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JD Vance is a Catholicist

I grew up Roman Catholic at the time of Vatican II. I do remember Latin mass with the priest facing the altar, but only a few years later, the mass was being said in English and the priest was facing the congregation. My church held a series of presentations from representatives of other faiths: Protestant (I don’t recall which denominations), Jewish, Muslim and Hindu. Ecumenism and tolerance were in the air. I don’t recall any intolerant words among the Catholics I knew until I attended mass at UT-Knoxville. During mass, someone offered a prayer for the Catholic Church’s ministry to gays, and afterwards, a woman in the music group expressed outrage. I found this odd, since Jesus was silent on the topic of homosexuality. That marked the beginning of my awareness of an intolerant, right-wing strain of Catholicism. It only took another couple of years, early in grad school, when I finally accepted the fact that I didn’t really believe in Church teaching, I only was going to mass out of h...
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A pediatrician’s thoughts on the new vaccine schedule

  A pediatrician’s thoughts on the new vaccine schedule The other day, I was getting my semi-annual cleaning at the dentist office. When the hygienist asked what I did before retirement, I told her I was a medical school professor. That touched off a 15-minute interrogation about childhood vaccination. She has an infant daughter. While she’s gotten all the recommended vaccines, she was plainly distressed by the Trump Administration anti-vax agenda and all the bogus anti-vax propaganda on the internet. I tried to answer her questions and put her at ease about her embrace of modern medicine over conspiracy theory, and she thanked me. Although I know something about infectious disease, immunology and vaccines, I’m not an authority on vaccines and I’ve never practiced medicine. So I’ll hand the microphone to Ken Haller, MD, a friend and former colleague. “Really, how many kids does  #RFKjr  want to kill? It's a valid question considering his reckless death-dealing In the disa...
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The mask is off

“In an  interview with The New York Times  published Thursday, Trump was asked whether there were any constraints on what he could do on the world stage, following the U.S. military operation that seized Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and amid renewed rhetoric from senior Trump administration officials about the United States potentially taking control of Greenland. ““Yeah, there is one thing,” Trump replied. “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”   “I don’t need international law,” he added.” This appears to be a new and unfamiliar use of the word “morality.” https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-limits-to-his-power_n_6960aa14e4b088e2524e3775?origin=home-latest-news-unit
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About that Venezuelan oil

There’s been a lot of crowing by Trump about how he’s seizing Venezuelan oil to hand it to American oil companies and skim profits for the United States. What oil, and how much? “ According to figures widely cited throughout the media and the oil industry itself, Venezuela is sitting on around 300 billion barrels' worth of "proved" oil, meaning barrels that have, in theory, been confirmed as commercially viable by conclusive testing or actual production.” *snip* “ This is a self-reported figure, however, and is published — but not verified — by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, of which Venezuela is a founding member. Holistic and conclusive evaluations by independent experts have never been conducted. “And up until 2007, Venezuela's self-reported proved reserves sat at around 100 billion barrels, according to data reported by OPEC. By 2013, that figure was updated after a reclassification of fields controlled by the country's state-run P...
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How to not Make America Healthy Again

I vividly recall a meeting when I was a young assistant professor and all the other male faculty, all MDs, were wearing white coats. The topic of “evidence-based medicine” came up. It was the first time I’d heard the phrase, so I asked the white-coat next to me (sotto voce, of course): “As opposed to what, magic-based medicine?” He replied, with more courtesy than I deserved: “As opposed to tradition-based medicine.” It hadn’t occurred to me before that there would exist any standard for medical practice other than evidence. Now I know better. The MAHA brand has become a mockery under RFK Jr and his minions. On the one hand, they’ve discovered that eating a healthy diet is a good idea, which is like discovering water at the bottom of the ocean. On the other hand, they’re promoting policies that are already making America sicker. Chief among them is the anti-vax agenda, which has led to an explosion in cases of measles and whooping cough, both deadly and preventable childhood diseases. ...
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Déjà vu all over again

The definition of insanity is making the same mistake over and expecting a different outcome. By that definition, the Trump coup in Venezuela is insane.   Maduro was a corrupt and illegitimate ruler. And the same was true of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Bush deposed Saddam, freeing Iraq from one nightmare but plunging it into another. The excuse in Iraq was phony charges of WMDs. The real reason was access to oil. Trump has deposed Maduro based on phony charges of drug manufacture and gang support. The real reason is access to oil.   Historian Juan Cole summarizes the five mistakes that Bush made in Iraq and that Trump is making in Venezuela:   “1. Violation of the UN Charter and the International laws of war   “The Bush administration attacked Iraq in 2003 without any foundation in international law. Iraq had not attacked the United States in the decade leading up to the American intervention. The UN Security Council, led by France, Russia and China, specifically decline...
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What the market will bear

I started college at the dawning of the age of cloning. Recombinant DNA technology represented the transition from descriptive molecular biology to genetic engineering. By the time I started teaching medical students, the genes mutated in terrible diseases like cystic fibrosis, Tay-Sachs, hemophilia and Fragile X were cloned. There was always an obligatory paragraph at the end of the paper to the effect that now the door was open to gene therapy. For decades, the cloning of such genes made the diagnosis in affected individuals much simpler, freed from pedigree analysis. The bottleneck to gene therapy was not cloning the affected gene, it was delivering a therapeutic gene in useful amounts to the appropriate organ or tissue.  Since the turn of the century, genuine progress has been made in gene therapies. Unfortunately, this has presented a new barrier to these technology—cost. Pharma companies have priced gene therapies so high that they are out of the reach of middle class and poo...
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