msb-0213 Credence

msb-0213 Credence

intro

Feedback comes first, so...

I am still unemployed and looking for anything that will pay the rent... (Some advertisers would be nice, really nice.)

My mother's still hanging in there.

I have applied for a handicapped parking spot in front of my apartment building. They aren't going to get around to doing an evaluation of the street until I have furnished them with doctors letters, MRI scans, have had their doctors evaluate them, and me.

[insert name of deity here] help me if I'm having a good day when I'm supposed to go for the medical, or a really bad one.

Then, after all that trouble, expense and "agita", I fully expect that they'll tell me that I can't have one anyway because there are already too many on my street. Or they'll tell me I can have one and proceed to rip up the street and I won't be able to park on the street "at all."

Yeah. Mother's impending death is weighing on me. You can just tell my mood's pretty low.

My wife often says I'm as cute as ever, and I am I guess (Who knows from "cute"?) but I certainly don't feel cute getting up out of a low chair, like the ones in the waiting room at my dentist. Then I feel quite elephantine, pachydermian even, quite clumsy and anything but "cute" as I struggle to my leaden feet.

But there might be some help coming MSers way:

From a /. piece [ http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/18/0242250 ]: "University of Manchester researchers have transformed fat tissue stem cells into nerve cells -- and now plan to develop an artificial nerve that will bring damaged limbs and organs back to life. In a study published in October's Experimental Neurology, Dr Paul Kingham and his team at the UK Centre for Tissue Regeneration (UKCTR) isolated the stem cells from the fat tissue of adult animals and differentiated them into nerve cells to be used for repair and regeneration of injured nerves. They are now about to start a trial extracting stem cells from fat tissue of volunteer adult patients, in order to compare in the laboratory human and animal stem cells."

---- "Bonnie Jean" by: "Artie Traum" http://www.artietraum.com/

Feed Forward comes next, so...

This is "your" segment.

Say "your" piece on this segment.

Share with other MSers whatever "you" want to share.

Drop me an email: charles at MSBPodcast.com

And I would apreciate if someone could write a review of this podcast on iTunes [ http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=120932170 ] You can just select the link and, eventually, scroll down the iTunes page to "Customer Reviews"

C'mon folks. I know you're downloading. What do you think of the show?

If its bad, I can improve it, but you've got to let me know. Don't worry about hurting my feelings. I can take it.

I've got MS. I can take anything.

---- "Maple Leaf Rag" by: " Jeanne Backofen Craig" http://mysite.verizon.net/vzeoswvo/jeanne-prof-page.html

Feed Me comes third, so...

Do you have a therapy, product, good or service that is of interest to MSers?

Consider advertising on this podcast.

Reminders on this segment only cost $0.03 per reminder per download of an episode. (A $30CPM targeted at MSers.)

It can/should lead to a full ad, in text, audio or video, which costs $3.00 per download.

That sounds expensive until you do the math and realize that if nobody downloads it it costs you nothing, unlike print, where you often can't even get an ad in to the specialized journals, or radio or TV where you'd just be wasting your money with the 0.0833% MSers rate of return. (That's about six times "below" the level of "statistical noise".)

But MSBPodcast is 100% in your market, and you only pay per download of your material.

No play, no pay.

Reach the MSers who would buy your therapy, product, good or service, with-out having to waste your advertising money on anyone who is "not" interested...

Send me an email at: charles (at) MSBPodcast.com

---- "Lost Highway" by: "Gene Loveland" no website

"Thesis:"

Credence in drug and/or therapies requires that those drugs and/or therapies show some believable efficacies.

In plain-speak, credence, or believability, of various drug regimens, therapies and what-not requires the providers to provide proof instead of just anecdotal evidence.

Efficacy requires a causal chain.

---- "If I Knew" by: "Running Home" http://runninghomerecords.com/

"Synthesis:"

Therapies and dugs show differing patterns of usefulness depending on some factors related to the individuals' personal make up.

The problem is that this can be be considered anecdotal evidence, which is clearly not enough to be called clinical research.

What is the difference? If so-and-so had some results using this-or-that shouldn't that be good enough for me?

Well, no. It shouldn't because if that's the evidence you're relying on, you will run into some very real problems at some point when anything goes wrong and you can't fix it. (I'm a firm believer in the old adage of "What ever can go wrong will go wrong." at some point. [I've been working in high-tech for thirty years and I can tell you that it always finds new ways to fu... uh, go wrong.])

Sadly, we're complex biological systems. What worked for so-and-so yesterday may be listed on the coroner's report as so-and-so's cause-of-death today.

Medical knowledge is always evolving, in part because of all those coroner's reports, (a real bummer, [specially if you liked so-and-so, {I don't think so-and-so is in any shape to care anymore,}]) and in part because the medical researchers understand the fluidity of an organism's response and monitor their patients for changes in their condition.

(That's in part part of the problem with health care. If you are an actuary, you deal with statistics, immutable aggregates. People aren't statistics. They are individuals and they are aggravatingly mutable. Just because we MSers usually have the requisite number of appendages doesn't necessarily mean we can rely on them to behave properly, as we rattle around in our somatic cages with our ill defined internal boundaries.)

---- "Moon Over Marin " by: "Dead Kennedys" http://www.deadkennedys.com/

"Conclusion:"

Credence in drug and/or therapies requires that those drugs and/or therapies show some believable efficacies.

In plain-speak, credence, or believability, of various drug regimens, therapies and what-not requires the providers to provide proof instead of just anecdotal evidence.

Efficacy requires a causal chain.

And if you want a long, twisted causal chain, I'm thinking of Christmas already.

---- "Chiron Beta Prime" by: "Jonathan Coulton" http://www.jonathancoulton.com/

Outro