In the Jan 9, 2012 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine in the Online First section an article appeared showing that women studied as part of the Women’s Health Initiative who were on statin drugs during the study developed diabetes at greater rates than those who were not on these drugs.  According to the statistical analysis of the authors, being on a statin increased the relative risk of developing diabetes by 48 percent!

These were observational studies and, as such, can’t be used to determine causality.  But they are interesting nonetheless because according to one of the authors there have been other clinical trials showing the same thing.  One of the authors of the study, Dr. JoAnn Manson, Professor of Medicine and Harvard Medical School commented on the findings of this study and what they mean to doctors who put patients on statins.  Dr. Manson’s commentary was provided by Medscape, a site for physicians to go to learn about the latest in medical wizardry.  The site requires registration, but if you are interested, you are allowed to register even if you aren’t a physician.

I decided that instead of commenting on Dr. Manson’s video after the fact, I would do it in real time right on the video.  This is my first effort at anything like this, so you can let me know what you think of it.  If you find it enjoyable and/or helpful, please drop a note in the comments, and I may be inspired to try it again.

Read more »

In an example of more brain damage from the mainstream medical press, a recent online article from heartwire savaged the low-carb diet as a treatment for diabetes along with one of its main academic proponents.  This piece, when read critically, provides a blueprint for how to subtly (and not so subtly) disparage an idea that doesn’t meet mainstream approval.  And it shows why the low-carb diet – despite the mountains of evidence demonstrating its superiority – continues to have difficulty gaining traction.

Here’s the story.  Dr. Eric Westman, from Duke University, gave a talk at the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) conference last month in Stockholm.  Dr. Westman made the point in his talk that since 98 percent of the research presented at diabetes meetings involved a pharmaceutical approach to treatment perhaps it was time to take a look at the benefit of lifestyle changes, specifically diet, to treat the disease.  He went on to provide data showing the benefits of low-carbohydrate diets in the care of diabetic patients.

As might be expected, the mainstream – and let me assure you, the EASD meeting was the most mainstream of mainstream meetings – didn’t like what they heard.  Neither, apparently, did the writers at heartwire, another mainstream organization.

Read more »

In my ongoing quest to become a little more technically adept, I started using Google Alerts for a number of things I’m interested in, including my own name.  (Believe me, there are a lot of people out there in the world with the last name Eades, including the Fire Chief of London.)  For those of you who don’t know, you can go to the Google main page and navigate around until you come to ‘Alerts.’  You can then sign up for these ‘Alerts’ to be delivered to you via email.  It’s a free service provided by Google, and it uses the Google system to crawl through cyberspace and find anything (blogs, articles, news reports, etc.) that has whatever word, words or phrases you submitted included and emails the link back to you.  I put a bunch of stuff in and get emails from Google throughout the day.  Most of it is stuff that is totally unrelated to anything I give a flip about, but every now and then it turns up something of interest.  Having my name listed has cost me money because one of the first things I that came back to me was an article about Eades Whisky, which I had no idea existed and which I had to try.  It is expensive, about $75 per bottle, but I ordered some.  It’s very good.  But it hasn’t replaced Jameson, however, by a long shot.

Yesterday I got back a hit about something that I had totally forgotten about:  our rebuttal to the idiotic ‘study’ presented by the PCRM (Physician’s Committee for Responsible Medicine – a name straight out of Orwell if there ever was one) a few years ago.  This group, composed mainly of militant vegetarians, came up with an insipid ‘study’ during the height of the low-carb frenzy back in 2003.  Neal Barnard, the head of the outfit, appeared on most of the morning talk shows telling how dangerous his study had found low-carb diets to be.  A couple of the national networks called MD and me asking us if we would provide a rebuttal.  We happened to be in Santa Barbara at the time, and we said sure.  Two different networks sent camera crews to interview us late in the afternoon.

As I’ve probably mentioned numerous times, we have an absolute knack for getting pre-empted whenever we get TV time.  This day was no exception.  The news teams were on their way to the little condo we had at the time to set up and shoot our rebuttal when the news came through that Michael Jackson was going to be flying in to the Santa Barbara airport to turn himself in on the child molestation charge that he later beat in court.  Of course, all the news vans and camera crews that were heading for our place were diverted to the Santa Barbara airport, and MD and I never got to rebut the PCRM idiocy on air.

Read more »

Changes in diabetic nephropathy

I received a short paper from a colleague in Portugal a couple of days ago that demonstrates in just a few pages how science should really work.

The paper from the journal Diabetologia reports on a study done in Pakistan showing that high-dose thiamin (vitamin B1) may be a valuable therapeutic agent in the treatment of diabetic nephropathy.   This small study certainly isn’t the final word, but it does show how medical science should work.

Read more »

I don’t know about you guys, but I like these link-o-rama posts because they let me get rid of a bunch of tabs on Firefox and disseminate info that probably isn’t worth an entire post.

First, let me start out by linking to one of my wife’s recent posts.  We’ve had a spate of people writing us through the website asking about cookbooks, of all things.  She did a post a couple of months ago about her favorite cookbooks.  In case you missed it, here it is.

Second, I’m going to start using these link-o-ramas to link to some of my older posts that I think would be of interest to a lot of people now.  One that I thought was pretty good on how to dissect a scientific article didn’t get many readers since I wrote it back when maybe three people read this blog.  The notion that it didn’t get many readers is evidenced by the fact that there are zero comments on it.  So, without further ado, here is Baboon Business.

After all the recent posts about the savagery of the nature, I thought I would throw this item into the mix just to show that nature can be tamed, at least in the short run.  There is a guy who is a fixture in downtown Santa Barbara who has a dog, a cat and a rat as pets.  He is always down on State Street, the main street running through town, with the cat riding on the back of the dog, and the rat riding on the back of the cat.  Here is the YouTube, so you can see for yourselves.

Read more »