -- in other words, that a calorie is a calorie is a calorie, as nutritionists are always telling us.
• It's as though their God, whichever one that might be, told them that obesity is caused by eating too much -- by gluttony and/or sloth -- and so they believe that unconditionally, and no amount of contradictory evidence, no failure to explain the actual observations can convince them to question it. They have unconditional faith that they know what the truth is, and there's no place for this kind of faith in the pursuit of science. Science requires skepticism to function. Religion requires faith.

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• Whereas fibromyalgia has been clearly identified as a central nervous system disease. In terms of its diagnosis, it is much more like other chronic pain syndromes, like a migraine headache where you may not have a specific physical finding except for tender points.
• The manifestations of the disease have to do with the central nervous system. Symptoms commonly associated with fibromyalgia, such as fatigue, depressed mood, difficulty thinking, as well as various others, are what we might call neuropsychiatric symptoms. This is a clinical area that is generally not within the scope of rheumatology training or expertise.

• The family studies have basically demonstrated that there is a common factor predisposing in both fibromyalgia and depression. So they are related, but they are not the same thing. Studies in pain laboratories have shown that, in fact, there is a pain-processing dysfunction in fibromyalgia such that minor signals from the periphery are interpreted as pain in the brain, and the brain areas that express pain definitely light up with minor levels of nociception during imaging studies.

  So basically what you have is a central nervous system that is very reactive to even subthreshold painful stimuli. What normal people wouldn't feel as pain is expressed as pain in a patient with fibromyalgia, and the corresponding areas of the brain will light up with pain signals, so it is very real. It's like a central filtering system that's not working right.

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