No More Happy Hour?

The latest Yahoo! News headline to catch my eye: "More evidence links alcohol, cancer in women." According to the article, 1.3 million British women at breast cancer screening clinics were surveyed about their drinking habits over the course of seven years. Researchers compared women who regularly consumed two or fewer drinks a week with women who drank more. According to the study, each additional drink increased the risk of breast, rectal, and liver cancer. If smokers drank, according to the study, only then were they at higher risk for esophageal and oral cancers.

What I did not like about this article was that it did not indicate who did the study. Because this is news, the research study is probably too new to appear as a research article indexed in a database. It would have been helpful to at least find out if the study had been published in a journal or not.

I am curious to read about the research design of this study, as well as why alcoholic beverages put the body at higher risk for cancer.

Does Talcum Powder Cause Cancer?

Talcum Powder and Cancer

A friend had emailed me this article, and it made me quite paranoid because we both powder ourselves liberally. I decided to check whether or not the author of this article had cited from any real research studies, and if what she had cited was correct.

The first study of a potential link between talcum powder and cancer was originally published in The Journal of the National Cancer Institute. It did show that a significant percentage of women who used talcum powder were at higher risk for developing ovarian cancer than others. Researchers involved in this study, however, did not want to make the claim that talcum powder caused cancer because they did not feel that the study asked enough questions of the patients in regard to the age when they started talcum powder usage, what brands of talcum powder were used, and whether the women were menopausal or pre-menopausal.

This second study published by Epidemiology, according to the abstract, also shows that use of talc increases the risk of ovarian cancer. I wish I had access to the article, because the researchers had looked at other factors such as smoking, endometriosis, tubal ligation, etc.

The third study that I found showed no correlation between talc use and ovarian cancer! According to the abstract of this study, hospital based studies showed no increased risk of ovarian cancer and talc use, while population studies did. The researchers believed that, in population based studies, the researchers already had a bias as to a particular type of women to target for the study.

I could go on, but...I am just going to take a powder.

How Medical Conclusions Are Made

Autism ruling fails to convince many vaccine-link believers.

According to a CNN report, "special court", composed of "special masters", decided that there is no link between autism and infant vaccines that contain "thimerosal", a mercury-based preservative.

I was a bit disturbed by this article, for the following reasons:

1. I would like to know who these "special masters" are who made this determination. The federal government's US Department of Health and Human Services appeared all too ready to accept this determination, based on "three or four" studies.

2. No information is given about studies conducted to determine whether or not a correlation between autism and thimerosal exists. How do we know that the results of those studies are even sound, or that the research samples were large enough to make a determination?

3. The studies to determine a correlation between thimerasol and autism were only conducted when parents of affected children sued the US Department of Health and Human Services. According to the article, the parents were unable to sue to the manufacturers of these vaccines directly. Regardless of this, is it not the responsibility of the manufacturers and the federal government to test all substances that enter the human body prior to putting them out on the market as safe, trusted, FDA approved substances?

4. The last part of the article:

This week's ruling brought a different outcome from the Hannah Poling case. In November 2007, the Division of Vaccine Injury Compensation concluded that the Georgia girl's illness that had predisposed her to symptoms of autism was "significantly aggravated" by the vaccinations she received as a toddler and that her family should therefore be compensated.

But Thursday, Special Master George L. Hastings Jr. wrote in his ruling in the Cedillos case, "The evidence advanced by the petitioners has fallen far short of demonstrating such a link" between autism and vaccinations.

What was the difference between the Poling case and the Cedillos case? Nothing in the article revealed any difference in the information provided. Why, then, did those decisions contradict each other?

To begin with, autism is such a complex disorder that medical professionals cannot even decide on a definition for the disorder or its symptoms, as they fall into a wide spectrum of variation. Second, no one knows for sure what exactly causes autism. Third, because not all autistic children display all of the the same symptoms of autism with the same level of severity, nor do those symptoms appear within the same age range for each child, the number of official diagnoses vary from year to year. Some children are only diagnosed with autism when they are already in primary school, while others are diagnosed as early as six months old.

So before any more guidelines to critical thinking are violated in the study of autism, here are my humble suggestions:

1. Scientists, psychologists, and pediatricians must go back to the drawing board. First, they must ask more questions about autism in order to determine what autism actually is. It may not be one disorder, but a group of related spectrum disorders, such as Asperger's Syndrome (which has already been isolated as distinct from autism, although it has many similarities to autism). Second, they have to do more studies on what could cause autism so that future parents could receive this education, even if they do not have a history of autism within their families.

2. Pharmaceutical companies must take all human factors into account when creating vaccines and medications, and they should review the history of medicine! Since the nineteenth century, it has been well-documented that the ingestion of mercury has caused various types of damage to the human nervous system (hence the expression "mad as a Hatter", as people who worked in hat factories had used mercury to treat the fabrics to make the hats, and they had been permanently brain damaged from overexposure to mercury). Old fashioned thermometers used to contain mercury to measure temperature, but no longer do because a person could get brain damage or even die from the amount of mercury in a thermometer should it crack in their mouths. Thermometers used to measure internal temperatures of foods also do not include mercury for this reason. Why oh why, then, did a pharmaceutical company decide to use a mercury based preservative in a vaccine for infants and toddlers, whose nervous systems are still developing and often at risk for damage from high fevers or other phemonena? The federal government has told people what type of fish they can and cannot eat, and in what amounts, based on the amount of mercury found in recent catches of those fish. Why oh why, then, is the federal government saying that it is still OK to produce a vaccine for infants and children that contains a mercury based preservative?

Dr. Google

Disturbing research article about doctors who admit to using Google to diagnose their patients. Based on the survey, 58.8% of the diagnoses from Google end up being correct.

Ironically, I discovered this article while searching for another article about a doctor who received prison time for a misdiagnosis based on his wonderful Yahoo! and Pub Med research. I read that article last month, and forgot to save the link! ):( Is it possible that this article has been expunged from public record, now that Google has become an all-powerful cureall?

Perhaps it is possible that the pro-Google diagnosis study depends more on the doctors' skill in prescribing treatment, rather than making the diagnosis? Do those doctors only use Google to confirm what they have already discovered?