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http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...

Based on the current weight of evidence of all available data, the risk for humans from the use of nano-structured titanium dioxide (TiO(2)) or zinc oxide (ZnO) currently used in cosmetic preparations or sunscreens is considered negligible. [...] Multiple studies have shown that under exaggerated test conditions neither nano-structured TiO(2) nor ZnO penetrates beyond the stratum corneum of skin.

I'm curious enough how they came up with these exact codes that I'm going to try and find out.

Some of them are specific enough (waterskiing while on fire, for instance) that they must have actually happened, but in that case you'd think they'd have one for getting hit on the head by a falling coconut, which they don't. (Incidentally, falling coconuts account for a single confirmed death in the US, in 1973).

Maybe they chose a particular year as the cutoff for injuries, although I'd imagine at least a few more Americans have been *injured* by falling coconuts after 1973.

There is so much fail in this I don't even know where to start.

Marijuana has far more positive health effects than negative. In fact THC the chemical that gets you "high" is anti carcinogenic and has proven cancer fighting effects http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...

"Purity" of street level product. Oy vey what a statement. You realize your fruits and vegetables have pesticides and herbicides on them as well right? Not to mention all of the nutrient "uptake" from fertilizers is in that plant. You are what you eat, includes plants as well. As for "purity" of the THC content, you either have cheap herb or dank green. Even a plant you grow yourself will have varying quality of THC. In the same way that your vegetables grown in the back yard won't have 100% the same nutritional facts as something grown on a properly fertilized farm.

Finally, PCP laced marijuana? Are you kidding me? Why would any dealer bother lacing weed with PCP? You know PCP is insanely more expensive than marijuana right? Why would a dealer undercut his own prices lacing it with a drug as ridiculous as PCP? Stop quoting DARE literature from 1982.

Want to know a secret about life long tobacco smokers? They're most likely cannabis smokers as well (that anti-carcinogenic effect).

Correctly placed barriers can significantly REDUCE the chance of "crowd crush" and stampedes, it's a common and well-understood technique that is often used to control "mosh pits" at large concerts and similar events. The basic principle is no different to putting baffles in a petrol tanker truck to stop it sloshing about uncontrollably and derailing the truck, a crowd has a "pressure" that is related to it's density, volume, and overall direction of motion. A larger space can build up much higher "spot" pressures than a small space with the same density and motion. As I understand the problem in TFA, the sheer number of people makes it impossible/expensive to simulate the effect of crowd control measures in real time. However the basic principles of "crowd baffles" are well understood and have significantly reduced the likelihood of tragedy over the last few decades that they have been in use. If you find that hard to believe, try obtaining public liability insurance for a large event without having a credible crowd control plan.

The stoning columns probably served this purpose until they were replaced with walls to prevent pilgrims from stoning other pilgrims. Essentially they replaced the pillar "baffles" with a solid barrier. The solution to the stray stone problem may have led to the stampede deaths.

This is going to be an unpopular post. But the premise of the article - that the accident itself caused/will cause no deaths, only overreaction - is simply not true. And their "proof by ghost reference" doesn't help things any.

Here's proof by actual reference.

Radiation risks from Fukushima were more enhanced near the plant, while the evacuation measures were crucial for its reduction. According to our estimations, 730–1700 excess cancer incidents are expected of which around 65% may be fatal, which are very close to what has been already published (see references therein).

Estimates not good enough? Let's try actual measurements of thyroid cancer in children:

Assuming two years for duration on detectable level of cytology until clinical level, incidence rate ratio was 26.98 (95% confidence interval, 14.12-48.61) in the nearest area, and in Fukushima city, it was 19.41 (95% confidence interval,?9.62-37.31), compared with the Japanese mean annual incidence among those aged 15-19 years from 1975 to 2008 (i.e., 5 per 1,000,000).

They do note that there's a risk of screening effects, but given the correlation between rates and distance from the plant, they believe that the outbreak is real and needs further study

What did I mean earlier by "proof by ghost reference"? Their first two links just go to NYT search pages that aren't fruitful in backing up anything they claim. The third link takes some work but you can dig out the actual report in question. The NYT article describes it thusly:

Even among Fukushima workers, the number of additional cancer cases in coming years is expected to be so low as to be undetectable, a blip impossible to discern against the statistical background noise.

The actual report says:

The latency time for late radiation health effects can be decades, and therefore it is not possible to discount the potential occurrence of such effects among an exposed population by observations a few years after exposure ... Among the group of workers who received effective doses of 100 mSv or more, UNSCEAR concluded that “an increased risk of cancer would be expected in the future. However, any increased incidence of cancer in this group is expected to be indiscernible because of the difficulty of confirming such a small incidence against the normal statistical fluctuations in cancer incidence.”

Okay, so we do expect more cancer in them - the sample size however is low enough (174 people) that it's hard to prove statistical significance. But wait, this too is an indirect reference - what does its source say? Just a second, but first let's cite one more thing from the IAEA report the NYT article cites (a WHO study):

For leukaemia, the lifetime risks are predicted to increase by up to around 7% over baseline cancer rates in males exposed as infants; for breast cancer, the estimated lifetime risks increase by up to around 6% over baseline rates in females exposed as infants; for all solid cancers, the estimated lifetime risks increase by up to around 4% over baseline rates in females exposed as infants; and for thyroid cancer, the estimated lifetime risk increases by up to around 70% over baseline rates in females exposed as infants. These percentages represent estimated relative increases over the baseline rates and are not estimated absolute risks for developing such cancers”

But back to the UNSCEAR report: here's its section on cancer risks that the IAEA claim cited by the Times was based on:

40. For adults in Fukushima Prefecture, the Committee estimates average life

You'll find that the after-effects of the bombs in Japan were quite limited. Even with dispersal of radioactive material, we find that Japan consistently has lower cancer rates than the rest of the world.

