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I'm not too proud to admit I wasn't sure exactly what Cirrhosis of the liver was despite hearing the jargon several times in the past. Here's some reference.
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/cirrhosis/DS00373
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcoholic_liver_cirrh osis

And here's me, remembering from one of the Looney Tunes: Sir Osis of Liver

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/cirrhosis/DS00373
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcoholic_liver_cirrh osis

Also, could you tell us how likely it is that you would have BOTH versions of the flu at the same time? Seems to me that would be pretty small.

You're not getting it. It only takes one person with Avian flu to get the the regular flu as well, and you've got a pandemic. Period. So how unlikely is it for someone with Avian flu, who's immune system is already seriously compromised to get the regular flue as well? Not terribly unlikely.

You see, when you get the Avian flu, you're immune system isn't what saves you, it's what kills you. That's why in flu pandemics, it's the young healthy people who tend to die. Your body starts sending a massive immune response that destroys lung tissue. While your lungs are in this perilously compromised state, you are far more vulnerable to any other illness, so simply exposure to human flu is just about a guarantee that you'll get it.

There are so many sources to site, jesus man, learn to use Google. Start of at Wikipedia. Look up Asian flu, Hong Kong Flu, Spanish Flu, H5N1 flu. Check their references. Check here, and here, and here.

And frankly, if you can't figure it out yourself from that stuff, then you're just never going to get it and there's no point in me wasting my time trying to explain it to you. You'll just figure it out when your friends and family start dropping dead left and right, if you don't go first.

More can be found here, here and here.

Other than that, it would be pretty hard to work next to people talking to themselves, as some are unable to speak in a hushed voice.

Furthermore, having programmers talk to computers would definitely knock the profession's geek-factor up by a notch or two; BAM!

To do some wild speculation, I would guess that this is caused by the fact that we tend to look in a constant direction at all times. Part of how nature has evolved is that whenever you move your eyes from one object to another, you blink. (Google "saccade" and "blink" for more info - I can't quickly find anything concise.)

To add to the speculation, this is probably even more pronounced than when reading, since at least then you need to go the next line, turn pages, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_counseling
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewontin's_Fallacy
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/sickle-cell-anemi a/DS00324/DSECTION=4

Will get you started. Yes databases of where genetic loci historically came from do exist, and are being expanded as we learn more.

What purpose does it serve? The most obvious is as an aid to diagnosis, much of which is sorting out the likely probabilities of symptoms from unlikely. Just because we all want to live in a colorblind society is no excuse to misdiagnose a black kid suffering from a sickle cell crisis because you want to give him the same diagnosis you'd give a white kid.

Secondly, an emerging field is to examine the effects of drugs on different genetic populations. Drugs can react differently in people depending on their genetic makeup. If you know that a rare mutation, one found mainly in Koreans, causes severe side effects with a certain drug, if you are Korean, you should probably not take the risk in taking the drug and use an alternative instead.

How do you know it's scientific? Statistics tells us what is scientific and what is not.

One in 12 (8.3%) African Americans (AA) is a carrier for sickle cell anemia (see the reference in my first post). Its percentage is much lower in whites (W) (let's say 0.1% to invent a number).

Let's say that the probability that someone has sickle cell anemia is P(S), and is perhaps 0.15% worldwide (again inventing numbers).

Thus, P(S) = 0.15%, but the conditional probabilities are P(S|AA) = 8.3% and P(S|W) = 0.1%

This numbers come from millions of samples. Are the differences statistically significant? Yes, unquestionably so. Therefore it is a scientifically valid statement to say that black people are more likely to have sickle cell anemia than white people. With one swoop, we can discard confounding questions of what exactly is a "Race" -- which is probably never going to be answered in a such a manner as to satisfy everyone. But if self-reported race is enough to show a very statistically meaningful difference, then it is scientifically legitimite to report the difference and keep it in mind during diagnosis and treatment.

Again, it's simply wishful thinking that we are all identical geneticly. It's even on the surface an absurd claim, almost by definition.

As I said in my original post, it's also absurd to claim one person superior to another because he has higher or lower levels of melanin. But I find it very suspicious when people try to deny incontrovertable science for their own agendas.

> lead based paint whas removed from the market because people were experiencing health problems from being exposed to it.

