Smooth Pebbles

Why Baseball Really Is a Game of Inches - Bats - Baseball - New York Times Blog

A particularly nice post by the Times' Tyler Knepper, who keeps the "Bats" blog: Luke Scott explains why hitting is so very difficult. http://bats.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/30/why-baseball-really-is-a-game-of-inches/index.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

NYT Scientist at Work: A Young Surgeon-Pianist Who Performs with a Scalpel

For Claudius Conrad, a 30-year-old surgeon who has played the piano seriously since he was 5, music and medicine are entwined — from the academic realm down to the level of the fine-fingered dexterity required at the piano bench and the operating table.

C.J. Gunther for The New York Times

IN TUNE Dr. Conrad, a pianist and surgeon, says that he works better when he listens to music and that music is helpful to patients.

“If I don’t play for a couple of days,” said Dr. Conrad, a third-year surgical resident at Harvard Medical School who also holds doctorates in stem cell biology and music philosophy, “I cannot feel things as well in surgery. My hands are not as tender with the tissue. They are not as sensitive to the feedback that the tissue gives you.”

Like many surgeons, Dr. Conrad says he works better when he listens to music. And he cites studies, including some of his own, showing that music is helpful to patients as well — bringing relaxation and reducing blood pressure, heart rate, stress hormones, pain and the need for pain medication.

But to the extent that music heals, how does it heal? The physiological pathways responsible have remained obscure, and the search for an underlying mechanism has moved slowly.

Now Dr. Conrad is trying to change that.
Technorati Tags: music, surgery, Mozart, Dobbs, Claudius Conrad

Pebbles I stumbled on this week (notables from the web)

A Chopin Nocturne...

from Derek Bownds' MindBlog by [email protected] (Deric)

Bownds blogs on neuro matters -- and, each week, posts a video of him playing a bit of classical music on his piano. Gotta like it.

FDA To Mine Big Databases For Safety Problems

from Pharmalot

The effort, called Sentinel Initiative,
will be the first time the FDA will have an opportunity to monitor
almost immediately how drugs are affecting the public. To do so, the
agency will mine databases of more than 20 million patients who receive
their drugs through Medicare. The idea, of course, is to catch side
effects that might otherwise go undetected for months or years.

Also covered at the Wall Street Journal Health Blog

A Musical Aptitude Section Of The Genome?

from Scientific Blogging - Neuroscience

Molecular and statistical genetic studies in 15 Finnish families have shown that there is a substantial genetic component in musical aptitude.

Musical aptitude was determined using three tests: a test for auditory structuring ability (Karma Music test), and the Seashore pitch and time discrimination subtests. The study represents the first systematic molecular genetic study that aims in the identification of candidate genes associated with musical aptitude.

File this under "Interesting if true" -- or what scientists call "needs replication."

As General Surgery Ranks Dwindle, Patients May Suffer

from WSJ.com: Health Blog by Sarah Rubenstein

Sexual Dysfunction On Anti-Depressants Higher Than Thought, Longer Lasting

from Furious Seasons by Philip Dawdy

Thanks to CL Psych who flagged this issue the other day and posted one academic paper acknowledging that not only are there weird problems such as genital anesthesia--such a polite term--connected with anti-depressant use in some cases, but that the rate of sexual dysfunction on the happy pills isn't very happy at all. In fact, it's much higher than doctors have commonly assumed and than pharma companies have been willing to admit.

Dawdy -- a fearless chronicler of others' and his own experience with depression and antidepressants -- notes that he himself experienced no sexual side-effects.

The shifting sands of the 'autism epidemic'

from Mind Hacks by vaughan

The Economist has a short but telling article on whether the so-called 'autism epidemic', occasionally touted in the media, may simply be a change in how developmental problems are diagnosed.

It covers a new study that did something really simple - it tracked down 38 people who, years ago, had been diagnosed with a delay in language and re-assessed them using the latest diagnostic interviews.

A Fine Flap Over Pharma Influence on Medical Reporting

A couple weeks ago Slate ran a piece asking "Are doctors shilling for drug companies on public radio?", which I took brief note of in a previous post.

Now I've written up a longer reaction (actually a reaction to the reaction to the Slate story) for Columbia Journalism Review's "Observatory" blog, which covers science journalism. The gist:

If journalists ... want the information they present to the public to be taken as credible, they need to err on the side of transparency, presenting not only the voices but also the relevant financial interests of the experts they feature. Failing to do so only damages message and messenger alike. But in the wake of the repeated scandals about drug-company concealment of drug-trial data, it’s strange that I have to spell this out.

