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Clinical trials Medicine Science

ERV asks: What happens when a PI dies?

ERV asks: What happens when a PI holding an NIH grant dies, given that PIs support post-docs, graduate students, and technicians in his or her lab? In other words: Or what would happen to me if Bossman got hit by a bus or got brain cancer. Does the NIH have some sort of protocol for […]

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Clinical trials Medicine Surgery

The problem of funding in surgical research

I hate it when I fall behind in my journal reading. Of course, it happens all the time, as you might expect, with my time sandwiched between running my lab, writing grants, seeing patients, and operating. Sometimes, though, I get a chance to try to catch up a bit. Such was the case the other […]

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Bioethics Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery

They don’t call it “cheat-lation” for nothing

Regular readers here are probably most familiar with the so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” therapy known as chelation therapy in the context of its use, or, more specifically, its misuse in “treating” autistic children, a misuse that has resulted in at least one death, a five-year-old autistic boy named Abubakar Tariq Nadama. However, before the […]

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Cancer Clinical trials Medicine Surgery

Barriers to the adoption of new surgical procedures

Last week, I wrote about factors that lead to the premature adoption of surgical technologies and procedures, the “bandwagon” or “fad” effect among surgeons, if you will. By “premature,” I am referring to widespread adoption “in the trenches,” so to speak, of a procedure before good quality evidence from science and clinical trials show it […]

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Antivaccine nonsense Autism Clinical trials Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery

A high tech form of the same old “detoxification” woo

“Detoxification.” Whenever I hear that term, I’m at least 90% certain that I’m dealing with seriously unscientific woo. The reason should be obvious to longtime readers of this blog or to anyone who has followed “alternative medicine” for a while, because “detoxification” is a mainstay of “alternative” treatments and quackery for such a wide variety […]