Archive for the 'Medicine'

That Evil Mr Vaccine. Doesn’t he understand that if there is no polio or smallpox making bad children suffer, the good children won’t have anything to gloat about?

The Irish Catholic bishops have issued a statement on medical care given to Savita Halappanavar… Wait. What the fuck does anyone care what a mob of ignorant assholes say about reasonable, ethical medical care? I can’t even imagine the degree of arrogance involved for these self-righteous, unqualified old men to be so seriously offering advice on life-or-death issues of obstetrics and gynecology — to be piously asserting their importance even now in the aftermath of a death that would have been avoidable if Catholic doctrine had not meddled. I can give advice, too. Catholic priests, sit down and shut the fuck up. Learn some humility for once in your privileged, pompous, puffed-up lives. This is the part where you should wake up and realize you are not qualified to run hospitals. Instead, listen to the doctors. Like Jen Gunter, who finds the bishops’ advice to be inconsistent, incoherent, and confusing. That they even felt that their recommendations would be helpful or needed is damning. All that their statement tells me is that they haven’t learned a single goddamned thing. They still think they’re qualified to interfere in medical decisions.

There is a small group of obsessives who really hate Atheism+ — they hate it so much that they pick over every thread on the Atheism+ forum, looking for nits. And then, unfortunately, they write to me in email and twitter and tell me how stupid they are. The latest example: an atheism+ mod writes a short comment rejecting the utility of vaginal douching, complete with a link to a scientific review of the practice. Douche is emblematic of the patriarchy. It’s a completely unnecessary product marketed to women as vaginas are icky. In many cases, it actually makes things worse. It’s basically completely awful. So yeah, douching is in no way a natural or automatic part of life as a woman (or even as a cis woman), nor does it appear to be even remotely a good idea, so how do you figure the word is sexist? That’s pretty much the world consensus. There are only a few benighted places on the planet, the United States among them, where people believe that flushing out the urogenital tract with scented water is beneficial. So then I see this tweet flash by from some manic goon going by the name @NYBoxTurtle, who claims that Atheism+ mangles scientific data. #AtheismPlus takes a stand on vaginal douching. How do they interpret scientific data? FIND OUT! http://www.reddit.com/r/AntiAtheismPlus/comments/13tszo/how_atheism_plus_mods_interpret_scientific_data … #FTBullies 11:12 PM – 26 Nov 12 Here’s what Mr @NYBoxTurtle claims is evidence of science abuse by Atheism+: Science: Studies around vaginal douching “conflict…and the strength of association varies enormously between studies” resulting in “less agreement…for hygiene and relief of vaginitis symptoms” with “many potentially confounding factors blur Read more
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Oooh, here’s a nice short summary of how the human immune system works, geared towards making anti-vaxxers heads explode. (This is also one of the tacks we’ll be taking at the skeptic track at Convergence this summer — we’ve proposed a session on basic, introductory explanations of immunity.)

A while back, two physicists, Paul Davies and Charles Lineweaver, announced their explanation for cancer with a novel theory, which is theirs, that cancers are atavisms recapitulating in a Haeckelian reverse double backflip their premetazoan ancestry. They seemed very proud of their idea. I was aghast, as you might guess. They even claimed that human embryos go through a fish/amphibian stage with gills, webbed feet, and tails in a pattern of Haeckelian development. They do not understand evolution, development, or cancer, facts that were apparent even in the absence of their admission that they had no prior knowledge, and it was freaking embarrassing to see two smart guys with a measure of legitimate prestige in their own specialties charging off into another discipline with such crackpot notions. Now they’ve done it again, repeating the same claims all over again. And worse, they’ve now published it in the journal Physical Biology, under the title “Cancer tumors as Metazoa 1.0: tapping genes of ancient ancestors”. Read more