Category Archives: Medicine

Medicine

Cardiac Electrophysiology Basics – Request for Comments

I’ve written up a basic introduction, with pictures, to my field of research. I would really appreciate it if any of you could read it over, tell me if you find it understandable, what’s unclear, etc. I need people who aren’t very familiar with this stuff.

It’s lacking some later stuff that’s more relevant to my research (at this point) but I want to get the foundations right before I move on.

Please please please help me with this.

The page is here. Also, sorry if you got this cross-posted on my LiveJournal.

Science Attacked From All Sides

You may have heard me complain about the Intelligent Design movement, what a load of bunk it is, and how much damage its proponents are doing to scientific understanding and progress. However vast and harmful that may be, in degree it doesn’t hold a candle to firebombing people’s houses, bomb threats, and the other nastiness perpetrated by the hypocritical animal rights groups.

Look, I’m vegetarian. I’m a Buddhist. I don’t think we should be eating animals en masse for a variety of reasons, the most important of which is health. I don’t have a problem with animal research, though. There are strict guidelines in place to ensure that it is done in a “humane” way. And even if that weren’t the case, is threatening someone, and firebombing their house a better way to act? What if that molotov cocktail had exploded, the house had burned down, and someone had died?

The ethical hypocrisy from these groups is monstrous.

Please, no matter how much you love animals, and want to see them treated well, do not let words like these (from the article) come out of your mouth, ever:

… force is a poor second choice, but if that’s the only thing that will work … there’s certainly moral justification for that.

ADDENDUM: You really should read the comments over there. Some of the comments from the animal rights nuts leave me agape. They also reveal a bit of a misunderstanding: they seem to think scientists like vivisection, like the pure glee of it drives them to do it. They seem to think if research is not on AIDS or cancer, then it’s “esoteric” and frivolous, and that no benefit can come from it.

Clearly there’s a major gap between public perception and reality when it comes to scientific research. What can we do to eliminate that gap?

ADDENDUM 2: I think we need to call the science nazi, as I mentioned with regard to ID a little while ago.

Research and Reference Management: Part The Second

Yesterday I posted a flow chart and a description of the first half of the process that it diagrams. Today, I’ll explain the more elaborate second half. First, for convenience, here’s the flowchart again:

The first part of the process gives me a prioritized list of articles to read. It helps, when I have time to read articles, if I can simply go to the list, get a few PDFs, print them, and read them. Therefore I typically go down the list and acquire PDFs for tens of articles in one go. That’s covered in the diagram. For each item on Cite-U-Like, there’s a link to PubMed. The important thing about that is that on PubMed, (while I’m on the University’s network) there are big icon-button things indicating whether I have full-text access to the article, and where. If I have full-text access, I follow the link and download the PDF. I then upload it to Cite-U-Like, which does three things for me.

  1. It keeps the file online for universal access (for me only)
  2. It renames the file to something sensible for me
  3. It puts the file in a nicely organized system with the rest of my article information

If, however, the article is not available to me in full-text (some institutions have more extensive access than others… *cough*), then I have to follow the “no” branch of the flow chart. First, I check the library’s online catalog to make sure that the library does not have the issue in question. They might have it. Ironically, they seem to have extremely obscure journals, but none of the really relevant ones. At least in my field. They also might have the article in J-STOR or Ovid or something like that. If so, then it’s time to descend into confusing multiple-electronic-database hell. I left that off the flowchart.

Anyway, so, the more likely case is that they don’t have it at all. That’s actually a relatively painless scenario, and it’s getting better. Most universities, including mine, have a nice online interface to request photocopies of articles via Inter-Library Loan (ILL). You request your article, and in a day to several days it arrives. Historically, the article would arrive in the form of a mailed or faxed photocopy. This was sometimes inconvenient. Why?

  1. You have to go pick up the article. If you’re doing this several times a week it can get pretty time consuming and annoying.
  2. The article is not digital. If you want to take the copy with you somewhere, you need to lug the dead trees. It is possible to scan the article using an auto-document feeder on a nice digital copy machine. This is yet another step, though.
  3. Sometimes they do a really bad job of copying
  4. Color figures usually become something between mostly useless and entirely useless after being xeroxed, especially if it’s not done with a careful eye for darkness settings.

The new thing is that most articles are delivered electronically. You get an email saying, “your article is in!”, you go to the ILL site and download however many arrived-articles have piled up, and you’re good to go. Of course, the issues of bad copying still apply, since nobody seems to use color scanning.

As you can see from the flowchart, no matter how the articles arrive, you can make them into PDFs somehow, and get them back into the Cite-U-Like library. From there, you can download the PDFs in order on the prioritized To Read list, and churn through them.

How to properly read and make use of the knowledge you gain from reading is worthy of several other blog posts. Questions?

The most important issues in scientific publishing

I’m in a bit of a pickle with a paper I’ve been writing for a while, and this post (which I had bookmarked because I thought it would have good writing tips — and it did, but not the kind I wanted) gave me a little bit of comic relief.

Actually, a lot of comic relief. If you’ve ever done research, applied for a grant, or tried to write a scientific paper, I’m 90+/-5% sure that you’ll get a kick out of this guy’s writeup.  I give an except below to give you some idea about how it reads:

Improbable Research

3. Scientific Writing
You have spent years on a project and have finally discovered that you cannot solve the problem you set out to solve. Nonetheless, you have a responsibility to present your research to the scientific community (Schulman et al. 1993d). Be aware that negative results can be just as important as positive results, and also that if you don’t publish enough you will never be able to stay in science. While writing a scientific paper, the most important thing to remember is that the word “which” should almost never be used. Be sure to spend at least 50% of your time (i.e. 12 hours a day) typesetting the paper so that all the tables look nice (Schulman & Bregman 1992).

Atrial Natriuretic Peptide

A little while ago I made a note to myself to look up the effects of atrial natriuretic peptide. We’re having an air conditioning / server issue so I took care of this while waiting. Wikipedia, as usual, had the answer:

Atrial natriuretic peptide – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The overall effects of ANP release are a reduction in blood volume and therefore central venous pressure, cardiac output, and arterial blood pressure. It also increases renal sodium secretion and excretion. The overall effect of which is to counter the blood pressure-raising effects of the renin-angiotensin system.