Category: ScienceEveryday (medical imaging is separate)

January 9, 2017 ScienceEveryday (medical imaging is separate) Post a Comment

Cleveland Clinic is fully committed to evidence-based medicine

Cleveland Clinic is fully committed to evidence-based medicine

I wonder what appropriately disciplined means. Anyway, I’m glad that the Cleveland Clinic recognized the danger of having their name associated with anything anti-vax.

The Science Mag article mentioned the increasing popularity of Alternative Medicine and how the Cleveland Clinic isn’t the only big hospital that is offering Alternative Medicine.

Here’s a bit from NPR from a few years ago.

But Is It Medicine? – Northwestern Memorial was one of the first U.S. hospitals to combine conventional medicine with alternative treatments like acupuncture, Reiki, and Chinese herbal remedies. In response to patient demand, a growing number of hospitals in Chicago and across the country are offering such services, but questions remain about their legitimacy. Most have not been scientifically proven to work, which also means they aren’t covered by insurance. Should patients be shelling out of pocket for alternative treatments? And what solution can conventional medicine provide?

Chicago Mag and NPR

https://soundcloud.com/morningshiftwbez/chicagos-northwestern-memorial

http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/August-2013/Integrative-Medicine/

eta

I’ve written before about why it’s so important to correct false information about vaccines. Here’s just one example.

https://plus.google.com/u/0/+ChadHaney/posts/iXZme6uNk25

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/01/cleveland-clinic-will-discipline-doctor-who-wrote-antivaccination-column

November 27, 2016 ScienceEveryday (medical imaging is separate) Post a Comment

The future might not be so bright

The future might not be so bright

Professor Sam Wineburg, with the Stanford History Education Group started a study to examine how students (middle school, up to undergraduates) understand real vs. fake news. Although the study began well before fake news became such a big issue during the election, the report is very timely. One positive outcome of this work is that, the researchers hope to produce videos showing the depth of the problem and demonstrating the link between digital literacy and informed citizenship.

You can read another version, summarizing the research here:

https://ed.stanford.edu/news/stanford-researchers-find-students-have-trouble-judging-credibility-information-online

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/11/23/503129818/study-finds-students-have-dismaying-inability-to-tell-fake-news-from-real?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=2054

November 25, 2016 ScienceEveryday (medical imaging is separate) Post a Comment

Remember, it’s #FidoFriday.

Remember, it’s #FidoFriday.

Fugazza et al, recently published work demonstrating that dogs have episodic-like memory. What’s episodic memory? It’s your personal recollection of an event, but not to be confused with autobiographical memory. Semantic memory is recollection of facts, e.g., knowing the capital of Iowa. To distinguish between episodic memory and autobiographical memory, remember autobiographical memory includes semantic memory, e.g., the names of the places in your memories.

In this study, dogs were trained to mimic the trainer when the trainer gave the command “do it”. It’s called Do as I Do training. To get at episodic memory, the dogs were then trained to lie down after watching the owner do a task, like touch an umbrella or jump over a chair. Then the dogs were surprised by being asked, “do it”. They had to remember what was done 1 minute earlier and 1 hour earlier. As with many of us, the dogs did much better at the shorter delay of 1 minute.

You can read more about memory types here:

Episodic Memory: Definition and Examples

http://www.livescience.com/43682-episodic-memory.html

The full article is here:

Recall of Others’ Actions after Incidental Encoding Reveals Episodic-like Memory in Dogs

http://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(16)31142-3

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/11/your-dog-remembers-more-you-think

October 11, 2016 ScienceEveryday (medical imaging is separate) Post a Comment

#ISeeTheWorldWithScience.

#ISeeTheWorldWithScience.

Trouble brewing at work.

If you want to guess what the two items are, tell me something interesting about them but don’t say what your guess is. Please don’t blurt out the answer.

If you don’t want to guess, you can tell me what science the image makes you think of.

