Blog entries by anciendaze
At the moment my present idea of exercise is more appropriate for playing with the family dog: "Sit up. Roll over. Play dead."
My Memorial Day weekend was the kind of memorable occasion I'd like to forget. I had a minor illness which others here will recognize as a serious problem when it comes...
It seems those of us who are so perverse we refuse to fit in convenient medical diagnostic categories with neat billing codes can't help but stumble around in minefields of medical controversy. This is one of them.
The name in this title is a sort of nickname for a molecule with full name...
Here is another more personal post. It started out as a message for friends alarmed by reports they saw in the general press.
This has become a topic in the general press because it appeared in "The Lancet" with apparently authoritative backing. You will have no trouble finding alarming...
The following is from a letter written to explain this illness to someone well-intentioned but misinformed. I've tried to avoid the heavy use of bibliographic references and other academic practices to concentrate on a limited number of objective measures intelligible to almost anyone. It...
We now have explicit evidence that a common retrovirus in cattle is transmitted to humans, and associated with lethal disease.
This falls short of academic standards for determining etiology, but that may not be very important when it points to a major risk factor. There are many risk factors...
The Human Genome Project found essentially all of the "coding DNA" being transcribed into proteins back in 2003. The first draft of a human genome was declared complete, though there were certainly loose ends to be tied up.
One surprise at the time was that the protein coding genes identified...
If knowledge itself is power, what results from profound ignorance? Whatever that is, I think it describes the way medicine has dealt with the immune system. Prior to Pasteur (ca. 1870) I would describe understanding of immunology as entirely anecdotal.
We have learned a lot since then, but...
This is a term in graphic arts for a trick that fools the eye, a deliberate optical illusion. Famous examples include recesses with statues, or windows with distant vistas, which turn out to be flat images on a wall, or huge, complicated domes or high vaults which turn out to be painted on flat...
What does it mean to improve public health? There are many measures based on what goes into the process, but fewer based on what results. Since zero input will produce zero output we tend to assume positive results must be proportional to effort expended. When large numbers of intelligent...
If a tree falls in the woods, and a statistician declares this a random event, does it make a sound?
This question ran through my mind when I read responses to news out of Columbia University concerning ME/CFS/SEID/WTF.
The report on plasma immune signatures of physiological pathology in the...
Note: this is actually a follow-up on my previous post The Sound of Silence. This was provoked by "expert opinions" on the Hornig/Lipkin study made public by the UK's Science Media Center, and in particular the comment that this was only "a small study". Readers looking for more topical...
There have long been problems in reconstructing the history of China, because several dynasties went to some lengths to erase the history of preceding dynasties. The classic case is the Qin (Chin) dynasty founded by Qin Shi Huang. You can tell this was remarkably successful because the...
I'll start with some lighter material which would get this deleted as off topic if this were not a blog. A little gentle humor is not misplaced when emotions run high. We'll see how it relates as we go on.
There have recently been reports of a major security breach at Anthem involving data on...
A great deal of noise has been made over various things the authors of the PACE study have claimed in publications or spoken statements. What has received much less attention is the remarkable extent to which they have remained silent on very significant aspects of that trial. The continuing...
The series of publications stemming from the PACE trial continues to roll on with the inevitability of a juggernaut or tumbrel. The venue for this series of reactionary proclamations has been The Lancet and specialty journals of that group. People might ask how such a prestigious publication...
In The Reefs of Taprobane, Arthur C. Clarke recounted some underwater adventures he and Mike Wilson had exploring reefs around Sri Lanka. (He was ahead of his time in calling his books on diving the Blue Planet trilogy. That name was not used for a television series until much, much later.)...
Many years ago there was a strange joke going around among aeronautical engineers: "What's bigger than an ox, has square corners, and flies?" After the victims spent a while trying to make sense of this they were told the answer was "a flying ox box." This fit all the stated requirements...
Earlier I discussed some parallels between Mason-Pfizer Monkey Virus MPMV and beta retroviruses which cause mammary tumors in other species in my post Curse of the Monkey God?. In the post titled The Purloined Virus I mentioned a delta retrovirus commonly infecting domesticated cattle and found...
In past posts I've already said some things about situations where normal distributions should not be expected. These actually turn up all over biomedical statistics, and the real puzzle is how researchers avoid seeing them. I'll repeat some of that in this post; bear with me. In this...
While most people at some time use the term "trainwreck" to describe a situation with a particularly messy outcome, few have actually seen a real trainwreck. I have come quite close. I didn't see the actual impact, but I passed through one crossing minutes before it was blocked by wreckage...