A couple of excellent science bloggers have taken the time to fill in some of the details around HPV and the vaccines that I left out in my self-preoccupation. PalMD did a great job of putting my situation into the context of regular screenings.

When a woman lays back on the exam table at her yearly exam, the doctor or nurse first looks at the outside of the vagina for any abnormalities such as external yeast infections or genital warts. They then open up the vagina with a speculum and can see the vaginal walls, and eventually the cervix, which at this angle looks a bit like a think donut. Depending on technique, a small, cylindrical brush is inserted into the cervix and rolled around to collect cells, and a wooden spatula is scraped around the outside of the cervix. Then the speculum is removed, and fingers are inserted internally and a hand is pressed against the pelvis to feel for any other abnormalities. Usually a finger is also inserted into the rectum to feel the tissue between the rectum and vagina.

If all this sounds rather invasive, it is. Some women have very little sensation in their cervix, but many women have a very sensitive cervix and yearly pelvic exams can be very, very unpleasant. For women with a history of physical/sexual abuse, the discomfort can be magnified a thousand-fold. So if you’re wondering how a woman could possibly fail to get a regular Pap smear, try a little empathy. In medicine, we find it tempting but ultimately not useful to blame people for their diseases.

Empathy is one of Pal’s strong suits, and there’s plenty to be found in his post, even though I told him not to worry about my feelings or privacy in getting his message out. Which he did.

Abbie at ERV also wrote a post that made my unforgiving self very happy. (What? It’s a virus. It doesn’t care how I feel about it.) She explained why the vaccine can do permanent good–why we don’t need to be too concerned about another HPV strain taking over and causing the same number of cancers as the vaccine prevents.

There is no adaptive advantage to an HPV that causes cancer.

It could be that ‘any’ HPV can cause cancer, by accident, its just that HPV 16 and 18 are the most prevalent HPVs, so they get the most ‘chances’ to make a mistake.

But thats not the case. 16 and 18 cause a teeny-tiny minority of all HPV infections.

Getting rid of them is not going to create an ecological vacuum that will necessarily be filled. While ‘shit might happen’ again, there is no evolutionary ‘reason’ to fill the ‘HPV cancer’ void.

Get your vax against HPV 16 and 18. Obliterate those assholes from the planet.

What she said.

Does this mean that we’re doomed when we try to fight fear? I’m not sure it does. I think it’s more likely that we’re currently fighting fear the wrong way.

Take the classic childhood fear of monsters in the unseen places–under the bed, in the closet, in the dark. How are most of these fears treated? Do we tell children it’s natural to be afraid of the unknown, but that these things don’t need to stay unknown? Do we hold their hands while they open the doors and look under the bed?

No, or at least not often. Instead, we say, “Don’t be silly, honey. There are no monsters. Go to sleep.” And we do it at the same time that we’re teaching them that there are things in the world to be afraid of.

Find out the consequences at Quiche Moraine.

I’m rather fond of holidays that make us reflect on our rights, so I marked International Blasphemy Day briefly this morning with a Tweet:

I’m happy without your religion, thanks. Luckily, I enjoy working to improve the world while others just pray. #BlasphemyDay

What I didn’t realize was that this was a gift-giving holiday. I apologize for not getting y’all something, but I’m happy to share what other people gave me in response to my Tweet. The first was this lovely comic from Miscellanea. (Also available as a t-shirt.) I’d seen it before, but it’s always worth another look.

The other (oh, the other) gift I got was a link to a video for a Bible prophecy group that damned near self-mocking.

Q: How do you predict the exact date of events from reading the Bible?
A: Wait until they’ve already happened.

Q: How will knowing when Armageddon will come is going to help save people’s marriages?
A: Hang on, honey. It’s only for a few days more.

Happy International Blasphemy Day, everyone!

The much-awaited survey on the religiously unaffiliated, “American Nones: The Profile of the No Religion Population,” is out and it exposes some fascinating gender differences. Or does it?

“Women are also less skeptical than men and less drawn to irreligious and anti-religious views. They are more likely to reject a secular upbringing,” Kosmin says.

Well, that’s just from the researcher talking to the press, and you know how that can go. How about the report summary?

Whereas 19% of American men are Nones only 12% of American women are Nones. (Fig. 2.1)

Oh, my Gawd! Men are 60% more skeptical than women!

And from the report itself (detailed pdf):

There are a couple of additional findings worth noting here. Looking at retention by gender, Nones are more likely to retain men than women: 66% of men who reported no religion at age 12 were Nones at the time of their participation in ARIS 2008, but only 47% of females who reported no religion at age 12 remained Nones. Of those who reported having a religion at age 12, 15% of men left while only 9% of women did. It appears that American women have a greater affinity for religion than men. And conversely men have greater affinity for secularity than women.

Well, that’s easy to say, but of course, the study isn’t directly measuring skepticism or the appeal of secularity or religious views. It’s measuring social behavior. It’s measuring affiliation.

So what happens if we look at affiliation? 19% and 12% give us 81% of American men who are religiously affiliated versus 88% of American women. Which means we have 9% greater affiliation among men than women. That’s still a significant difference, and it’s the difference in what is actually being measured by the survey.

Of course, religion isn’t the only major type of affiliation that people are expected to have. In fact, Kosmin and his group looked at the interaction of political affiliation and and religious affiliation. Unfortunately, they didn’t report their results by gender, but a 2004 Pew study did. 59% of men and 65% of women identified themselves as affiliated with a political party. In other words, women showed about 10% greater rates of political affiliation.

Huh. About the same, then. Who’d have guessed?

