Why do women eat salads on dates? A new study suggests it’s all for show.

Researchers at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, observed 469 individuals in 266 groups at three cafeterias on campus. Sitting at a distance of at least 10 meters (damn Canadians and their metric system), the researchers watched these people in a natural setting and recorded how many people were sitting at each table, of what gender the people were, and estimated the caloric content of what each one was eating.

The findings were pretty clear:

1) Females chose foods with significantly fewer calories when eating with men rather than women. (Note to Jezebel: word “female” is in the study!)

2) Women’s food choices weren’t affected just by a man being present, but in proportion to how many men were present — more men equaled fewer calories.

{ True/Slant | Continue reading }

One of my many pet peeves is drug marketing. Even though Big Phama likes to tout how much it spends on R&D as a justification for high drug prices, it spends more on marketing as a percentage of revenues than it does on R&D. Think about it: in what other industry are the margins high enough to support in person selling to small businessmen? And I read once that over 88% of the so-called “new drug applications:” in the last 10 year have not been for new drugs, but new uses for existing drugs, and to extend the patent on existing drugs.

Drug companies are masters of this art. At Pfizer, which sets the gold standard for drug selling methods, each salesman markets only three drugs in his territory. So if a doctor is a candidate for more than three, he has more than one salesman calling on him. The scripts are highly refined, with a 15 second pitch that rolls into a one minute pitch that rolls into a longer chat if the drug detailman can get the time. All drug companies keep current records on how much each doctor is buying of each drug. Another tactic is “You aren’t prescribing as much of XXX as your peers are….”

They also give lots of little goodies (pens, notepads, desk toys). There is ample research that shows that giving even minor gifts is effective (doubters please read Robert Cialdini’s classic, Influence: The Art of Persuasion). And drug companies do all kinds of small scale research on existing drugs (as in this has no medical benefit, it’s just a sales tool, but those studies no doubt get lumped in the R&D total) to give the salesmen something fresh to talk about with existing drugs.

{ Naked Capitalism | Continue reading }

photo { Dr. Jeffrey F. Caren, a cardiologist in Los Angeles, created a display of the hundreds of pens given to him by the drug industry. | J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times }

Anyone who has been trained as a physician – or is close to someone who has been – is aware that the dissection of a cadaver is an integral part of the physician’s learning and socialization. The first incision is something few physicians forget. That procedure is reproduced time after time, in country after country, and provides a seminal building block of medical education. (…) Dissecting a cadaver also gives young doctors “an appreciation for the wonders of the human body”. Students often give their first “patient” affectionate names; however, much less attention is paid to where the cadaver came from.

Supplying human cadavers is left to the responsibility of others, most notably the anatomy course instructors or school administrators. These individuals are not alone in trying to secure specimens. Alongside primary medical education providers, a large number and wide range of other users are also trying to secure cadavers for their own needs. The continuing training of medical doctors, for instance, relies on cadavers. In addition, allied health professionals, emergency medical workers, and medical researchers all demand cadavers or cadaver parts. As an illustration, orthopedic surgeons use human joints to fine-tune their skills to learn new procedures. Similarly, some researchers studying Alzheimer’s disease might require human brains. Also, government agencies and automotive manufacturers that try to improve automotive safety benefit from research using cadavers.

It does not help that many users seek the same “good” type of cadavers. A good specimen, in this context, means a young cadaver, one not overly obese or too evidently diseased. Such a description is generally the antithesis of cadavers made typically available through donations, so the supply is further strained. Not surprisingly, both in the United States and other countries, those who require cadavers often question the adequacy of the supply and regularly voice their fear of shortages of cadavers.

However, trying to address the question of a shortage of cadavers often means facing the taboo on trading human anatomical goods. Blood, organs, and cadavers are generally thought to be better left untouched by market dynamics. (…) In essence, many would argue that blood, organs, and cadavers should not be considered goods.

That said, the demand for cadavers remains strong, and numerous ideas have been voiced to augment the supply. As an illustration, there is an ongoing debate about the impact of using financial incentives for donors or their families to encourage anatomical donations. Similarly, surveys of potential whole-body donors seek to gain insight into the reluctance to donate and how better to educate potential donors. By understanding the reluctance to donate, the hope is that the root causes of such reluctance might be addressed.

