Cholesterol Drug War

Watch the 2013 Australian Broadcasting Corp. documentary on statins.

The lone doctor interviewed in favor of statins almost sounds like a pharma shill. Makes one wonder whether he has conflicts of interest to declare.

Epidemic of diagnosis of thyroid cancer

Incidence of thyroid cancer has been going up. Steeply. But the mortality rate has been as flat as the Bonneville Salt Flats. Ergo, either we have an excellent treatment regimen for thyroid cancer or we have an epidemic of thyroid cancer diagnosis. It's the latter.

Currently, there is no way to confidently predict which incidentally detected thyroid nodule may be the precursor to a more aggressive process. Predictions such as these would require more accurate characterization of the biology of individual thyroid cancers than is currently possible. With time, we might prove our ability to confidently differentiate low-risk from high-risk thyroid cancers, but until that happens, routine screening for thyroid cancer by imaging billed as a “health checkup” should not be performed

[http://archotol.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleID=2276788]

Dr. Gilbert Welch explains this lucidly in his cancer screening video (@11 min.)

Antibiotics-bacteria chart

Finally, someone made a quick guide

[http://wellingtonicu.com/Data/Antibiotic%20Overview.pdf]

Statins linked to diabetes

While the study is retrospective in nature, evidence is apparently mounting that there is a significant correlation between statin use and diabetes.

Quality of life

Longevity is not the be all. Being isn't just a matter of continuing to be alive and staving off death as much as we can. What's more crucial when the medical community and the patient and his/her family feel they're facing the final curtain is quality of life, or more to the point, the quality of remaining life. In the contest between mere quantity and marked quality, the latter surely must trump the former. Life extension makes sense only if the additional days, weeks, months that we can buy aren't spent in unremitting pain and suffering, in unending rushes to the ER, or in being incarcerated to the very end in a hospital with a welter of wires and tubes dangling off our face and body. Life is worth prolonging only if we are not consigned to living out the rest of our days in a hell on earth. We must rage against the dying of the light. And old age should burn and rave. But only if there is still a life worth living.

Science Babe on the Food Babe

Yvette d'Entremont exposes Vani Hari's breathtaking ignorance.

Reading Hari's site, it's rare to come across a single scientific fact. Between her egregious abuse of the word "toxin" anytime there's a chemical she can't pronounce and asserting that everyone who disagrees with her is a paid shill, it's hard to pinpoint her biggest sin.

Atul Gawande on overdiagnosis

In his New Yorker article Dr. Atul Gawande talks about--among other things--overdiagnosis:

More than a third of the population turns out to have these tiny cancers in their thyroid, but fewer than one in a hundred thousand people die from thyroid cancer a year. Only the rare microcarcinoma develops the capacity to behave like a dangerous, invasive cancer.