Whoa

Single-handedly finding a cure for cancer, spurring a hydrogen economy, and desalinating water all from the same technology?

Patient's vision: Treating cancer without chemo

Even though the article is written in sort of a fable-like way and the results are very preliminary, I haven't had such a whoa moment since the first days of Google-searching, and that was pretty wowing.

"Computational Thinker" Thinks About Medicine

Some of the herpes viruses that are being studied at Stanford as suspects in chronic fatigue syndrome are described as remaining dormant in the body after a person recovers from infection, in specific parts of nerve cells or bone marrow, though sometimes reactivating. (The better-known members of the herpes family include the viruses that cause chicken pox and mono, in addition to the ones people actually call "herpes".) People are familiar with shingles being a reactivation of the dormant chicken pox virus.

I read about "dormant" viruses and wonder what does "dormant" actually mean to doctors and scientists? Is it completely asleep and immobile, nonfunctioning and nonreproducing, not doing anything to the human body? Is it the exact same virus entities from say fifty years ago in somebody's body reawakening after fifty years, and none of them woke up during that time in between? If not, that would mean they reproduced somewhere along the way.

What happens to all of the microbes when a body fights off infections? What happens when you take an antibiotic? Is the reason why people usually stay well after recovering from infections because antibiotics or the immune system kill every single one of the bacteria possibly located in the body? What would a random doctor or medical scientist answer to these questions?

Me thinking, thinks that well, these are cells and molecules, antibodies and antigens, flowing through blood and lymph and whatever in the body. They are actually objects and not magic nor abstract ideas. Physics, chemistry, and statistics apply. What are the chances that antibodies and antigens will perfectly collide such that every single one of the infecting microbe is killed before it gets to reproduce? Why do low levels of antibodies remain after an infection has been fought off?

My imagination plus logic thinks that viruses and other microbes in the body probably behave like chemical reactions with equilibriums that shift in response to various factors in the environment. Are "dormant" viruses actually "dormant," or are they just in an equilibrium in very small numbers against the immune system? I'm picturing visible infection as analogous to those pH experiments everyone does in high school chemistry where you drip one drop of acid or base at a time into a beaker of some pH-detecting liquid that changes color suddenly from clear to pink after one particular drop.


Viruses are known to be linked to some types of cancer, but interestingly there hasn't been much attention on the viruses as active causes of the disease and targets for treatment. Sometimes I think this is an example of lack of thought.

Here's an interesting article on a new discovery:

Kill the Virus, Stop the Cancer

And here's the research paper from the cool open access PLoS journals:

Treating Cancer as an Infectious Disease—Viral Antigens as Novel Targets for Treatment and Potential Prevention of Tumors of Viral Etiology


There have been a lot of news articles on the following big study which includes the conclusion that eating more meat increases the risk of cancer.

Doctors, Dietitians Stand Behind Fat/Cancer Link: Most Physicians Applaud New Report; Meat Groups Oppose Recommendations

In the meat and vegetables area, it's not enough to just eat more vegetables, you have to eat less meat too. That's one possible factor to explain different results from different studies, such as one I recently read about finding that doubling fruit and vegetable intake did not have an effect, and another finding that a diet heavy in vegetable-y foods lowered risk compared to a diet heavy in meaty foods. Seemingly conflicting research study results actually have logical explanations that should be figured out, and which probably actually turn out to be key information.


Okay, it's a vague link, but I thought this article on the need to teach and apply computational thinking in sciences and life in general is interesting. "Computational thinking" seems to be a term describing basic logic and problem solving skills, useful and needed for just about everything, but not taught or practiced very much outside of computer science and engineering.

Computational Thinking, Jeannette Wing
Official Google Blog: About the Google Education Summit

Sleep Deprivation and Psychiatric Disorders

This is an interesting article about a study that shows that sleep deprivation causes increased activity in parts of the brain linked to various psychiatric disorders:

Lack of sleep linked to emotional imbalance, imaging study suggests

It brought to mind when I read about author Iris Chang's suicide a few years ago and how it struck me that the stories suggested to me that sleep deprivation, three days without sleep while overworking, had triggered her psychosis and depression. I had bookmarked this article. It might not be a conclusion that other people would have come to or consider much, since it seems that both the medical and lay understanding of depression is mainly focused on its relationship to emotional or mental stress instead of physical stress, even as it's now accepted that depression is a disorder with a biological basis. But from the related timeline of events and history, it seems quite apparent to me that those three days of sleep deprivation were really the immediate cause.

