Month: January 2012

It’s almost a hypochondriac’s dream come true…a chance to be tested for all kinds of physical and health parameters. Fitness tests, dual x-ray absorptiometry for body composition determination, blood pressure, height and weight, urine tests, jogging test on a treadmill with heart monitoring, the works. People pay good money for a raft of tests like this to find out there’s nothing wrong with them. Me, I got recruited (randomly selected via my GP) into the Fenland Study and am expected to attend the MRC facilities at New Addenbrooke’s Hospital next month.

I have to fast from 10pm the night before, wear loose clothing and trainers for the tests and bring along a fully indexed folder with all my meds (okay, it’s not that bad, just a short list, honest). They want to know if you have any X-ray procedures the week before the testing, presumably to avoid giving you a second (unnecessary) dose of radiation in a short time…oh and they ask you to confirm that you’re not pregnant.

In fact, aside from the very scary thought of discovering that I am perfectly fit and well, the worst outcome is that in order for them to attach a heart monitor that you wear for six days after the testing session they will have to shave off a patch of chest hair.

Needless to say, I will let you know how I get on…with the tests, not the shaving. The results are in.

A strain of tuberculosis (TB), wholly resistant to antibiotics has been reported and confirmed in India among patients from the slums of Mumbai.

Drug-resistant strains have emerged before in Italy and Iran and multiple-resistant strains have been seen in China and Russia. This emergent strain has meant 12 patients have failed to respond to any antibiotics despite months of treatment. Three have died, the BBC reports.

The American Centers for Disease Control CDC confirmed that the Indian strain appears to be fully resistant to available antibiotics, the BBC says.

A few days ago, I blogged about the “drug addict’s Facebook timeline”, which showed the fictional life and alternative life of Adam Barak. It was “a creative social media campaign” by media agency McCann Digital Israel. Within a few minutes of posting, I had a tweeted comment from a reader pointing out that it was totally unrepresentative of drug addicts prescribed their addictive meds. I am sure it is, but I don’t think that was the target audience for the campaign, despite how tragic any form of drug addiction can be.

I was intrigued to start reading a comment just now on the post that started:

I take 4 medicines a day for Bipolar Disorder, OCD, ADHD & Depression. I have heard MANY people tell me how bad these medications are for me. But, the problem is, I am 17 & I don’t think that I can refuse medication yet. I live in Missouri & I don’t know what the law is here on refusing medication.

It was only as I got further into the rather long comment post that I spotted the author had signed themself “medicines” and used a rather dodgy-looking Yahoo email address. My immediate suspicion was that it was nothing more than a spam and as I got to the bottom of the comment the give away appeared with a spammy link to some online pharmacy. I did a quick search for a random snippet of text from the comment to confirm and found several sites on which the exact same comment had been posted. So almost certainly pure, uncut spam. Now sliced and diced by my blog spam filter and the IP address blacklisted.

If someone suggests trying a medicine from the realm of complementary or alternative medicine and it sounds too good to be true offering to cure almost any ailment and illness, like some kind of panacea, then check this handy chart before you part with your hard-earned cash or put your life in the hands of quacks.

Phrases like “helps your body heal itself” or “removes toxins” essentially means it’s a sCAM, you cannot boost liver or kidney function by ingesting a herbal extract. In fact, when you think about it ingesting any additional substance simply gives your liver and kidneys more work as they have to then metabolise and excrete the components of that substance too. Moreover, some physiologically active extracts of plants and animals may actually interfere with liver enzymes and slow down the detoxification of other substances in your blood or interfere with the normal processing of prescription and/or over-the-counter medicines. By contrast, homeopathy has no physiological activity, it’s just water and sugar pills. Period.

If your putative sCAM practitioner mentions energy as being some kind of universally pervasive force, point out that energy is nothing more than the capacity to do work in the thermodynamic sense and ask them in what units they are measuring the mystical energy of which they speak. If they try to invoke ancient wisdom point out that demons, blood-letting and trepanning are ancient wisdom. If they hint at ancient eastern mysticism, remember the words of the mighty Tim Minchin: “There is no eastern and western medicine, there’s medicine and then there’s the stuff that hasn’t been proven to work.”

To paraphrase the words of physicist turned comedian Dara O’Briain: Just because science doesn’t know everything (if it did, it would stop), doesn’t mean you can fill in the gaps with whatever fairy tale most appeals to you, such as quantum realignment through touch therapy. And, remember, herbal medicine has (indeed) been around for thousands of years (indeed), we tested it and the stuff that worked became medicine.

The best motto to follow is be skeptical and be safe. But, I suspected I’m preaching to the choir here…pardon the analogy, and the alt med brigade will simply cry conspiracy and tell me I’m a shill for the pharma companies. There is no conspiracy and I am not.

No matter how diligent a person is, there’s always a chance that someone malicious could slip something into your drink on a night out. Even an innocent non-alcoholic beverage can ruin your night and perhaps your life if spiked. "Date rape drugs," have led to at least 200,000 rapes in the US alone according to 2007 Department of Justice statistics.

One of the tell-tale signs of a spiked drink is a blue tint, which is presumably easier to spot in a glass of Chardonnay than a Blue Lagoon cocktail, but there are available test strips for sale. Advice from Wired on how to tell if your drink has been spiked with Rohypnol, GHB, ketamine (roofies): Check Your Drink.