Beneficial Biological Effects of Miso with Reference to Radiation Injury, Cancer and Hypertension

For years the tobacco industry did something along the same lines.
It's the calories stupid.

*Which is accounted for in the above.

Food is an incredibly inefficient source of energy. A kilogram of beef, for example, causes the emission of a couple dozen kilograms of CO2 and contains 2140 kcal. A typical man cycling will burn on the order of 60 calories per mile at 14mph, or 840 calories per hour. Driving should be about 100 (comparing to other activities), so 740 excess kcal, aka 346 grams of beef, aka about 8 kilograms of CO2 for 14 miles, aka about 600 grams per mile. A prius emits 135 grams per mile. A Hummer H2 emits about 660, depending on the version - most large SUVs well less

Before you go off on a rant and call people "dumbass", do the damn math.

And before you start saying "people don't eat just beef" - no, they don't! But a lot of other things they eat are even worse. For example, vegetables - healthy for you, but an utterly terrible ratio of calories per unit CO2 emitted (because they don't contain a lot of calories). Other meats are also very bad - some even worse than beef. Lots of fruits and nuts, while containing relevant amounts of calories are bad because they take so much energy to harvest, process, or ship. Only some relatively narrow categories allow a cyclist to beat a car in terms of CO2 emissions. But food doesn't just have CO2 emissions as its negative consequences, as mentioned, but also others which are sometimes even worse, such as habitat consumption, water consumption, and fertilizer and pesticide pollution.

No, no , no, this is natural transgenics, and that makes things fine, because evolution just smooths things out like that, like it did with the appendix. That was the reaction to natural transgenes in sweet potatoes anyway You joke this might have an impact on the GMO controversy. It won't. Horizontal gene transfer has been known to exist for a long time; amazing what a little hand waving, armchair speculation, and goalpost moving can do to buffer an ideology.

But this doesn't really come as much of a surprise. I think that as more genomes are sequenced and compared to other sequences, we'll probably turn up a lot more examples of horizontal gene transfer. We've already seen a similar case in the plant parasite, striga.

Come to think of it I never did look into if there was an actual correlation between studying an instrument and academic merit or if this was just an old wives tale.

There is definitely an actual correlation between studying an instrument and cognitive skills. Whether or not that translates to "academic merit" is another question, but it absolutely increases intelligence (independent of IQ when musical study is started).

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...

That's a study of young people, but a few weeks ago there was a study showing the same effect with older people in the news.

Knots may be far more interesting and useful than just their use with ropes. There was an unexpected connection discovered between knot theory and Burnside groups: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15576510/

By having a deeper understanding of knot, we may get a better handle on aspects of group theory which has very close connections to quantum mechanics and string theories. So, whilst you may argue about whether that can be considered "practical", it may lead to a deeper understanding of the matter that we're made of.

The article highlights an interesting idea. However, one concern is that most sunscreens (except total blocks like zinc oxide and titanium dioxide-pasty stuff) are composed of biologically active compounds that absorb photons. They degrade quite quickly in a hot environment (typical advice is reapply every 2 hours in the sun-mostly for wearing off). For most cosmetically acceptable sunscreens they would need an environmentally protective device to keep them from degrading quite quickly. You probably shouldn't leave sunblock in a car on a hot day, or use them past expiration as they are in the unusual group of topicals that really do loose potency.

To get to your comments... Well, I'm not so sure Google is the best way to get medical info, but here's what I came up with (I'm not a dermatologist, but I am an MD).

These studies looked to see how much of the TiO2 penetrated the skin and got into blood (none to very little), but only after relatively short exposures (paywalls ahead):
https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/a...
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi...
http://toxsci.oxfordjournals.o...
http://toxsci.oxfordjournals.o...

This one looked at "sub-chronic" exposure (2, 4, and 8 weeks):
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...

Lastly, this one looked at the effects from TiO2 in makeup and while TiO2 wasn't toxic to cells, hitting it with UV radiation caused some free radical formation, whatever that means for tumorogenesis:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...

Bottom line: Sunblock is probably safe and at this point is definitely better for you than constant sunburns.

The article highlights an interesting idea. However, one concern is that most sunscreens (except total blocks like zinc oxide and titanium dioxide-pasty stuff) are composed of biologically active compounds that absorb photons. They degrade quite quickly in a hot environment (typical advice is reapply every 2 hours in the sun-mostly for wearing off). For most cosmetically acceptable sunscreens they would need an environmentally protective device to keep them from degrading quite quickly. You probably shouldn't leave sunblock in a car on a hot day, or use them past expiration as they are in the unusual group of topicals that really do loose potency.

To get to your comments... Well, I'm not so sure Google is the best way to get medical info, but here's what I came up with (I'm not a dermatologist, but I am an MD).

These studies looked to see how much of the TiO2 penetrated the skin and got into blood (none to very little), but only after relatively short exposures (paywalls ahead):
https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/a...
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi...
http://toxsci.oxfordjournals.o...
http://toxsci.oxfordjournals.o...

This one looked at "sub-chronic" exposure (2, 4, and 8 weeks):
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...

Lastly, this one looked at the effects from TiO2 in makeup and while TiO2 wasn't toxic to cells, hitting it with UV radiation caused some free radical formation, whatever that means for tumorogenesis:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...

Bottom line: Sunblock is probably safe and at this point is definitely better for you than constant sunburns.

