Denialism Blog

Denialism Blog

  • Conscientious objector or deserter?

    The discussion we’ve had since Friday regarding the Bush administration’s latest foray into theocracy brought up some interesting points. We discussed implications of the draft regulations including likely limitations on access to safe and effective birth control. But there is another issue here that disturbs me greatly.

    Last week we talked a little bit about medical ethics. I’m not an Ethicist (Mike! Are you reading?), but I am a “practical ethicist”, as are all health care providers. How do ethics inform the discussion of what care we can or cannot provide?
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  • Tangled Bank is on the way…

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    The Tangled Bank, the carnival for folks who love their science blogging, is coming here to denialism blog August 6th. We are the emergency fill-in hosts but promise to do a bang-up job. Send in those entries (to PZ, click the badge above).

  • Theocracy in action—HHS proposes to limit birth control

    I’m so angry I can barely type coherently. I have very strong feelings about abortion, but I believe it is possible to respectfully disagree about the ethical issues involved. I have an obstetrics colleague who does not perform abortions, but refers patients needing this service to others. That’s the ethical way for a doctor to oppose abortion—don’t do it, don’t prosteletize, refer out. My personal feeling is a woman has the right to control her body and all that dwells within, but I can see why others would disagree.

    All that being said, if you chose a profession that will, by its very nature create an insoluble ethical conundrum, you need to get a new job. Pharmacists who refuse to dispense birth control when given a lawfully written prescription should be fired immediately and consider a change in careers.

    The Religious Right is trying to protect these types of “acts of conscience.” Traditional passive resistance in the model of Thoreau and King emphasized the breaking of unjust laws and the acceptance of any punishment that goes with it. The religious right in this country is not content with this model—they would prefer to allow for acts of conscience without consequences. In this vein, the Church Amendment was passed. This amendment protects professionals who are trying to impose their values on others by mandating that health care providers who receive federal funds not require providers to provide services that to which they morally object. This has not been widely enforced apparently, because a draft is circulating at the Department of Health and Human Services that would step up enforcement, and broaden the services to which people could object, even protecting them if they refuse to refer to an alternate provider. This document terribly flawed for a number of reasons.
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  • New OTA site

    The archived reports of the OTA are on a new site hosted by the Federation of American Scientists.

    You may remember that we’re big fans of the OTA as we feel that scientific assessment of government policy and guidance of legislation is key to having an efficacious, informed congress. In our initial post on the OTA we said:

    It used to be, for about 20 years (from 1974 to 1995), there was an office on the Hill, named the Office of Technology Assessment, which worked for the legislative branch and provided non-partisan scientific reports relevant to policy discussions. It was a critical office, one that through thorough and complete analysis of the scientific literature gave politicians common facts from which to decide policy debates. In 1994, with the new Republican congress, the office was eliminated for the sake of budget cuts, but the cost in terms of damage to the quality of scientific debate on policy has been incalculable. Chris Mooney described it as Congress engaging in “a stunning act of self-lobotomy” in his book the Republican War on Science (RWOS at Amazon).

    The fact of the matter is that our government is currently operating without any real scientific analysis of policy. Any member can introduce whatever set of facts they want, by employing some crank think tank to cherry-pick the scientific literature to suit any ideological agenda. This is truly should be a non-partisan issue. Everybody should want the government to be operating from one set of facts, ideally facts investigated by an independent body within the congress that is fiercely non-partisan, to set the bounds of legitimate debate. Everybody should want policy and policy debates to be based upon sound scientific ground. Everybody should want evidence-based government.

    One of the leading advocates of restoring the OTA, Rush Holt, has a video up explaining why he thinks the OTA is important:

    I’m glad to see that within the government there are those who still think this is an important issue, and the possibility of bringing science back within the halls of government is still a very real possibility.

  • More on the effects of tobacco poisoning

    My recent post on tobacco poisoning focused on chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, the cause of about one-third of smoking related deaths. Let’s move on to cardiovascular disease (CVD), which accounts for another third.

    When we talk about CVD, what are we taking about? The pathophysiology is very interesting…go and read.

    Heart disease, which includes heart attacks and heart failure, kills about 100K smokers yearly. This includes people who have a heart attack and die suddenly, but also people who develop heart failure and linger on swollen and breathless.

    Strokes kill about 16.5K smokers yearly, which doesn’t include smokers who are only disabled by strokes.

    Aortic aneurysms kill about 8.5K yearly. That’s a fun one. An aortic aneurysm is a dilation of the main blood vessel that leaves the heart. When this tears or bursts it causes horrific pain in the chest or abdomen that radiates to the back. Thankfully the pain often doesn’t last long, because if the aorta actually bursts, you bleed out into your chest or abdomen very quickly.

    Oh! Wait! I forgot peripheral vascular disease! Who doesn’t like gangrene? (Don’t click unless you’re ready for the gangrene picture.)

    Peripheral vascular disease often starts as pain in the calves when walking, but can rapidly progress to loss of a limb. Eww.