The problem isn't just because it's a metal, the problem is that lead itself causes health issues mostly unrelated to how it's used. In paint, the lead is in tiny particles that are easier to be consumed accidentally (eg, paint chips on the floor where a small child is playing). I wouldn't recommend eating copper filings, mind you, but lead is more dangerous because of the toxicity that aluminum & copper simply do not have.

If you are interested (probably not, but what the heck), a few sites contradict each other as to whether lead can be absorbed through the skin (such as by playing in a sandbox with lead painted sides). Mosts sites I found say you can, but this Mayo Clinic Article (and WA State Dept. of Ecology) says that most products (except diesel gasoline) containing lead do not enter through skin. This EMSA article and this ACNEM study say otherwise.

So this seems reasonable to me, and doesn't strike me as flip flopping.

Except, of course, for the fact that in previous statements, Bush has stated that in order to "protect" (from what, exactly?) marriage, it must be defined as only between a man and a woman, and that same sex couples do not deserve the same rights as others in this country. However, I agree: it's not flip-flopping, it's just that he doesn't actually know what he's said (or believed) in the past.

It's remarkable that two (at least) of the last three republican presidents can't (couldn't) remember what they say or do from day to day. It's also remarkable that those two presidents had essentially the same staff.

Living 2 blocks from a somewhat large hospital I understand about the cell phone ban in hospitals. However, they DO use pagers quite extensively there. From what I understand they run on a different enough frequency and waveform that the equipment in question isn't bothered by it.

Frankly, with my relatively sedentary lifestyle, it's absolutely obvious to me that if i could manage a coke or a piece of cheesecake after physical therapy, i'd be home free. (I recommend anybody heading for a carnivore's diet to make sure that they know what gout is, because it's something that anybody making sudden changes should be aware of. )

Here is an interesting site for calculating calorie use by activity. No, it doesn't have every activity. And it's pretty general. I advise you to enter your weight- in pounds, i think, and put the counter at 1 minute. Then multiply that by how much time you spend jumping rope, walking in circles, twiddling your thumbs, whatever- it will give you an idea of the average amount of calories someone your size burns off. I don't have to remind you that averages lie- but it will still at least be a ballpark figure.

And in the meantime, i'm up to six meals a day, and down to a size 3. In women's clothing, that means that it's very, very difficult to buy things that don't have tweety bird on them... because the odds of finding clothes that fit increase the more time i spend in the kids department.

Frankly, I say again that we've been through all of this before, and if anybody from the last debate is posting again at the same-or-higher weight after telling us how much they lost, I'm amused.

I'm a medical writer so I can comment on the medical content of the sites in the Consumer Webwatch reports. I don't think they're good enough.

(Since I write for the web, I found the programmer comments very useful. OK, I'll change that code in my site RSN).

I agree completely that (my) content doesn't matter if you can't find it, and without good graphic design, backed up by good programming (thanks guys), you can't find anything on those web sites (which have thousands of pages). Everything you want to know about medicine is on the Internet many times over, but the problem is (1) finding it (2) in a form that you can understand and (3)evaluating its accuracy and validity.

Here's a good example: I went to a doctor for a checkup, and he didn't perform a digital rectal examination, although he did give me a guiac test. A DRE is a way of screening for prostate cancer and rectal cancer, and the American Cancer Society among other well-known organizations recommends it for everyone above 50, like me. A guiac test samples the stool for blood, which is often a symptom of colon cancer. Various organizations also recommend sigmoidoscopy (a fiber optic scope that goes through the rectum and up the colon about a foot) and colonoscopy (which goes up the colon even farther) as screening for colon cancer. My medical textbooks were either out of date or ambiguous on these issues.

So, here's my question for the medical web sites:

Should my doctor have performed a DRE on a 50-year-old man in a routine physical?

My first stop was the web site rated No. 1 by the experts National Institutes of Health. Once I got there, I realized that I had to refine the question. What I really wanted to know is,

would a DRE have lowered my chances of dying of cancer?

As it turned out, there are scientific studies with control groups that found that there was no good evidence that patients who had screening DRE, sigmoidoscopy or colonoscopy lived longer than patients who did not. However, patients screened with guiac tests did live longer (endpoint of death, they call it). I found this on the professional side of the site, not the consumer side, couched in technical language. Not easily accessible or understandable -- for something that your life depends on.

