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A lot of the so called innovation is turning something from subcutaneous shots into pills. I'm sorry, but that is nothing that takes BEEEELLLIONS to research. It's worthwhile. But it's not the tedious research bit where you painstakingly find out how an illness works and how to counter it.

A lot of the "research" leading to these evergreen patents is even more trivial than that. See this article. Adding caffeine to the pill is a good one. Changing the binding agent in the pill so it dissolves with a different time course. Many of these don't involve the extensive FDA testing required for new drugs, or can capitalize on existing off-label studies.

Evergreening inhibits innovation. eg, if doc's discover that Drug A causes a lot of stomach pain and routinely add/promote calcium carbonate (Tums) along-side Drug A. As the patent on Drug A comes up, the drug company just adds some CaCO3 to the formulation and Bam! new patent. The only reason to introduce this "innovation" before the patent expires is the convenience of the consumer, but delaying the "innovation" until expiration allows the company to maintain a monopoly on a nominally superior product.

Kudos to the Indian courts for standing up to this crap

By this logic, the NIH should be funding endless studies of all kinds of quackery, such as putting magnets in your shoes to cure arthritis.

Unfortunately, they are.

Modern medical science isn't terribly far ahead of the placebo effect when it comes to many chronic diseases including advanced pancreatic cancer. It's reasonable to try to separate the efficacy of a new medicine from the efficacy of psychosomatic healing when qualifying a drug. But to ignore the later entirely is not good medicine. Here is a graphic example of the effect of hypnosis on Congenital Ichthyosiform Erythodermia, a disease which did not respond to any recognized treatment and is barely touched by modern medicine. It was considered to be incurable and yet substantial and long-lasting healing took place 5 days after a hypnotic suggestion specifically on the side of the body suggested by the hypnotist. And yes, potatoes really do cure warts if your child believes they do.

If it's LTE, you can get a transfer rate of 66Mbit down and 12Mbit up, so 500MB is about sixty seconds of access. Still extortion unless you pay $70/mo for "unlimited". Strangely enough it shows 12GB on the website. There are single files out there in excess of 25GB - just get into genomics or mapping. If they prohibit tethering, better figure out USB host mode or find a source for 64GB SD Micro cards.

Here's an example of government-generated data http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed

Pubmed is a database of essentially every medical journal article, prepared by the National Institutes of Health. A computer scientist one told me that it was the best-designed database (in terms of user searching) that he knew of. He's probably right. Pubmed is now one of the main tools of medical research and clinical practice.

One of Al Gore's real accomplishments was to make Pubmed free online. Before then, it was sold through private contractors who, at one time, charged $1 a citation. The incremental cost of making Pubmed free was almost nothing, because the NIH library had to prepare it anyway. If they had done it as a paid-subscription service, they would have gotten maybe 10,000 subscriptions from medical school libraries, pharmaceutical companies, and malpractice lawyers. Now, there are millions of people using it around the world, including high school biology students, patients researching their disease, and everyone who writes about medicine on Wikipedia.

An interesting contrast is Lexis and Westlaw, the proprietary services that lawyers use to look up court cases. Those services charge a fortune. I don't know what the current fees are, but they used to be around $200 a month for a lawyer in private practice (correct me if I'm wrong). Westlaw had an annoying policy of not providing service to public libraries, so it was impossible for an ordinary citizen with no legal affiliation to get access. They carried the full text of the decisions, but these were public record, and in principle owned by the taxpayers and citizens, so they were selling our own public domain information back to us. They did add a certain value -- they had a reference system like the Internet before the Internet. But a well-run government database could provide the same service to everyone free (through taxes, of course) that the private vendors sell to only to the few thousand people who can afford to pay their high fees. Now the Internet is catching up with them with Findlaw, Cornell law school, etc.

Well-run government services can often do the job cheaper, and make information accessible to a lot more people, than private companies. Everybody pays a lot less through taxes than they would through private subscriptions.

Not Really. We can make self-replicating amino-acid chains [ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8700225 ], and we can make amino acids themselves through electrical discharges (ie. lightning) into common compounds. The two occurring together might be low probability, but hardly impossible.

To dig into your 'distinction' a bit - Are viruses alive? They have none of the machinery required to 'live.' No way to move, no way to generate energy, no way to reproduce. Yet they evolve and adapt, features we normally would limit to living creatures. Or Prions, misfolded proteins. They have no machinery at all, simply acting as a catalyst to misfold other proteins. Yet they reproduce.

Spoken like a true wannabe aristocrat. The possibility of being intelligent may be inherited, but actual intelligence isn't. Most trust fund babies I've ever met have been pretty useless except for office political gain. Breeding has nothing to do with being fit for the job.

I joined up on a genetic testing site recently. I was surprised there were some studies regarding this. However the IQ difference from genetics so far is only about 10 points. I'm sure they'll find more as we go along. While I find it very uncomfortable to believe all things are not equal, it certainly seems the case. IQ however is not an indicator of success in life.


From the genetic site...
The researchers found that being breastfed raised a personâ(TM)s IQ an average of six to seven points, but only among those who had at least one C at rs174575. Among those with a G at both copies of rs174575, breastfeeding appeared to have no effect on intelligence. This result was found in two independent groups, one composed of 1,848 British children and the other of 858 children of European ancestry from New Zealand. The effect associated with this SNP was larger than the one described below for rs1535, which is included for customers who do not have data from rs174575.
citation: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?cmd=Search&term=17984066

The study found that being breastfed raised a personâ(TM)s IQ an average of four to five points, but only among those who had at least one A at rs1535 â" and only in the larger of the two study groups, which consisted of 1,848 British children. Also British children with a G at both copies of rs1535 did appear to have a small IQ benefit from breastfeeding, though their increase was significantly smaller than that of children with one or more A copies of rs1535. Among the 858 children from New Zealand, genetics appeared to have no effect; breastfed children of all genotypes had increased IQs.
citation:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?cmd=Search&term=17984066

A study of Dutch families found that rs363050 is associated with "performance IQ" (i.e. non-verbal IQ). Each A at rs363050 increased subjects' performance IQ by an average of three points compared to those with no copies. The authors estimated that rs363050 accounts for 3.4% of the variation in performance IQ between people.
citation: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?cmd=Search&term=16801949

Spoken like a true wannabe aristocrat. The possibility of being intelligent may be inherited, but actual intelligence isn't. Most trust fund babies I've ever met have been pretty useless except for office political gain. Breeding has nothing to do with being fit for the job.

