Everyone sounds smarter in French
If you’ve ever wondered what I sound like in French–and surely you have–now’s your chance to find out. The French version of Slate ran one of my posts, and you can read it here. Or in English here.
Month: January 2019
A nice pair
I often despair when I read some of the papers that pass for phage therapy science, so it’s nice to see a couple of very solid contributions published this month. Neither are attention-grabbing reports of cures of patients who had failed antibiotic therapy and were at death’s door. You won’t see a word about them Read More …
Phage therapy for Alzheimer’s?
Alzheimer’s rivals sepsis as the La Brea Tarpits of the pharma industry. 400+ clinical trials of new therapies were run between 2002-2012. They yielded exactly one approval. And that was for a drug (memantine) which treats symptoms but does not affect the course of the disease. Memantine was cleared in 2003; no new drugs have Read More …
Yes, cancer deaths are down, but not for the reasons you’ve been told
By now you’ve no doubt read that cancer death rates (age-adjusted) are down 27% since 1991. The better sort of news articles point out that this is a bit of cherry-picking, as cancer death rates peaked in 1991, and current progress has brought us back to the rates that prevailed in the 1940s. This graph Read More …
Really Bad Blood
I read Bad Blood, John Carreyou’s account of the Theranos fiasco over Christmas and must say it changed my conception of what went down there. I’d written a fair amount about Theranos over at Quora (see here), and was clearly much too sanguine as to what was going on. I thought they were just at Read More …
Phage therapy: GMP is not the problem
I often worry that I am too hard on clinicians, mocking them for their credulity and innumeracy. Medicine is hard, and I would much rather be treated by a doctor who is innumerate and a careful listener than one who knows the difference between a standard error and a standard deviation but doesn’t listen to Read More …
Culture is more important than technology
Let me preface this by saying that we are all dumbasses, every one of us. And that overconfidence and misplaced self-regard are the usual source of our failings. Although it’s easy to rag on doctors and other healthcare workers for their foibles, they are no different than anyone else in this respect. It’s just that Read More …