Early in the pandemic there was a widespread belief that science would be our salvation. With the help of science we would be spared the worst consequences, such as occurred during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. A vaccine would arrive, reliably, after a few hard months of research, and in short order the problem would…
What If The Media Covered The World Series The Same Way It Covers Science?
October 16, 2015 by 1 Comment
Note: This is a slightly updated version of an old post. I think it is especially relevant at this time of year. October brings the Nobel Prize announcements and the World Series. No one will mistake media coverage of one for the other. Each Nobel Prize will get one article and 10 seconds on the…
Ignorance, Cardiology, And The Milky Way Galaxy
August 25, 2015 by Leave a Comment
Question: How is the Milky Way Galaxy like cardiology (and the rest of medicine and science)? Answer: Sometimes we think we know a lot more about them than we really do. I remember staring at the page of my third grade science textbook. We were learning about astronomy and the Milky Way galaxy. There was…
Good Science/Bad Science: Contrasting Papers On Dietary Compositon In JAMA And BMJ
June 27, 2012 by 3 Comments
Two studies published on Tuesday on dietary composition offer a striking contrast. One tackles the interesting question of whether different diets producing the same amount of weight loss might have different effects on energy expenditure. The investigators performed a rigorous, carefully designed experiment that advances our knowledge about diets and metabolism. The second tackled an…
This Week In Medicine: Stop Exercising and Eat Chocolate!
May 31, 2012 by 5 Comments
It’s been a terrific few days of medical news for lazy people and chocoholics. First, a study in PLoS One provided ammunition to the exercise-averse crowd by claiming that exercise can actually be bad for some healthy people. As an added bonus, a story about the study was carried on the front page of the…
You Know Nothing, Dr. Snow: Why Medicine Can’t Be More Like Facebook
May 18, 2012 by 3 Comments
Medicine can never be like Facebook, despite what Matt Herper argues over at Forbes. Perhaps he was just trolling for hits on a day when everyone is thinking about the Facebook IPO, but Herper proposed, with apparently seriousness, that medicine needs to model itself on the tech world in order to match the kind of…
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