I joined up on a genetic testing site recently. I was surprised there were some studies regarding this. However the IQ difference from genetics so far is only about 10 points. I'm sure they'll find more as we go along. While I find it very uncomfortable to believe all things are not equal, it certainly seems the case. IQ however is not an indicator of success in life.


From the genetic site...
The researchers found that being breastfed raised a personâ(TM)s IQ an average of six to seven points, but only among those who had at least one C at rs174575. Among those with a G at both copies of rs174575, breastfeeding appeared to have no effect on intelligence. This result was found in two independent groups, one composed of 1,848 British children and the other of 858 children of European ancestry from New Zealand. The effect associated with this SNP was larger than the one described below for rs1535, which is included for customers who do not have data from rs174575.
citation: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?cmd=Search&term=17984066

The study found that being breastfed raised a personâ(TM)s IQ an average of four to five points, but only among those who had at least one A at rs1535 â" and only in the larger of the two study groups, which consisted of 1,848 British children. Also British children with a G at both copies of rs1535 did appear to have a small IQ benefit from breastfeeding, though their increase was significantly smaller than that of children with one or more A copies of rs1535. Among the 858 children from New Zealand, genetics appeared to have no effect; breastfed children of all genotypes had increased IQs.
citation:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?cmd=Search&term=17984066

A study of Dutch families found that rs363050 is associated with "performance IQ" (i.e. non-verbal IQ). Each A at rs363050 increased subjects' performance IQ by an average of three points compared to those with no copies. The authors estimated that rs363050 accounts for 3.4% of the variation in performance IQ between people.
citation: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?cmd=Search&term=16801949

Spoken like a true wannabe aristocrat. The possibility of being intelligent may be inherited, but actual intelligence isn't. Most trust fund babies I've ever met have been pretty useless except for office political gain. Breeding has nothing to do with being fit for the job.

I joined up on a genetic testing site recently. I was surprised there were some studies regarding this. However the IQ difference from genetics so far is only about 10 points. I'm sure they'll find more as we go along. While I find it very uncomfortable to believe all things are not equal, it certainly seems the case. IQ however is not an indicator of success in life.


From the genetic site...
The researchers found that being breastfed raised a personâ(TM)s IQ an average of six to seven points, but only among those who had at least one C at rs174575. Among those with a G at both copies of rs174575, breastfeeding appeared to have no effect on intelligence. This result was found in two independent groups, one composed of 1,848 British children and the other of 858 children of European ancestry from New Zealand. The effect associated with this SNP was larger than the one described below for rs1535, which is included for customers who do not have data from rs174575.
citation: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?cmd=Search&term=17984066

The study found that being breastfed raised a personâ(TM)s IQ an average of four to five points, but only among those who had at least one A at rs1535 â" and only in the larger of the two study groups, which consisted of 1,848 British children. Also British children with a G at both copies of rs1535 did appear to have a small IQ benefit from breastfeeding, though their increase was significantly smaller than that of children with one or more A copies of rs1535. Among the 858 children from New Zealand, genetics appeared to have no effect; breastfed children of all genotypes had increased IQs.
citation:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?cmd=Search&term=17984066

A study of Dutch families found that rs363050 is associated with "performance IQ" (i.e. non-verbal IQ). Each A at rs363050 increased subjects' performance IQ by an average of three points compared to those with no copies. The authors estimated that rs363050 accounts for 3.4% of the variation in performance IQ between people.
citation: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?cmd=Search&term=16801949

Me? I want my salt to be as refined and inorganic as possible. Na and Cl in equal proportions, nothing more.

The you will probably develop an thyroid problem. Please rate the parent comment -1 uninformed.

Small point, but the main reason for preferring sea salt is that it tastes different than "normal" table salt.

The main reason for using sea-salt is: Iodine.

One of the more fascinating ones to read is this one: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2596756/ ("Protanomaly without darkened red is deuteranopia with rods").

One thing that makes it so hard to talk about deuteranomalous gamut is the fact that the best and richest part of it mostly lies OUTSIDE the gamut of traditional RGB. Imagine if I gave you a yellow laser, then asked you to mix it with light from a monochromatic orange laser until it matched a red laser. It's impossible -- no matter how dim you make the yellow and how bright you make the orange, it will never look "red". That's the problem deuteranomalous individuals have with everything from photos to video... they always look "wrong" compared to real life (the same way as the Mars Rover's pics), and there's no adjustment we can make to compensate for it... even if we manage to flawlessly match one specific shade of orange by adjusting the relative brightness of red and green, the color of everything ELSE is going to be screwed up even worse. Our color definitions don't match everyone else's, and most of OUR colors get rolled off, attenuated, and mangled away when reproduced in CMYK or RGB.

The best way to illustrate the true spectrum in a way that would preserve everybody's detail and help people with "normal" vision understand deuteranomalous gamut would be to build a row of monochromatic lasers whose frequencies ranged from "pure green" (~500nm, I believe) at the left to extremely intense near-infrared (around 850nm) at the right... with extra lasers at smaller intervals around "orange", since that's where OUR bands of different colors are all clumped and smashed together.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18637995

I.. um... Well... ok thanks.... good to know.