Anyone who has pulled all-nighters while studying knows how it feels. It's actually kind of hard to describe. Dazed, muddled, kind of crazy altered state of mind. If you actually think about it, something physical is going on in your brain to cause that and it's not something good. We probably assume that it doesn't cause lasting damage. But maybe it's like how you can revive a slightly wilted plant but if you don't water it for too long, it becomes unsalvageable.

Apparently I Chew Tobacco

And sometimes I'm left-handed, and sometimes I'm right-handed. And sometimes my right leg is my left leg.

These are just a few of the discoveries you might learn about yourself if you get the opportunity to read your medical records and letters that doctors have carefully and thoroughly written.

Yes, doctors are busy people and they must see dozens of patients in a day. But sometimes these can have grievous consequences.

What surprised me was that it wasn't a rare occurrence but almost all of the letters written by the dozen doctors I had seen had at least one incorrect recording of medical history, not just mixing up right and left (frequently), mixing up weeks and months, and the sequence of reported events, but also creating weird things out of the blue. I'm perplexed by my tobacco-chewing habit, and that my blood pressure can apparently be recorded for a visit when my blood pressure was not taken.

My first full-time job was full-time quality control statistical programmer. My entire job was to check another programmer's work to make sure we came up with the same and accurate results. Even the people who entered the data probably had to use double data entry. Seeing as other industries have hordes of quality assurance engineers, test engineers, proofreaders, editors, etc., and feedback, code reviews, document reviews, peer review processes, bug-tracking, bug-finding, and bug-fixing, maybe we need to add some to the medical industry.

Synthetic Food

Like I said, our "food" is scary.

Doctors Link a Man's Illness to a Microwave Popcorn Habit

"A fondness for microwave buttered popcorn may have led a Colorado man to develop a serious lung condition that until now has been found only in people working in popcorn plants."

Bush Apparently Had Lyme Disease

I'm not kidding. Here's an article from Thursday:

Bush Apparently Had Lyme Disease, Washington Post

I like this quote from this random blog:

"While this doesn't explain the first 6 years of bad decision making, it might help with the past year."

Also, when I search for Bush Lyme, Google search wants to know if I mean Bush lame instead.

Interestingly, the doctors never tested him for it. Is that because they know that the lab tests are not very good? Or, maybe they did test him for it, and it was negative, so they don't want people to know.

Or how about the notorious Dr. Wormser being quoted as saying that "if he got it in Texas, it was undoubtedly STARI." How undoubtedly can it be, when no bugs were looked for, new bugs are discovered all the time, and the causative agent of STARI hasn't even been identified yet? Unless STARI is another name for "unidentified". It was undoubtedly unidentified.

Well, STARI is supposed to be milder than Lyme disease. In any case, the President is too old, and "lame", to notice if he ends up having long-term problems from the infection.

Addendum to the Previous Two Posts

Apparently the name of the game show where the math puzzle comes from is "Let's Make A Deal", and that even professors and statisticians get it wrong. The "statistics" required to solve the problem is extremely simple, but people have a lot of trouble defining what the problem is and not making faulty assumptions, such as the two choices are independent of each other, or that the two choices are even similar.

These kinds of mistakes happen all the time in everything including the path to Nobel Prize-winning medical research, which is part of the reason why it took twenty years to convince the medical community. One interesting part of the story is that they were unable to culture the bacteria, until accidentally one weekend the lab was too busy with other things to do what they had been doing with the plates, which was to throw them out after two days. After this discovery, they stopped throwing away the plates before the bacteria could grow. Ta-dah!

Not only is there the problem that medical people incorrectly conclude that inability to culture a bacteria is "proof" that it is not the cause, or doesn't exist, but apparently the efforts to culture bacteria and probably any other scientific procedure have to be questioned due to high chances of them just being done wrong without knowing.

Another thing was they were looking for corkscrew-shaped spirochetes, but the bacteria presented differently on the plates and biopsy specimens. Important things can be passed over because of assumptions.

