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Via Talkr - have a listen. I'd never seen Talkr before, but it takes any blog post (or any text for that matter, at least in theory) and converts it to audio, a podcast. Check it out. The voice is actually fairly fluid and not terribly robotic. This is one of the coolest apps I've seen in a while. Notice that KidneyNotes has "listen to this article" buttons/links below each post. I wonder if Typepad has that functionality as a plugin or option of some kind.
Grand Rounds Volume 2, #36 Check out the folksonomy at the top of the blog-- nice! Also, have a look at the spikes in the graph below via Kidney Notes via Technorati. The spikes represent mentions of the Grand Rounds (or link-love, not sure which). Each spike is a Tuesday, when the Grand Rounds is usually puslished.
Fixin' Healthcare: The Lifestyle Chronicles - More Of Pogo Knows. This is the second time I've read in the last 24 hours about doctors giving patients unnecessary medical test. "Medicalized" is a new word I'm seeing here as well. Is American getting medicalized? Are we all sick by default?
Kevin, M.D. - Medical Weblog: Why doctors order unnecessary tests. Key quote:
"The patient has no symptoms and doesn't smoke, but he gets a routine chest X-ray. If there is a small shadow, doctors are obligated to look further."
"That X-ray becomes a CT scan. That may show a small little nodule. The next thing you know, the patient ends up with a cardiothoracic surgeon who wants a needle biopsy, or even an open ," he says. "In a lot of these cases, he comes up with nothing, a benign nodule or something."
I'm heading in for a physical soon and I'm sure after reading this I'm going to think twice about the tests. Maybe I can point my doc to this blog post and ask his opinion, or better yet, print it out and bring it with me. Or maybe that won't win me any points with the doc and I'll end up with even more tests that I don't need :)
Medpundit's last blog post? It's been quite a run, and quite a read.
Some are making the case that susceptibility to bird flu may be, at least partly, genetic. Hiroshi Kida (of the dept. of disease control at Hokkaido University in Japan) says "there has not been a single case of infection involving husband and wife." Others are suspicious:
... consider this. If I flip a coin and it comes up tails and you flip the same coin, under identical conditions and it comes up heads, we don't say that I have the "tails" gene and you have the "heads" gene. Or if you see a movie and like it and I see the same movie and hate it, we don't say you have the movie-loving gene and I have the movie-hating gene.
For those of you with the blog-reading gene, read on.
NHS Blog Doctor: Homeopathy, bird flu and ducks. (via Aetiology's Grand Rounds) Key quote:
A public health doc writes in to draw my attention to the role of homeopathy in the treatment of bird-flu.
There is a connection between avian flu and homeopathy. Avian flu is transmitted by birds. Homeopathy is quackery.
This dismissal of homeopathy reminds me of something else I read recently regarding the placebo effect. Maybe there is real evidence-based support for homeopathy, maybe there isn't. Or maybe it's all placebo effect. But many swear by it. Many also swear by an aspirin-a-day to keep heart attacks away. What's strange is that according to a book I was reading referencing the placebo effect (hope I can find it or someone will comment giving me a hard time) studies show that Americans benefit more from the aspirin-a-day-keeps-heart-attacks-away strategy more than their counterparts in the UK, where people generally don't swear by it. Is American's faith in aspirin to prevent heart attacks what makes more Americans benefit from it? If so, does faith-based medicine have a place alongside traditional medicine, as long as it works as such? I'm not of course envisioning a day in which there will be fine print on pills that reads "powered by placebo," but if aspirin-to-prevent-heart-attacks is indeed powered-by-placebo, how many others might be? Just a thought. Big disclaimer: I'm not qualified to debate this with any authoritity whatsoever. Just an overly curious health consumer blogging away...
Found this today via Aeitiology. Dr. Ng Swee Choon argues that high colesterol may not be the direct cause of heart disease after all. This is something I've heard before... maybe with regard to the Atkins diet, can't remember, and there was a Time mag article about inflammation and heart disease that raised a few eyebrows a couple years ago. But as a relative outsider I'm not familiar with the intricacies of the debate, to say the least. But it concerns me when things that seem to be such common knowledge for Joe health consumer like me-- that cholesterol is public enemy #1 regarding heart disease-- are called into question by doctors themselves. From Dr. Ng Swee Choon:
... in cardiology, three observations relating to CAD cast severe doubt on the theory that high cholesterol cause CAD...
Read his blog post here and look for the three observations as bullets halfway down the page.
