Debunking EBM
Trick or Treatment: Do Doctors Encourage Poor Patient Behaviors?
Happy Pumpkin Day folks, and to celebrate this day of weird encounters, I am going to reel off a list of the commonest peeves I have experienced in the past couple of years I have been doing Medicine. There are obvious gaps in the stories, and many are not even unique to me, but I […]
Knowledge Compression and the Beauty of Data
I stumbled onto this fantastic Ted Talk given by “data detective” David McCandless via a Tweet on the @BMJ_latest account: Editorial brainstorm today with "data detective" David McCandless http://fb.me/Di4njr4o— BMJ (@bmj_latest) April 13, 2011 If you are like me and like crunching numbers or at least, trying to pry out hidden information from datasets, then […]
Cochrane Students’ Journal Club: An Introduction
Why this Journal Club?Three simple reasons.. To provide students with an opportunity to critically read literature outside their key area of study: To provide students with an opportunity to critically discuss scientific papers. To sensitize them to EBM. Okay. So this is how it goes..A clinical scenario asking a question on the potential management of […]
The Word for 2011: Wakefieldian!
Ok, so Sarah Palin shot to fame and glory when she refudiated someone’s claim to something or whatever, and ended up contributing to the posterity by adding a word to the lexicon. And it seems there is a new candidate this year already (and the first fortnight hasn’t even sailed by!): WAKEFIELDIAN. So what would […]
Steaming Vaginas!
So I am going to blame the holy Orac at Respectful Insolence for writing Steamed vajajay woo when I end up getting a lot of hits on this post from porn seeking freaks. Like most science freaks, I love Orac’s blog and although I am sometimes amused by his sense of well-placed immodesty, there is nothing […]
XKCD and Kim Tinkham
So, I have talked about the Kim Tinkham issue in some passing references on this blog, and I think that her unfortunate demise stands as a monument against tinkering with non-scientific woo-s to help with potentially fatal situations. The author of the much revered nerdcomic XKCD was recently faced with illness in his own family, […]
Twitter WTFery
So, Deepak Chopra tweeted this some time ago, and while logging on to Twitter, I saw it had become one of the popular tweets and was being featured on the front page: Twitter and social networks are globalizing human consciousness. A collective creativity that could heal the planet is emerging— Deepak Chopra (@DeepakChopra) December 22, […]
BMJ: Busting Myths Journal
I have already admitted how enamored I am with the Christmas edition of the BMJ in an earlier post. And the reasons for loving BMJ in the waning month of each year just keeps on increasing. Somehow, they have managed to take the seriousness out of medical research. Quiet like the Annals of Improbable Science, […]
ASStronomically Bad Science
<start rant/> Regret the poor pun already, but if you are a BMJ-Christmas edition fan like me, you will have eagerly awaited the brilliant series of enjoyable scientific reads they bring forth as a year end extravaganza that they spew each December. I was pleasantly exhilarated to read this article which takes on the pseudoscince […]
Two Sides of the Same Coin
There has been a lot of noise on the interwebs lately centering the almost prophetic death of two of the most popular (at least posthumously) faces of breast cancer sufferers. Kim Tinkham and Elizabeth Edwards. Whilst the former concentrated on alternative medical therapies, stressing on the need for alkalinizing the body to cure cancer which […]