It was also interesting that the two researchers described some elements of their background and skills which enabled them to accomplish Nobel Prize-winning work, including general training rather than specialized training, a tendency of thinking off onto what might be considered inconsequential tangents, and hobbies in engineering, photography, and drawing. The latter helped to see detail.

Nobel Prize in Medicine 2005: Psychosomatic Until Proven Otherwise

The discovery and proof that bacteria instead of stress causes ulcers, which won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 2005, has been cited as an example of how prevailing medical knowledge gets turned on its head. I did not realize how interesting the story is until I read the Nobel lectures and the autobiographies. These Nobel lectures, and maybe this expensive book, Helicobacter Pioneers, should be required reading for medical students. Some of the more interesting quotes are below. The story has more relevance to chronic fatigue syndrome and Lyme disease than I thought.

I was actually searching the Web for diseases once thought to be psychosomatic but eventually proven otherwise. Most of the time, Google search finds answers for me in a few seconds. This one is not so easy. There are references to all sorts of diseases such as epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, tuberculosis, and diabetes having been thought to be psychosomatic in origin, but I wanted to find a more "reputable" reference. This type of information seems to be found only in lore and anecdotes. Perhaps the medical authorities don't want to mention the history on their Web sites.

The dictionary definition of psychosomatic is "Of or relating to a disorder having physical symptoms but originating from mental or emotional causes."

In actual usage, psychosomatic is used to mean, "We don't know a physical cause or mechanism, so that means that the cause is psychological stress and anxiety, because we don't understand what not knowing is."

Despite the discovery about H. pylori in the 1980s, and the researchers finally convincing the medical community about twenty years later, and the Nobel Prize being given for it in 2005, I have still heard at least one doctor in the last year reference ulcers as an example of illness induced by stress. And here is an encyclopedia definition of psychosomatic illness that prominently describes peptic ulcer as a classical psychosomatic disorder caused by stress.


Interesting quotes from the Nobel lectures:

Helicobacter Connections, Nobel Lecture by Barry J. Marshall

To quote historian Daniel Boorstin: “The greatest obstacle to knowledge is not ignorance; it is the illusion of knowledge”. The relevance of his quotation is that in 1982 the cause of peptic ulcer was “already known”. Ulcers were caused by excessive amounts of acid secondary to personality, stress, smoking, or an inherited tendency. The successful introduction of H2-receptor-antagonists (H2RA) five years earlier seemed to confirm this idea because nearly all ulcers could be healed by lowering stomach acid secretion with these drugs. Thus, when Helicobacter was revealed, doctors were not looking for a new cause of peptic ulcer, that territory had already been taken by the illusion of knowledge.

It was certainly a paradox and so everybody had ignored Magnus’s findings because they did not fit in with what people thought would be the norm. When I presented our data in October 1982 at a meeting in Perth, a local gastroenterologist said to me; “Barry you’ve got that wrong, people with duodenal ulcers don’t have gastritis. The stomach is usually normal.” From what I had seen of Warren’s biopsies, I could say “How do you know since nobody ever biopsies the stomach of duodenal ulcer patients?”

Interestingly, I saw many patients who had ulcer symptoms, but in whom no ulcer could be found. Many doctors believed that such patients had a psychosomatic illness. However, I soon collected many such “crazy people” in whom symptoms greatly improved during antibiotic treatment. I started to believe that it was not always necessary to have a visible ulcer in order to suffer from ulcer symptoms. Perhaps duodenal inflammation, a pre-ulcer condition, could cause pain.

I found the response to my presentations very illogical and rather irritating. One day, after I presented my histology data showing the healing of gastritis with bismuth, the senior hospital pathologist stated “Dr Marshall these changes seem very subtle.” Actually the changes were quite dramatic, and this was the first time anyone in the world had been able to heal gastritis! I bit my tongue to stop myself from saying “are you crazy?” Others suggested again that these commensal bacteria merely infected people who already had ulcers. But quite clearly I had presented data from patients with gastritis who did not have ulcers.

I realized then that the medical understanding of ulcer disease was akin to a religion. No amount of logical reasoning could budge what people knew in their hearts to be true. Ulcers were caused by stress, bad diet, smoking, alcohol and susceptible genes. A bacterial cause was preposterous.

