The sad thing is, this and this barely pinged my surprise-o-meter. I'm writing a chapter on cancer and am familiar with some of this, but it's nice of Robin to pull so much together like that ( Read more... )

OK, I know what you're thinking: enough with the cryptic transmissions and vague allusions to a higher calling -- can he still bring the science? Yes we can! I don't intend to do this kind of thing much anymore, but I'm making an exception because I haven't been this jazzed about a new paper since I went ga-ga over Hawks et al (2007)The paper in ( Read more... )

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Via xshardsx. Erroneously rosy views about modern medicine aside, it was like having a scene from my own life hilariously narrated by someone with more of a gift for words. (Am available for parties, BTW.)

Via Brad, yet another grab-bag of medical voodoo rituals. None of this will surprise any of my enlightened long-term readership, though the stuff about antibiotic abuse struck me as especially noteworthy. It would be interesting to know if there were correlations between their use and subsequent immune disorders or uncommon infections, which would ( Read more... )

The last piece of advice my doctor gave me*: try taking 3mg of melatonin before bed.

That worked *great*, let me tell you: waking up in the middle of the night becomes a total non-issue when you're nolonger able to get to sleep in the first place. I have to hand it to him, that solution would never have occurred to me. Last night was the worst ( Read more... )

When beliefs need some modification,
We make it with much trepidation.
For our world is then new,
And things seem all askew
'til we're used to the new formulation.

-- Arnold Tustin

This is really starting to take its toll on me: for the past three weeks I've been averaging maybe one uninterrupted night's sleep out of every four. No surprise that my productivity has taken a nosedive; I'm running largely on amphetamine and spite. One measure I like to keep an eye on is my ability to respond adaptively to things I haven't ( Read more... )

pleasedtoeatyou had been getting stomach aches in the morning, and for a while we were both stumped -- subtracting regularly consumed foods from her diet didn't seem to yield consistent results. Then last week she suggested it might be her toothpaste; lo and behold, when I plugged in "gastric+fluoride" into Gscholar I came up with two decades' worth of papers, of ( Read more... )

According to the Merck manual, the average adult loses a little less than a liter of water per day through the parts of their body that come into contact with the air, assuming they haven't been sweating a lot. Your typical bladder also holds up to half a liter of fluid, and presumably needs to be emptied once per day just to get rid of necessary ( Read more... )

". . . boldness alone is not yet exploration unless it is coupled with a critical sense. . . . the more we learn to look at the individual and particular work of art as the work of skilled hands and great minds in response to concrete demands, the more we shall teach authority that what the artist needs is not more myth or more propaganda, but ( Read more... )