Well this sounds familiar to me: well-known atheist blogger PZ Meyers found himself whisked into the hospital suddenly for heart problems over the weekend, and today he tells us about his angiogram, complete with Jawas and a giant floating head. I gotta tell you that I was a lot more lucid for my procedure six years ago; I’ll never forget the truly creepy sensation of feeling the cath being ratcheted up into my heart and the “skreetch-skreetch-skreetch” noise it made inside me. Best wishes to PZ for his speedy recovery.
Did you know that the third leading cause of mortality in the United States is medical treatment? Nearly a quarter of a million people are killed in this country every year by a combination of medical errors, unnecessary surgery, and hospital-acquired infection. This recent NYT article goes into detail about a particular problem: the difficulty in distinguishing between the many and varied plastic tubes that get used often results in hooking things up incorrectly, thus killing people by giving them lethal drugs, blocking their airways, or even pumping food into their veins.
This Popular Science article reports that researchers have found a way to engineer RNA in such a way that it stops protein production in cells, thus preventing those cells from reproducing, and they have begun testing this technique as a way to stop liver cancer from spreading. Because the technique can be applied to many different types of cells, it may eventually be an effective treatment for a variety of diseases, but they need to develop a more precise method for targeting just the diseased cells.
From the Department of Don’t Worry, Be Happy comes the news that bad thoughts can kill! Cynicism, “lack of meaning”, fretting, lack of self control, anxiety, pessimism, and stress are the seven deadly sins in this article. No wonder I’m headed for an early grave!