Wish I had mod points left. That's what I really call +1 Informative.

And this is so random that I had to post it. I couldn't remember how to spell discernible, so I typed "descernable" into google. This was in my list of results:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18637995

I.. um... Well... ok thanks.... good to know.

Not as bad as when some guy posted a link to the symbian website but forgot the m. That's still my favorite. :)

You could do something really exhausting for a short period of time.
Get a chin/pull-up bar and use it before work. Do 3-4 reps where you're about completely drained of energy after each rep.
Here you could see how GH and testosterone levels depend on rest length in between repetitions http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20555276.

For back and stomach you can do V pull-ups:
http://www.chunkfitness.com/exercises/back-exercises/lat-exercises/v-pull-up-calisthenics

Or; easier but less muscles (breasts, back, biceps, forearms):
http://www.chunkfitness.com/exercises/back-exercises/lat-exercises/pull-up-chin-up-calisthenics

(If you really need front shoulders and triceps as well, you could complement with push-ups).

That's about the whole upperbody if you put in some ear wiggling.

If you're really nerdy, you can build this one for recovery:
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/august/cooling-glove-research-082912.html
A cooling glove, that vacuum pumps the hand in order to keep up circulation from the hand, while cooling it, in order to quickly cool the core temperature after
exercise, without cooling the muscles. According to this Stanford article, this will give better recovery than steroids, for some very strange reason.

Here's something about high intensity training, where you do 3 minutes of really uncomfortable exercise per week:
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/242498.php

There's growing evidence that treating Alzheimer's early, before substantial amyloid plaques have formed, can quite significantly delay the onset of symptoms.

Indeed. If you know you have AD, there are preventative measures you can take to delay, and possibly avoid, the onset. There are antibodies that can eliminate the amyloid plaques, but if you wait too long, there is too much and the antibodies cause fatal brain inflammation. Here is an article with more information: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23217740. Wikipedia also has a good overview.

Looking for treatment and prevention requires a good way to measure if a therapy is working. Using clinical progression to Alzheimer's disease (AD) requires a huge multi-year study to get any real statistical power. Not everyone goes on to develop AD, people die from other stuff, etc. If a treatment doesn't work, you've just wasted lots of $ and time to find that out (e.g., http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18305231). Maybe you had your dose wrong, maybe you had the timing off, ... The search space for a treatment is HUGE, there has a to be an efficient way to quickly (relative here) and accurately determine if a therapy works. Having a way to detect and monitor neurodegenerative diseases would be awesome from a research standpoint. It would allow therapy to be tested using a cross sectional study rather than a longitudinal study.

to bamboo.

Abstract

Price gouging...
Private hospital in tiny town: $18,000 for 36 hours in a womens health room with a straight saline drip, half of that bill was for the saline drip (billed as "IV therapy", it had no meds in it and was only there so they had a line open if needed)
Closest hospital equipped to deal with a 7 week preemie: $17,000 for 10 days stay total. Lifeflight, 3 days high risk pregnancy observation and blood pressure treatment, c-section, 7 days of recovery, and emergency hemorrhage treatment 2 days after the c-section

Even couple hour ER trips on the weekends where they just tell us "Sorry you're in blinding pain but I don't feel like doing anything, have some tylenol" result in multiple $5,000-10,000 bills from the hospital, doctor, nurses, oncall surgeon/anesthesia/radiology who wasn't even there and did noting.

I'm sorry, but [citation needed] here. I work in the health industry. A helicopter flight alone to a close hospital is on the order of $10,000. One figure quoted to me was that it costs $1,000 to wheel the bird out of the hanger (granted, likely a mark-up). ICU care is on the order of $3,000-5,000 a day minimum, without major intervention. A c-section is going to be on the order of $10,000-30,000 itself. The OR is billed on the order of $30-100 per minute. Blood is a couple hundred (~$500) per/unit. This doesn't even include the cost of medications or ancillary services.

Your bill for a high risk pregnancy/premie treatment is more likely billed at $170,000, and in reality could reach $250,000. What you saw was probably a negotiated price from your health insurance, or mark-down from medicaid

I will agree that your community hospital bill was way out of line, but the upgrade in care, especially at a teaching hospital is going to be much higher.

Also a 7 week premie is non-viable. That is considered a spontaneous abortion. You probably meant to say a 32-week premie, which while serious, is a very survivable stage with modern care. (Premies are classified by length of gestation, not by the time remaining.) And FWIW, the current cut off (e.g. documentation of survival) is at about 25 weeks, it improves at 26 weeks where the mortality (chance of death) is about 50%

As an aside, I threw out those figures off the top of my head, and decided to verify and add the citations....I was pretty damn close (off on the ICU by about $1,000/day, but I was still in the ballpark). I'm either: that cynical or I've been at this too long....

Sorry I work for an helicopter ambulance service that cover over 30 states and you 10k in way low. the average is between 30k and 40k for just the transportation with medical personal on board.

Price gouging...
Private hospital in tiny town: $18,000 for 36 hours in a womens health room with a straight saline drip, half of that bill was for the saline drip (billed as "IV therapy", it had no meds in it and was only there so they had a line open if needed)
Closest hospital equipped to deal with a 7 week preemie: $17,000 for 10 days stay total. Lifeflight, 3 days high risk pregnancy observation and blood pressure treatment, c-section, 7 days of recovery, and emergency hemorrhage treatment 2 days after the c-section

Even couple hour ER trips on the weekends where they just tell us "Sorry you're in blinding pain but I don't feel like doing anything, have some tylenol" result in multiple $5,000-10,000 bills from the hospital, doctor, nurses, oncall surgeon/anesthesia/radiology who wasn't even there and did noting.

