Trump’s war on universities, like Iran, is doing great damage to the US, here via success in reducing research funding and causing chaos.
Read more...Newsom backs the PMC over anti-vaxxers, even though Northern California is a stronghold of RFK Jr. health fetishists and quacks.
Read more...Part the First: As Giants Still Walk the Earth. Stanley Plotkin began practicing medicine in the 1950s. When he was an intern, outcomes for patients such as this little boy were frightening and devastating: Stanley Plotkin recalls a night in 1957, during his pediatrics internship, when a father brought a gravely ill toddler into the […]
Read more...How Category III CPT codes for new procedures became entangled in a politically driven, zero-sum reimbursement game, to patient detriment.
Read more...Part the First: Confirmation the Scientific Literature Has Entered Terminal Decline? In an update from last week’s Coffee Break, Cabell’s Predatory Reports database passes 20,000-journal milestone: The US-based information services company reports that Predatory Reports has grown by more than 300% since its launch in 2017. Having reached 10,000 journals in 2019 and 15,000 in […]
Read more...In this modern world, sometimes it seems that everyone has “something,” and many of these conditions are relatively “new” and their incidence is increasing. Leading diagnoses from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), include ADHD, autism, depression, and anxiety. Conditions that have become more common in recent years that have no primary […]
Read more...Part the First: Predatory or Not? Over the past six years the biomedical literature has accumulated 494,547 scientific “publications” with “COVID” (case insensitive) somewhere in the paper. A search using “AIDS HIV” as the query returns 204,559 papers over the past forty-five years. Something does not add up here. And that something is the nature […]
Read more...How large is the exposure of gender transition doctors who were quick to provide treatments to teens? A $2 million award says pretty big.
Read more...Part the First: Whalers in Brazil 5,000 Years Ago. Whaling rightly has become anathema in this modern world, except in certain, very limited, circumstances. But the historical origins of whaling remain an interesting question. It turns out that whalers were active in southern Brazil 5,000 years ago: Some of the oldest harpoons ever found reveal […]
Read more...According to the news article in Damage Assessment (paywall that may be surmounted by registration) in Science by Jeffrey Mervis, the stated goals of Trump v2.0 have been consistent and were implicit during Trump v1.0. These have been: (1) shrink the size and scope of the federal government, (2) expand the power of the presidency, […]
Read more...Is being virtuous more than just its own reward?
Read more...After one full year the grim news on the science front – all fronts really – this Coffee Break is devoted to why science is interesting and fun. And useful, even if its use value cannot be predicted before the fact. Part the First: Ancient Travelers. Or, social networks (not this kind) have always been […]
Read more...The Trump administration asks USDA scientists to research foreign co-authors for suspected collaboration or crimes.
Read more...Part the First: We Live in Pluto’s Republic. With apologies to the shade of Walt Disney, this was bound to happen eventually. From Corey Robin, who notes that at Texas A&M a philosophy professor must dispense with Plato in his course because the content will be in violation of this edict: “No system academic course […]
Read more...Gene therapy has been a goal of medicine since the first “inborn errors of metabolism” were identified by Sir Archibald Garrod in the early twentieth century. This was before anyone had a good idea of what a gene was, but the principles of Mendelian genetics were used by Garrod, with the assistance of William Bateson, […]
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