Blog archives for the year 2008

A lot of breast cancer literature out there encourages the option of lumpectomy + radiation over mastectomy. This is understandable, since for a long time, mastectomy was considered the only option, and may be overkill for a lot of early stage breast cancers. But the NIH’s current statement on the matter seems rather [...]

Not to belabor the politics, but ’tis the season. Montana must get the award for the Least Likely to Pass ballot initiative in this Tuesday’s election: “C-44: Investment of Public Funds in Private Corporate Capital Stock.”
This would amend Montana’s constitution to allow up to 25% of government funds to be invested in [...]

This is not a political blog, and the topic has nothing to do with biology or music, but a few days from a presidential election, it is more topical to mull over campaign money and where we go from here, now that public finance is clearly dead in presidential elections.
Ever since 2000, many of us [...]

Astute readers of this blog (those who are left) have noticed a long hiatus in posts. This has been due to medical reasons, and also because of these, most future posts for awhile will be cancer-themed. Perhaps research summarized here may help others also looking for information to help them with difficult decisions [...]

In light of several comments on a recent post, it seems as though a more complete discussion of cost-benefit analysis might be useful. It is a process that is useful in many aspects of biology, from resource management to health issues.
The basic premise is that to make decisions, you need to estimate [...]

It’s been a busy week for music - my jazz band performed three times in eight days. One tune especially satisfied the requirements of this blog quite nicely: “Inchworm.” Jazz aficionados will recognize this tune as a Coltrane standard.
But I never liked the fact that Coltrane only played one of the two counter-melodies in [...]

In recent years, there has been a small bit of backlash against the ubiquitous use of antibacterial soaps. Indeed, research beginning in 2002 has continued to confirm that based on both effectiveness and potential negative side effects, there really is no reason to use these soaps and plenty of reasons not to.
The active antibacterial [...]

This is a comment, based on personal experience in this area, on the latest news about Vioxx - that Merck hired “ghostwriters” to write the scientific papers about Vioxx and thus were perpetrating “fraud.”
A new report (Ross, J.S., MD, MHS; K.P. Hill, MD, MHS; D.S. Egilman, MD, MPH; H.M. Krumholz, MD, SM. 2008. Guest [...]

Time to start getting your omega-3’s from plants. We are long past the golden age of fish production and quickly approaching a complete crash of most fisheries, in case you had not noticed. Probably it was inevitable, but over a decade ago, a couple of biologists figured it was worth a shot to [...]

There is a fallacious argument commonly held and cited by pro-private-property advocates. The argument goes that interested parties having private property results in the reverse of the “tragedy of the commons,” which holds that public resources are over-exploited because they belong to nobody, and thus are not worth protecting; if I do not grab [...]