If one is wearing sunscreen, then "summer will never come" and the body will remain in a state of disrepair. Which benefits the health insurance industry (it's not a "health care" industry).

The geek tends to think like an adolescent.

Although most babies born in 1900 did not live past age 50, life expectancy at birth now exceeds 83 years in Japan --- the current leader ----and is at least 81 years in several other countries.

It wasn't until the 20th century that mortality rates began to decline within the older ages. Research for more recent periods shows a surprising and continuing improvement in life expectancy among those aged 80 or above.

The progressive increase in survival in these oldest age groups was not anticipated by demographers, and it raises questions about how high the average life expectancy can realistically rise and about the potential length of the human lifespan. While some experts assume that life expectancy must be approaching an upper limit, data on life expectancies between 1840 and 2007 show a steady increase averaging about three months of life per year.

Global Health and Aging

In 1925, your life and health insurance client will be dead in 25 years. In 2015, your 25 year old client stands a good chance of living another 60 years. Which do you think yields a better return?

Bad idea. You're making the assumption these things work. The idea is well intentioned, "oh those poor people that have no access to modern western medicine".

Pity the poor Baku in the coastal forest of west Gabon who have a natural immunity and cure for Ebola (There are tribes of Indians in the amazon in Bolivia too. Why? Riddle me this: what does the soil in Bolivia have in common with Senegal? That's the key to Gabon. Wouldn't you rather that than 40 years of trying to make a vaccine that at it's best is 25-75% effective. Note the death rate outside africa. Other than 2 (3?) we didn't hear about, or heard about when their liver had turned to soup, nobody else died of a disease that's up to >99% fatal (WHO).

http://en.ird.fr/the-media-cen...
I think its safe to say it's no longer a "possible" immunity. There's more than one way to skin a cat, and immunization technology from 1720 from the school of homeopathy ("like protects against like"; this remains unacknowledged but unverifiable) is one way but not the only way.

"29 January 2015 Last updated at 00:55 - We've now seen several cases that don't have any symptoms at all, asymptomatic cases," said Anavaj Sakuntabhai who suggested the virus might be mutating.
http://www.bbc.com/news/health...

Giggle. The virus didn't change. People did.

British nurse cured of Ebola credits new drug - and strawberries
"Back in Britain, the decision to try MIL 77 was not difficult. “I said ‘I have Ebola, so, yes, I’d rather have that than high-dose vitamin C,’” she said"
"“I reckon I’ve had 10 punnets,” joked Corporal Anna Cross, who smiled nervously as she talked for the first time after her treatment at the Royal Free Hospital in north London." (10 punnets would be about equal to two 1000mg injections a day)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...

April 2015 - semen found infected after 175 days, twice the previous record.
http://io9.com/ebola-survivors...

The Ebola outbreak in Liberia is over
9 May 2015 -- Today marks 42 days since the last confirmed case of Ebola in Liberia was safely buried — the period of time set by WHO to declare an outbreak over. WHO now considers Liberia free of Ebola transmission.
http://apps.who.int/ebola/libe...

Wednesday, May 13, 2015 - Ebola Not Mutating Beyond 'Normal' Rate, Scientists Say
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medline...

28 May 2015 | Did real-time epidemic modeling save lives in West Africa?
http://spectrum.ieee.org/compu...

Ask yourself what might have happened on October 17 2014.

"Pity the tribes in South America and North America who never suffer the effects of influenza.
"Folklore of past civilizations report that for every disease afflicting man there is an herb or its equivalent that will effect a cure. In Puerto Rico the story has long been told "that to have the health tree Acerola in one's back yard would keep colds out of the front door." 1 The ascorbic acid content of this cherry-like fruit is thirty times that found in oranges. In Pennsylvania, U.S.A., it was, and for many still is, Boneset, scientifically called Eupatorium perfoliatum 2. Although it is now rarely prescribed by physicians, Boneset was the most commonly used medicinal plant of eastern United States. Most farmsteads had a bundle of dried Boneset in the attic

As part of its lifecycle, HIV integrates its viral DNA into the DNA of the cell it infects. In a normal infection, the viral DNA is then processed by the infected cell's own gene expression machinery and the virus starts to replicate. However, sometimes instead of the virus being expressed and made, the DNA is "silenced" by the infected cell, meaning the viral DNA is there but not being actively expressed by the infected cell. These cells then harbor the latent virus for as long as these cells are alive, which for some memory immune cells can be for the rest of your life. This is the virus reservoir. If you take anti-retroviral therapy (ART) drugs, such as the NNRTIs mentioned before or protease or integrase inhibitors, these will inhibit active viral replication, but won't cause any harm to the reservoir viruses that are latent. Randomly* as well, these "silenced" virus DNAs in infected cells that make up the reservoir can become un-silenced, and the virus will start replicating. If you are still taking ART, then nothing happens. If, however, you stop taking the medication, these viruses that pop back up will re-start the HIV infection and within a few weeks you will be HIV+ with viral loads (amount of virus in your blood) the same as before the ART treatment was started. This is why the ART medication must be taken for the rest of the patient's life, not because big Pharma wants to make extra cash.

Interestingly, if you follow patients that have lapses in their ART treatment and sequence the viruses that repopulate the infection, they become more similar (clonal) over time, due in part to the reservoir cells! Since potentially a single virus will do the repopulating from a reservoir cell, you would expect the resulting population of viruses to be more similar to each other than in the original infection, and this is what is observed: Specific HIV integration sites are linked to clonal expansion and persistence of infected cells .

* Random by measurement, not necessarily by mechanism.

Ahh, the famous peer reviewed articles that assert truth. Fairly sure nothing like this could ever happen.