I knew that most people continued to believe that ulcers were psychosomatic so it was important to ensure that patients were completely unaware of which treatment they received.
...
As part of the study I included a psychometric test called the Jung Scale, which approximately measures things such as sleep patterns, optimism, wellbeing etc. I wanted to see if the so-called ulcer personality had anything to do with the ulcer disease.
...
the Jung Scales showed that the patients’ mental status improved when I eradicated their Helicobacter. When patients were in remission from their ulcer, Helicobacter eradication correlated with significantly lower Jung scores. Thus it seemed likely that the “ulcer personality” merely reflected a diminished state of health related to chronic infection of the stomach.

Helicobacter - The Ease and Difficulty of a New Discovery, Nobel Lecture by J. Robin Warren

Since the early days of medical bacteriology, over one hundred years ago, it was taught that bacteria do not grow in the stomach. When I was a student, this was taken as so obvious as to barely rate a mention. It was a “known fact,” like “everyone knows that the earth is flat.” Known facts can be dangerous; to quote Sherlock Holmes (Conan Doyle, The Boscombe Valley Mystery) “There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.”

I was unable to convince the clinicians of the importance of the organisms. Generally, they did not believe they were there at all. ‘Everybody knows the stomach is sterile’.... Another common question was ‘If they are there, why has not anyone described them before?’ At that stage I did not know why I had not seen them, let alone no one else.

It has become apparent over the years that gastric bacteria have been described many times over the last 100 years. However, these descriptions were not generally known.... The apparent absence of any previous report was given to me as one of the main reasons why they could not be there at all.

How Do You Know If You Fainted?

Last July, I picked a random doctor out of the nearest facility, to go have one of those things called an annual physical, which I had never had before, having grown up in one of the many Chinese American doctor families who never go to the doctor.

Some of the dialogue went like this:

Me: I fainted three times in a row.

Doctor: How do you know you fainted?

Me: (not thinking too much about the question) Oh, I woke up and found myself on the floor, before I could get to the phone.

Doctor: But how do you know if you were unconscious?

Me: (Hm...) Well, I don't remember how I ended up on the floor.

Doctor: But how do you know if you were actually unconscious? Because, you know..., if you were unconscious, how would you know, you know...?

Okay, is that supposed to be some sort of pseudo-philosophy? Fainting = fainting. And the doctor's interest seemed to stop there instead of addressing the fainting issue. Is that what I get for picking a doctor who lists "psychosocial medicine" under her interests?

Intestinal Microbiota

After sending in another disability application, and now waiting for them to reject it, I can now direct that energy elsewhere, like more blogging perhaps. I tried somewhat to avoid ranting about lameness but everything I thought to blog about was a rant. So if you do not want to read rantings about doctors, you might want to check back in in a few months.

On another note, I found this very cool set of open access scientific and medical journals when I read this article on a yummy topic, Digging in Diapers For History of Gut Bacteria, linked from Google Health News. The research article, Development of the Human Infant Intestinal Microbiota, is authored by a group of Stanford medical researchers, and browsing the other articles shows that many of them are authored by researchers from esteemed institutions such as Stanford, UCSF, Harvard, and Johns Hopkins. So this appears not to be just some dinky Internet journal.

Under the open access license, people are free to copy, distribute, and even make commercial use of the work, if proper citation is given. Wow, so I can copy large chunks of the articles into my blog and not break any rules.... Indeed, more people will read, and critique, and generate more ideas.

On the topic of gut bacteria..., I found this related article, Children May Breathe Easier If Antibiotics Are Avoided In Infancy, interesting.

Rural kids had less of a chance of developing asthma than urban children, overall. The researchers speculate that this may have to do with the differing microbes that colonize the guts of city and rural children as well as country kids' wider exposure to a variety of microorganisms. "Evidence for this hypothesis comes from epidemiologic studies, which link variations in gastrointestinal microflora and probiotic administration with less allergy and asthma," Kozyrskyj says.

And since I like to relate things that most people don't relate, I think this could be related to this interesting new finding that the gender ratio of people with chronic fatigue syndrome is strikingly different among people who live in large metropolitan areas, smaller urban areas, and rural areas. This is another open access article from a different journal:

Prevalence of chronic fatigue syndrome in metropolitan, urban, and rural Georgia

There were significant differences in female-to-male ratios of prevalence across the strata (metropolitan female: male 11.2 : 1, urban 1.7 : 1, rural 0.8 : 1).

