CodeBlueBlog

A Call To Arms --

  ...   _ _ _    ...

  I've picked up a blogosphere SOS.

Yesterday I posted a piece about the planned chiropractic college at FSU. Little did I know that there is a widespread rumore throughout the science and medical Internet regarding this academic TRAVESTY unfolding in Florida.

Essentially, a chiropractic legislator has rammed a project to build a state sponsored chiropractic college through the Florida legislature . The academicians and physicians at FSU -- where this alien is supposed to land -- are up in arms.

Several important sites around the net are taking up the cause and I urge you all to visit  Chirobase, especially this article; The 2% Company; and, Rhosgobel: Radagast's Home has a synopsis.

FSUblius is a site almost totally dedicated to this topic. Pharyngula is at it, so is University Diaries and Confessions of a Quackbuster .

Chiropractery is one of those things society lets people do to one another because it is too much trouble to fend off anecdotes, lawyers, and venal congressmen... but everyone who is serious about science and medicine KNOWS it is just old fashioned BS ... a leftover of the snake oil days.

But we need to make a stand sometimes, and this is one of those times. We cannot let them INSTITUTIONALIZE this practice by allowing a state sponsored school of chiropractery to be built!

State Senator Jimmy King, who has been running the flying wedge through our legislative process with the chiropractic football had this to say:

``I don't think we should turn our back on people who want to become part of a profession that pays $90,000 a year.'' 

Well, Jim, strippers make more than that...should we open a school for ecdysiasts? How about hired killers and assassins -- they make a good wage. God knows we don't want to turn our backs on MONEY in Florida...it might DAMAGE our reputation!

Now Mr. King and certain legislative thugees are threatening bad things if the FSU professors are successful in blocking his little pet. Oh Boss Tweed be gone! Here's what FSUblius said:

Senator King denies that he is vindictive but has indicated (through the press) to faculty that the "Legislature will be angry" and that they should "evaluate with their department heads what kind of cuts there will have to be."  Here is classic quote:

"Would I be disappointed? Yes," King said. "Am I going to be vindictive? No."

He added: "I'm a Scorpio. I'm much more subtle than that."

I would ask all science and medical bloggers to join in a general, Internet-wide protest against the state-supported QUACKERY as is being proposed in FLORIDA -- the same state that recently lured the Scripp's Institute on the basis that Florida was  fecund  ground for the growth of legitimate scientific enterprises...

There is no reputable body of peer-reviewed literature to support cracking backs as a valid medical treatment. How then can we allow this to continue? And how then can we allow the state to use our tax dollars to build colleges to teach students to use this unvalidated undocumented unscientific treatment?? How??

This is a call to arms.

Torter Costs: Don't Forget, Snapping Turtles Hide Under Rocks

How They Get Us: A Continuing Series

A study released today shows that if you remove breasts because of breast cancer and replace them with inert implants, the implants do not raise a woman's long-term risk of dying from breast cancer or other causes

Please join in with a big, collective "DUH?!"

Why do we waste our time and resources on these studies? According to the Reuter's dispatch:

This is mainly due to the general concern that first arose in the 1980s that breast implants filled with silicone gel might raise a woman's risk of certain serious illnesses, including cancer and immune system-related diseases such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis

  Okay, now I understand. Now that the torters have destroyed the companies that made silicone implants based on anecdotal stories and backed by NO research or proof, we need to waste MORE money by showing that implants are safe -- despite the fact that they were never shown to be harmful.

See how torters waste our money, time and resources? There are ways we haven't even counted yet.

Remember The Seminole! FSU Docs Take a Stand Against Kook Medicine

Go 'Noles

You may be used to seeing the Florida State Seminoles raking over opponents on the football field, but now you can watch their professors taking a stand against the metastasis of quackery threatening their institution.

In the past, Florida Universities were poorly regarded nationally, perhaps not without good reason. However, the last twenty years have seen the emergence of  powerful, burgeoning, and important academic forces in Tallahassee, Miami, and Gainesville.

So the physicians, professors and teachers at FSU -- reluctant to give back hard-won academic prestige  -- have rightfully taken a stand against the pork barrel establishment of -- of all things -- a state-sponsored Chiropractic school at FSU!  OMG!

From the Palm Beach Post via blog.bioethics.net:

A petition opposing the school has been signed by about 500 FSU faculty members. At least nine assistant professors have said they will resign if the legislatively prompted, and funded, chiropractic school is allowed to open.

How could such a thing come about? Political PORK. Backscratching, in the most foul backroom political way.

The Back Cracker Suite

  The theory that cracking the back could affect health was a teleological assumption by a nineteenth century self educated nonscientist who, lore has it, cured a deaf janitor by cracking his back. This autochthonous chiropractor ( who was using MAGNETS to treat patients before landing on their backs!)  "reckoned" that since the spine is important, and nerves come out of the spine, then "adjusting" vertebral bodies could affect health.  What are the chances one can come up with a valid medical discipline on the basis of a series of uneducated assumptions? ZERO.

The sound one hears when a joint is "cracked" represents the release of nitrogen, forced by distraction, from the vacuum of a joint space. There is NO proof whatsoever that any chiropractor has ever actually changed the alignment of anyone's spine; moreover, there is no proof whatsoever that even if one COULD "adjust" vertebral alignment, this would result in some salutary benefit.

It CAN hurt you, however, and there are many cases of vertebral artery damage and cerebellar infarction (a stroke) due to neck manipulation.

Why do people report that back cracking makes them feel better? First and foremost, most cases of acute backache are self-limited. Most people get better within one month, and 90% of people get better within three months. Whether the back is cracked or not, the ache goes away. So back crackers get credit for normal healing tendencies.

