Science Ain't So Bad

BLOOD TYPES

If you know your blood type it’s probably because you “gave at the office”.

Mister ScienceAintSoBad is proud of you.

If you ever need a transfusion, knowing your blood type may come in handy. A common complication of mis-typed blood is death. If you have trouble remembering whether you’re A, B, AB, or O (or Rh positive or negative), this isn’t exactly going to thrill your pants off but you now also have to know if you are “Langeries” or “Junior” too.

Actually? Hang on to those pants okay? There were already 30 recognized blood types before the new ones came along.

Didn’t know that, did you? Two more blood types brings it to 32.

This is the work of University of Vermont biologist Bryan Ballif (Nature Genetics). And he didn’t exactly “discover” Junior and Langeries. What he did was  get rid of the mystery surrounding them and their genetic structure. Now we know how and why they do what they do.

Your chances of being anything other than A, B, AB, or O are about the same as meeting a Martian on match.com.

(No KIDDING? Well sorry to rub salt into a wound then.)

Ballif’s work is a good thing. First of all, for the small number of people who are in these new groupings this reduces the risk of nasty transfusion reactions. And the proteins associated with these new blood types have some interesting anti-cancer properties which may lead to new therapies. Mostly, this is how science works. One step at a time. Little drama.. Put the pieces together, though, and suddenly things come into focus.

ScienceAintSoBadRating =9. Not bad!

Listen. I don’t want to leave you all worried about this. “Instant blood typing” is common now. So you don’t have to tape your blood type to your nose if you don’t want to. In fact, a team of chemical engineers  at Monash University headed by professor Gil Garnier (Analytical Chemistry) are working on a paper test strip for blood typing. 

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Image credits: Maybe I should have said discredits. This one isn’t exactly inspired. But, anyway, it’s all mine

THE NOTORIOUS BULLS EYE

TICKS

Dear Mister SASB, I live out in the woods with three dogs. I get a lot of ticks on me. No Lyme disease yet but it’s just a matter of time!!! Is there anything I should do? – WoodyLane5

Image credits” Yersinia Pestis. 
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Dear MISTER SASB: My grandmother’s got stomach cancer. She’s had surgery, drugs, and chemo. Now the doctor says she should get hospice care which totally (if it’s okay to say) sucks big time. Grannie taught me to read and to ride a bike and even how to cut cocaine. There MUST be something they can do! –  Nancy Trill

Dear Nancy:

It sounds like yer granny could open up her own pharmacy.

Anyway, to answer your question, her Docs COULD get your granny hooked up with a clinical trial that offers some new hope. But they probably won’t. Denise Mann (Web MD) says most patients who could qualify for clinical trials, won’t even hear about them. At least, not from their own doctors.

This doesn’t mean doctors are a bunch of bums. The ones I’ve worked with (and consulted) are almost uniformly terrific. They work hard and they’re, mostly,  very smart. BUT they are human (surprise!). Just so many hours in a day. Just so many dollars in a paycheck. They can’t be everywhere. Can’t do everything. Gotta go home sometime. And this has a lot to do with why they’re shy about introducing their patients to clinical trials. Keeping up with 8,000 trials is SLIGHTLY impossible. When would that “keeping up”  happen? Before 5 AM? Or after 2 PM? Medicine is intense. The hours are long and the stakes are high. And there’s a lot of required reading just to stay current in day-to-day practice.

Also, there’s the relationship thing.  Maybe a particular clinical study does offer “a shot” (usually a long one). Still. It probably means the patient’s off to some distant place at a time that’s infinitely crappy and emotional horrendous.  And the patient and his.her doc often have a thing going, a doctor patient relationship. Believe it or not, separating from the Doc who took the patient this far down  Dismal Road  can be tough for both the patient and the physician.

INVESTIGATE EARLY

People, naturally, do the regular stuff, first. If things don’t work out, maybe they start looking around for unregular stuff.  It’s tempting to see clinical trials like the extra innings. After the first nine. (A little baseball metaphor here.) Well, sorry, Bub, but that may be too late. Some of these trials won’t let patients who are practically gonners into their programs. They need to get at them earlier in the progression of the disease.

THE RIGHT ANSWER

You’re kidding, right? If I knew the right answers to this stuff, do you think I’d be sitting here cranking out blog articles? I don’t know how to get doctors back into this loop either.  But something’s gotta change. That’s for sure. It’s not right to expect patients, on their own and at the worst possible time in their lives, to become medical detectives, capably sorting through the relevant research. And it’s not like NO doctors are referring to clinicals. Maybe we need to understand what the doctors who get this right are doing.

Mister ScienceAintSoBad‘s an optimist. He thinks things will improve.

Sooner’s better than later.

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Credit for above cartoon (which I don’t exactly understand either) to, xkcd.

CHEAPER THAN MEDICAL SCHOOL

I guess you’ve been watching all the smuggies with their smartphones.

You can live without one, right?

Till now.

Here’s an app so good you gotta buy a phone to carry the app around.

I think I’m serious.

Healthagen developed this thing called iTriage

Stunning!

iTriage’s brilliance is the way it puts a simple interface over medicine. Your phone becomes your Startrek Tricorder. The pain’s in the biceps? All the time? Just at night?

Click “look up symptoms” to search an ordered list of likely symptoms.

Once you think you know what’s causing the problem, you can “Find Medical Treatment” or “Learn About Procedures”.

You can even “Find A Doctor”.

If you don’t understand a medical term you can look that up.

I was chicken to try the “Emergency” button . Was it gonna make an entire team of paramedics materialize right out of the phone? What would I tell ‘em? Just looking?

Jabber, Jabber, Jabber

Test: How is political debate different from science?

I will pick up your papers at the end of the class. I don’t want you looking at anyone else’s answers.