Religion serves more than one role

I have always felt that the main function of religion is not to worship an invisible man but to create a social network. This just seems intuitively obvious (to those who are not religious) but it is still nice to see that some of the faithful recognize that religion is, to some extent, a pretense for other things.

Mary Stutts, an associate pastor at Revival Center Ministries in Vallejo, Calif., says she regularly spreads the word about local job opportunities to worshipers before and after services. "In the last month, I've given out four job referrals," she says. Ms. Stutts even announces job opportunities from the pulpit when interesting ones open up locally. She learns of most openings from church members and through her work outside the church as a business-relationship consultant, she says.

Yes, Monster.com is competing with the big man, and I don't think it is a battle they can win. I especially like how religious job counselors think it is appropriate to use religion when it is useful:

While many job seekers may rely on prayer for support and success, career experts warn against discussing faith when meeting with hiring managers or executive recruiters. "You don't want to turn it into a religious conversation," says Kevin Zwetsch, a partner with the law firm Fowler White Boggs Banker in Tampa, Fla. "You're veering off the path of what you're there for."

"Thanks, big guy, for the help landing the interview. Now, could you stay in the car. You're actually a little embarrassing."

Really, I don't care. This isn't any different from me using my connections when I applied to grad school. I just wish people would be more honest about their reasons for wanting to belong to a faith community. It would be quite refreshing.

Congratulations to Al Gore ...

... and the UN panel on climate change. I think what Al said summarizes my feelings on this topic best:

"We face a true planetary emergency. The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity."

What I find mildly amusing is that Rush Limbaugh has been going on and on for the past six months about how he is a Nobel Peace Prize nominee and how important that makes him. Poor Rush. I hope the cognitive dissonance isn't too much for him.

Woo comes to the trauma ward

I'll take my medicine without the side of pseudo religious mumbo-jumbo, thank you very much. Maryland Shock Trauma, a center featured on Discovery Health's show The Critical Hour, is turning to magic to help cure patients.

In a strange pairing, high-tech Shock Trauma is opening its doors to a fuzzier sort of medicine, one that focuses less on the physical and concrete and more on the spiritual. As part of the Baltimore hospital's pain management options, patients are being offered acupuncture, reiki and music therapy alongside OxyContin and morphine.

Officials at the University of Maryland say this is the first time that alternative medicine has been used in a trauma center in the U.S., a sign of the growing acceptance of this booming field.

They are saying that like it is a good thing. Why should a trauma center be proud that they are waving their hands over patients as a form of treatment? This is analogous to dowsing methods, nothing more. But doctors at this trauma center don't seem to think so.

"I was very skeptical. I was like, 'OK, so you wave your hands over people and there are these energy fields and this makes you feel better?'" recalled Dr. David Tarantino, an anesthesiologist who runs Shock Trauma's pain management service. "I said, 'Obviously it isn't going to cause the patient harm so let's try it.'

No harm? Telling a patient to trust in shamanism over modern medicine causes no harm? Telling a patient to try something that has no supportive evidence causes no harm? Leading hopeful patients down dead end roads when they should really be exploring more fruitful options causes no harm?

Look, go ahead and test music therapy, acupuncture, green tea, and whatever else you want to test. You might find that some treatments show a mild effect, which wouldn't really surprise me. But then you isolate the effect and see how you can make it work better. If it works, it should fit into the framework of what we know about human physiology.

But don't tell me that hand waving is going to make me feel better and then make it impossible to test by completely altering what we know about physiology. Start with square one. You think our physiology is regulated by ethereal energy, then show me where that energy is. Show it, test it, prove it interacts with our physical body. Then at least we will be talking the same language. Until then, the theory behind things like reiki is where the real hand waving is going on.

Blogs on this:
Orac

A novel pathway for treatment of breast cancer

Part of the goal of Bioscience Bootcamp is to make sure that students have a broad understanding of research. Hence, we periodically summarize papers outside our field of study for the class. The following is my summary of a paper on cancer research. (Annoted summary, paired-down from a one hour presentation I gave. A few facts have been glossed over to make it less boring).