I'm sorry, but [citation needed] here. I work in the health industry. A helicopter flight alone to a close hospital is on the order of $10,000. One figure quoted to me was that it costs $1,000 to wheel the bird out of the hanger (granted, likely a mark-up). ICU care is on the order of $3,000-5,000 a day minimum, without major intervention. A c-section is going to be on the order of $10,000-30,000 itself. The OR is billed on the order of $30-100 per minute. Blood is a couple hundred (~$500) per/unit. This doesn't even include the cost of medications or ancillary services.

Your bill for a high risk pregnancy/premie treatment is more likely billed at $170,000, and in reality could reach $250,000. What you saw was probably a negotiated price from your health insurance, or mark-down from medicaid

I will agree that your community hospital bill was way out of line, but the upgrade in care, especially at a teaching hospital is going to be much higher.

Also a 7 week premie is non-viable. That is considered a spontaneous abortion. You probably meant to say a 32-week premie, which while serious, is a very survivable stage with modern care. (Premies are classified by length of gestation, not by the time remaining.) And FWIW, the current cut off (e.g. documentation of survival) is at about 25 weeks, it improves at 26 weeks where the mortality (chance of death) is about 50%

As an aside, I threw out those figures off the top of my head, and decided to verify and add the citations....I was pretty damn close (off on the ICU by about $1,000/day, but I was still in the ballpark). I'm either: that cynical or I've been at this too long....

Sorry I work for an helicopter ambulance service that cover over 30 states and you 10k in way low. the average is between 30k and 40k for just the transportation with medical personal on board.

Immunity, unless they stop being prostitutes, then they would get it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/02/03/us/a-new-aids-mystery-prostitutes-who-have-remained-immune.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1539443/

I couldn't find any link indicating anyone has trued to get copyright protection on their genes.

And thank you for illustrating the fact that when people assume they know what is best for the patient and don't involve them in health decisions, you can make some really deadly mistakes.

For example, from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3112029/

Antibiotics are a vital weapon in combating serious bacterial infections. To maximize the benefit-to-risk ratio of antibiotic therapy, ... it is critical to be vigilant for potential risk factors that may increase the likelihood of a patient experiencing adverse hepatic events,... The latter mainly include a previous experience of hepatic dysfunction with the same antibiotic drug, the co-administration of other drugs known to cause hepatotoxic reactions, a pre-existing hepatic insufficiency without close monitoring of the hepatic function and, depending on the drug, one of several other risk factors

In this case, my relative was going in for a SECOND knee surgery because the first replacement resulted in a MRSA infection which required a second removal surgery to remove the replacement, treatment period to elminate the MRSA, and a third surgery to put in the replacement again.

The doctor screwed up bigtime.

1. He ignored what the patient said
2. He prescribed a drug which was unnecessary because non-acetaminophen containing versions were available but required more oversight (schedule 2 vs schedule 1)
3. He did NOT inform the patient that he was ignoring the other doctor's recommendation against Acetaminophen.

The only reason we caught it was because I explicity told my relative to get confirmation of exactly what pills they gave him or tried to inject into his IV. At the time, I wasn't sure what Paracetamol was, and was able to use google to discover that they were trying to give him something that likely would have killed him.

From first surgery to this incident, due to the MRSA infection he had lost over 60lbs. By any measure he exhibited many risk factors for liver failure, and should never have been given acetaminophen.

The doctor, like you did right now, assumed that he knew more than the patient, and the results were almost deadly.

(If you want to get into the risk of getting surgery so soon after getting over an infection, welcome to the world of working for a living and your disability insurance getting maxed out months earlier. So, surgery and get back to work, or go homeless AND have a leg with no knee, remember the first one was removed to treat the infection)

Moral of the story: Don't tell the doctor you have been advised to not take Acetaminophen, tell them you are allergic so they put a bright pink wristband on you. (isn't that great, we have to lie to the doctor just so they won't ignore your other doctor's directives)

Price gouging... Private hospital in tiny town: $18,000 for 36 hours in a womens health room with a straight saline drip, half of that bill was for the saline drip (billed as "IV therapy", it had no meds in it and was only there so they had a line open if needed) Closest hospital equipped to deal with a 7 week preemie: $17,000 for 10 days stay total. Lifeflight, 3 days high risk pregnancy observation and blood pressure treatment, c-section, 7 days of recovery, and emergency hemorrhage treatment 2 days after the c-section

Even couple hour ER trips on the weekends where they just tell us "Sorry you're in blinding pain but I don't feel like doing anything, have some tylenol" result in multiple $5,000-10,000 bills from the hospital, doctor, nurses, oncall surgeon/anesthesia/radiology who wasn't even there and did noting.

I'm sorry, but [citation needed] here. I work in the health industry. A helicopter flight alone to a close hospital is on the order of $10,000. One figure quoted to me was that it costs $1,000 to wheel the bird out of the hanger (granted, likely a mark-up). ICU care is on the order of $3,000-5,000 a day minimum, without major intervention. A c-section is going to be on the order of $10,000-30,000 itself. The OR is billed on the order of $30-100 per minute. Blood is a couple hundred (~$500) per/unit. This doesn't even include the cost of medications or ancillary services.

Your bill for a high risk pregnancy/premie treatment is more likely billed at $170,000, and in reality could reach $250,000. What you saw was probably a negotiated price from your health insurance, or mark-down from medicaid

I will agree that your community hospital bill was way out of line, but the upgrade in care, especially at a teaching hospital is going to be much higher.

