"Just as the financial system has to be changed to serve the needs of the people before the needs of the bankers, the drug trial system has to be changed to lower the incentives for cheating (and massive death tolls) just for a quick buck. As I mentioned before, it’s still not clear that they would have made less money, even including the penalties, if they had come clean in 2000. They made a bet that the fines they’d need to eventually pay would be smaller than the profits they’d make in the meantime. That sounds familiar to anyone who has been following the fallout from the credit crisis.
"One thing that should be changed immediately: the clinical trials for drugs should not be run or reported on by the drug companies themselves. There has to be a third party which is in charge of testing the drugs and has the power to take the drugs off the market immediately if adverse effects (like CVT events) are found. Hopefully they will be given more power than risk firms are currently given in finance (which is none)- in other words, it needs to be more than reporting, it needs to be an active regulatory power, with smart people who understand statistics and do their own state-of-the-art analyses – although as we’ve seen above even just Stats 101 would sometimes do the trick."

"In the seventeenth century, a map of the plague suggested a radical idea—that the disease was carried and spread by humans. In the nineteenth century, maps of cholera cases were used to prove its waterborne nature. More recently, maps charting the swine flu pandemic caused worldwide panic and sent shockwaves through the medical community. In Disease Maps, Tom Koch contends that to understand epidemics and their history we need to think about maps of varying scale, from the individual body to shared symptoms evidenced across cities, nations, and the world.  "

The thing is, despite my "modest proposals" tag, the numbers make sense. You'd have to bet against the program working at (back of the envelope) more than 10:1, and think it would deliver _no_ benefits if it didn't completely cure diabetes...

Oh this makes me feel ever so much better about going to the doctor.

Institutionalizing BMI, despite its ineffectiveness and the existence of superior alternatives. (Which, errr, make it even more obvious that I'm way over-weight, so this isn't rationalization on my part.) Lots of issues here for a data-mining class.

This really looks very bad. (And: a journal refusing to share referee reports with someone listed on the MS. as an author? WTF?)

"Unani" == "Ionian", i.e., "Greek".

"There may well be rational, science-based reasons to oppose the creeping influx of checklists and protocols. It may also be that there are right ways and wrong ways to introduce such checklists and that wrong ways could even do harm. However, none of these are reasons not to introduce into more hospitals lists that have been validated in studies as being useful and let the data show whether these lists work when used more widely. Unfortunately, a lot of the resistance I sense from my colleagues seems to derive more from an emotional reaction to what they perceive as being told what to do or as an erosion of their autonomy than from science, risk/benefit ratios, or economic concerns about the expense of introducing such lists."

--- Or: a case study in why, in the struggle between professional autonomy and discretion and bureaucratic procedures, bureaucracy wins.

"A scene from a thousand horror movies, retold in the medical literature, with an additional lesson about the correct use of cerebral perfusion and angiography in diagnosing the brain dead patient."