Health

NEVER “JUST TRUST THE SCIENCE”:

Book Review: Why the Medical Establishment Often Gets It Wrong (Lola Butcher, 11.01.2024, UnDark)

“Much of what the public is told about health is medical dogma — an idea or practice given incontrovertible authority because someone decreed it to be true based on a gut feeling,” Makary writes.

Makary’s assertions are supported by hundreds of footnotes as he builds each indictment, but that doesn’t mean all physicians and researchers are nodding in agreement. One example: When a research team analyzed 13 studies comparing antibiotics to appendectomy, it found almost a third of the patients initially treated with antibiotics had an appendectomy within the year. Although the other two-thirds did not, the researchers called the evidence that antibiotics are better “very uncertain.” So surgeons who choose to operate immediately are not necessarily doing something wrong.

Makary, one of medicine’s most prolific iconoclasts, has been poking at America’s health care system since at least 1998 when, as a medical student, his article calling on hospitals, medical schools, and health insurance companies to divest their tobacco stocks was published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association.

A few years later, ignoring criticism from his colleagues, Makary created a checklist to improve surgery safety; after proving that safe surgery checklists reduced surgical errors and deaths, they are now used in most operating rooms around the world. His 2012 book, “Unaccountable,” demanded that hospitals reveal their infection rates and medical errors. A few years later, Medicare began requiring public reporting of those and other indicators of health care quality. His 2019 book, “The Price We Pay,” documented hospitals’ price-gouging practices and called for all hospitals to post cash prices for certain services — which is now required by law. […]

He does not call the medical establishment nefarious; rather, he accuses it of frequently embracing a narrative — that stress causes ulcers, for instance — without evidence, ignoring scientific findings that do not support the idea, and blackballing those who question their position.

THANKS, DARPA!:

Fixing typos in the book of life (Stephen McBride, October 7, 2024, Risk Hedge)

mRNA (messenger RNA) technology can turn cancer from a death sentence into a mere nuisance.

Remember, “mRNA” is the tech that helped scientists develop a COVID vaccine in record time. Please, don’t hate mRNA because of how governments + big pharma forced these vaccines on us.

mRNA really is a game-changing tech with incredible promise. For cancer, it can prime our bodies to seek and destroy solid tumors not easily cured with surgery, and without the nasty side effects of chemo.

These cancer-killing jabs are only in the trial phase. But the results are extremely promising.

What’s even more promising is mRNA vaccines for pancreatic… colorectal… metastatic… and lung cancer are all showing positive results in trials, too. What if mRNA is the “skeleton key” that helps us cure every cancer?

I love how my friend Matt Ridley describes mRNA: “Synthetic messengers that reprogram our cells to mount an immune response to almost any invader, including perhaps cancer, can now be rapidly and cheaply made.”

IT’S ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

Worldview may have more impact on mental health than chemical imbalances – study (Ryan Foley, 30 September 2024, Christianity Today)

The Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University released the study Tuesday, attributing the rise in mental health issues, such as anxiety, depression and fear, to what researcher George Barna calls “worldview deficiencies” rather than “psychological or chemical imbalances.”

The findings are based on interviews conducted in January with 2,000 U.S. adults aged 18 or older, with a sampling error of plus or minus 2 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.

The report highlighted mental health struggles among younger generations, noting that 56% of Generation Z and 49% of millennials regularly experience anxiety, fear or depression. Generation Z refers to the youngest group of American adults, while millennials are defined as those born between 1984 and 2002. In total, one in three adults from these generations has at least one diagnosable mental disorder.

ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

Pain relief from mindfulness meditation not a placebo effect (Paul McClure, September 08, 2024, New Atlas)

New research has found that mindfulness meditation reduces pain by engaging a distinct brain pathway, separate from the pathway activated by a placebo. The standalone analgesic effect that mindfulness produces could be leveraged to help people living with painful conditions.

Practice don’tmindfulness and just your quibbles.

ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

When pain really is in your head (Nancy Shute, 9/-7/24, Science News)

As we report in this issue, researchers are now getting a better handle on the complexities of chronic pain, including the brain’s role in amplifying or maintaining pain, and people’s perceptions. As freelance science journalist Cassandra Willyard reports, scientists are pursuing possibilities ranging from new medications to a tiny injectable electrode to forms of cognitive behavioral therapy designed to help patients grasp that chronic pain is sometimes a misfiring signal from the brain that can be managed. Rather than one-size-fits-all, these treatments will be tailored to the patient, and will likely include multiple treatments to better address the complexities of chronic pain.

CHASING FADS:

The Case for Hypochondria (Anna Altman, August 21, 2024, New Republic)

“Hypochondria has been called ‘the ancient malady,’” writes Caroline Crampton in her lyrical new book, A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria. “For as long as humans have had an understanding of health, there has been anxiety about it”—especially when that understanding is subject to superstition and misconception.

What happens with that worry—what behaviors develop, how much it hampers or deforms us, how it relates to our symptoms and our interpretation of them—is where things get tricky. If doctors tell us there is nothing wrong with us, but we persist in our anxiety, are we acting pathologically? Or are we experiencing something as yet unknown, at the edge of medical knowledge? Is hypochondria a somatic condition—a form of mental illness, an experience of the mind expressed in the body—or is it rooted in physical experience? Is it a diffuse anxiety about health, fear of contracting communicable disease, or the conviction that an illness is already present? Is it a form of obsessive compulsion? What is hypochondria’s relationship to diagnosed illness, anyway? Is it always an unhinged departure from what’s happening in the body, or is it sometimes a reasonable response to the uncertainty of corporeal experience?

It was bad enough when hypochondria was just a form of keeping up with the Joneses, but now that so many “conditions” have been valorized it’s also a way of making yourself seem special, without any risk of being judged weak.

A MIND IS A TERRIBLE THING TO WASTE:

Placebos reduce anxiety even when people know they’re taking fake pills (Paul McClure, August 26, 2024, New Atlas)

Taking placebo pills fully aware that they contain no active pharmacological ingredients can still significantly reduce stress, anxiety and depression according to a new study. It’s suggested that these ‘non-deceptive placebos’ might be an effective way of improving mental health.

IT’S ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

Hard-to-treat traumas and painful memories may be treatable with EMDR – a trauma therapist explains why it is gaining popularity (Laurel Niep, 8/16/24, The Conversation)

Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing was developed in 1987 by Dr. Francine Shapiro after she discovered that moving her eyes from her left foot to her right as she walked – in other words, tracking her feet with each step – resulted in lower levels of negative emotions connected with difficult memories, both from the more recent frustrations of the day and deeper events from her past.

Conventional treatments, such as cognitive behavioral therapy or dialectical behavioral therapy, rely on extensive verbal processing to address a client’s symptoms and struggles. Such therapy may take months or even years.

Depending on the trauma, EMDR can take months or years too – but generally, it resolves issues much more quickly and effectively. It is effective for both adults and children, and can be done remotely.

Any distracxtion works.

VAX, MASK, CLOSE:

What worked to stop the spread of COVID-19? (Kevin Drim, 8/07/24, Jabberworking)

A recent paper by Christopher Ruhm of the University of Virginia quantifies the value of various efforts to combat COVID-19 in the US. The headline result is a composite score for different states based on what kinds of restrictions they imposed, but I found the detailed national breakdown more interesting. Here are his estimates of how various interventions affected death rates: