BARBARA'S TCHATZKAHS

By BARRON H. LERNER, M.D. Lucy, one of my longtime patients, has a neurological ailment she believes I have been unable to adequately diagnose. Although I hope to make further progress on her case, I have also told her that there may never be a definitive answer. Not surprisingly, she is feeling pretty frustrated with me. Why do doctors and patients often approach the diagnosis of disease so differently? Part of the answer lies in the concept of triage — the notion, originated in wartime, of caring for the sickest and most salvageable patients first. Once they were saved, attention could be turned to less drastic cases. A similar strategy has evolved in emergency rooms, where physicians are trained to “rule in” or “rule out” severe conditions. Thus, doctors immediately consider heart attacks or pulmonary embolisms for patients with chest pain, and intestinal rupture for those with abdominal pain. But what happens when these conditions are ruled out? In such cases, doctors proceed to se...

From this great blog! Bookmark this one! by Paul Campos Even by the remarkably mendacious standards of the "obesity" racket some of the claims in this story are beyond belief. The most laughable is the idea that by 2048 everybody in the US will be "overweight" or "obese." This result was derived via statistical extrapolation, the crack cocaine of social science analysis (by similar methods one could prove that within a few generations Olympic sprinters will be running at speeds that will hurl them into low Earth orbit and everyone in America will have a plasma TV seventeen miles wide). In fact there has been no weight gain at all over the past 30 years in the thinnest quartile of the population -- whatever (poorly understood) factors have caused Americans to weigh more on average now than they did in the 1970s have had very different impacts across the weight spectrum: thin people have gained no weight, people in the middle weigh 10-15 pounds than they d...

Gotta love those Global Warming deniers. Safe behind their keyboards. Since so far, this summer has been cool they're saying, "SEE - no Global WARMING! It's COOL out!" Get a clue. The fact that the predictable weather patterns are varying should tell you something. But most of them aren't gardeners like me, out tending flowers and growing a few veggies to serve to my family (tomatoes and my herbs are doing well so far this year, thanks!). No they'd rather bloviate from their computers and central air conditioned condos. Duh. And don't ask to debate them. Those bullies will just cut you off and scream louder. HOAX! I wonder if there's Global Warming in Hell? GLOBAL WARMING DENIERS ARE ON THIN ICE by Joel Connelly Chilling news on hot topics takes different forms, witness two e-mails that arrived cheek-by-jowl one afternoon last week. Sea ice in the Arctic thinned dramatically between the 2004 and 2008 winters, with thin seasonal ice supplanting thic...

It's getting tiring hearing the Global Warming deniers. Very tiring. All they have to do is engage their brains and step outside. However, I find most of these particular deniers so far off one end of the scale that they are unwilling & unable to listen. Nor will they admit being wrong or change their minds. ( I suspect some of these people work for power supplying companies, too) T hese 'it's a hoax'ers won't debate you or be rational in discussing it. While they have a right to their opinion, I have the right to not be treated in a rude or dismissive way. They can't even agree to disagree with you. And that - says it all about them. These same wingnuts turn on anyone who doesn't think or believe the way they do into "crazies, loons" or "chicken littles." When I was a teenager we had four seasons. Nowadays we really have TWO. Spring and Fall have become compressed and weather changes are becoming a body-slam from hot to col...

By Ed Edelson -- HealthDay Reporter Ever get a gut feeling something just isn't quite right, and make a decision accordingly? Science is beginning to suggest those instincts may have roots deep in the brain. Research in young volunteers points to some kind of "sixth sense" -- a mechanism in the brain that picks up on subtle clues, then sends out subconscious signals of trouble ahead. The finding could help explain certain intuitive phenomena seen among humans. For example, in the recent Asian tsunami, aboriginal people sought out higher ground in the moments before the disaster, as did many wild animals. Could subtle changes in weather or the environment have warned them early on? Just such an early warning system may exist in the anterior cingulate cortex, a brain area important in processing complex information, according to a report by psychologists at Washington University in St. Louis. Their findings appear in the Feb. 18 issue of the journal Science. In their experi...

"I assert that the cosmic religious experience is the strongest and the noblest driving force behind scientific research." The university professor challenged his students with this question. Did God create everything that exists? A student bravely replied, "Yes, he did!" "God created everything?" The professor asked. "Yes sir", the student replied. The professor answered, "If God created everything, then God created evil since evil exists, and according to the principal that our works define who we are then God is evil". The student became quiet before such an answer. The professor was quite pleased with himself and boasted to the students that he had proven once more that the Christian faith was a myth. Another student raised his hand and said, "Can I ask you a question professor?" "Of course", replied the professor. The student stood up and asked, "Professor, does cold exist?" "What kind of que...

IGNORED, MARGINALIZED OR SIMPLY BURIED Dr. Richard Carmona, the former U.S. surgeon general, has accused the Bush administration of political interference, such as censoring his speeches and preventing him from speaking publicly on issues such as contraceptives and abstinence-only sex education. "I was blocked at every turn . . . Anything that doesn't fit into the political appointees' ideological, theological or political agenda is ignored, marginalized or simply buried, " Carmona testified before Congress. "The problem with this approach is that in public health, as in a democracy, there is nothing worse than ignoring science." Carmona's term expired in July 2006. The nominee to replace him, Dr. James Holsinger, has been denounced by the Human Rights Campaign, the HIV Medical Association and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force for authoring a 1991 paper that made a medical argument against homosexuality. The American Public Health Association is a...