B - Social media use by medical students

Harrison B, Gill J, Jalali A. Social media etiquette for the modern medical student: a narrative review. International Journal of Medical Students 2014;2(2):64-67

Most medical students worldwide are using various social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) for file sharing, circulation of educational resources and staying connected with peers.  This narrative review examines social media use by medical students, with a concentration on online professionalism and how education on the topic is, or should be, integrated into the world-wide medical school curricula. The research shows that there is a potentially dangerous dichotomy between the online social lives of modern medical students and professionalism requirements of medical career for which they are training.
http://www.ijms.info/ojs/index.php/IJMS/article/view/72/html_42#.VBxCUP9xkuQ

B - Peer review for RCT

Patel J. Why training and specialization is needed for peer review: a case study of peer review for randomized controlled trials. BMC Medicine 2014;12:128
(doi: 10.1186/s12916-014-0128-z)

Innovations in peer review have focused on the process of peer review rather than its quality.  Some types of research, such as randomized controlled trials (RCTs), may lend themselves to a more specialized form of peer review where training and ongoing appraisal and revalidation is provided to individuals who peer review RCTs. Any randomized controlled trial peer reviewed by such a trained peer reviewer could then have a searchable ‘quality assurance’ symbol attached to the published articles and any published peer reviewer reports.
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/12/128

B - Impact factor mania

Casadevall A, Fang FC. Causes for the persistence of impact factor mania. mBio 2014;5(2):e00064-14 
(doi: 10.1128/mBio.00064-14)

Science and scientists are currently afflicted by an epidemic of mania manifested by associating the value of research with the journal where the work is published rather than the content of the work itself. The authors consider the reasons for the persistence of impact factor mania and its pernicious effects on science. They conclude that impact factor mania persists because it confers significant benefits to individual scientists and journals. Various measures to reduce the influence of the impact factor are considered.      
http://mbio.asm.org/content/5/2/e00064-14.full
              

 

 

Complementary medicines are useless and dangerous

Complementary medicine is anecdotally-based medicine, not supported by scientific fact.

From the Dayli Mail, I found this article:

A lot of complementary medicine is ineffective, and some positively dangerous. Meanwhile, alternative treatments that promise to cure cancer 'are downright irresponsible, if not criminal'.

These are the views not of an old-school doctor dismissive of alternative therapies, but of Professor Edzard Ernst, Britain's first professor of complementary medicine and, you would have assumed, its greatest champion.

There is a booming market for complementary medicine, and it's not only the public who are turning to alternative remedies. Last week it was revealed that 60 per cent of Scottish doctors prescribe their patients homeopathic or herbal remedies.

Read the rest here.

Quackery Exposed

Cancer is not caused by bacteria.

A little bit of common sense can help us see through the fraudulent claims of Hulda Clark.

Clairvoyant led Americans to Saddam

Article November 06 from News.com.au tels us it was a clairvoyant who led Americans to Saddam.......

DID a clairvoyant help US commandos ferret Saddam Hussein out of his hiding place in Iraq three years ago?

Israeli-born celebrity psychic Uri Geller, best known for his spoon-bending antics, says the power of the paranormal led US troops to the fugitive Iraqi ex-dictator.

"You remember when they found Saddam Hussein in Iraq? A soldier walked over to a rock, lifted it and then found a trap-door and found him in there," Geller said.

"Well, I know that that soldier walked over to that rock because he got information from a 'remote viewer' from the United States."

Geller, who says he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the Cold War, said his information came from a high-level source involved in US paranormal programs.

A US military spokesman in Iraq had no immediate comment.

At the time of his capture, US commanders said a source close to the fugitive had given him up under interrogation.

A Brazilian psychic tried last year to claim a $US25 million ($A32.53 million) bounty offered for Saddam's capture, saying he had described the hiding place in letters to the US Government.

Do you believe the incredible?

How does stress influence your health?

Barry Spencer wrote an interesting article The unbearable bunkness of stress.

Everybody says they have stress and everybody "knows" stress is bad for your health.

In the article it says:

Stress is a concept invented in the 1930s by Dr. Hans Selye. Dr. Selye died in 1983. Dr. Selye admitted that stress is an abstract concept, and he admitted that stress has never been adaquately defined. Dr. Selye's own definition of stress is the non-specific response of the body to any demand.

To most people, however, stress is not an abstract concept but is something you feel. The feeling that many people call stress boils down to anxiety and frustration. So the word stress refers to two different things: (1) an abstract concept ("The non-specific response of the body to any demand") and (2) anxiety and frustration.

The problem with the stress-theory is

First of all, it ignores everything we know about the causes of disease, such as dietary deficiencies, genetic abnormalities, and infectious agents. Second, it makes society — civilization itself — responsible for our personal ills, and it strongly implies that work — not anything in particular that happens at work but rather work in and of itself — causes disease. How then to explain illness in people who do not work? The stress of unemployment! Or maybe family stress: very unhealthy. No family? The stress of being alone! In short, according to the stress theory, stress is inescapable. We are all just laboratory rats trapped in the big electrified cage of life.

I have come to the conclusion that stress is an inescapable part of life.

But does that mean stress is bad for your health?