The adherer effect

  As if trying to pull meaning out of the medical literature weren’t difficult enough as it is, a new study demonstrates yet another obstacle to easy understanding: the adherer effect. We’ve all seen the headlines.  Statins improve bone health.  Statins prevent cancer.  Statins make us smarter.  Low-fat diets improve longevity.  All these headlines and…

Odds and ends May 21, 2009

I figure it’s about time for another grab bag of a post updating everyone on what’s going on at Casa Eades and throwing up a few interesting articles and websites. The Verdi Requiem The Santa Barbara Choral Society’s Verdi Requiem was a triumph last weekend.  As you can see from the photo above, MD was…

Weekend link-o-rama 2/21/09

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…

Observational studies

Observational studies

A day almost never passes without someone sending a comment my way about some recent study, plucked by the media from the hundreds published that same day, showing that low-carb diets cause brain fog or decreased longevity or cancer of some type or any number of conditions any of us would rather not have.  These…

Bye bye Guinea worm

When I took my parasitology course in medical school I was exposed for the first time to all the loathsome diseases that are unheard of here but are a part of daily life in other parts of the world. Here people go nuts and rush to the emergency room if they find pin worms in…

Baboon business

I’ve read the paper that is the topic of today’s post from beginning to end five times. Not because it is a brilliant, enlightening paper, but because I found it so worthless I kept thinking there was something I was missing. If this paper had been published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association…