Best line ever

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Mosque-Erade
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

John Oliver: You can build a catholic church next to a playground. Should you?

This whole ground zero mosque nonstory, noncontroversy is basically right-wingers being racist and trying find a way to get attention from their failures in time for November, the media gladly complying with whatever they say, and the democrats hemorrhaging votes by feebly attempting to make the fake outrage die down.

Nuclear armageddon

This is a map of nuclear bomb detonations (that we know of) between 1945 and 1998.



It's worth watching all 14 minutes of it, if only to make sure you never live in the Southwest (of course, the US kicks ass at this game).

Fake science legitimized

There's a lot of pseudoscientific or grossly biased "studies" out there that pretend to be actually doing real science. That really can't be stopped. Lots of organizations spend a lot of money to come up with "evidence" to back up whatever they like to promote. What upsets me is when these "studies" get published under the guise of actual scientific work. Some of theme are even peer reviewed. The great PZ brought up an example today from the Southern Medical Journal of a study that showed that prayer improves vision by recruiting subjects from a church revival, not blinding and not having a control. If the Southern Medical Journal is a legitimate medical journal, how did this study make it past the editor (let alone through peer review)? Clearly, the scientific process doesn't matter for this journal.

There are a lot of science journals that have been publishing pure crap (I suppose in order to get more readers) and it really diminishes their value. Not quite this bad, but even bigger named journals like the New England Journal of Medicine have been trending towards legitimizing pseudoscience, such as this recent review of acupuncture (discussed by Orac). A few years ago, I actually got in an argument with an editor from the American Journal of Health-System Pharmacy because they published a letter to the editor that used a posting from prolifeblogs.com to support their argument against the availability of over-the-counter emergency contraception. The response I received from the editor was that they can't be selective against the literature their contributors cite (yes you can! And, a blog post can't count as scientific literature).

So, similar to my post on companies that underhandedly promote religion, I want this post to include a (probably) growing list of scientific journals that aren't exactly scientific:

Completely Fake:
Journal of Cosmology
The Open Information Science Journal - accepted a fake paper without review from a couple of people from MIT claiming to be researchers at the "Center for Research in Applied Phrenology" (CRAP) - as long as they sent an $800 check to an address in a tax-free zone in the UAE.

Has Ulterior Motive:
Australasian Journal of Bone and Joint Medicine (sham journal for Merck provided by the supervillain of scientific journals: Elsevier).
The Journal of Global Drug Policy and Practice - funded by the Department of Justice and only publishes "research" that shows that punishing people is the only way to reduce drug use.

Ignores scientific process for publicity/money/religion:

An exhaustive list of preditory open-source journals can be found at Scholarly Open Access
American Journal of Health-Systems Pharmacy
American Journal of Surgery
British Journal of Psychiatry
Journal of Medical Hypotheses
PLoS One
Social Science Research
Southern Medical Journal
Psychology Today
Synthese

... and more coming when I get the chance to get to them.

King and King

We've been going to the library and randomly grabbing children's books to read to mxh jr (he has no idea what they're about, so any book will do), and we happened to grab a book called "King and King," about a prince who needs to get married and can't seem to find the right person. All the princesses don't cut it out for him. Finally, he sees the person of his dreams (and from the title you could guess that it wasn't a princess). Pretty cool. It's about time that children get exposed to all types of relationships and learn that love isn't about gender.

Of course, some people aren't happy to see this book in libraries. The Amazon reviews bring out some less-than-enlightened reviews. And someone tried to sue a school for having the book, claiming that "the book in school constituted sexual education without parental notification." Pretty lame... with that logic, you'd better get rid of every other book that ends with "and they lived happily ever after." Luckily, the judge threw the lawsuit out saying, "Diversity is a hallmark of our nation."

4th year and radiology

So, I've decided to go into radiology and am starting the last year (#8 - can't believe I've spent nearly a decade here) with a radiology clerkship. Since I last took radiology before 3rd year actually started, now that I've actually experienced a lot of what medicine has to offer, sitting behind a resident or attending while they look at images actually isn't that bad. In a previous post I complained about how med students don't get the most exciting experience in radiology, but I've learned on this rotation, that you actually can. The best way to enjoy radiology is to do it yourself. With 3rd year behind me, I can actually make a reasonable attempt at reading some images. So the advice that I've been given (which works pretty well for me) is to find a free computer in the reading rooms and look through the new studies on your own and try to come up with a diagnosis. Then when the resident or attending go over them, you'll get much more out of their discussion. Amazing how in a few weeks those images that I could make little sense of actually start being somewhat meaningful (I'm looking at you ultrasound).

USMLE Step 2 CS: A waste of $1000

I recently took the clinical skills (CS) portion of step 2 of the US medical licensing exam (USMLE). It's a whole day of interviewing standardized patients (actors), writing notes, coming up with possible diagnoses and ordering lab tests. It definitely covers what every physician should know. What's upsetting though, is that it's a recently-introduced exam that costs $1295 and has a 96% pass rate (and supposedly 100% at our institution). So essentially, every medical student in the country (something like 15,000 students each year) has to take the exam so that only 600 (most of whom probably also have terrible grades and are unlikely to match into a residency program anyway) could be weeded out. We live in a culture of standardized testing. There are whole industries surrounding it (books, tutoring, computer programs, testing centers, patient actors, etc.). So, its not surprising that the company administering the medical licensing exam would like to add yet another exam for students to take. What's disappointing is that physicians in charge of medical licensing go along with it. Residency programs don't care about your Step 2 CS score and I highly doubt that there will be less dangerous physicians around because of this new exam. My cynical opinion is that someone decided that they could make an extra $20 million each year off of medical students and "convinced" those in charge of medical licensing to go along with it.

Oh well, at least I'll never have to deal with fake patients anymore.

Seven alternatives to evidence-based medicine

Two more days of 3rd year left... can't wait.

This article is a pretty funny (but in my experience true) description of how some doctors justify their treatment plans. My favorite:

Eloquence based medicine---The year round suntan, carnation in the button hole, silk tie, Armani suit, and tongue should all be equally smooth. Sartorial elegance and verbal eloquence are powerful substitutes for evidence.