Okay, now that I’ve got you thinking about what the survey does and doesn’t measure, and the complexity of the situation, it’s time to take a step back. When Kosmin is talking about regarding skepticism in the original quote isn’t the base statistics on affiliation. He’s talking about a smaller survey of beliefs among the non-affiliated, in which 58% of women indicated a belief in a higher power or personal god, compared to 46% of men.

Yet Kosmin’s statement isn’t that women are less skeptical of religion. Nor does it address the interaction between those beliefs and the ways in which women move into and out of religious affiliation (if males with no belief stayed among the unaffiliated while the women with no belief left for social/affiliation, rather than belief-based reasons…). It doesn’t, as my Episcopalian atheists friends would be the first to tell you, even address belief among the religiously affiliated by way of comparison. In no way can it be said to address gender differences in skepticism in general.

While it is possible to conduct studies in which women show less skepticism, it’s also possible to choose topics on which men are less skeptical. One survey that covered a range of topics found no difference by gender. If you want to really address the question, you simply have to look at a broad range of areas requiring skepticism. I recommend Podblack’s three–part series on the topic.

Whatever you do, don’t take Kosmin’s word for it.

Update: I also recommend this post at Pandagon and the comments, which delve into the question of gender differences in affiliation.

Via Barbara Drescher comes a lovely analysis behind some rather sensational reporting:

Technology addiction among young people is having a disruptive effect on their learning, researchers have warned.

Their report concluded that modern gadgets worsened pupils’ spelling and concentration, encouraged plagiarism and disrupted lessons.

Luckily for those of us who might have some contact with teenagers, education or technology (how many of us is that again?), Anne Marie of Wishful Thinking in Medical Education sprang for the report behind the press release.

With regards to ‘tech addiction’ this seems to have been a self-assessment based on response to the question: How addicted are you to the internet or your mobile phone? The proportions given in the BBC report are those who stated they were ‘quite’ or ‘very’ addicted. Of course, we don’t know what the students meant by ‘addicted’.

With regards to this addiction harming learning, there is no analysis relating the perception of being addicted to outcomes in learning. In fact very few of the questions are related in any way to learning.

The whole thing is worth a read, as is a comparison between the BBC article and the blog post. It highlights the way that several red flags regarding the research are reported in the article without being emphasized or interpreted in any way for readers who don’t already know that these are flags.

Carrie, of course, is not otherwise healthy. She’s prone to seizures, one of the rare complications of pertussis. She also has that problem with swallowing.

Think back to the last time you had a bad coughing fit. It’s gross, but think about the saliva and the mucus. Think about the last time you threw up. Now imagine all that together, along with gasping for air–and not being able to swallow.

If Carrie gets pertussis, she’ll almost certainly get pneumonia. Well, she will if the doctors can keep her from choking to death first. There’s a very good reason that pneumonia is a common complication of pertussis, even without Carrie’s problems.

A far too personal vaccination story, at Quiche Moraine.

How often do you hear people say, “Psychology isn’t science”? Truth is, like any other field of knowledge, it can be approached scientifically or…well…not. The geocentrists weren’t scientists, but that doesn’t mean modern astronomers aren’t. Same goes for psychology.

Aaron Beck is one of my heroes in this regard, although I never actually remember his name, just his work. He developed cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), and The American Scholar has a great article on how his insistence on evidence of efficacy reshaped psychotherapy.

To understand why the introduction of scientific standards into the field of psychotherapy was groundbreaking, it is necessary to know what the scene looked like prior to Beck’s arrival. “From the early 1900s through the 1950s, people didn’t know what worked in psychotherapy and what didn’t,” says Donald Freedheim, professor emeritus of psychology at Case Western Reserve University and editor of A History of Psychotherapy. “There was a rule of thumb: about a third of patients got better, about a third got worse, and about a third stayed the same.” Without a reliable gauge of efficacy, therapeutic notoriety was conferred on those clinicians who, by sheer force of personality and persuasiveness of rhetoric, were able to attract the most acolytes, adherents, and patients. This “guru model” was precisely what Beck found unacceptable, and what he has dedicated himself to dismantling. He hasn’t been the only person to insist that psychotherapy rest on a foundation of replicable data—he wasn’t even the first—but he has been the position’s most dogged, visible, sophisticated, and influential proponent.

As a consequence, psychotherapy has been moving steadily from a model that is “eminence-based,” as a rueful saying has it, to one that is “evidence-based”—a powerful watchword in the field. Over the past several years, federal and state agencies in the United States and government-based health-care systems abroad have been spending hundreds of millions of dollars to disseminate psychotherapies for which there is a solid core of scientific evidence, while insurance companies have been encouraging the clinicians within their systems to practice “empirically supported therapies” (EST) above others. In short, more and more, Freud’s world of subterranean drives is becoming Beck’s world of scientific accountability.

Highly recommended reading. Thanks to Josh for the link.

I know they’re bad. You know they’re bad. But try explaining to your friends who make more emotion-based decisions why they shouldn’t use antibacterial products for normal, daily applications.

Actually, now you can.

Dolphins are swimming in waters tainted with germ-killing soaps, but they aren’t winding up squeaky clean.

Triclosan, an antibacterial chemical found in everyday bathroom and kitchen products, is accumulating in dolphins at concentrations known to disrupt the hormones and growth and development of other animals.

Scientists have found that one-third of the bottlenose dolphins tested off South Carolina and almost one-quarter of those tested off Florida carried traces of triclosan in their blood. It is the first time the chemical has been reported in a wild marine mammal – a worrisome finding, researchers say, because it shows it is building up in the ocean’s food web.

Thanks to Ana for the link.