wiggins37

I might chime in as an internal medicine resident that fecal transplantation is relatively new, and most doctors still only think of it being used for recurrent c diff (clostridium difficile) infections (which is a very bad diarrheal infection that is associated with antibiotic use and just being in the hospital).

It sounds like you are doing a good job bringing this up and questioning why your doctors are choosing certain therapies for your wife. There's more and more data coming out on using fecal transplants in Ulceratic Colitis (UC) patients and for the most part it seems well tolerated (there is one case report I just saw of someone getting a fecal transplant for c diff and then having a flare of their UC after it was in remission for 30 years).

Keep pushing and when they say no ask them why they don't think this is appropriate to try rather than the risks of surgery. It sounds like you've already done research online about this and are well informed. If her doctors aren't open to trying this (or can't because their hospital doesn't have experience doing this) I'm sure they would be able to refer you guys to someplace that would try it. Of course, there's the whole insurance issues of covering this (new and still experimental) which I won't get into but maybe there is a research study you can join.

I had the same thought, I was cracking up reading the website, especially the "testimonials" and the brief FAQ answers. Then I read the comments and had to search for "green" before I found your comment that even suggested it was a joke. I think is all one elaborate joke.

I like to think how this could change how ideas are spread and organizing. I imagine something like google hangout but with 100 like minded people all present at the same time discussing a common interest, with something like a real time voting mechanism in place so that those with (presumably) better ideas are more likely to be heard.

In one example I'm imagining a city council meeting, where anyone who just has the time to log in can take part. And then I realize that maybe this would lead to horrible popular ideas being more easily spread.

I hope that somebody reads this and sits down in the automatic BP machine at the drug store. Current recommendations are for everyone to have their BP checked every two years even if they have never had hypertension. Besides neurological damage you could be saving yourself a lot of grief with heart disease and kidney disease in the long term if you get your blood pressure under control early. Especially if your parents have or had high blood pressure, please get your's checked.

I'm a resident in Internal Medicine and actually it is not surprising that a lot physicians tested got this wrong. The good news is that this topic, also known as "lead time bias", is actually being taught pretty regularly now (in at least my experience). So when I read this I knew exactly what the catch was going to be with screening "A". So there is hope.

Actually, as someone who has treated many people over the past week for heroin withdrawal, I would like to add that heroin withdrawal very very rarely kills people unless they have an underlying medical condition like coronary artery disease that can become worse with stress. On the other hand, alcohol, benzos, and baclofen withdrawal are much more common ways that people die.

I was also wondering how many scientists run for political office. I have never heard of one (although maybe they don't advertise it loudly due to fear of a bias). I think a lot of it has to do with the amount of time and effort that goes into specialized knowledge. As a healthcare worker (not a scientist), politics is definitely looming over me, although on a daily basis I rarely if ever think about it. I don't think I could ever pursue both.

About 3-5 min before the launch time there were many voices chiming in to say "ready". I remember one of them, "OSM" had to be asked twice before they responded ready, which was different than all the rest. Anybody on here know what "OSM" stands for? Is it orbital station module? Anyways, I was just wondering if it might have been connected with the abort (such as they saw the high pressure build up in engine 5).

I think that a lot of it stems from an ignorance in the general population of what mental disease is. Practising psychiatrists don't use the words psychopath or sociopath when describing people, at least not in my experience (a relatively new internal medicine doctor), and I'm going to disagree that psychiatry is "highly subjective", although there is definite a large component of subjectivity, since it mostly deals with things that are difficult to objectively measure (although there are examples such as the PHQ-9 score for depression).

I agree with you that psychiatry has a history of being soft, but modern psychiatrists are medical doctors and there are very few living one's that I know who use aspects of Freud or Jungian theories in the way they treat psychiatric diseases. Nowadays, just like the bulk of medicine, the focus on is on evidence based therapeutics. Unfortunately, how the brain works is still much of a black box and for many of the medications we use we have no idea how they work. We have some inkling of what they do in general, but on a directly mechanistic level it's still at a point where we try things based on what we think might work, and then if it's shown to work in a large population better (or maybe as well as, with less side effects) then we keep it.

I do think that you could apply some subsets of various aspects of the DSM to anybody, but if you read it, these diagnosis have time courses, and based on the current way they are diagnosed (which is soon to change when DSM V comes out), you have to have symptoms present for a specific amount of time before you can be labelled.

Anyways, the feeling I get from your post is a concern about psychiatric diagnosis being applied too liberally. In my experience I see so many people with the really big psychiatric issues, such as people who have just had a luckily unsuccessful suicide attempt or are actively hallucinating from schizophrenia. The psychiatrists I work with are overwhelmed (especially in child psychiatry) with these kinds of patients and aren't out to change abnormal behaviors into pathologies.

But, I see your point about people dropping psychiatric diagnosis on things they don't agree with which is wrong. I'm just defending the field of psychiatry, which I don't think has any interest in redefining what is normal/abnormal.

I'm glad that the author is thinking about ways to increase communication between scientific authors, but some of the statements he made, specifically regarding "curing cancer 2-3 years sooner" make him sound ignorant of some of the challenges facing researchers. Not all scientific knowledge is presented only through journal articles. As others have already mentioned, conferences with "poster presentations" are pretty common in medicine to discuss ideas before the paper comes out. In addition, labs across the country working on similar problems often exchange ideas and substrates by email and mail respectively. I agree that it would be great if there was a more centralized repository of information online to get information. If anyone has any experience with blogs, forums or websites specifically addressing oncology (that are not just press releases) I would appreciate learning about them.