Also a 7 week premie is non-viable. That is considered a spontaneous abortion. You probably meant to say a 32-week premie, which while serious, is a very survivable stage with modern care. (Premies are classified by length of gestation, not by the time remaining.) And FWIW, the current cut off (e.g. documentation of survival) is at about 25 weeks, it improves at 26 weeks where the mortality (chance of death) is about 50%

As an aside, I threw out those figures off the top of my head, and decided to verify and add the citations....I was pretty damn close (off on the ICU by about $1,000/day, but I was still in the ballpark). I'm either: that cynical or I've been at this too long....

Price gouging... Private hospital in tiny town: $18,000 for 36 hours in a womens health room with a straight saline drip, half of that bill was for the saline drip (billed as "IV therapy", it had no meds in it and was only there so they had a line open if needed) Closest hospital equipped to deal with a 7 week preemie: $17,000 for 10 days stay total. Lifeflight, 3 days high risk pregnancy observation and blood pressure treatment, c-section, 7 days of recovery, and emergency hemorrhage treatment 2 days after the c-section

Even couple hour ER trips on the weekends where they just tell us "Sorry you're in blinding pain but I don't feel like doing anything, have some tylenol" result in multiple $5,000-10,000 bills from the hospital, doctor, nurses, oncall surgeon/anesthesia/radiology who wasn't even there and did noting.

I'm sorry, but [citation needed] here. I work in the health industry. A helicopter flight alone to a close hospital is on the order of $10,000. One figure quoted to me was that it costs $1,000 to wheel the bird out of the hanger (granted, likely a mark-up). ICU care is on the order of $3,000-5,000 a day minimum, without major intervention. A c-section is going to be on the order of $10,000-30,000 itself. The OR is billed on the order of $30-100 per minute. Blood is a couple hundred (~$500) per/unit. This doesn't even include the cost of medications or ancillary services.

Your bill for a high risk pregnancy/premie treatment is more likely billed at $170,000, and in reality could reach $250,000. What you saw was probably a negotiated price from your health insurance, or mark-down from medicaid

I will agree that your community hospital bill was way out of line, but the upgrade in care, especially at a teaching hospital is going to be much higher.

Also a 7 week premie is non-viable. That is considered a spontaneous abortion. You probably meant to say a 32-week premie, which while serious, is a very survivable stage with modern care. (Premies are classified by length of gestation, not by the time remaining.) And FWIW, the current cut off (e.g. documentation of survival) is at about 25 weeks, it improves at 26 weeks where the mortality (chance of death) is about 50%

As an aside, I threw out those figures off the top of my head, and decided to verify and add the citations....I was pretty damn close (off on the ICU by about $1,000/day, but I was still in the ballpark). I'm either: that cynical or I've been at this too long....

5 minutes on google will tell me that.....

Will tell you what? Not as much as you think, apparently.Thank you for illustrating this. ~2 grams/day (some say more, but 2 is solid) of acetaminophen/paracetamol/tylenol/etc have been studied and accepted as safe in chronic liver disease. 500 mg PO QID if you are so inclined.

The therapeutic use of acetaminophen in patients with liver disease.

Alcoholic liver disease: Is acetaminophen safe?

Acetaminophen, When Taken as Directed, is Safe for Patients with Liver Disease

etc......

OK, I did the research, by which I mean I used Google to find out what research had already been done. Honestly, these guys just about took care of it back in 2006. The answer appears to be a qualified "yes," in that many of the basic features of experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis translate to MS, but MS is known to have more involvement from some pathways and less from others. In particular, the method of inducing EAE infection in mice led to a focus on the role of CD4+ cells (which include the TH17 cells) for years, until it was discovered that CD8+ cells also play a major role in MS. It turns out that treatments developed using EAE have had mixed results in treating human MS. For instance, there was a lot of hope in the late 1990s for a tumor necrosis factor blocker called lenercept, which was effective against EAE, but actually made MS worse. On the other hand, secukinumab, an antibody against interleukin-17 itself, has shown positive results against MS in a early proof-of-concept trial.

As the Gold, et al. paper concludes, "Autoimmune encephalomyelitis is, thus, an excellent tool for studying basic mechanisms of brain inflammation and immune-mediated CNS tissue injury, and for obtaining proof of principle, whether a certain therapeutic strategy has the potential to block these pathways. Whether they are relevant for multiple sclerosis patients in general and, if yes, for what subpopulation of patients has to be determined in respective clinical studies."

In 1986, Pacfic Northwest (National) Laboratory won an R&D 100 award for:

"Computer Aided Genetic Engineering/Genetic Engineering Machine (CAGE/GEM)—;Richard J. Douthart, James J. Thomas

CAGE/GEM is a software toolkit that can help researchers design genetic structures before performing expensive laboratory experiments. By using the system, scientists can analyze sequences from both a broad and specific viewpoint with integration of expert knowledge. They can isolate a genetic element in DNA sequence, then graphically manipulate the element to create and explore new genetic constructs."

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC339405/figure/F1/ shows some screen shots.

It was written on Dec MicroVAX computers and was a complete GUI environment back when those were still rare. It could do all of the design and analysis work but there wasn't any technology to actually create the resulting physical constructs. It merely provided guidance to the laboratory folks doing gene sequencing and early genetic manipulation experiments. DOE installed the software at quite a few universities as part of some research projects.

Hmmm. Where exactly did Von Braun get his rockets from? Oh yeah, Godard, an American.
Oh yes, Seymour cray who developed superscalar in the 60s, was definitely Russian. Or the fact that Intel had superscalars PRIOR to the fall of the USSR really proves your points.
Corinary Bypass was an ex-german who did some of the work in SOuth Africa and was able to do it when he hooked up with an American. The actual work was done by the American, not the ex-german. Oh, as to Argentina, please look at the last section of the history. You will notice the argentinian that you speak of, did his work 7 years later. Here is a comment from one of the docs who was there, but hey, do not let what those who were there influence YOUR idea of facts.
WHO in their right mind thinks that Harry potter was American or LOTR was American? Harry is 100% English filmed and LOTR was filmed in New Zealand. I think that ANYBODY with any intelligence KNOWS both of these.
And Sergey MOVED to the USA when he was 6 years of age. IOW, he grew up as a first generation American. My wife moved here at age 10. And I can tell you that she is neither British nor Indian except in birth and ancestors, respectively.