The study also found that 2.5% of the population meets the definition of chronic fatigue syndrome, which is 6-10 times higher that previously found.

Perhaps I need to eat some dirt.

Doctor Demographics

I've been to see many doctors during the last year, and I wonder why all of them are men, and most are men around 60 years of age. Aren't medical schools graduating about half and half, male and female these days? Though I suppose, if most of the doctors I've seen are around 60 years old, then most would be men.

So here are some interesting statistics. Apparently only about a quarter of working doctors are women. But still, all the doctors I've seen are men, in contrast to knowing so many women in medical school, residents, etc.

And a lot of 60 year old male doctors really do think that if you're a 30-ish female, especially single, highly educated, and working (since working is a male thing, and women need a man to be sane), that you must be extremely neurotic. ("Do you have a boyfriend?" should not be part of medical history taking.)

Or maybe they just think that chronic fatigue syndrome is neurotic, like this one doctor describes how other doctors reported back to her that all her patients were neurotic:

From Skepticism to Science: After 20 years, chronic fatigue syndrome may finally be getting some respect and cutting-edge science

Do Babies Feel Pain During Surgery Without Anesthesia? Um...

I'm supposed to be saving my energy so that I can manage to fill out more disability forms, for this illness with no objective medical evidence. Objective medical evidence is required by disability insurance. Chronic fatigue syndrome by current definition has no objective medical tests for diagnosis, and by definition is a disabling illness. Sigh.

But what I had to post is this: Believing Babies Feel Pain.

Is this for real?!? Or is this some Snopes-worthy story that made it into USA Today?

Did doctors en masse really think that babies are like not born with pain nerves and then one day magically grow them at some arbitrary age when they are no longer considered "babies"? Was it really necessary to have to conduct studies on levels of stress hormones in order for doctors to believe that babies feel pain when having surgery without anesthesia?


We're talking about open heart surgery in the 1990s. Here are more articles on the topic:

Study Backs Deep Anesthesia for Babies in Surgery, New York Times

"Indeed, babies once routinely underwent surgery without any anesthetics. Many doctors believed newborns did not feel pain the same way adults do."

Babies feel pain - babies remember pain

"When he went to an anesthesiologist and asked why neonates were not given an anesthetic. 'He just told me, ‘hey, babies don’t feel pain. If we give them an anesthetic, it might make their blood pressure go down.’'"

Premature babies 'feel true pain', aka Doctors need to see brain scans in order to think that premature babies feel pain from painful procedures. I'm sorry, but babies' brains are developed enough to feel hungry, to move their arms and legs, and to cry, especially if you slap them or poke them with a needle, so why wouldn't they be able to feel pain?


Even if this began as a coping mechanism for doctors at a time when anesthesia was too dangerous for babies,

I call this DELUSIONAL.

Why It's Good For Children To Play With A Little Fire

So they don't become a college student who inadvertently burns down the Bio building when trying to put out a teeny tiny fire on an inflammable lab table.

For lack of blogging activity lately, I'm pulling out a draft I wrote a while ago.

Since I've been ranting about the retardednesses of doctors, I might as well continue with the story of how I saved the Bio Lab building from being burned down by a fellow Asian pre-med student. We were working on our lab projects for Bio 44X/Y. It was late at night and there were only two of us in the lab. People frequently accidentally set the glass dishes of alcohol on fire by putting a just-off-the-bunsen-burner hot glass rod in them. The other girl did this, and the flames shoot up quite high. I went over to get the big glass cover dish to snuff it out, but it's really not a problem to just let the alcohol burn out, since the glass and lab tabletops are pretty much indestructable. But before I got back, she was trying to snuff out the fire with a paper towel.

Now holding a flaming paper towel in hand, she was really freaking out, running around (fanning the flames) looking for a place to drop the flaming paper, and dropped it into the big garbage can... where there's a whole lot of other paper towels. Oh boy, but still a pretty small problem. Conveniently, the labs have these trays of squirt bottles with distilled water in them, next to trays of squirt bottles with ethanol. So I grabbed a bottle of water and started squirting. The girl decided it would be a good idea to copy me so she ran over and grabbed a bottle of ethanol and started squirting on the flames. Whew boy, does fire like alcohol. "No no no! Just STOP! Let me do it."

I should have thought of something to say afterwards to perhaps help the poor girl figure out how to put out a fire next time.