Another novel solution to the cadaver shortage lies in securing specimens from a new set of actors in the commerce in cadavers. These actors are legal entrepreneurial ventures that have been operating for more than a decade in the United States; they cater to domestic users and international ones alike. (The procurement of cadavers is regulated, but the export of cadavers much less so.) For medical schools in countries with strong societal norms against donating one’s body to science, such a supply route can prove quite practical. In those and other instances, medical schools can purchase for a fee the entrepreneurial ventures’ services and help medical students learn their craft. Like corn, wheat, and civilian aircrafts, cadavers sent abroad can be seen as another U.S. export product, although one dwarfed by these other export categories. The notion of human cadavers as a thriving export industry is obviously far away; however, I want to suggest that its legality and limited occurrence underline crucial new developments in markets for anatomical goods. While the international organ trade is almost unanimously condemned, human cadavers can legally freely flow across the globe.

{ A Market for Human Cadavers in All but Name by Michel Anteby | Economic Sociology, November 2009 | PDF | Continue reading }

photo { Ruth Bernhard, In the Box - Horizontal, 1962 }

This is the primary misconception about placebos: that the placebo itself is somehow “working” to treat a medical condition. You can see it even in the headline for an otherwise well-crafted article that appeared in Wired last August: “Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why.” As internist and medical professor Peter Lipson noted on the Science-Based Medicine blog, placebos by definition have no medical effect. The “placebo effect” is due to the subject’s (and sometimes, the experimenter’s) expectation that a treatment will work. And, of course, a patient sometimes recovers simply due to chance or because his or her immune response handled the problem. Researchers observe an improvement, and this gets attributed to the placebo. In the case of the Wired article, the misconception in the headline is cleared up by the text of the report: The placebo effect may be getting stronger for reasons that are unclear to researchers. Placebos themselves, as ever, remain ineffective.

{ Seed | Continue reading | Cognitive Daily/ScienceBlogs }

photo { Camilla Akrans }

New cosmetic medical devices including DIY lasers are expected to explode into a $1.3 billion market 2013, up from just $296 million in 2008, according to the analyst group Medical Insights. The growth in the market appears to be coming from light-based products that claim to either remove or grow hair on the human body. The Silk’n Hair was the first at-home laser device to be approved by the FDA, in 2006, although it didn’t come on the market until early 2008.

The laser hair removers damage the hair follicles that are in their growth phase, generally leading to some permanent reductions of body hair. DiBernardo questioned whether the lasers used in the home devices were powerful enough to get the kind of results that clinics achieve.

{ Wired | Continue reading }

photo { Viviane Sassen }

{ A Dallas woman has filed a lawsuit seeking six figures from a former neighbor and landlord for damage she says was caused by cigarette smoke wafting through adjoining walls of her high-end townhome. Cary Daniel and her mother Chris Daniel no longer live in the townhome, and said they need to wear respirators and goggles when they return to the townhome to retreive their belongings. | Dallas News | full story }

What do Mao Zedong and Howard Hughes have in common? In maturity, especially later in life, neither one brushed his teeth. Ever.

Hughes—inventor of one of the largest planes in history, owner of Trans-World Airlines, blockbusting director, millionaire (for a while the world’s wealthiest man), and aviation pioneer (a transcontinental airspeed record-holder)—was also a lifelong obsessive-compulsive germaphobe. (…) His aversion to the toothbrush stemmed from its ability to carry invisible contaminants.

The mastermind of China’s Communist revolution and the author of the “Little Red Book,” on the other hand, simply preferred not to brush. Instead, Chairman Mao rubbed his teeth with green tea leaves, giving them a well-documented jade tinge. “A tiger,” he reasoned, “never brushes his teeth.”

The two men may have exposed themselves to health and hygiene problems, but they also—no doubt unintentionally—avoided injury. The US Consumer Product Safety Commission estimates that 2,953 Americans were treated in 2007 for toothbrush-related injuries. The odds a person will visit an emergency department due to an accident involving a toothbrush in a year are 1 in 99,340, making a toothbrush slightly more dangerous on average than a garage door.

{ Book of Odds | Continue reading }

related { Wall Street Journal on the Book of Odds }

{ AP Photo/Eric Risberg }

related { A Radical Solution to End the Drug War: Legalize Everything }