“Live foods” woo at the Yabba Pot

There’s an organic vegan foods place right down the street from me. They have tasty and healthy foods, and the prices aren’t bad. On my first visit there, actually at another location due to renovations, I read some woo on the menu about the enzymes in raw foods and their healing effects, as well as the harm caused by chemicals produced when foods are cooked. I could kind of see a point there, but it’s a weak point.

The second time I visited, then nice and close to my apartment in their normal location, I was waiting at the register, staring over the woman working there’s shoulder, where I found a sign with big letters exclaiming that “Doctors kill people” or some other such nonsense. I should go take a picture. It then quoted very selectively an article from the Journal of the American Medical Association (commonly JAMA) on death from iatrogenic causes (i.e. death caused by a health care provider’s mistake(s)). Combined with other BS written in the menu and various places throughout the store, the conclusion the customer should make is clear: Doctors are wringing you for money and sometimes killing you and you fall right into their trap when you don’t eat raw (live) foods.

Imagine how I felt as I handed over my School of Medicine (I’m a grad student in the SoM, not a medical student) ID for my student discount.

To you, dear readers, the folly of all of this should be self-evident. Firstly, how many people would even be alive to die of iatrogenic causes without modern medicine? That’s not to say that mistakes aren’t made, or to excuse them, but indicting the whole of modern medicine and abandoning it to imbibe solely in raw foods is lunacy. Secondly, who published the article? The JAMA! It’s a self-policing article! If anything that should inspire more confidence in modern medicine, not less.

Despite my love of good vegetarian food, that’s not a place that gets my money anymore.

“Skim” – A program for scientific reading

When I read scientific papers, I mark them up a lot. I underline useful snippets of information, circle reference numbers to check later, write questions in the margins, and so on. Until recently, I was doing this on paper, and then transcribing my notes manually to a FreeMind outline. However, since discovering that I can do all of this and more in Adobe Acrobat, using the built-in OCR scanner to produce text even from scanned PDFs, I’ve gone digital.

Acrobat is pretty expensive, though, especially if you aren’t an official student or faculty at a university with an educational discount. I prefer to avoid lock-in to commercial software, especially expensive commercial software when possible. Anyhow, PDF is now an open standard, with good native support under OS X. I had wished for a long time for a good open-source PDF editor that I could use to mark up scientific documents. Skim is the answer to my wishes.

Skim is designed for scientific reading, and marks up PDFs reasonably well. It is free and open-source software (FOSS if you like acronyms), and comes in Universal Binary and source code flavors. Lifehacker did a brief review of it, as have others if you search the interwebs. I tried it, but ran into one rather frustrating problem. It doesn’t restrict its highlighting to a single column of text. Thus, if you have two-column text, as is found in most journals, it will select across both, totally ruining your ability to highlight a sentence. I don’t know how much of a showstopper this is for others, but for now I’m still using Acrobat. However, since it’s open-source and I think it has a potentially wide audience, there’s a good chance a fix will be made in the future.

For most people who want to add notes to PDFs on a mac, it should work splendidly.

Still recovering

I am (yes, in fact) alive and actually doing pretty well. I am still sorting through an enormous backlog of Next Actions and internet articles to read. When I’m done, I will have an even bigger backlog of things to write about on this blog, and then I can start spewing posts forth.

But not yet.

Tools of the Trade

I’ve been thinking back on my trials and tribulations when working on the ischemia paper. One thing that tripped me up all along was a lack of knowledge of the techniques for analyzing cardiac electrophysiology data. Something that said, “if you want to find out why X is happening, first try Y and look for this, then try Z and look for that.”

Rather than whine about the lack of a list of such things, I’ve decided to start my own. I’ve added (or will shortly) a Page (on the right) called “Tools of the Trade”. There, I hope to document useful methodologies that I have used and that I use in the future.

Do you have any suggestions for analyzing electrical activity in the heart?