He reminded me of those long nights with GI bleeders in my day, and how, not infrequently, we couldn’t get it stopped and had to call the surgeons. It was a regular on-call event for any internist. "That’s a thing of the past,<\/font><\/em>" he said. "With the new drugs, we<\/em><\/font> saw a lot fewer bleeds, and when we did – we could stop them with the scopes.<\/font><\/em>" "Chronic ulcer disease? <\/font><\/em>Rare to never.<\/font><\/em>" "Surgery required? I can’t recall the last case.<\/font><\/em>" Parenthetically, He was referring to the abstract<\/font><\/strong><\/em> at the beginning of journal articles. I’ve thought about that along the way myself. Back in those days, that’s what I did too – read the abstracts. I got four or five journals a month, reprints left at the office, more in the mail, and I worked 10 hour days. I couldn’t possibly have done more than that. I’d look at the graphs and scan the tables sometimes, but I rarely read the whole articles – certainly not drug studies. To read them like I’ve read them on this blog takes a day or two. Then, I expected the abstract<\/font><\/strong><\/em> to be just that – an accurate abstract<\/font><\/strong><\/em>. I might deeply study an article for the odd journal club, but not routinely. I would expect that what I did was the norm, or if anything, I was on the conscientious end of the spectrum.<\/p>\n All I had on last week’s trip was a tablet computer [new and more unfamiliar than I’d planned], but I could get my blog, so I thumbed back through articles I had looked at over the years – just reading the abstracts<\/font><\/strong><\/em>. Thinking back, in my naivet\u00e9<\/span>, there was a time when I might have even thought that the abstracts were something the journal editorial staff wrote. Whatever I thought, my index of suspicion was woefully low. Nowadays, the abstracts<\/font><\/strong><\/em> are carefully crafted by ghosts. And looking at them as a group, the abstracts<\/font><\/strong><\/em> are usually inflated over and above the distortions already in the articles. I concluded that the pharmaceutical marketing departments must know that’s what doctors do, read\/scan the abstracts – that little thing at the top<\/font><\/em>.<\/p>\n![](\"http:\/\/1boringoldman.com\/images\/little-thing.gif\")
throughout the week, the ophthalmologists talked about the advances over their careers – Lasik<\/font><\/em>, cataract lenses<\/font><\/em>, microscopic surgery<\/font><\/em>, etc.<\/font><\/em> – as did the anesthesiologist – both drugs <\/font><\/em>and equipment<\/font><\/em>. But the gastroenterologist did say, "When the acid switch drugs first came out, they performed as advertised. But later, I thought the newer ones were overblown in the journals. I stopped reading and mostly learned about them at meetings, from colleagues.<\/font><\/em>" And then came the punch line. "But y<\/em><\/font>ou know, you don’t have to read the whole article. You can just read that little thing at the top.<\/font><\/em>"<\/p>\n