For those of you playing along at home, I’ve finally come out of my depression enough that it feels safe to start working on my story again.

I haven’t written anything new yet, because it’s been awhile and I have to re-immerse myself back in the tale, but I’ve been through it from page one, and rewriting things as I deem necessary. I still have on passage I know I need to rewrite, I wrote it solely to amuse myself, but I think only a handful of other people will get the joke, so for such a major plot point, I’d best make some changes. (Basically, the start of a major scene is a huge Deep Space Nine joke. Amusing to me, not so much to anyone else.)

All this, of course, assuming that I can slow down my current reading binge.

I give it 50/50 odds right now.

It’s a funny thing, having your weblog under your own name. Knowing that what you write is going to be out there for anyone to read with your name right there.

Including future employers and possibly litigious current co-workers. (They might not be litigious now, but if I wrote down what I was thinking they’d probably be.)

Which is too bad, because as I may have mentioned before, y’all are missing some of my best snark. However, writing about morons at work isn’t great for continued employment, so I refrain.
(more…)

There is a distinct possibility that if I even publish this post, I may regret it and take it down.

Which you can take as your warning that this post is going to contain a bit more personal information than normal.
(more…)

I was quite pleased to stumble across an interview with Jay Bakker in the NY Times. Several years ago Terry Gross interviewed him on Fresh Air, and now, as then, I am both intrigued and impressed.

In contrast to his father, who larded his show-biz patina thick, Bakker is unpolished and self-effacing. He has mild dyslexia, which makes it hard for him to write, and as a child he suffered from an eating disorder. Recently he stopped taking the antidepressant Paxil, which had caused him to gain weight, and started taking a little Zoloft instead. ”We are who we are, and that’s got a lot to do with punk,” he said. ”We try not to live a lie or have a false perception of ourselves, that we’re holier or better than other people. We don’t try to live up to the standards of mainline Christian society and the pressures they put on you.”

One reason this article resonated with me, is because earlier this week I ran across another incidence of “God hates Gays,” for a forceful reminder of why I avoid organized religion. I stumble across things like this and end up reading some of the diatribe before I quite realize what it is, at which point I can’t get away fast enough.

But then I’m left with a simmering anger and intense dislike of people who would believe that God would could hate any of creation. That a God who created men and women to be a certain way would then hate those people for being as they were created. It’s illogical and it’s ugly and I want nothing to do with it.

So it’s a relief to read about someone like Jay Bakker. Someone who seems to be, not interested in telling people how to live their lives, but in trying to live his life as best he can, and helping others to do the same.

Perhaps that’s too simple a summary of what he’s doing, but to me, it seems to be the essence of faith and religion.

The FDA is likely to approve an implant that stimulates a portion of the brain as a treatment for depression.

The device which is already in use to treat severe epilepsy, is supposed to help moderate depresison through stimulation of the vagus nerve.

However, what I found most interesting about the article, were the quotes from the FDA panel, specifically those by A. John Rush who was testifying for Cyberonics Inc, the group hoping the expand the market for their product.

“We lost four of these individuals in the last 2 1/2 hours,”…basing that figure on the high suicide rate among patients with resistant depression.
…
“In the time to do another trial, we will lose another 1,000 patients a month, 36,000 if the trial takes three years.”

I’m not sure what else was said to the panel, but it seems to me that those statments are deliberately misleading, especially for a treatment whose randomized trial didn’t show statistically significant results. 15% improvement in the treatment group versus 9% improvement in the control group is not impressive, and certainly would not correlate to the saving of “1000 patients a month” as Rush seems to be implying.

Which reminds me: several medical groups, including the AMA, are pressing for a database of clinical drug trials. Much of this call comes after GlaxoSmithKlein was accused of supressing the results of clinical trials for Paxil in adolescents

This comes back to a long standing problem in research, which is that negative results are rarely published, for a variety of reasons. Firstly, it isn’t very interesting or exciting to say “we didn’t find anything”; such results are rarely going to be published in the leading journals. Secondly, if the trial or research was sponsored by a specific company for a specific product, that company is not going to want information published saying their product was ineffective.

The other option, which has been discussed, is the creation of a journal for publishing negative results. However, a database, preferably one available on-line, would be a good idea, because it would make knowledge of those trials widely available.