Oops, here's the link to the study: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...

P.s., here's a link to another study that I can't access due to paywall. It was cited in the appropriate place, so it's relevant: http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...

Being in my forties, it's a toss up whether I'd manage to have children at all, and autism is hardly the only thing that increases with maternal age (I seem to recall that there are some risk factors associated with paternal age as well). This was, in fact, my point - even if it was a high priority for their postulated struggling post-apocalyptic community to make babies (and seriously, I think you want to make sure you have the basics covered before you get on with the breeding) I am just not your best candidate. I'd always figured that if I hadn't had kids by the time I was thirty-five - and I was aiming for late twenties - I wasn't having them. However, my ex rather abruptly decided that he wanted not to have kids, and for me to quit my job and take care of him... well, hence the ex part.

(Between my martial arts students and my undergraduate research students, I pretty much get any need to nurture taken care of, and I might make a better teacher than I would a parent. I have a twisted enough sense of humor than I regret not inflicted my genes on the next generation - but when I looked into donating eggs, while apparently I looked like a great donor, they said I'd have to lay off of the training for a month, and, well, no.)

"(Guess why autism rates are skyrocketing? That's right, women having kids well past their thirties because they were too busy having a job. Thanks feminism.)"

There are so many things wrong with this line. First of all, you're pulling out one factor that is correlated (let us repeat together, correlation does not imply causality) and trying to put all the increase in autism rates (which are hard to track anyway because diagnostics have changed so much) at its feet. The research simply doesn't support this - this is clearly far more about your political agenda than about the science. Especially since the science shows linkages to paternal age as well.

(Just a couple of abstract links: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu... , http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu... )

But it's equally asinine to lay women having children later because they have jobs at the feet of feminism. Hell, you could just as strongly make exactly the reverse argument, that feminism in its current form arose in part because of women entering the workforce and achieving such a degree of economic independence. This isn't something that just happened - you're looking at the results of huge changes with industrialization, better medicine, the rise of birth control*, increasing automation of housework, and so on. Do you want to have an economy that works? Well, from where we are right now, women have got to be in the workplace in large numbers - it's not some hobby, it's economic necessity, both on the individual household level and in terms of our country.

* And seriously, for all the guys who seem to fantasize about a time when women would be forced to be homemakers because they got pregnant just like that, isn't it awfully nice to be able to have sex without worrying about having kids? I am highly pro-birth control myself. Yay, more sex, fewer worries.

Being in my forties, it's a toss up whether I'd manage to have children at all, and autism is hardly the only thing that increases with maternal age (I seem to recall that there are some risk factors associated with paternal age as well). This was, in fact, my point - even if it was a high priority for their postulated struggling post-apocalyptic community to make babies (and seriously, I think you want to make sure you have the basics covered before you get on with the breeding) I am just not your best candidate. I'd always figured that if I hadn't had kids by the time I was thirty-five - and I was aiming for late twenties - I wasn't having them. However, my ex rather abruptly decided that he wanted not to have kids, and for me to quit my job and take care of him... well, hence the ex part.

(Between my martial arts students and my undergraduate research students, I pretty much get any need to nurture taken care of, and I might make a better teacher than I would a parent. I have a twisted enough sense of humor than I regret not inflicted my genes on the next generation - but when I looked into donating eggs, while apparently I looked like a great donor, they said I'd have to lay off of the training for a month, and, well, no.)

"(Guess why autism rates are skyrocketing? That's right, women having kids well past their thirties because they were too busy having a job. Thanks feminism.)"

There are so many things wrong with this line. First of all, you're pulling out one factor that is correlated (let us repeat together, correlation does not imply causality) and trying to put all the increase in autism rates (which are hard to track anyway because diagnostics have changed so much) at its feet. The research simply doesn't support this - this is clearly far more about your political agenda than about the science. Especially since the science shows linkages to paternal age as well.

(Just a couple of abstract links: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu... , http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu... )

But it's equally asinine to lay women having children later because they have jobs at the feet of feminism. Hell, you could just as strongly make exactly the reverse argument, that feminism in its current form arose in part because of women entering the workforce and achieving such a degree of economic independence. This isn't something that just happened - you're looking at the results of huge changes with industrialization, better medicine, the rise of birth control*, increasing automation of housework, and so on. Do you want to have an economy that works? Well, from where we are right now, women have got to be in the workplace in large numbers - it's not some hobby, it's economic necessity, both on the individual household level and in terms of our country.

* And seriously, for all the guys who seem to fantasize about a time when women would be forced to be homemakers because they got pregnant just like that, isn't it awfully nice to be able to have sex without worrying about having kids? I am highly pro-birth control myself. Yay, more sex, fewer worries.

"Plants only absorb light in the red visible spectrum and parts of the ultraviolet spectrum"

Nope. Red and blue are just the quickest to be absorbed, while green actually passes through more easily and bounces around more easily, and primarily powers growth under the canopy. When plants reflect (actually re-transmit) green, you're only seeing certain wavelengths of green coming back at you. That's because there are hundreds to thousands of biological pathways that works with various wavelengths of light, and are absorbing them and re-emitting a photon with a lower energy level.

Plants evolved under full spectrum sunlight. Of the visible light that makes it through the atmosphere, green has the highest amount of overall energy. For plants to not utilize it would be ungodly wasteful. Too much blue is damaging to chlorophyll. Too much red can cause premature flowering/reproduction.

Balanced white light is the way to go.

http://pcp.oxfordjournals.org/...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...