Second, THE PLACEBO EFFECT is powerful, statistically significant, and seems to be especially potent when surrounded by the pomp and circumstance that many back crackers put into their cracking rituals.

Just The Back Facts Jack!

So why the hell has the Florida legislature agreed to spend $9 million to start this project, with an estimated $35 million more to finish the building and then untold millions to run the school in years to come? It hurts to look at how this bill came about...because it reinforces the stereotypical view of Florida as a state run by backwater Huey Long-type politicians.

As Jann Bellamy, Talahassee lawyer wrote:

If there is a pressing need for more chiropractors (phone book listings suggest otherwise), that fact is not reported in the legislative analysis.

The driving force to get the school built is Senate Majority Leader Dennis Jones, R-Seminole, whose occupation is...Um...chiropractor.

Backing Senator Jones is Senate President Jim King, R-Jacksonville, and Speaker of the House Johnnie Byrd, R-Plant City, each of whom gets a research program named in honor of his parents in the same bill (CS/SB 2002). The legislation to do this badness ran quickly through committees and was brought to a vote within the first week of last year's legislative session.  It passed with only one vote against it.

One is tempted to call this legislation pork, or logrolling, but it is more. It's like some kind of personal favor for Dennis Jones specifically designed for his own aggrandizement. Ugh! Tammany Hall politics is about as close a concept as I can find to describe this sort of political foreplay.

Chiropractic Nation

The University administrators at FSU are supporting the plan to establish the chiropractic school. It will be the first such state-sponsored back-cracking institute in the country. This is not the sort of publicity we need in Florida -- a State that worked so hard to lure the Scripps Institute to it's shores. This decreases Florida's legitimacy. It denigrates the scientists and professors who have made this state our home and it propagates -- no institutionalizes-- quackery...is THAT what we want Florida science to be known for?

It's time we stood up to alternative voodoo medical treatments in this country. With health care dollars in severe shortage the last thing we need to do is stamp the Imprimatur of FSU and the State of Florida on a pseudoscience invented on a hunch and unvalidated by scientific evidence.

It's a disgrace.

Dr. Raymond Bellamy, an assistant professor at FSU  has scheduled a public forum on the issue on Jan. 13 in Tallahassee — the night before an FSU Board of Trustees is to meet about the issue. We need to throw our support behind him.

Jeb Bush -- get this tripe out of our system! What are you thinking!??

The War on Obesity: Report From an Embedded Journalist

Obesity Wars: Update from The Alternate Universe

The Long Haul

When the war on obesity  was first declared, most of us thought it would be a quick lightning-like strike, we'd obliterate the enemy and come home. But now it looks like we're in for a long, expensive fight. I guess we should have learned from the wars on poverty and drugs. These wars take time. Forever kind of time.

After all, the enemy is smart, strong, and pernicious. It makes money by poisoning our kids with fattening foods through advertising and clever recipes, designed to manipulate genetic tendencies and human foibles.

Goodbye Columbus

As we learned this past weekend in the The New York Times Sunday Magazine (subscription), according to the "thrifty-gene hypothesis" (no, it is not the locus for that inexplicable desire of some women to shop at Target), "situations" are "created" by our "chromosome combinations"  which can explain obesity in certain groups of Mexican-Americans:

the theory that some combinations of chromosomes create a situation in which cells are more inclined to store calories efficiently for times of scarcity. Some researchers have speculated that because many Mexican-Americans are descendants of American Indian hunter-gatherers, who evolved to store fat more easily for times of famine, those living a sedentary life in modern westernized societies with access to fast food may be more prone to gain weight

Another nail in the coffin of Columbus's reputation!

Looking Into the Abyss

Then again, The Times' article also blames obesity on the guilt complexes of parents, the concept of fatalismo (live for today) in Hispanic culture, and the "pobrecito syndrome" in which parents over empathize and overcompensate their children.

In the field, most soldiers involved in the war against obesity throw up their hands at such useless and endless omphaloskepsis. They have a dirty job they were sent to do, and it doesn't matter how it got this way...

Once out of the bottle, of course, the war genie can never go back, as social scientists and bureaucrats clamber aboard the obesity juggernaut and the steaks get bigger as the stakes get bigger... In case you weren't aware, there is a lot of the taxpayer's money to spend.

Stop Making Sense

Subversives will stop at nothing to foil the fight against flab. The University of Pennsylvania, yesterday,  reported a study citing Weight Watchers as a nutrition plan that works -- while blaming no one.

Unlike the thrifty gene or pobrecito explanations for fleshiness, Weight Watchers skips over the entire game of victim-sorting and just states the facts: Eating plans can be constructed to maintain a weight that falls beneath the Bell Curve distribution for normal. This involves permutations on a simple mathematical proposition:

Calories consumed become fat when they are not burned off or used for building and maintenance.

Weight Watchers will tell you that no matter what your genetic make-up or childhood traumas, if you figure in the food groups appropriately, a healthful and weight-maintaining diet is almost easy to construct.

But it is up to you to actuate it. 

It takes a little knowledge,  a little discipline, and a little effort. 

So much for that. I'm pulling m,y combat boot on and heading back out into the field. I'm embedded with the first fat infantry. Tomorrow we are staking out a McDonald's. That mother is going down!

Grand Rounds a la RangelMD

Today's Grand Rounds is on display at RangelMD. Of particular note is the mighty proliferation of medical blogs and the creepibng subspecialization that is occuring. And then there is Rangel's presentation, which is attratcive and smart.

Be there now.