And yes, I have been out of USA and multiple continents. I would guess far more than you have been to other continents.
You could keep adding stuff, but the fact is, that you were wrong on every single thing that you wrote. Sadly, your racism and lack of intelligence is getting in your way.

This has all the normal problems of a nature paper:
1)the methods section doesn't explain anything and just leads to and endless series of "see these multiple papers for detailed methods" sections that aren't even consistent with one another,
2)sample sizes are only kind of reported (why aren't they equal between groups)
3)the distribution of the data is unavailable for no good reason. (only means and SEMs). Did all the mice respond equally?
4) they don't cover any possible confounds or other explanations (they have perfectly controlled everything I guess, I don't know because I'm not in this field).
5) Its not explained anywhere why certain experiments or results are missing (eg the sour insensitive only mutant for the physiology ) or why some results may not fit the narrative (the 5 cells that did not respond to both bitter and KCl).

They told me to go to this paper for methods and for the descriptions of "other mouse strains", so maybe it used the same WT mice:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2849629/pdf/nihms-168779.pdf

Compare figure 3B there with figure 4A in the one you suggested. Why are the aversion responses of the control mice to NaCl so much stronger in the current paper? Maybe its different strains... not easy for me to figure out.

there's absolutely nothing new about using X-ray crystallography in the study of pathogens

The press release is horribly written. What they're doing that is genuinely novel, AFAIK, is crystallizing actual infectious virus in a biosafety level 3 facility. Usually crystallographers work with just the capsid or some other subset of viral proteins, which requires fewer (if any) special precautions. The native virus particles are typically studied by EM, which typically doesn't yield as high resolution as crystallography, but has the advantage of requiring much more portable and less expensive equipment than crystallography.

They didn't bother to link to the actual paper, but it is (remarkably) free online.

If your comfort zone can be stretched into biotechnology, there are many opportunities for analyzing huge volumes of data in genomics/proteomics. As one modest example: a select number of model organisms are commonly used for basic research. Is it feasible to build an app/tool that can gauge the suitability of an experiment subject for a particular scientific inquiry based on available genomic data? Recently, I heard a talk by a researcher in autism attempt to find a mouse model of the disorder based on observed behavior in cognitive experiments across many different laboratory strains that have been inbreed to very exacting parameters for other experiments. Given the level of detailed information on these particular strains, it is easy to see how convenient it would be to have a tool that can mine their genomes for a particular trait or set of traits or perhaps even do an in silico genetic engineering experiment before any resources are physically committed. Even if hardcore biology isn't your forte, you might maybe talk to someone who teaches the subject and ask what tools can be developed to help visualize or otherwise communicate conceptual information that derive from databases of the type kept by organizations like NCBI.

The raw data set is being used in a different way. In this type of sequencing, millions of short sequence 'reads' are aligned to a reference genome. A given locus may be covered by dozens of overlapping reads, as in the 'pileup' image here (second figure):

http://blog.goldenhelix.com/?p=490

For detection of sequence variants (e.g. single base changes), the 'read depth' (height of the pileup) must be sufficient to call that variant confidently (allowing for heterozygosity, and the error rate of the technology), but it doesn't matter if that locus is covered 30 times or 100 times. Copy number variants, however, are detected by differences in read depth and, since read depth varies even across regions with the same copy number, you can't simply count the reads that align to a given locus - you need enough data (which may be more than a $6k genome run provides) to do the stats and look for regions of significant difference between genomes:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2752127/

Remember what we're talking about. You said:

They far outperform humans in finding the best, likeliest match given the current symptoms and the response to treatment so far.

I said:

I challenge you to give me a citation to a real medical journal article that describes such a program that was actually validated in the real world. Show me 100 patients who were diagnosed with something by a computer that a doctor missed.

You have not done so. Bullshit confirmed.

(1) The NYT article says the opposite of what your'e claiming:

Dr. Henry Lowe, an internist at Stanford University and director of its Center for Clinical Informatics, doubts that a computer could ever replace a diagnostic wizard like Dr. Dhaliwal, or even a competent clinician.

“Designing computer systems that work well with incomplete or imprecise information is challenging,” Dr. Lowe said. “Particularly in medicine, where the consequences of defective decision-making may be catastrophic.”

(2) NYT article doesn't say anything about DiagnosisPro or Isabel Health Care.

(3) The NYT isn't a medical journal.

(4) Since you didn't give me a medical journal article, I tried to find one myself, to see if -- possibly -- there actually was something to your claims. I don't like to dismiss things merely because they sound ridiculous, I need to see the evidence.

When I searched for "DiagnosisPro" in PubMed,
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=DiagnosisPro which is the best medical database available, I didn't get any results. Interestingly, when I did a Google search, I did find a couple of aticles in medical journals. That shows you that even the best medical database -- Medline on PubMed -- is incomplete. (Actually, DiagnosisPro itself uses Medline.)

(5) Here's a review of DiagnosisPro that I found with a Google search:

http://xnet.kp.org/permanentejournal/sum02/diagnosis.html

I think that this program represents a useful advance over the previous version, 4.0. The greatest utility of the program will be to advance the learning curve of neophyte physicians or medical students; however, even an experienced physician contemplating a difficult case can meaningfully use this program. The program is comprehensive; after becoming familiar with it, the user realizes that the program can be used to expand the scope of differential diagnosis for any patient.