Many associate Sensory deprivation with torture but short-term sessions have been described as relaxing and conducive to meditation. Sessions of up to 24 hrs for therapeutic purposes are referred to as Restricted Environmental Stimulation Therapy (REST) There is a substantial amount of research in treating addictive behaviors with REST is reviewed with smoking, overeating, alcohol consumption, and drug misuse. There are two types: Flotation REST and Chamber RESTIn chamber REST, subjects lie on a bed in a completely dark and sound reducing (on average, 80 dB) room for up to 24 hours. Their movement is restricted by the experimental instructions, but not by any mechanical restraints. Food, drink and toilet facilities are provided in the room and are at the discretion of the tester. Subjects are allowed to leave the room before the 24 hours are complete; however, fewer than 10% actually do. With regard to the article, I would be concerned as some studies have had participant experience hallucination after 48 hrs.

Does anybody know how this compares to the hard sciences? How many published math papers turn out to be incorrect? How many physics experiments cannot be reproduced?

Obligatory citation

By your argument, since scientific findings are always subject to revision in light of future data, they can never be used for decisionmaking. Well screw that, I don't want to live in a world where a double-blind placebo trial carries no more weight than a magic 8-ball.

I do agree with you on two things: first, that she should be given a proper well-blinded test for electromagnetic sensitivity, which I guarantee you she'll fail because *nobody* passes them except by chance ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... ). And second, we agree that this lady "needs help as she is clearly suffering". How about we have someone use actual medicine to figure out what's actually wrong with her, rather than giving her a bit of money and letting her suffer for the rest of her life because she wrongly thinks the wi-fi is to blame?

Careful. In one NIH study they did find one woman that was sensitive to the power cycling of EMF devices. She couldn't sense the device when it was already on and brought into the room, but could sense when it was turned on or off. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...

Keep searching, m8. There really is a lot of stuff out there: Medication errors: prevention using information technology systems

It doesn't do ANYTHING you are talking about

EHRs absolutely do do all of those things, including checking drug interactions, allergies, and pregnancy and lactation warnings, and there absolutely is scholarly evidence of their effectiveness if you care to Google. Here's one concluding barcoding and CPOE are "vital."

If your EHR doesn't do those things, then that's a defect peculiar to whatever software you're using.

The medication lists are ALWAYS wrong or misleading as they are huge and hard to read, harder to update

You think they were any shorter, easier, or more up to date on paper? A bad computer system can make med rec harder, but even a good one can't make anyone give a shit about the patient's PTA meds. Nor can a hospital losing Joint Commission accreditation, apparently.

results from another EMR is always incompatible, so you have to scan it in

Yes, that's very common. It doesn't have to be the case, but it usually is.

Have you read an EMR progress note?

Yes. I have read lots and lots of EMR progress notes. I've seen notes filled with pages of stale labs because computers make it easy to copy forward the entire chart. I've seen notes flagged by the built-in plagiarism tools because copy-pasting an old note (and getting paid when you file it!) is easier than actually rounding on the patient. I've seen SOAP notes filed with weeks-old vitals because one group of residents preferred copying things into and out of Microsoft Word, which didn't exactly have the latest telemetry. I've seen notes with assessments that weren't done, filed on patients that weren't rounded on, because easy money.

But you know what? You can read them. And so can the doctor who sees the patient after you.

Boy, you're really going on that citation thing, you know? Completely missed where I posted sources?

Here, have another couple.

Here's what the World Health Organization and the National Institutes of Health have to say. There was a single female individual in the NIH study that could honestly detect the initiation and termination of a field (power cycling of a device), but when one was already on (or not) she could detect nothing. Other than that, everyone seems to agree that it's mostly psychosomatic in nature and without extensive, double-blind testing the kid has very little chance of winning a diagnosis let alone the suit. I would go with something in the environment other than EMF radiation as a cause, if the little bugger is actually ill at all.

I once dropped sixty pounds and she dropped 40 pounds and we're in our mid-40s and are within 10 pounds of our what we consider to be ideal weights (I'm 5'10" and 195 and lift; she's 5'4" and 125 and runs).

I got news for you: ideal BMI is ~21.7 (see here). if you are 5'10", your ideal weight is about 151 lbs, although admittedly you would be at the edge of the BMI normal range at 174 lbs. At 195 lbs, you are still more than 20 lbs overweight! Just so you know.

Tip: if you want alcohol, plain, high quality Vodka (though certain whiskeys are okay too) is your go-to booze

Alcohol has a lot of "empty" calories. Again, just so you know.

CAPTCHA: frauds. Apropos?

When I see the word Toxins, my bullshit radar activates

I am a physician and yes, my BS meter usually goes up when people who have no understanding of human anatomy, physiology, histology, biochemistry, or pathology start rambling on about toxins. But take it from person who deals with sepsis and critical ill patients on a weekly basis. Bacterial endotoxins are the real deal. There are a significant source of morbidity and mortality in severely ill patients. Also, please realize that this research is in collaboration with Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard's Engineering department.

That being said, I pulled the original article and on first read, it seems to be a potential game-changer. My questions:

1. They liken this to dialysis. Many critically ill patients can not tolerate dialysis due to fluid shifts across the membrane....What sorts of flow are required scaled up to humans would be required. Could this be run on a CRRT-HF type circuit or a SLED schedule?

2. They use FcMBL adsorbed to dialysis tubing. I only see animal studies. What, if any, interaction does this with human proteins and cell lines. e.g. if it causes hemolysis or Agglutination, this would destroy the utility.

3. What is the observed length of endotoxin/pathogen clearance? Ties back into #1.

4. I presume this is Fc based (the only description I saw was "FcMBL protein was expressed and purified from a stable transfection of CHO-DG44 cells "), is this Fc, human, murine, equine, porcine, leporine, or bovine?