These kinds of things make you ponder while sitting in a doctor's office, even with something like a Stanford diploma on the wall, whether your doctor has ever tried to put out fires with paper towels and alcohol, and what that means for your medical care. You certainly hope this pre-med did not become an ER doctor or a surgeon.

But hey, maybe she had Lyme disease and her brain wasn't working. I can certainly understand that. :P

Tick Blog

I've been neglecting this blog lately. Actually I've been feeling a teeny tiny bit better for the last couple of weeks, and with that little bit of extra energy to use beyond eating and showering, I've been collecting info for... hm... my new Tick Blog. Hopefully I won't get in trouble for the liberty with which I've taken very large quotes out of government publications. I haven't quite gotten to finding data on ticks for all of California yet... but most of the Bay Area.

Because, do you hear doctors (and other people) say that you can't get Lyme disease in California, and here in the Bay Area? I think about 19 of 20 doctors I've seen said so. Only one of them actually had looked up the facts.

"Where does she live?... here in the Bay Area? Then it shouldn't be Lyme disease."

"Have you been to the East Coast, New York, Massachusetts, etc.?"

...etc...

Wonder, where do doctors (or other so-called experts on any topic) get their information from? Have they even bothered to look up any data or information before spewing their expert "knowledge"? Did they get their information from overhearing some other uninformed doctor say the same thing, and thus continue spreading the myth? Does "can't happen here" just mean the doctor or whoever just doesn't know any information on the topic and hasn't bothered to find out that it can happen here?

So anyways, almost every Bay Area county has been for many years conducting tick surveys with regard to infection with Lyme disease bacteria, and publishes the data on the Web. (Wow, where a doctor could just look it up with a few clicks if he or she bothered to know something before talking?!)

The average tick infection rate for the Bay Area is 2-3%, with data ranging up to 14% (that I've seen so far). The chances of being bitten by a tick, multiplied by 2-3%, is at least greater than the chances of winning the lotto jackpot. But even winning the lotto is possible in California! And if you have already been bitten by a tick, your chances are higher than getting E. coli from a bag of spinach. Some people I know pick up several ticks each when they go hiking.

A lot of the data is collected from big parks, but really, does a tick or the deer, mice, and lizards that they feed on care if a blade of grass is in an open space preserve or in your backyard? Some counties did collect data from smaller parks and roadsides in the middle of suburbia.

So if this is doctors' attitudes on Lyme disease and tick infection rates, sometimes you have to wonder if doctors know what they're talking about with regard to any other medical issue. Having 90-something percent of doctors think it is okay to BS and not be aware that they are BS-ing from a void of knowledge, is pretty scary.

Testing

This was one of the most e-mailed stories on the New York Times:

Chemotherapy Fog Is No Longer Ignored As An Illusion

Sounds a lot like Lyme brain and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome fog.

But somehow I bet there are still a ton of doctors who think it's not real. They can't imagine that people can perform normally on neurocognitive tests and still have trouble functioning. Blame the test or blame the person? Do we really expect the little test to cover so much of human brain function? Maybe it can find severe brain problems, but there's nothing in the test that is going to see whether a person puts their shoes in the freezer, or whether they can do their job which requires much more complex and coordinated brain activities.

In software, the QA engineers can put the software through the most thorough testing they can possibly do, but customers are still going to call up with all sorts of bugs. Imagine telling customers that it must just be their perception because all our QA tests passed 100%!

Doctor Logic

Because this is one of my favorite topics lately.

My mom was discussing Lyme disease with a doctor at CPMC who happened to be from Mendocino county where according to him, 70% of people get Lyme disease. He added that, in most people, it's a relatively mild disease, but in some cases it can be severe and take up to two years to get better. Most doctors don't acknowledge it exists in California, and most don't acknowledge it can be a severe illness. Since he lived in Mendocino, he's seen more.

On the topic of whether Lyme disease can be transmitted from person to person, through blood to blood contact... at first he said, no, it's not possible. Then after thinking for a little while, he revised that statement, saying that it could happen if you injected blood from a needle into a large vein. But it couldn't happen even if you rubbed two people's bloody wounds together. Hm...

Okay, then how does a tick, less than one millimeter in size, transmit the bacteria into people? It only goes less than one millimeter into your skin and doesn't go into a large vein.