Specific Killing of BRCA2-deficient tumors with inhibitors of poly(ADP-ribose) polymerase. Bryant, et al. (2005) Nature 434

PARP1 and PARP2 proteins aid in the repair of single strand breaks in DNA, which in a cell occur on the order of 10,000 times per day. If this PARP repair mechanism is inactivated, single strand breaks become double strand breaks, which eventually results in cell death. Despite the importance of this PARP repair mechanism, PARP1 null mice are “viable, fertile and do not develop early onset tumors.” This is likely due to the ability of cells to repair double strand breaks.

How do they do this? Via BRCA2 recombinational repair. Deficiencies in this gene lead to deficiencies in DNA double strand break repair, leading to tumor growth (which is why BRCA2 is implicated in hereditary breast cancer). Cell death, however, does not occur because other repair pathways are still intact. So, the authors hypothesize that inhibiting PARP mediated repair in BRCA2 null cells will greatly reduce DNA repair, leading to cell death rather than tumor growth.

(I am glossing over an important fact here, that individuals carrying the BRCA2 deficiency are somatically heterozygous, but homozygous in the tumour. So BRCA2 repair is only deficient in tumours, not the rest of the body. Google two-hit hypothesis if you want an explanation.)

Through a series of experiments, the authors showed that; PARP inhibitors induce death in homologous repair deficient cell cultures; PARP1 rather than PARP2 is the key protein in causing cell death through PARP inhibition; and double strand breaks increase if PARP is inhibited. Here is a model (from their paper) of what they think is occurring.

The thought process is this.

1) PARP inhibition alone isn't dangerous

2) Inhibit PARP and you increase double strand breaks i.e. collapsed replication forks

3) Increase double strand breaks in BRCA2 deficient cells and you cause cell death

4) This would only affect tumour cells because somatic cells retain their BRCA2 repair activity.

End result, a new treatment for cancer that uses the tumour cell's own metabolism to destroy it.

What happens when they try this in a whole animal? Well, they implanted tumors in the thighs of mice and then treated them systemically with PARP inhibitors and got the following (again from the paper):

Those black triangles show the decrease in tumour size in a mouse with a BRCA2 null tumour and a five day systemic administration (day 27-32) of PARP inhibitor. No tumour was present at the time of autopsy. This was the most dramatic case, but there was also decreased tumour size in the other mice. None of the controls showed spontaneous decrease.

These data are a couple of years old and more work has been done since then. In fact my understanding is that this form of treatment is undergoing clinical trials in the UK now. It is not a cure to breast cancer, as PARP inhibition could not kill all tumor cells. But because of its well tolerated nature, this treatment could be used in addition to standard treatment to increase the odds of successful cancer treatment greatly.

Misdirected hysteria

There must be something about the name Mike Adams. After all, Mike Adams, the criminology professor who magically converted from both atheism and liberalism (ooohh, doubly evil), has been periodically lambasted by PZ over at Pharyngula for having a rather silly world view. But there is another Mike Adams on the horizon making some rather silly claims about 20 things that are more dangerous than lead paint in toys.

It's not that I think everything he mentions is great for you. I avoid hot dogs, anti-bacterial soap, and fast food, for instance. But to say the following about soda is a bit much

15. Soda

Aside from directly promoting diabetes and obesity, sodas also contain high amounts of phosphoric acid, a substance that dissolves bones and causes a loss of bone mineral density. This causes massive tooth decay as well as a shrinking jaw bone and overall skeletal fragility. Diet sodas are even worse, since they contain chemical sweeteners linked to neurological disorders and learning disabilities.

Yeah, okay, phosphoric acid can dissolve bones. Of course this would require that you a) have a molar concentration of acid sufficient to do so and b) pour it directly on your endoskeleton without the benefit of passing it through your digestive system. The pH in your stomach is lower than that of most sodas, but Mr. Adams doesn't seem to be too worried about that. He also states that soda "directly promotes diabetes and obesity" and that chemical sweeteners are "linked to neurological disorders and learning disabilities". Now, what is missing from his claims? No, besides a dose response curve. Yes, citations. Of course you can't expect every columnist to have the fact checking ability of a sixth grader writing a term paper, but it is something to hope for.

Read the rest if you like. He may be partially right that some of these things are to be avoided; but more dangerous than lead? I'm going to need more than just opinion on that.