More questions will come up...but I have a lecture to prepare...

When I see the word Toxins, my bullshit radar activates

I am a physician and yes, my BS meter usually goes up when people who have no understanding of human anatomy, physiology, histology, biochemistry, or pathology start rambling on about toxins. But take it from person who deals with sepsis and critical ill patients on a weekly basis. Bacterial endotoxins are the real deal. There are a significant source of morbidity and mortality in severely ill patients. Also, please realize that this research is in collaboration with Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard's Engineering department.

That being said, I pulled the original article and on first read, it seems to be a potential game-changer. My questions:

1. They liken this to dialysis. Many critically ill patients can not tolerate dialysis due to fluid shifts across the membrane....What sorts of flow are required scaled up to humans would be required. Could this be run on a CRRT-HF type circuit or a SLED schedule?

2. They use FcMBL adsorbed to dialysis tubing. I only see animal studies. What, if any, interaction does this with human proteins and cell lines. e.g. if it causes hemolysis or Agglutination, this would destroy the utility.

3. What is the observed length of endotoxin/pathogen clearance? Ties back into #1.

4. I presume this is Fc based (the only description I saw was "FcMBL protein was expressed and purified from a stable transfection of CHO-DG44 cells "), is this Fc, human, murine, equine, porcine, leporine, or bovine?

More questions will come up...but I have a lecture to prepare...

Thank you for deflecting and coming up with excuses.

A mother that smokes, drinks, does drugs while knowing she is pregnant is considered to be committing child abuse.

No, it's not abuse because if it were so everyone who had kids and smoked would be committing child abuse and you never, ever see them being charged as such.

What is happening is poisoning, plain and simple. From the mother to the unborn is a direct link so whatever she smokes, drinks, ingests, snorts or shoots goes directly to her unborn. She is poisoning her unborn child but you, and others, apparently don't have a problem with that.

I don't know where your obese argument is headed, but I don't see that as causing problems for the child.

Obese women are at greater risk of having children with congenital defects or stillbirths.

If you want to try and argue that child abuse is perfectly acceptable, so murder should be perfectly acceptable, perhaps you should rethink your argument?

You claiming it's murder doesn't make it so and your argument claiming child abuse is equally false. The fact remains people such as yourself make a big deal of forcing a woman to have a child, even if she doesn't want it, even if she's been raped as a ten year old, even if the kid will die a horribly painful death shortly after it's born because of some genetic anomaly, yet you remain horrifically silent on the slow poisoning of the unborn.

If you're trying to claim the moral high ground that you're trying to protect a "life", you fail miserably because who knows how many "lifes" are killed each year by women who smoke, drink heavily, do drugs or are obese. Apparently when those women kill their child it's no big deal.

Pull up a scientific paper right now. No no... now. Look at the layout and pretend that is modern or ideal.

How different do you want the layout to be in order to be "ideal"? That is a purely subjective criteria. Nonetheless, here is a recent psychiatry paper that does not look like it was laid out in "1942". It has modern references with hyperlinks, it is easy to search, and there is a PDF version as well if you want to print it. You can also access it through pubmedcentral where additional viewing options exist.

Sort it yourself. Tweak search terms if you need to. A quick skim indicates that quite a few artificial sweeteners have established negative effects on the gut microflora, however, and the few whose abstracts I've skimmed add that it also makes for acidic feces & altered drug metabolism because of altered gene expression.

If you're going to idly drink something, soda is not a good choice, but I've used it on occasion when I want something that raises electrolytes or actually need 'empty' calories...which can easily happen if you're running a caloric debt.

Remember, it's not your caloric intake itself but the ratio of intake-to-burned that's important: You can eat a diet 100% free of 'bad' foods and still be fat, and you can eat a diet with a lot of calorie-rich food...and have problems having enough calories.

Too much stressing about your caloric intake probably is just plain unhealthy, anyway. I've been having to get it through an anorexic's head that the moment they started referencing BMI for calling themselves overweight, I got concerned. (Casual article covering parts of why BMI is a bad measure--basically, it's used because it's popular and easy, not because it's accurate because it's not.)

This is the way it worked when I was in biomedical research 20 years ago. The grad student or post doc who did the work and wrote the paper got to be second author. The principle investigator with the grant got to be first author or last author, depending on the lab or paper. There's a whole cultural system for deciding the order of authors on papers, with varying collaborators getting credit.

In the papers I was involved with the P.I. of the lab that let us have some monoclonal antibody they had developed got to be an author, as did the chemist who synthesized a custom vitamin A derivative for the project. So did the PhD who started the project years ago as a grad student, but hadn't been involved in a dozen years. The lab assistant who did most of the work for the project might have gotten an acknowledgement.

Ethanol is one of the smallest organic molecules, most drugs are huge in comparison. It might help to think of it as a solvent, not unlike water.

I hear ya. Small molecules are why DMSO nicotine patches may exist but not generally, prescription drug patches (never mind the dosing nightmare). Just like the Java Sandbox concept or Microsoft Wallet, many biological barriers/frontiers that were once considered difficult or impossible to breach have been crossed.

The skin: while small-molecule poisons and toxins, even simple hydrocarbons were long known to pass through the skin, it was only ~1963 when it was realized that DMSO can help carry larger molecules into the bloodstream.

The Blood brain barrier has been known to be weakened by inflammation but has been breached outright by gas microbubbles and localized ultrasound (too damned creepy!).

