placebos revisited

can you get addicted to a placebo? i was searching for a definition of reward with google (easier than finding and thumbing through the dictionary) and one of the reasons i love and hate the internet popped up. when i put 'reward' in the google search box, 'reward deficiency syndrome' came up as an option. now i've seen it all. it's supposed to explain addiction by showing how people need positive strokes or rewards and when they don't get them they look to temporary 'cures' like alcohol, drugs, sex, gambling, etc., to help assuage the deficiency.
there's a diagnosis for everything.
and do you know why a diagnosis is important? other than that it gives people the ability to say 'i have reward deficiency syndrome' instead of 'i can't control myself'? it allows doctors to put its number in a box beside which said doctor can put an order for a medicine or a treatment for that diagnosis and then the insurance company is supposed to pay for it. no diagnosis, no payment.

put mercury back in vaccines

10 years ago thimerosal, the mercury-containing preservative used in many multiple dose vials of vaccines, was removed due to the thought (not proof, just idea of possibility) that it contributed to the rising incidence of autism. since then, thankfully, autism is now nonexistent....no, it's not, autism diagnoses are rising even faster. makes me wonder if we should put the mercury back into the vaccines?

beware of false studies

the temptation to jump on the bandwagon against andrew wakefield and his study about MMR and autism being false (pretty much proven already) and even (collective gasp) motivated by monetary gain is strong. but if that same critical eye is aimed at many pharmaceutical studies sponsored by the company who stands to profit, we find that it's easy to point fingers when the villain is our enemy but not so easy when they are feeding us lunch every day. ouch.

placebos

a new study shows that placebos work...duh...that's what they're supposed to do. but they work even when we know they are placebos. we always, at least i always, assumed that they worked as a tactic to fool people into thinking they were getting something that they really weren't getting, and that it proved that it was not the medicine that worked but that the person thought they were getting better so they did. and that may be true, but now it seems that we don't even have to be fooled to believe stuff works even without any reason to believe it will. this makes me think at several different levels.
first, it explains why babies get better with pretty much any kind of drop you put in their mouths when they are fussy. after a dose or two, just the touch of the dropper to their lips makes them calm down. sometimes. truly sick babies believe less in the placebo effect than others.
it explains why babies seem to get sleepy when given tylenol by their parents. seems that the placebo effect is transferable. if the parents believe it, the kid gets sleepy.
it explains why antibiotics work. and it explains why colloidal silver works. and ear drops with vinegar. and pretty much anything else you do with the belief that it's going to help. because usually the ear infection will go away in a couple of weeks regardless of what you do.
but it doesn't explain why people continue to take medicines whose list of side effects is longer than the list of good effects. why not just take a placebo? it's got about as good a chance as any to work, without the side effects.
so this study both explains why pharmaceutical companies are making so much money, and asks why? at the same time. maybe it's the side effects that make you know it isn't a placebo.

prairie voles and songbirds

just got a newsletter/fundraising letter from OSU dept. of zoology (my alma mater, my major). two professors each got grants of over $300K to study songbirds and prairie voles. the songbird study will see if growing up in a good environment affects adult zebra finches vs. those growing up in bad environments (not sure what that would be, maybe lots of cats around), and the prairie vole study is what really caught my eye. these little creatures are 'monogamous animals that form long-term pairbonds and exhibit behaviors that appear very similar to those that we humans might call 'love' for both a mate and for offspring'. the guy is going to look at their brains and see what hormones make them 'love' and especially look at the males and their attachment to their offspring 'to provide a better understanding of what controls monogamy and offspring care by fathers'.
hey, save your money and quit looking at tiny animal brains and read the bible, numbnuts! 'Start children off on the way they should go, and even when they are old they will not turn from it.', and 'That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.'
we get angry when people waste their money on frivolous stuff but welcome it, almost worship it, when it's in the name of science. especially in the name of 'developmental origins of adult disease' and 'understanding the causes of dysfunction in social attachment, such as.........autism'. 
words of wisdom from my lovely bride: 'you find what you're looking for in the last place that you look'. and it seems that scientists have the bible buried pretty deep in their piles while looking elsewhere for answers to life's questions. but i guess you don't get much grant money for studying 'why people don't pay attention to what God says despite continually suffering the consequences of such behavior'. oh, well.

need a doctor?

¹² On hearing this, Jesus said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.
in matthew 9:12, mark 2:17, and luke 5:31 Jesus makes it pretty clear that it is the sick who need a doctor, not the healthy. man's response to this? the healthcare industry, with us (i'm sure i'm as guilty as the next "health care provider") as its minions, is out to make everyone think they are sick. so they'll need a doctor. God forbid that people figure out that most of their sickness is self-induced or just plain made up out of thin air, drug advertisements, and webmd. not to tout my knowledge or that of the medical profession so much as to help lay persons figure out why when they search symptoms on the internet and find weird stuff that it's not the long list of things that could cause the symptoms they are having that we need to learn in med school, but which ones on the list we can mark off without a lot of unnecessary expensive tests and treatments. the 2nd year of med school, pathology was the course, was a whole year of being pretty darn sure i had every disease about which we learned because they all had fatigue, headache, irritability, or some other random symptom common to every disease in the world, including not getting enough sleep, but surely it's something way more interesting than just that i'm staying up too late and not eating right and not exercising and working too hard and generally ignoring the common sense signals my body gives me, has to be. i must be sick. so i must need a doctor. Jesus said so. so i still have a job. so what started as a rant against webmd and people thinking they are sick all the time ends up as thankfulness that i have a job that benefits from this! wow. sometimes you just gotta think/write things through. i forgot how much fun this blogging stuff was.

a cynical look at john chapter 11

in studying john 11 for a bible study there were a couple of questions asked that brought out my cynical side. ok, it's always out, but it was provoked.

one was about which of the sisters martha and mary and which one was more responsive to Jesus. i'm pretty sure the answer according to the 'experts' is going to be martha. but i'm going with mary because she chilled at the house until Jesus called for her, then she went to Him and talked with Him, while martha had been on webmd looking for a cure for lazarus all the time Jesus was waiting to come and it's pretty obvious she was a bit ticked at Our Savior for taking so long, making me wonder if He needed malpractice insurance or something. so our american way is to go with the aggressive out front ask the questions regardless of the fact that you know what Jesus is going to say and things are going to work out ok in the end because after all it's Jesus after all and you trust Him and everything but you just have these couple of questions you really need to get answers to so that you can understand even though you understanding really adds nothing to the situation other than making you look like an impatient wench and then you argue with Him when he wants the tomb opened because you're afraid it's going to stink and you'll be embarrassed because nobody in this family has ever been stinky in public if martha had anything to do with it. ok, enough on martha.

next, the whole lazarus thing had to happen back then because now old martha would have had him bundled up and taken him to an urgent care or er where they would have done $5000 worth of tests on him to diagnose and then treat his problem and he would have never died and the book of john would have been one chapter short. and the shortest verse in the bible wouldn't be there. john 11:35 'Jesus wept'.