As expected, this generated some blowback from people less worried than I about the trust problems created by failure to disclose potential conflicts of interest in experts quoted in medical stories. I expected, for instance, to be accused of trying to end all links between doctors and drug and device developers or to shush doctors with such ties from public discussion, and I was, at least indirectly. Yet as I noted in the comments column:

I am not proposing that doctors or researchers with financial ties to industry be excluded from press stories or public discussion of medicine. That would be destructive. I am arguing that the relevant financial ties of quoted experts should be disclosed so that the public can consider those in considering their positions. Butterworth appears averse to this idea. But it's one that the leading medical journals have embraced, and it seems to have raised rather than eroded faith in the studies published in those journals.

The issue of industry influence on medical opinion is a rich one; may this little squabble shine a bit of light on it. Check it out at "To Disclose or Not to Disclose."

Technorati Tags: Brownlee, Jeanne Lenzer, journalism, Lilly, pharma, Slate

An Omnidirectional Treadmill Means One Giant Leap for Virtual Reality

My (very short) story on a new omnidirectional treadmill for spatial cognition research is up at the Wired site:

An Omnidirectional Treadmill Means One Giant Leap for Virtual Reality.

...This April, a team based at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, unveiled the CyberWalk, an omnidirectional treadmill designed to serve as a VR-capable movement platform. Treadmills have been tried in VR before, of course, but early models were unconvincing — either too small to keep goggled wanderers on the platform or too slow, bouncy, or gap-ridden to feel the least bit real. The CyberWalk solves these problems with a stiff, gapless, 20 x 20-foot floor and movement and feedback systems that enable quick, fluid changes of direction.

We know what you're thinking: Halo! But gamers must wait. For now, access goes to spatial-cognition and perception researchers, who will use the CyberWalk to "explore all sorts of things we haven't been able to explore before," says William Thompson, a University of Utah computer scientist. In addition to studying our brains and understanding space and movement, they'll assess potential for military and disaster-response operations and see if the device can be used to treat medical issues such as Parkinson's.

Slate asks: Are MDs shilling for pharma ... on public radio?

In a nifty bit of reporting, veteran health reporters Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer revealed in "Stealth Marketers," a story on Slate, that a "Prozac Nation: Revisited," a radio piece on antidepressants and suicide that ran on many public radio stations recently, "featured four prestigious medical experts discussing the controversial link between antidepressants and suicide" who all reportedly have financial ties to the makers of antidepressants -- as does the radio series, known as "The Infinite Mind," that produced the show.

As the story notes, the extent of the financial ties are unknown because those involved won't reveal them. Still, Brownlee and Lenzer argue, the show in question, "Prozac Nation: Revisited," "may stand in a class by itself for concealing bias." (Then follows a troubling paragraph outlining the conflicts of interest involved.)

is that undisclosed financial conflicts of interest among media sources seem to be popping up all over the place these days. Some experts who appear independent are, in fact, serving as stealth marketers for the drug and biotech industries, and reporters either don't know about their sources' conflicts of interests, or they fail to disclose them to the public.

The story goes on to list several examples that point out out badly such influence compromises our ability to trust many news reports.

Conflicts of interest abound even in unexpected places. A recent survey of academic medical centers published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that 60 percent of academic department chairs have personal ties to industry—serving as consultants, board members, or paid speakers, while two-thirds of the academic departments had institutional ties to industry. Such ties can be extremely lucrative. And according to these articles in the medical literature, researchers who receive funding from drug and medical-device manufacturers are up to 3.5 times as likely to conclude their study drug or medical device works than are researchers without such funding.

Brownlee and Lenzer put some focus on journalists as well. They cite one study of 544 science stories from top outlets (from 4/06 to 4/08) that checked whether the journalists quoted an independent expert and/or made some attempt to report researchers' potential conflicts of interest. "Half the stories failed to meet this requirement."

This doesn't surprise me. This story prompted a very lively exchange on a science writer listserve I participate in. That exchange confirmed that there's wide variation in how consistently researchers (and the institutions they work for) reveal their funding sources and in how often or consistently journalists ASK their sources about their funding resources. Science journalism is a field ever in tension between an excitement over the scientific discoveries in question and the more hard-nosed mission to vet the reported results and examine science as a social, political, and commercial activity. Most science journalists are ever balancing interest and enthusiasm with skepticism and critical thinking. They should do so conscientiously, of course; that's their job.