And the Placental blood barrier opens in late pregnancy, presumably to give the developed fetus a survival-edge of antibodies from the mother, but long before that there are specialized mechanisms to transport only fats or glucose or eliminate waste. What if some miracle drug has the unintended effect of compromising the mechanism that decides when and how it is opened? In the case of (S)Thalidomide it was not the drug itself, but compound CPS49 produced from it by the liver (the mother's I think) that crosses the barrier.

So nature's greatest defenses have become small hurdles...

not your grandfather's mandelbrot

I like. This one actually resembles my grandfather.

Unfortunately, treatment will still cost more than ever due to lawsuits and drug costs.

Lawsuits are often caused by human error: sleep deprived doctors, or overconfident doctors making bad diagnoses on insufficient information.

No, actually they are not. The leading cause of lawsuits is poor communication. And if you want to believe a lawyer the top two leading causes are surgical misadventures and issues with child birth. Missed diagnosed probably comes in third.

I actually predict Watson as potentially increasing medical costs. The issue? Something we call incidentalomas. These are incidental findings that were not expected and rarely result in an identified problem. But we spend a ton of time, money, and effort tracking these down, and they rarely pan out.

A nurse with a printed flowchart will usually give a better diagnosis than a doctor. So replacing (or supplementing) doctors with AI should reduce lawsuits, and improve care.

If that is what you think, then go for it. If you believe that care from a lesser trained individual is better for you, then by all means have at it. I work with nurses, and physicians, and other "healthcare" extenders. Nurses are great a following a well ordered script. They can nail, say, 90-95% of the primary care medical problems out there (e.g. outpatient settings). The problem? If you are part of the 5-10%, they don't do so well (and cost you more money in the process). Most don't have the training or experience to "know what they don't know" or they are Unconsciously incompetent. A good primary physician is at least "Consciously incompetent" to "Unconsciously competent" and can either treat you or refer you. Now I know some are going to tell me that their doctors "know nothing", but I'll bet they know more than most nurses (yes there are physicians who shouldn't be - that's another discussion for another day).

Unfortunately, treatment will still cost more than ever due to lawsuits and drug costs.

Lawsuits are often caused by human error: sleep deprived doctors, or overconfident doctors making bad diagnoses on insufficient information.

No, actually they are not. The leading cause of lawsuits is poor communication. And if you want to believe a lawyer the top two leading causes are surgical misadventures and issues with child birth. Missed diagnosed probably comes in third.

I actually predict Watson as potentially increasing medical costs. The issue? Something we call incidentalomas. These are incidental findings that were not expected and rarely result in an identified problem. But we spend a ton of time, money, and effort tracking these down, and they rarely pan out.

A nurse with a printed flowchart will usually give a better diagnosis than a doctor. So replacing (or supplementing) doctors with AI should reduce lawsuits, and improve care.

If that is what you think, then go for it. If you believe that care from a lesser trained individual is better for you, then by all means have at it. I work with nurses, and physicians, and other "healthcare" extenders. Nurses are great a following a well ordered script. They can nail, say, 90-95% of the primary care medical problems out there (e.g. outpatient settings). The problem? If you are part of the 5-10%, they don't do so well (and cost you more money in the process). Most don't have the training or experience to "know what they don't know" or they are Unconsciously incompetent. A good primary physician is at least "Consciously incompetent" to "Unconsciously competent" and can either treat you or refer you. Now I know some are going to tell me that their doctors "know nothing", but I'll bet they know more than most nurses (yes there are physicians who shouldn't be - that's another discussion for another day).

Unfortunately, treatment will still cost more than ever due to lawsuits and drug costs.

Lawsuits are often caused by human error: sleep deprived doctors, or overconfident doctors making bad diagnoses on insufficient information.

No, actually they are not. The leading cause of lawsuits is poor communication. And if you want to believe a lawyer the top two leading causes are surgical misadventures and issues with child birth. Missed diagnosed probably comes in third.

I actually predict Watson as potentially increasing medical costs. The issue? Something we call incidentalomas. These are incidental findings that were not expected and rarely result in an identified problem. But we spend a ton of time, money, and effort tracking these down, and they rarely pan out.

A nurse with a printed flowchart will usually give a better diagnosis than a doctor. So replacing (or supplementing) doctors with AI should reduce lawsuits, and improve care.

If that is what you think, then go for it. If you believe that care from a lesser trained individual is better for you, then by all means have at it. I work with nurses, and physicians, and other "healthcare" extenders. Nurses are great a following a well ordered script. They can nail, say, 90-95% of the primary care medical problems out there (e.g. outpatient settings). The problem? If you are part of the 5-10%, they don't do so well (and cost you more money in the process). Most don't have the training or experience to "know what they don't know" or they are Unconsciously incompetent. A good primary physician is at least "Consciously incompetent" to "Unconsciously competent" and can either treat you or refer you. Now I know some are going to tell me that their doctors "know nothing", but I'll bet they know more than most nurses (yes there are physicians who shouldn't be - that's another discussion for another day).

The nuclear bomb cost about $25billion (inflation adjusted) dollars. The majority of that went into facilities construction (housing for the workers). Just the US NIH yearly budget is $30B. Cancer research from the US alone is ~$5billion/year. Diseases are more difficult than engineering problems. http://report.nih.gov/categori...

Even if I were a normal healthy person, all veganism would get me is a nutritional deficiency.

Repeating a lie over and over does not magically turn it into truth. Care to provide some study corroborating this statement of yours? Nutritional deficiencies can appear in any diet, meat or no meat.
Besides the fact that most vegans are healthy and show no deficiencies, there are numerous studies contradicting your statement, not the least from the American Dietetic Association. From the abstract:

It is the position of the American Dietetic Association that appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes.

The vegans are advocating genocide of one form or another.