The practicality of finding time to use the program and to reflect on the depth and profundity of its information is another issue, however. Limited time is available to see a patient in the office or even during inpatient rounds: Considering the patient's diagnosis, ordering laboratory tests, prescribing treatment, and discussing these matters with the patient is often done in less than 15 minutes. To use a computer program to review one case and to research the diagnostic possibilities takes considerably longer, although with increased familiarity--especially if quickly viewing the leading differential diagnostic possibilities--the clinician may find this program excellent for the purpose.

(6) You said:

They far outperform humans in finding the best, likeliest match given the current symptoms and the response to treatment so far.

That's the issue. DiagnosisPro doesn't outperform humans. What the doctors who review it say is that it's interesting. It's a good learning tool for medical students. It's interesting to try it on a difficult case and see what it does. However, DiagnosisPro itself doesn't claim to outperform humans.

On their website, they give a bibliography of the sources they incorporate for their diagnoses. ht

Because a study of those chemicals was recently completed, and guess what? She was right and they're really harmful to humans. California is now overhauling their rules on use of the stuff...

Brain training games are basically Snake Oil.

They don't improve intelligence.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22708717

There is also no evidence they will keep your brain healthy in old age or anything else they are claiming they will do.

Playing any game, will improve your ability to play that game. That is about it.

Well, some tasks of the brain training games DO help you in every day life. I mean, if you're doing 100 math problems every day, you'll get good at doing math problems (just basic addition, subtraction, multiplication and division). This actually has extreme usefulness in daily life for everyone, because math is everywhere. And even though all the numbers are between 0 and 99, being able to do basic math has almost no downsides.

From calculating how much your lunch (or your gear) will cost, to seeing if you can mentally budget your money is extremely useful. And being able to add up your shopping cart, or figure out if something is a real deal without having to break out a calculator makes life just that bit less frustrating.

Or being able to stand at the cashier, glance at your coins and how much you owe, and figure out how to make "convenient" change, getting rid of a bunch of coins and getting a nicer quarter or something back. Spending jars of coins is easy if you know how to quickly add and subtract.

Or knowing how much your shopping car is supposed to cost before tax, with tax, and able to know when the register overcharged you.

Don't be sure- at the very least, I hope you're getting yourself checked out by your doctor regularly.

"Metabolically Obese but Normal Weight" (MONW, or popularly, 'skinny fat') is a real thing, and puts you at FAR greater risk of some bad results of heart disease, diabetes, and other 'metabolic syndrome' diseases - most likely because the skinny folk don't exhibit symptoms until the disease is more advanced, meaning intervention is less likely to improve things.

In a nut, you don't have to be "fat" to have these diseases - they TEND to travel together, but if you happen to be an ectomorph who is still raising hell with his body by dumping raw sugar into it at the rate you claimed, then that's probably going to exact a pretty steep toll on you over time. Being skinny and "not falling apart" isn't exacly a bill of good health... if you're not getting regular checkups with the doc, you might want to consider starting.

Not to say "oh god don't drink that stuff ever" - maybe you're the lucky "one in a million" whose body is able to handle it better than most... but the weight of medical evidence is pretty clear that that volume of regular soda over that long a time has some pretty bad effects on most people.

Brain training games are basically Snake Oil.

They don't improve intelligence.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22708717

There is also no evidence they will keep your brain healthy in old age or anything else they are claiming they will do.

Playing any game, will improve your ability to play that game. That is about it.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. You are obviously not in the medical business.

No CAT Scan, MRI or Cancer drugs would have been invented without patents to give the inventors time to make their years of investment back by a period of exclusivity. Regulation by the government (mostly for safety & efficacy) is just another business expense, like fuel, that all players pay. The price to enter the game.

I call B.S., and provide the following link to the National Institute of Health's Invention Reporting Requirements for Grants and Funding page.

Fun fact: Most medical device and pharmaceutical research is actually done by the NIH, on the taxpayer dime, only to be subsequently patented and locked down by greedy-ass, for-profit corporations.

Youre ignoring the whole "the controls werent equal, and the researchers didnt bother to control for experimental bias" thing. Thats not exactly minor, and criticism (even from "neutral" observers) for the princeton study isnt exactly rare.

If I read the criticisms correctly they also didnt bother measuring how much chow was eaten, which makes it pretty hard to link the weight gain to HFCS.

Criticisms of the princeton study

The claim that the metabolic consequences of HFCS and sucrose differ radically should raise eyebrows among physiologists. While I’d be skeptical of any results that find a difference, I would find good evidence for differences fascinating...... So if I were a metabolic physiologist, I might be tempted to look into how HFCS makes rats less active.

Except that I wouldn’t because after reading the paper, I would note that the experimental design, statistical analysis, and interpretation of the results in Bocarsly et al 2010 are deeply flawed. ......
[Issues]

• Experimental Design. The experiment lacks a 24-h Sucrose treatment and thus any interpretation of the 24-h HFCS treatment confounds two potential factors, time (12-h v. 24-h) and sugar (HFCS v. sucrose).
• Second, and most importantly, because this is relevant to all of their results, the authors either fail or make no mention of controlling for type I error using something like a Tukey-HSD test

And so on, if you wish to read.

Another article which brings up a different issue...
Complicating things further, the researchers cite a related study of female rats that found no difference in weight gain between animals that consumed HFCS or sugar over an eight-week period.

And at the end of the day, the real issue is that one study does not prove a point, particularly when it doesnt even begin to offer a mechanism whereby 5% more fructose would cause a significant difference in weight. Studies showing negative effects from EM radiation come to mind.