As Brownlee and Lenzer note, it's impossible to know at this point a) how much money some of the people involved actually got from drug companies and b) of course, how much it influenced them. But it's well-establshed that trust in scientific results -- especially in the much-tainted arena of psychiatric drugs -- depends on a transparency in funding that has been sorely lacking. This sort of thing -- undisclosed funding from pharm interest of a show that purports to EXAMINE the controversy over antidepressants and suicide -- can't help matters.

Technorati Tags:
depression, journalism, Lilly, medicine, pharma, Slate, Brownlee, Jeanne Lenzer

Psychiatry Handbook Linked to Drug Industry

From Well, Tara Parker-Hope's health blog at the NY Times:

More than half of the task force members who will oversee the next edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s most important diagnostic handbook have ties to the drug industry, reports a consumer watchdog group.

The Web site for Integrity in Science, a project of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, highlights the link between the drug industry and the all-important psychiatric manual, called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The handbook is the most-used guide for diagnosing mental disorders in the United States. The guide has gone through several revisions since it was first published, and the next version will be the D.S.M.-V, to be published in 2012.

The American Psychiatric Association’s Web site has posted the financial disclosure of most of the the 28 task force members who will oversee the revision of the D.S.M.

It’s not the first time the D.S.M. has been linked to the drug industry. Tufts University researchers in 2006 reported that 95 — or 56 percent — of 170 experts who worked on the 1994 edition of the manual had at least one monetary relationship with a drug maker in the years from 1989 to 2004. The percentage was higher — 100 percent in some cases — for experts who worked on sections of the manual devoted to severe mental illnesses, like schizophrenia, the study found.

Salmon Fallout -- and Diver Deaths

I've been remiss in tracking here the farmed salmon issue I wrote about in the April/May Eating Well. Much has transpired; here a few tidbits and updates.

Soon after my feature ran, news broke that the Sacramento king (aka chinook) salmon run -- traditionally fairly robust, and the base of both the California salmon fishing industry and the main supply for many California restaurants -- went completely snuff this year. The California salmon fishery was closed for the first time in 160 years. A stunning blow to the fishing industry and all fans of salmon in general.

This has had some interesting fallout right up the line. The Eater SF blog laments:

The cancellation of salmon season has made the question of farmed/wild salmon a hot topic, and now at least one more local won't be resorting to the Loch Duart alternative: "It will come as no surprise, then, that there is one fish I will not serve at Contigo: farmed salmon. Not even Scotland's eco-friendly Marine Conservation Society-endorsed Loch Duart salmon. My decision isn't based on holier-than-thou food snob bull shit. It comes from my heart. My decision is based on respect for and solidarity with people like Larry Miyamura, hardworking fishermen who depend on the salmon season for the majority of their income. It's a personal choice. It just wouldn't feel right to me to put farmed salmon on my restaurant's menu. Especially not this year."

That quote comes from chef Brett, who blogs at in praise of sardines and is soon to open a new restaurant, Contigo.

And yesterday's news brings report of another problem with the farmed salmon industry, at least in Chile: The death on April 25 of farmed-salmon industry diver Nelson Andrés Bustamente, from the bends, brought to 54 the number of Chilean salmon industry divers who have died since 2005. Crîstån Soto of the local divers union there in Chile told a Patagonia Times reporter that Bustamente died because he had been asked to go deeper than is safe. "Every day we go down further than we're supposed to, Why do we do it? Because if we don't, we'll be out of work." The Patagonia Times story ran no response from industry. The mere count, however -- 54 divers dead in a bit over 3 years -- seems rather damning itself.

Where All That Brain Energy Goes

That our brains account for 20 percent of our calorie use tends to amaze people, as it did me. Now it appears that about a third of that is devoted to brain maintenance rather than electrical signaling. The full dish here:

Link: Why Does the Brain Need So Much Power?: Scientific American.

It is well established that the brain uses more energy than any other human organ, accounting for up to 20 percent of the body's total haul. Until now, most scientists believed that it used the bulk of that energy to fuel electrical impulses that neurons employ to communicate with one another. Turns out, though, that is only part of the story.

A new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA indicates that two thirds of the brain's energy budget is used to help neurons or nerve cells "fire'' or send signals. The remaining third, however, is used for what study co-author Wei Chen, a radiologist at the University of Minnesota Medical School, refers to as "housekeeping," or cell-health maintenance.