Previous examples of #ISeeTheWorldWithScience

http://goo.gl/98ZhNL via +Mark Crowley

http://goo.gl/kPz2Kr via +Rajini Rao

http://goo.gl/3nhaI4 via +Johnathan Chung

http://goo.gl/XpKIco via me

ETA

This edition of #ISeeTheWorldWithScience is long over. The two items below are liquid helium dewars that I used to refill my MRI at work.

October 9, 2016 ScienceEveryday (medical imaging is separate) Post a Comment

Time for some smelly science

Time for some smelly science

Fresh Air’s Terry Gross interviews Alexandra Horowitz to discuss her new book, Being a Dog. One of the fascinating capabilities that Alexandra mentions in the interview is that dogs can tell time via smell. We know dogs have a tremendously more sensitive sense of smell compared to us. It makes sense that dogs can use smell to tell time, if you think of time in a different way. For example, they can smell just traces of something left behind by another animal. Therefore they know that a faint smell is from the past. They also can detect faint smells in the air, perhaps around the corner. Therefore, they can smell the future. The way Alexandra describes a more traditional sense of time is pretty interesting. As the air heats up in your house, you can imagine air currents change. The smell of the room should change too. Remember we are visual creatures but dogs are more olfactory. Imagine 3D smell instead of sight. It makes sense that the scent profile of a room would change depending on the time a day and therefore a clue to what time it is. It’s very much like how we can use shadows to guess if it’s midday or evening.

Alexandra mentioned the vomernasal organ, sometimes called the Jacobson’s organ and I’m guessing a lot of people have never heard of it. The vomernasal organ (VNO) is the peripheral sensory organ in the olfactory system that involves chemoreception. Pheromones are often mentioned in the definition of VNO but in some non-mammalian species, such as snakes, VNO might be used to track prey using chemoreception. Therefore focusing just on pheromones is not broad enough of a definition. There is some debate as to whether or not humans have a VNO. It seems clear that it exists in the embryonic stage. The debate seems to be whether or not it is functional as adults. The article by Meredith (linked below) focuses not on whether it exists but what its function could be.

The other interesting thing from the Meredith article is the section about pheromones, where he talks about the definition and its use in scientific discourse. So first, the definition.

What is a pheromone and is it a well-defined, scientifically useful concept? The term pheromone was coined to describe a chemical substance which carries a message about the physiological or behavioral state of an insect to members of its own species, resulting in ‘a specific reaction, for example a definite behaviour or a developmental process’ (Karlson and Luscher, 1959).

He goes on to discuss how communication by pheromones needs to be mutually beneficial for sender and receiver. That benefit, is in an evolutionary sense.

The term pheromone is not going to disappear so long as it holds the public fascination. Its use for a class of chemicals that communicate information seems reasonable, but the definition is important if the term is to be useful in scientific discourse. Too rigid a definition can make its applicability to real situations so limited that it is useless. We know that even archetypal insect pheromones are not unique chemicals used by single species, as supposed in some definitions [see discussions in Beauchamp et al. and Albone (Beauchamp et al., 1976; Albone, 1984)]. Similarly, too broad a definition devalues the term and also makes it useless.

Getting back to the interview with Alexandra and dogs’ incredible sense of smell, there are some great illustrations in the PBS, NOVA article below. An eye opening estimate of how much more sensitive dogs’ sense of smell compared to ours is something like 10,000 to 100,000 times ours.

In Alexandra’s previous book, Inside of a Dog, she writes that while we might notice if our coffee has had a teaspoon of sugar added to it, a dog could detect a teaspoon of sugar in a million gallons of water, or two Olympic-sized pools worth.

Hopefully you have a sense of dogs’ great sense of smell now.

Human Vomeronasal Organ Function: A Critical Review of Best and Worst Cases

Michael Meredith

Chem. Senses (2001) 26 (4): 433-445.

http://chemse.oxfordjournals.org/content/26/4/433.full

Dogs’ Dazzling Sense of Smell

On NOVA

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/nature/dogs-sense-of-smell.html

#ScienceSunday

http://www.npr.org/2016/10/04/496417068/from-fire-hydrants-to-rescue-work-dogs-perceive-the-world-through-smell