But of course... I suggest that, instead of embarrassing yourself by making things up, you document yourself on what vegans actually advocate, and stick to debate on that.

We now have more black babies being aborted than being born.

That's dopey. You've got to get information from places other than pro-life websites.

But even if you use the numbers cited by the pro-life websites (and cited NO WHERE ELSE), you'll see that live births outnumber abortions by at least 6-1. If you use census data for births, you'll see that it's more like 10-1. And that's if you accept the total number of black abortions the pro-life websites have pulled right outta their ass.

Okay, here are some figures.

National Vital Statistics Report. Table 1, page 15. In the year 2000, among black women aged 15-44, birth rate was 70 per 1000 women.

From Am J Obstet Gynecol. 2010 Mar; 202(3): 214–220., "in 2000 Black women had a[n abortion] rate of 49 per 1000 women."

So in 2000 there were more black babies being born than aborted, but the ratio was 7:5, and certainly not 10:1. Two (Bush) recessions later, and I would not be surprised to see the ratio flipped the other way.

We now have more black babies being aborted than being born.

That's dopey. You've got to get information from places other than pro-life websites.

But even if you use the numbers cited by the pro-life websites (and cited NO WHERE ELSE), you'll see that live births outnumber abortions by at least 6-1. If you use census data for births, you'll see that it's more like 10-1. And that's if you accept the total number of black abortions the pro-life websites have pulled right outta their ass.

This fact sheet from the Guttmacher Institute says "twenty-one percent of all pregnancies (excluding miscarriages) end in abortion". Which is 4-1... not 6-1, and certainly not 10-1. As you may know, Guttmacher Institute is not pro-life; wikipedia says "it works to advance reproductive health through birth control, including abortion." Of course, 4-1 is far from 1-1. But then, the claim you were responding to was about a population subset, so 1-1 is still quite possible. It would not at all be surprising if abortion rates depended strongly on age, income, employment, marital status, and contraception use. for an example of the latter: "Compared to whites, blacks were less likely to use any contraceptive method (adjusted odds ratio, 0.65); and blacks and Hispanics were less likely to use a highly or moderately effective method (adjusted odds ratio, 0.49 and 0.57, respectively)"

There's actually a lot of evidence that points to the heritability of personality. One of the more recent studies also looked at how parenting factored in and found that good parenting increased that amount that genetics factored in to personality.

Over a long period of time, you're going to end up with a group of people that will tend to make more poor choices and that even if you provide the same opportunity for their children, they'll also be more likely to make poor choices than the children of other individuals. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't care or try to provide everyone with the best possibility of success, but doesn't mean we can ignore the effect either.

There's actually a lot of evidence that points to the heritability of personality. One of the more recent studies also looked at how parenting factored in and found that good parenting increased that amount that genetics factored in to personality.

Over a long period of time, you're going to end up with a group of people that will tend to make more poor choices and that even if you provide the same opportunity for their children, they'll also be more likely to make poor choices than the children of other individuals. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't care or try to provide everyone with the best possibility of success, but doesn't mean we can ignore the effect either.

Ensure isn't really designed for long-term, one-food use like Soylent.

So if you have a long term medical condition that prevents you from eating anything non-liquid what do they give you and why wouldn't they want to make it suitable for long-term one-food use?

My guess is it's because it's really hard and they don't know how to do that. If Soylent thinks they've done it they're probably just shooting at a lot easier target.

They may have other advantages over Ensure such as taste or market image, but I'm really dubious it's a medically superior drink.

If you can't digest liquids, then you're sure as hell not digesting solids, which means you'll be on TPN via IV.

Actually, Celiac Disease (real Celiac disease) is an immune-response disorder (i.e., allergy). There are four levels of IgE mediated allergic response and non IgE mediated allergic responsesso it gets real complicated, real fast.

Psychopaths are most definitely not normal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., nor by any stretch of the imagination could their behaviour be considered normal. As more testing is being done in correctional institutions so the statistics are becoming worse now 1% general population, 15% prison population (some are showing it up to 25%) and 50% of crimes of violence. Distinct genetic traits are being discovered, they could be considered a sub-species of humanity, a parasitic sub-species. A good thing the FBI doesn't agree with your defence of the traits you likely know well https://www.fbi.gov/stats-serv.... Also http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm... "These results indicate that different psychopathic traits as measured by the MPQ show distinct genetically based relations with broad dimensions of DSM psychopathology". So suck it up and make no mistake, they all definitely have psychopaths on the radar and it is a growing global trend, so we definitely are looking to a better future, well, not all of use, psychopaths definitely will be losing the ability to hide amongst us to be able to prey upon the rest of us.

A market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., can mean lots of things, note the only one they didn't list was free market. Separate entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., so basically a caveat emptor market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... Basically in reality the closest we get to a free market would be a 'Fence' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., interesting in that the products do enter that market upon an actual 'Free' basis and it is unregulated until of course the psychopaths who run it get caught and they regulate right out of existence.

Four out of five elderly people given CPR end up dying within days. Many of them with prolonged and intense suffering due to CPR prolonging the inevitable.

We certainly need more thought about end-of-life care, living wills, and do-not-resuscitate orders. But CPR is not the only intervention affected by that.

And in some cases CPR is given when it's not warranted, breaking ribs, collapsing lungs or otherwise causing serious and sometimes fatal damage.

Sometimes, yes, but more rarely than you might think.

If I keel over, please don't resuscitate unless there is at least a 50% chance of long-term success, and less than a 50% chance of causing long-term damage.

Dude, unless you're already in the hospital, whoever sees you go down or trips over your unconscious body does not have your medical history, nor can they predict your course of treatment.