The other effects like jitters and palpitations is probably harmful to the heart in the long term

Caffeine (at high) doses can cause heart problems much more acutely. We have shown that 0.3mM caffeine (equivalent to ~2.3g*) can modify the activity of a protein in the heart sufficiently to mimic the effect of herditary mutations capable of causing fatal arrhythmias and that effect is quick (within mins). http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18518861

*Based on an average water volume of a 70kg man = 40L, caffeine = 194g/mole and all caffeine being absorbed.

What's odd is that there's a painting of him where the hump was clearly added afterwards.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2726816/

Yes, the racism is in the fact that blacks get arrested much more than whites.
There are many factors. Racial profiling means that blacks are more likely to be stopped and questioned then arrested for minor offenses ("resisting arrest", etc.).
Also, more likely to be arrested for drugs... (see this article on marijuana: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/23/nyregion/23about.html)
Another article about drugs from the UK but reporting on the US: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/oct/31/race-bias-drug-arrests-claim
Another reference: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2981137/

This 1998 paper on skipping seems to be free to read--at least in my country. It's not fun reading, but maybe you can skip some of it.

You're absolutely correct. The National Institute of Health has studies that show the Placebo effect can actually be effective treatment for certain diseases in certain cases, such as certain forms of mild depression (in the head). There's a real fine line between what the brain can control and real, physical or biological issues that can't be controlled by the brain. Placebos are quite cheap compared to actual medicine,depending on what one considers a valid Placebo.

The laying of a Priest's hands is financially cheap, and might be just enough to help someone if they believe enough in the action to activate the Placebo Effect.

On the other hand, the long-term cost of placebos due to the erosion of trust in the medical establishment which they require generally speaks against their use, not to mention the general erosion of the placebo effect as a result - it only works if you think you've been given real medicine.

You're absolutely correct. The National Institute of Health has studies that show the Placebo effect can actually be effective treatment for certain diseases in certain cases, such as certain forms of mild depression (in the head). There's a real fine line between what the brain can control and real, physical or biological issues that can't be controlled by the brain. Placebos are quite cheap compared to actual medicine,depending on what one considers a valid Placebo.

The laying of a Priest's hands is financially cheap, and might be just enough to help someone if they believe enough in the action to activate the Placebo Effect.

Not so. See Lenton, Held 2008 for example.

Related by me: http://www.changemakers.com/discussions/discussion-493#comment-38823
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html

By others:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/library/natural_depression.aspx
http://www.anwot.org/
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1108-21.htm
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2738337/
http://www.fatsickandnearlydead.com/

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2738337/

Look into books by Dr. Andrew Weil and Dr. Joel Fuhrman.

See also a list of other stuff I put together on health and happiness: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2738337/

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2738337/

Look into books by Dr. Andrew Weil and Dr. Joel Fuhrman.

See also a list of other stuff I put together on health and happiness: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2738337/

I used to believe stuff like that about vitamin D and minimal sun exposure of hands in the winter, which I was taught in grade school. It turns out to be wrong. You may want to do some more research on this topic before making such confident (and incorrect) pronouncements on this topic in the future. See for example: http://gizmodo.com/5823058/tanning-can-cause-cancer-but-not-tanning-could-cause-a-lot-worse

Or from:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2839537
"Sunlight has long been recognized as a major provider of vitamin D for humans; radiation in the UVB (290-315 nm) portion of the solar spectrum photolyzes 7-dehydrocholesterol in the skin to previtamin D3, which, in turn, is converted by a thermal process to vitamin D3. Latitude and season affect both the quantity and quality of solar radiation reaching the earth's surface, especially in the UVB region of the spectrum, but little is known about how these influence the ability of sunlight to synthesize vitamin D3 in skin. A model has been developed to evaluate the effect of seasonal and latitudinal changes on the potential of sunlight to initiate cutaneous production of vitamin D3. Human skin or [3 alpha-3H]7-dehydrocholesterol exposed to sunlight on cloudless days in Boston (42.2 degrees N) from November through February produced no previtamin D3. In Edmonton (52 degrees N) this ineffective winter period extended from October through March. Further south (34 degrees N and 18 degrees N), sunlight effectively photoconverted 7-dehydrocholesterol to previtamin D3 in the middle of winter. These results quantify the dramatic influence of changes in solar UVB radiation on cutaneous vitamin D3 synthesis and indicate the latitudinal increase in the length of the "vitamin D winter" during which dietary supplementation of the vitamin may be advisable."

A fair-skinned person in a skimpy bathing suit under noon-day near-equatorial summer sun can produce on the order of 20,000 IU vitamin D (which self-limits in the skin when from UV) in about twenty minutes. A dark-skinned person will take a couple of hours to reach that level under those conditions. As the above paper suggests, in winter father from the equator, your skin will produce essentially no vitamin D. Reference:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/about-us/our-staff0/john-j-cannell-md/

Given the above, the US RDA of about 600 IU D3 per day for an adult of any size is just bad medicine, as is setting a tolerable upper limit of 4000 IU D3 daily (when that "limit" is closer to what the avergae adult needs). That is why you won't get enough vitamin D from food, because the RDA is about 10X too low for most people. A better recommendation:
http://www.grassrootshealth.net/recommendation

With our increasing indoors lifestyle, people became more and more vitamin D deficient -- even living in sunny places like Arizona or Texas. That was made worse by the fear mongering by the dermatology profession (with dermatologists as whole causing on the order of 10X the cancer they prevented plus a host of other health issues like autism with their well-meant but terrible advice).

Studies have shown a link between nutrition and depression. See, as one example:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2738337/
"Few people are aware of the connection between nutrition and depression while they easily understand the connection between nutritional deficiencies and physical illness. Depression is more typically thought of as strictly biochemical-based or emotionally-rooted. On the contrary, nutrition can play a key role in the onset as well as severity and duration of depression. Many of the easily noticeable food patterns that p