Why do we put antiseptic on children when they scrape their knees?

Would you want to rub wounds with a person who has AIDS?

***

Pharmacist Logic

Says that the Lyme bacteria doesn't live in the blood, so that's why it can't be transmitted from person to person even with blood to blood contact.

Okay, then why do doctors try to culture the bacteria from people's blood???

And how does the bacteria get from the tick bite to the rest of the body?

***

Collective Logic

Take what one doctor says and what another says, and it just doesn't make any sense.

But what can you expect, when doctors don't even believe it's possible for a person to have Lyme disease after they were bitten by a tick and had a diagnostic bullseye rash.

***

Through my Web-stalking habit, I found that the doctor/resident who had chronic fatigue syndrome, was treated successfully, and now does volunteer work for the Stanford research study, is in family practice. When she finishes her residency, I might have to go seek her out to be my primary care physician... if she moves to this side of the bay. Because you will hardly find one doctor who acknowledges chronic fatigue syndrome exists, even with the CDC stating that there are now thousands of studies showing that it is a real distinct entity. Though she might not even believe that it was induced by a tick-borne illness.

My current primary care doctor is supposed to be one of the best and raved about in the area by both patients and other doctors, but even consultation from a Stanford doctor/research doesn't seem to make an indentation in him. And even that doctor doesn't actually treat chronic fatigue syndrome except for his research focus.

***

But when I really need something done, I'd probably have to go to my doctor sisters. This story came to mind, about a doctor who found her way into treating arthritis with antibiotics. I had come across it a while ago, and found it again with an interesting Google-age: "I'm your mother" arthritis.

Placebo-izing

I came across an article mentioned in a blog post about how China plans to modernize traditional Chinese medicine. Unfortunately you need a subscription to read the article, so I've only read the blog post. Everything has a blog these days. Even Nature has blogs.

Western medicine seems to rely solely on the randomized double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trial to research and prove that treatments work. This is well suited to treatments you can take in a pill form. And yes, Western medicine seems to rely solely on the taking of little pills to treat everything. Magic pills indeed.

Now how would one conduct a placebo-controlled trial on whether massage therapy or acupuncture work? Or tai chi or yoga or just plain exercise. Or changes in diet.

The solution so far seems to be to just ignore and dismiss all possibility of anything that is not a pill and cannot be placebo-ized. It doesn't fit into the one trusty scientific methodology that has been developed, so let's just not look at it.

Instead of, how about trying to come up with and use research methods that do work for something different?

Some people say things are not possible. Some people ask, how? How can it be possible? How can it be done?

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Awareness Campaign

Apparently, I'm having post-exertional malaise from cleaning out fish sauce and hauling the bottles to the dumpster two days ago. So I spent most of the day in bed, pretty much waiting all day until I had enough energy to type something here. However, it's not quite as bad as it was a few months ago, which I describe as, even if I had been starving in bed I would not have been able to get up and go out and acquire some food to eat, assuming money falling from sky, of course. I've read another person's description as, even if the building were burning down, she could not have gotten out of bed. Yes, this is really hard to imagine if you don't experience it yourself. It's one of those things where in order to understand, I wish people could experience it, yet it's really not something you'd want to wish on anyone.

The CDC and CFIDS Association have partnered up for an educational campaign. They have a pretty informative Web site: Provider Education Project and the CDC site on Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

However, as far as the Awareness Campaign, I don't know who it's reaching. The people who are looking for the information are already aware. The people who need awareness are the ones who would pass over learning about it even if the information fell in their laps. Who is this Awareness Campaign reaching, if in San Mateo County, between world-class UCSF and Stanford medical centers, one of the wealthiest and most highly educated regions in the world, and one of the most progressive supposedly... if I can go to twenty doctors in various specialties and hardly a one even recognizes this thing exists? The old-minded ones (who aren't quite used to women being in the work-world yet) say it's anxiety, stress, or psychosomatic. That's a pretty "interesting" conclusion, because when you think about it, that's an even more nebulous mechanism of causing physical symptoms than what the same people would call hokey in alternative medicine explanations of energy flow, meridians, trigger points, and whatnot.

So I wonder what would happen if, in response to my PCP saying to please let him know if there's anything else he can do to help, I suggested learning about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, even if he doesn't believe in the Lyme disease stuff. Doctors don't like to be told things.