    I always tell my residents that helping a patient to quit smoking is usually the best thing you can ever do for their health. Smoking is the cause of most preventable deaths in the U.S. and causes about 20% of all deaths. It is impossible to overstate the public health menace that smoking presents. Cessation programs have become more sophisticated, as have the drugs that are available. Patients often ask me if nicotine patches are safe. My usual response is, “Well, are cigarettes safe?” There are very few bad ways to quit smoking. The first step is deciding you’re ready. Then, get educated. Resources abound.

    Ach! I forgot to tell you….

    Average monthly cost of cigarettes: 350 USD. That’s a whole lot of money.

  • Another reader question, and open thread

    This is one of those topics I’ve always sort of avoided, and I’m still avoiding it for now. But that doesn’t mean you have to remain silent. Here’s the reader comment/question:

    This is off-topic, but I wanted some doctorly input to a discussion that I am having over at another blog.

    This lady is hyperventillating about the “sinister” (her word) policy of the Oregon Public Health Plan.

    They won’t cover curative treatment for people who have a “less than 5% chance of surviving five or more years”

    Instead, they cover palliative treatment, hospice, and Doctor-Assisted suicide.

    This lady is setting it up as a moral judgement that the government is making a value judgement on 1,2,3, or 4 years of life.

    To me “less than 5% chance of surviving five or more years” doesnt sound like curative treatment doesn’t have a very good chance of buying you even one year of additional life. I think that she has an unrealistic view of what it means to have a less than 5% chance of surviving five or more years” means.

    Heres the story:

    http://conservablogs.com/haemet/2008/07/28/the-real-face-of-choice/

    Teresa

    It’s all yours, folks.

  • Link love—Sceptics' Circle #92 at The Lay Scientist

    It’s up over at Martin’s place. His blog came out of nowhere (don’t they all) a few months back, and he’s hit the ground running.

    Just, please, when you get to my section, try not to use your imagination too well. Trust me.

  • How real science works

    ResearchBlogging.orgEvery once in a while I like to do a piece on how real science works. The New England Journal of Medicine was kind enough to serve up a nice example for us this week.

    Real science is hard. It’s time-consuming, expensive, and leads down many blind alleys. That’s one of the reasons pseudoscience is so alluring—anyone can do it. It doesn’t require an education, an R01 grant, or really even a grasp of reality.

    So on to the current article. Heart disease is a big killer. Over half-a-million people yearly have the worst type of heart attack, called an ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI). Coronary heart disease kills almost a half-a-million Americans yearly and around 300,000 people die of heart attacks in American ER’s every year.

    So this is a pretty important disease. Here’s how it works…
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  • Rationality served up hot and fresh

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    One of my favorite pet websites is RationalWiki, which is slowly transforming into it’s 3.0 iteration. It originated as a parody/rebuttal site to the execrable Conservapedia (and no, Conservapedia is not a parody, just an example of Poe’s Law at work). Eventually, it expanded to developing articles that examined irrationality in general, such as fundamentalism, evolution denialism, etc.

    In its latest phase, it has implemented an interactive “What is Going On” (WIGO) feature. Initially this simply tracked inanity at Conservapedia. Now it will also track the best and worst of the blogosphere, the news, and anything else that seems interesting. It will allow readers to evaluate content real-time and see how idiocy is debunked. And, being a wiki, anyone can join in on the back-end helping to build content.

    It’s fun. Check it out.

  • The truth is out there…WAY out there

    Oh. My. F-ing. God. All the news that’s fit to print???

    I know some of my readers don’t think much of the New York Times (yes, PP, I’m talking to you), but despite some of my reservations, it’s still the Paper of Record. That’s why I was, er, um, was nauseated was flabbergasted threw up in my mouth was surprised when I saw a piece on the OpEd page today calling for better investigation of UFOs.

    If you just did a spit take on your LCD, please wipe it off now.

    OK, done? Good.

    I did not make this up. Really. I’m not going to go through all the arguments regarding the utter improbability of alien visitors, or a conspiracy to cover up alien visits. It’s been done, and done, and done.

    There are a few points about this particular piece worth pointing out. First,

    It’s the New York Freakin’ Times!

    Second, the main argument here is that the US reportedly stopped investigating UFOs in 1968, and in these days of hightened terrorist threats (what color are we now, RED!!111!!?) we should not be ignoring potential threats, especially threats that might be invisible to radar.

    To parse it out, the author is essentially defining UFO’s as FO’s that are visible to credulous individuals, but not to radar. He points out that the US has stealth aircraft, so Bad Guys might have radar-evading craft as well.

    OK, first, al-Queda can’t afford a stealth bomber, ‘k?

    Second, does this guy think the US military is completely daft? Yes they have their problems, but the military is also staffed by some seriously smart professionals. D’ya think they are ignoring airborne threats to national security?

    This whole piece is ridiculous. The only reason it isn’t fit for the National Enquirer is that it uses too many words. Why it’s in the Times is beyond me.