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Archive for October, 2016

the great race…

( OPINION )

Tired of worrying about the historic race? Frequently checking Nate Silver’s 538 site?  There’s a solution to your turmoil… Change historic races!

the frenzied match of ping pong: the last stand…

( OPINION )

Is this trial misreported? Truth seeking in the burgeoning age of trial transparency by Peter Doshi, associate editor British Medical Journal. 2016 355:i5543 We all agree that the participants in trials should be randomly assigned to the various arms of the study, and about the conditions of the double-blind design. The old pharma trick of […]

the frenzied match of ping pong: step one…

( OPINION )

So do I think that editors and researchers sit around thinking, "We’ve got to keep them from nailing down the process to insure that there’s some official copy of the a priori Primary and Secondary Outcome variables publicly available"? I kind of doubt it. I expect there are some people inside the walls of Pharma […]

the frenzied match of ping pong: decoded…

( OPINION )

The Goldacre et al COMPare study in a frenzied match of ping pong… seems straightforward. Find the Outcome Variables they said they were going to use and see if they used them. They frequently didn’t. But finding those preregistered [a priori] Primary and Secondary Outcome variables in the first place is no minor task. In […]

a frenzied match of ping pong…

( OPINION )

Is this trial misreported? Truth seeking in the burgeoning age of trial transparency by Peter Doshi, associate editor British Medical Journal. 2016 355:i5543 Peter Doshi has, as usual, done a great job of clearly laying out an issue and exploring all of its facets. It’s certainly one I haven’t been able to stop talking about […]

don’t forget……

( OPINION )

the clinic…

( OPINION )

A few years back, a woman in her mid forties showed up in the clinic "depressed" [visible from 50+ yards]. She wanted to talk about her symptoms and not her life. As it played out, one reason was because she didn’t have one [a life]. She was the housewife to her second husband, a man […]

ta…

( OPINION )

the times are a changin’…

( OPINION )

I work as a volunteer physician in a [formerly] charity clinic in a rural part of a rural State. The Clinic was started by some retired doctors and operated out of a few trailers with a large volunteer staff, seeing only uninsured patients. This is an unusual place at the beginning of the Appalachian Mountains. […]

without ever talking to the patient…

( OPINION )

In bygone days, as a resident and as a director of a busy city/county hospital psychiatric emergency room, I had years of working in collaboration with staff and trainees who were the primary contact person. With many cases, I saw the patient in person only briefly. And as a supervisor, I met with residents who […]