What's better, a doctor (or any person) who is dumb and nice, or one who is smart and not-so-good a person? My mom says that people who really are nice and caring won't be that dumb, and people who are not-so-good people won't really be that smart. Hm... but in the case of a sick person seeking treatment from a doctor, which would be more effective? Neither? If a dumb person really cared enough, could he find a way to solve a problem with endless effort? On the other hand, does dealing with some smarter people require navigating Jekyll and Hyde?

I really haven't come across many doctors if any (excepting sisters of course) who are both really smart and really caring. There may be some luck involved there. I still have to share the story of the Stanford pre-med who tried to put out a fire with a paper towel. That's also the story of how I saved the Chem building from burning down, hehe. Next time you go to see a doctor, even a Stanford or Harvard educated one, consider the fact that even with that stamp, they might try to put out fires with paper towels. Scary.

Today is a record day for comments from new commenters. I was especially amused that I got an answer to my chemistry question. Yay!

Bookmarks

Confronting Lyme Disease: What Patient Stories Teach Us

Chronic Lyme disease: psychogenic fantasy or somatic infection?

The Complexities of Lyme Disease: A Microbiology Tutorial

Additions to LymeRix Vaccine Victims’ Stories and Related Articles

LymeRix Vaccine Victims' Stories

Quack Quack

Somehow I find Quackwatch to be one of the most annoying sites on the Web, and it turns up in far too many search results. (Of course, by linking to it, I'm just adding ever so slightly more to its Google PageRank.) Maybe it's because there are people who spend all their time quacking that everything is impossible. It eludes me how people think they are making sense when they try to debunk entire medical systems, like chinese medicine and ayurveda, that have been developed and used for thousands of years by billions of people. Especially with a page of nearly all inaccurate information. With those kinds of false claims, you could debunk anything.

And you'd be surprised how many people still say things are impossible even after other people are already doing those things. I've heard plenty, even in the small world of computers and the Internet, like... in 2000, "online ticketing will never happen" (I think it had already been in existence in some form for several years)... and "Google will never make money"....

It just occurred to me how scary it is that some people don't even have enough imagination to imagine things that exist in front of their eyes!

Why are pharmaceutical drugs believable, and herbal medicine not? Penicillin was derived from mold, morphine from opium, caffeine comes from tea, coffee, and other herb-ish substances, etc. Marijuana is used for pain. Where do people imagine the drug discoveries come from originally? The medical community does seem to recognize that herbs can cause problems when taken with pharmaceutical drugs, and doctors regularly ask if you're taking any herbs. Duh, so what does that mean... about herbal activity...? Does this idea of using chemistry and computers to study the chemical compounds in herbs help? Why should that make a difference whether it's believable that herbs work? The herbs don't change from not working to working after such scientific studies.

A lot of the time, it isn't even known how pharmaceutical drugs work anyway, and many uses are discovered by accident. Like the whole class of selective serotinin reuptake inhibitor anti-depressant drugs, apparently it's just a theory that what they do is inhibit serotonin reuptake. Now some people think they actually work by growing new brain cells. And apparently, the first anti-depressant drug discovered was actually an antibiotic being used to treat tuberculosis.

The problem seems to be that if people don't have the means to figure out how something could be working, to some people it's unacceptable and therefore isn't real, doesn't exist. Well, it's going to be a while before we can dissect every single molecule in the human body and follow all their actions in a lab. Science requires abstract thinking and imagination as much as logic and proof. Someday after we surpass Star Trek levels of technology, we'll be able to describe all of the quadrillion molecular activities that make up "qi" flowing through the body, "meridians", and "blockages"... or balancing vata, pitta, and kapha.... These are actually describing biological systems much more complex than the current science and technology can break down. Maybe it's a bigger number than quadrillion, how about googol?

This reminds me of a time when a friend told me how she remarked how wondrous and beautiful the stars they were looking at were, and her pre-med boyfriend at the time replied that they're just some gaseous material. Hrm, ok, well, the artist does not deny that stars are made up of gas, but apparently many "scientists" don't care to see that they can be anything more than that.

Copernicus was a quack. Anybody who ever made a discovery, invented anything, or produced new knowledge was pretty much a quack. The biggest quacks are those who call everything quacks.