Articles - Medical Science

Advertising in Medical Journals
 
Should Current Practices Change?

Peer-reviewed medical journals are generally considered to be a source of unbiased and reliable information about drugs. But at the same time, most medical journals contain advertisements, almost all of which are for drugs, and which are, by their very nature, biased toward promoting sales of that drug. In this article, we address the purpose and effects of journal advertising, the possible reasons for pharmaceutical product domination of advertising pages, and the current policies and practices of representative journals.

       >> Read the complete article from Plos Medicine here. 
 
Emphysema & Rebounding: Pulmonary function improved by very gentle rebounding
 
The physical therapy department at the University of Michigan medical school reported, about 1980, that the very mild up and down motion from gentle rebounding on a mini-trampoline would very significantly improve the functional breathing capacity of people with severe emphysema. This improvement was separate from the exercise portion of this motion since someone else could do the bouncing while the patient simply sat on the middle of the trampoline. Now, nearly 20 years later, when anyone contacts this department there is no longer anyone there who knows anything about this breakthrough.
 
Getting It Right: Being Smarter about Clinical Trials
 
A major NIH meeting led to recommendations for conducting better clinical trials

Concerns about adverse events, including deaths, in recent large clinical trials, both publicly and privately sponsored, prompted Elias A. Zerhouni, Director, National Institutes of Health (NIH) to convene a meeting at the NIH on January 11–12, 2005, to discuss “Moving from Observational Studies to Clinical Trials: Why Do We Sometimes Get It Wrong?”.
 
       >> Please review all the NIH recommendations in this Plos Medicine article.  
 
How to Use Radionic Concepts to Save Money on Vitamins
 
It usually takes decades for fundamental scientific discoveries to become accessible to everyone.  Nowhere is this more true than with the mysterious subject of quantum physics.  Just mentioning quantum physics at a party used to be a sure way to clear the room in a hurry.
 
Pandemic Influenza
 
Risk of Multiple Introductions and the Need to Prepare for Them

The World Health Organization recently stated the following:“Since 2003, the world has moved closer to a[influenza] pandemic  than at any time since 1968”. Influenza A (H5N1) viruses have reached high prevalence in both domesticated and wild birds in several parts of Asia; the virus has spread over an area ranging from Romania to Indonesia, possibly carried over this distance by migratory waterfowl. Over 160 human cases, about half of them fatal, have occurred, from Indonesia to Turkey. These trends suggest an increasing risk that the virus may acquire the ability to transmit efficiency from human to human, equipping it to cause a new pandemic.
 
       >> Link here for the Plos article.  
 
The Extremes of Availability of Medical Information
 
Medical researchers in the developed world increasingly feel overwhelmed by the mass of published information, both on paper and on the Web. MEDLINE/PubMed, the National Library of Medicine’s electronic database, gives an idea of the scale of the problem: it contains references to more than 16 million articles in some 4,800 biomedical journals. Even this volume is dwarfed by the indexed, “gray,” literature lurking in the world’s digital databases.

       >> The Plos Medicine complete article is available here. 
 
The Limits of Reductionism in Medicine
 
Could Systems Biology Offer an Alternative?
 
Since Descartes and the Renaissance, science, including medicine, has taken a distinct path in its analytical evaluation of the natural world. This approach can be described as one of “divide and conquer,” and it is rooted in the assumption that complex problems are solvable by dividing them into smaller, simpler, and thus more tractable units. Because the processes are “reduced” into more basic units, this approach has been termed “reductionism” and has been the predominant paradigm of science over the past two centuries.
 
       >> Link here to the complete article provided by Plos Medicine.
 
Why Most Published Research Findings Are False
 
Published research findings are sometimes refuted by subsequent evidence, with ensuing confusion and disappointment. Refutation and controversy is seen across the range of research designs, from clinical trials and traditional epidemiological studies to the most modern molecular research. There is increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims. However, this should not be surprising. It can be proven that most claimed research findings are false. Here I will examine the key factors that influence this problem and some corollaries thereof. 

       >> Link here for the complete essay from Plos Medicine 
 
Reductionism vs. Systems Biology 
 
"The science underlying our medical practices, from diagnosis to treatment to prevention, is based on the assumption that information about individual parts is sufficient to explain the whole. But there are circumstances in which the complex interplay between parts yields a behavior that cannot be predicted by the investigation of the parts alone."