Bad statistics headline of the day

Long distance runners don't get arthritis of the knees.

maybe because if you have arthritis, you don't run?

and heavy women are probably that way because they have painful knees.

and since most long distance runners are athletically endowed by their gene pool, the rest of us who are klutzes are not runners.

in my case, it is my high arched feet and varicose veins, not my knees, which are fine.

hearing loss

UKTelegraph says that French Horn players are at the highest risk for hearing problems.

Scientists have found that those who play the distinctive, curved brass instruments experience some of the loudest noises within an orchestra and have the highest risk of hearing loss.

New findings suggest that up to a third of horn players suffer hearing problems in at least one of their ears, with younger musicians being most at risk.

It is thought that the shape of the instrument, which can direct the sound towards the player's ears and those of their neighbour, is partly responsible for this increased risk compared to other musicians.

and they aren't the only ones:

A recent study published last year by scientists in Slovenia, suggested that violinists were also highly prone to hearing loss due to the proximity of their instrument to their ears.

and here, for your enjoyment, is a song about French Horns:

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/jc_BFM_wJMU" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

paperwork paperwork

UKMail reports on a study showing that doctors working for the British health service spend more time on paperwork than on seeing patients.


and a Cornell study showed that US doctors spend four times as much time on paperwork than Canadian doctors.

the article attributes that to the "single pay" system there, but I'm not so sure.

In the USA, billing medicare/medicaid is very complicated, requiring diagnoses and complications/comorbidity with the appropriate numbers,  but when I visited a friend in Canada, he could bill for several patients on a single sheet of paper, with a single diagnosis not a number to justify the cost. That was 20 years ago so maybe things have changed.

Here is one example: you have to sign it, not your nurse/secretary/etc.

Hmm...wonder  if docs could get an automatic pen writing machine to do it...

The MERS (coronavirus) can spread person to person

There has been an outbreak of a corona virus in SaudiArabia, with a few people leaving there and dying elsewhere.

WIKIPEDIA article 

It is not yet known if the infections are the result of a single zoonotic event with subsequent human-to-human transmission, or if the multiple geographic sites of infection represent multiple zoonotic events from a common unknown source. Among animal reservoirs, CoV has a large genetic diversity yet the samples from patients suggest a similar genome, and therefore common source, though the data are limited. It has been determined through molecular clock analysis, that viruses from the EMC/2012 and England/Qatar/2012 date to early 2011 suggesting that these cases are descended from a single zoonotic event. It would appear the MERS-CoV has been circulating in the human population for greater than one year without detection and suggests independent transmission from an unknown source

translation: Probably from an animal but no one knows which one.

The problem? If it starts spreading from person to person, we will be faced with another SARS epidemic.

And today's GMA reports one of our Pinay nurses died of the disease in late August (and that another filipina who was a patient at that hospital has since recovered).

A 41-year-old female Filipino nurse died of MERS coronavirus in Saudi Arabia last month, the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) said on Tuesday.

The Filipino, whose identity was not disclosed, is the first reported fatality from the Philippines. She died at a hospital in Riyadh last August 29.

A medical report obtained by the Philippine Embassy says the deceased “tested positive for the coronavirus before her death,” Foreign Affairs spokesman Raul Hernandez told a press briefing.

The hospital’s VIP ward supervisor said prior to her death, the Filipina went to the United States for a vacation on July 13. She returned to Riyadh on July 19 and reported for work on July 21.

In mid-August, she complained of fever and coughing and developed respiratory distress. She was put on a ventilator on Aug. 22.

Two days later, she was diagnosed with severe pneumonia and had to be transferred to the hospital’s Intensive Care Unit.

The part about being in the US is a red herring (no SARS here, but it did make the differential diagnosis have MERS patient?

Or were there patients in the area, where air flow could have spread the virus?

(this happened in SARS, where a case in Hong Kong infected his apartment building, and in Germany, where a smallpox case infected those on a different floor of the hospital).

I should note that there are a million Filipinos in Saudi, which has a population of 19 million locals and 8 million foreign workers.

the WHO does not consider it a threat...yet. more HERE.

Defining deviance down

The everyday sadists among us.

yes, thanks to the "Shades of Grey" trilogy, the NYTimes now declares this is normal behavior.

Related item: Nature's Fourth Trimester abortions.

yes, it's "natural" and was "common" in the past, goes the narrative, (implying that we should legalize infanticide).

What is not recognized is that usually such things happened when the families had no choice,  because of severe poverty where another mouth would mean not enough food.

I am reading a book on the Eskimos in Canada, which noted that "infanticide" of girls and the deaths of the weak/crippled elderly stopped as soon as the gov't there started granting family allowances so that familes could survive.

Ditto for twins in Africa: not enough milk for two and so both would die...but with more money and canned milk/formula now an alternative, it is rarely done nowadays.

And it was rarely a free "choice": Pearl Buck tells of Chinese women weeping when they related killing their girl babies during a famine, and in Africa, one older lady mentioned that when she had twins, her husband's mother killed them, and she was so upset that she left that husband (and later married again.)

No, infanticide happened, but not when there were alternatives (hence stories of abandoned babies taken to monasteries, or those abandoned in ancient Rome being saved by those who would bring them up and sell them as slaves, or stories of Christians who saved these babies).

And babies saved include people like Darius and Oedepus...or Paris of Troy...

Medical notes of the week

The "I Don't like Green Food" item of the week:

Broccoli slows arthritis, researchers think.

uh, that says it is their opinion, not a scientific fact, and is based on mice and cell cultures, meaning it is a very very early experiment.

So they now will have folks eat lots and lots of broccoli to see if it's true.
YUM!


The good news: IF you don't like broccoli, brussel sprouts will do.

and it could be worse: You might be told to eat Hospital food....

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Growing human minibrains in the lab? 

The "Yuck" factor here is high, suggesting there are ethical problems with the experiment: Like, why didn't they start with monkey or guinea pigs instead of embryonic cells?

or maybe not: some of the brains didn't come from embryos but from skin?

Prof Paul Matthews, from Imperial College London, told the BBC: "I think it's just mindboggling. The idea that we can take a cell from a skin and turn it into, even though it's only the size of a pea, is starting to look like a brain and starting to show some of the behaviours of a tiny brain, I think is just extraordinary.

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Saxon herbs

an article about saxon herbal medicine, linked for later reading

What is interesting is that although this book was written during the mid Anglo-Saxon period when Christianity was well established, it is clear that many beliefs from the earlier pagan religions were still held as well as the new faith. This is shown by these examples of illness caused by dark-elves whom the Saxons believed attacked people during the night or by relations with the devil.
For elf sickness, a leechdom…one must sing over the plants before one takes them and one must place them under an altar.
Make  a salve for the elvish race and nightgoers and the people with whom the devil has intercourse.
Some interesting methods of treatment
For palsy, if the mouth be crooked or deficient, take coriander, crush it into a woman’s milk and put it in the healthy ear. Here they seem to be talking about what we today call Bell’s Palsy which causes paralysis and dropping of the side of the face. Not sure what putting milk in the other ear would do.

The Tolkien professor has a course on Fantasy literature, starting with the Middle Age stories of people being kidnapped by elves, and points out that if a person