So when I read the Consumer WebWatch report, I decided to see how the expert's No. 2, MayoClinic.com handled it. To my surprise and dismay, the Mayo Clinic web site, in its extensive discussion of screening for colon cancer, did not make the point that only guiac testing had been shown to save lives. There is criticism in the medical literature that doctors don't provide enough hard information to their patients to enable patients to make an intelligent decision. I think the fact that the life-saving ability of 3 of those 4 screening tests is not supported by evidence-based medicine is an important fact for patients that the Mayo clinic should have provided for patients who are trying to decide whether to take an uncomfortable and (for the scopes) expensive test with a risk of perforating the bowel.

Evidence-based medicine, BTW, is a term of the art, and a good Google search. It means practicing medicine on the basis of scientific evidence, when it exists (the catch: you wind up saying, "science doesn't know" too much of the time).

EBM started when 2 doctors in Canada were having trouble keeping up with all their reading, and said, "Hey, let's just read the stuff that's supported by scientific evidence." That cut down the pile significantly.

A good explanation is on the Bandolier web site, from Oxford, UK. This will reduce medicine to the rationality that engineers and other geeks are used to thinking in.

What is series:
Evidence-based Medicine

Bandolier

Forms of evidence
Evidence is presented in many forms, and it is
important to understand the basis on which it
is stated. The value of evidence can be ranked
according to the following classification in
descending order of credibility:

I. Strong evidence from at least one
systematic review of multiple well-designed
randomised controlled trials.

II. Strong evidence from at least one properly
designed randomised controlled trial of
appropriate size.

III. Evidence from well-designed trials such as
non-randomised trials, cohort studies, time
series or matched case-controlled studies.

IV. Evidence from well-designed
non-experimental studies from more than
one centre or research group.

V. Opinions of respected authorities, based on
clinical evidence, descriptive studies or
reports of expert committees.

BTW, when people ask me where to find medical information on the Internet, I recommend peer-reviewed sources, starting with the Merck Manual Home Edition , then British Medical Journal, then Medicalstudent.com.

But you can't do it on the Internet alone without professional guidance -- medical librarians explained to me how to search the medical literature. And very often what you want to know is only available on paper.

I went into this in more detail when I taught a class in medical journalism. I interviewed a medical librarian and posted her explanation in an article on my web site. That's why brick libraries are so valuable -- they don't just have paper, they have librarians.

Dude, if your nuts really do look like that, you may want to get checked out for scrotal masses. While most are benign, there can be some really nasty ones that lead to infertility or even the necessity of testicleotomies.

Here at Mayo, we have performed the most RRP's (radical retropubic prostatectomies) than anywhere in the world. We have the largest database of patients that have had them out. So we have some authority to make these recommendations. It was not 1 month ago that the chair of the department, another surgeon and I were discussing this and the conclusion was that for the next year or two we can't offer prostatectomy removal by da vinci and offer the same low degree of complications as you can offer with RRP.

In prostate removal, the primary goal is removavl of the cancer. Secondary goals are preservation of quality of life such as 1)continence - the ability to control your urine and 2)erections - preservation of the nerve pathways at time of surgery. Since the nerve pathways run past the seminal vesicles directly next to the prostate it requires delicate excision to preserve these. You won't enjoy the same success statistics for quality of life if you have your prostate removed by robot right now.

Okay, I'll agree the summary of the article is rather fitting and somewhat funny, but the rest of Restil's comments are in very bad taste.

In case no one noticed, the guy is mentally ill. He has serious problems, and they are not his fault. He didn't chose to "drive himself into depression" or any such thing. Manic depression (aka bipolar disorder) is one the most clearly nuerochemically linked and genetically linked mental illnesses there is. It's hardly his fault that some of his nuerotransmitters receptors are functioning incorrectly. Unlike simple (unipolar) depression, manic depression can't be solved by talk therapy alone, it is a physical illness of the brain that must be controlled with medication.

Yes, he's paranoid. Yes, he seems unable to hold a job. Yes, he has suicidal epsiodes. Is this his fault? No! He has a disease that literally makes his mind unable to function the way a normal person's does. Join the rest of us in the 21st century and quit blaming the patient for something beyond his control.

In the mean time, moderators, why am I reading this distasteful junk at Score:4?

For more info on bipolar disorder, see here, here, or here.

I hope this post doesn't cause a "wear you tinfoil hats cuz aliens use aspartame to control your brains" discussion. Read this."