You know all that guff about drinking red wine being somehow good for you despite the fact that it is up to about 15% potent organic solvent by volume? It was the resveratrol wasn’t it? The substance red wine that’s supposed to have had health benefits…well…The University of Connecticut just released details of a scientific fraud investigation.

“An extensive research misconduct investigation has led the University of Connecticut Health Center to send letters of notification to 11 scientific journals that had published studies conducted by a member of its faculty. Dipak K. Das, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Surgery and director of the Cardiovascular Research Center, was at the center of a far-reaching, three-year investigation process that examined more than seven years of activity in Das’s lab.”

Derek Lowe has more of the details over on In the Pipeline and reports that Das allegedly “had a business relationship with Longevinex, a well-known supplier of resveratrol supplements.” He also points out that despite the 60,000-page report from UConn, Das is “not going down without firing all his ammo”.

I have reported on resveratrol in the past but have in recent years been less keen to discuss the notion that single compounds whatever their source can have any of the panacea-like effects that increasing hyperbole suggests. Nevertheless, science can do without scandals of this sort, it reduces public confidence in genuine research and gives the “alternative” brigade another piece of ammunition with which to make conspiracy claims. Of course, in this case it was the alternative supplements industry that was exploiting the supposed research. As Lowe points out, the case for resveratrol was never clearcut. For me, I enjoy drinking red wine but would never consider it a health-giving pass time. This case simply corks another spurious claim.

The other researchers in this field? Presumably above reproach. Das, according to Lowe, isn’t even that big a player…

My issue of Education in Chemistry arrived today complete with a nice big poster of burning elemental symbols, each coloured to represent the actual flame test colour you get when burning lithium, barium, potassium etc. It is a promo for the Cambridge Chemistry Challenge Lower Sixth (C3L6).

But, this is no ordinary poster. Grab your iPad or iPhone and install the Zappar app, load up the Flaming Elements module and point the camera at the poster and the magic of augmented reality will see the elemental symbols burst into flames. Tap an element and the symbol spins to reveal periodic details, while a narrator tells you a little about the chemical in question. The previous stuff I’d seen demonstrated by Zappar at #Meerkats11 were purely entertainment, this implementation is both entertaining and educational.

You don’t even need the poster for the app to work. Just visit the Zappar page on your laptop or desktop and point your iOS camera at the screen and you’ll get the flames. I just tested it with the thumbnail on this page pointed at with an iPod camera and even that worked fine.

A placebo is “a substance or procedure a patient accepts as medicine or therapy, but which has no specific therapeutic activity”. In other words, it simulates a medical treatment and deceives the patient. Is this why practitioners of spurious complementary and alternative medicine (sCAM) are so keen to “harness the power of the placebo”? You bet.

The deception component of giving a placebo is critical to it having any effect and as such is why in general practice and conventional medicine in general you will not find sugar pills being prescribed except as part of a clinical trial. That said, there is anecdotal evidence and a few limited studies that show even when told they are to receive a proverbial “sugar pill” some patients will see some recovery from whatever ails them.

sCAM artists, of course, usually prescribe nothing but placebos. The likes of Reiki, crystal healing, homeopathy etc are pure placebo. In the case of the increasingly common use of homeopathy for “drug-free” malaria prophylaxis CAM is even more dangerous than no intervention at all as it lulls patients into a false sense of security.

David Gorski writes at length on the ethics of placebos in his latest column for Science Based Medicine and points out that: “Using placebos outside of a clinical trial is now generally considered at best paternalistic and at worst downright unethical, because it violates informed consent and patient autonomy.”

That is certainly not stopping those in sCAM exploiting patient ignorance of the nature of the placebo effect and the recent surge of scientific interest in how various factors affect recovery even when they have no direct physiological activity.

Rebranding CAM as “harnessing the power of placebo”.

In what Mashable calls “a creative social media campaign”, media agency McCann Digital Israel has exploited the Facebook Timeline feature to promote the Israel Anti-Drug Authority. It uses the split-screen layout to create two views of a year in the life of fictional addict/non-addict, Adam Barak, to show the course of events and how either being an addict or not, as the case may be changes him over the year.

Facebook timeline addicts. Mashable’s post linked to the page, but it looks like that’s been killed, possibly because there is a genuine Adam Barak on Facebook who seems to post nothing but his daily horoscope and little else on his wall. Also rather unfortunate, although perhaps deliberate is that they gave their character the surname Barak. Not quite Barack…but wtf anyway?

Nevertheless, you can watch Adam Barak’s Timeline unfold via this Youtube clip:

Nicolas Steno (1638-1686) was a scientist and Danish Catholic cleric who was a pioneer in both anatomy and geology. By 1659, he had decided not to accept a statement as true simply because it was written in a book, but rather to rely on his own research. He is considered the father of geology and stratigraphy by some and was (ironically enough given the stance on fossils taken by many people of Christian faith these days) beatified in 1988 by Pope John Paul II. Today he is celebrated with a Google Doodle.

Steno was not first to realise that fossils derived from long-dead organisms, his contemporaries Robert Hooke and John Ray spotted that too. However, Steno realised how fossils might have been laid down in layers. His landmark theory that the fossil record was a chronology of the creatures that lived in different eras was essential to the development of Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection.