Blog archives for the year 2009

If bisphosphonates taken for bone health actually do also help prevent breast cancer, does that mean every woman should take them?

More evidence continues to accumulate that it is a perfectly reasonable approach to take a wait-and-see approach after being diagnosed with early-stage prostate cancer with a low Gleason score.

The American College of Radiology is outrageously irresponsible in its assertion that “countless American women may die needlessly from breast cancer each year” if the new USPSTF recommendations are followed. So much for the Hippocratic oath of 34,000 doctors - screening results in overtreatment, which, as has been known for a long time, can cause a great deal of harm.

The decision by a federal appeals court in New York to reject Myriad Genetics’ and the University of Utah’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit against them was a small step toward the inevitable recognition that uncreated biological information should not be patentable.

There might just be finally enough data about cancer screening to tip the balance toward a more intelligent and nuanced way of looking at cancer.

Economic considerations are necessarily a huge part of the health care debate. But should they be the only ones?

If you have had breast cancer surgery that involved the removal of lymph nodes (i.e., axillary [armpit] lymph node dissection), you have almost certainly been given an advice sheet something like the one posted at breastcancer.org (excerpts below):
• Do moisturize your skin frequently and regularly. Use lotions such as Moisturel, Eucerin, Vaseline Intensive Care, or your [...]

Just art and biology, not music, but this is to cool to ignore. An artist, Luke Jerram, has produced beautiful glass models of viruses, with help from the virologist Andrew Davidson. He has so far represented small pox, HIV, H1N1 and SARS, among other viruses, and one bacterium, E. coli.:
These are spectacular works, [...]

It’s the decades-old question, which still hasn’t been adequately answered. These days when the environmental issue du jour is carbon emissions, the concerned citizen’s choice is a lot more complicated than earlier alternatives of saving trees or clogging landfills. Our assessment of “environmentally friendly” is constantly evolving; ironically, in the 1980’s “biodegradable” was [...]

The latest on honeybee “colony collapse disorder” (CCD) may be disappointing to some (it’s still not cell phones), but it is not really surprising (except perhaps to conspiracy theorists). So far, at least, there is still no evidence for a single culprit. The leading evidence up to this point suggested a virus, but [...]