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February 21, 2008
More Statin controversy
I have never followed the business news but this commentary from AAPS gives some hope. The business and even news people are beginning to understand the difference between relative and absolute risk reduction.
The question still remains: is an absolute risk reduction of 1% (which I would challenge) worth the risk of the medicines?
But the bigger question is not even asked: Is an attempt to reduce this one risk by this 1%, in light of the thousands of other risks we daily face, tantamount to idolatry?
Posted by Robert Maddox at 02:03 PM | Comments (2)
Adverse Drug Reactions
Interesting article here by a Pharm D on ADRs, makes this statement:
"Contrary to the public's common belief, all drugs are dangerous. Just because a drug is approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does not mean that it won't cause problems; all usually do, from minor side effects to permanent disability, to life threats, and even death.[1-3] The FDA approves drugs on the basis of benefits outweighing the risks, not because there is a complete lack of danger."
Good overview of the ways that patients, pharmacists and physicians generally view adverse drug reactions.
Posted by Robert Maddox at 10:48 AM | Comments (0)
February 07, 2008
Rife
I do not want to make a practice of evaluating every alternative therapy that is offered. However, I found this news interesting. This is one of Royal Rife's infamous claims. Rife additionally built a frequency generator to blast apart various organisms, though he believed in pleomorphism, and was not convinced of the germ theory of disease causation. He also built a scanner/scope of sorts (pre-electron-microscope) that could see these organisms and watch them be destroyed.
This will bear watching.
Posted by Robert Maddox at 10:23 AM | Comments (1)
February 01, 2008
Truth
Perhaps in light of the last post, I should make a general comment again. I stopped posting for a long time for various unrelated reasons, but among them was the post VERITAS. Patients and doctors like think that medicine has found truth, when it has not and cannot. (Well, it can find truth, properly understood. Continue below.) So this hubris that I am writing against was summarized poetically in the name of those studies, VERITAS.
I do not doubt that many people feel better after taking shark cartilage or C/G for their joint pain. The original Mass VA study using ground up chicken cartilage had some 20 of 21 end-stage knees or hips walking out of the hospital without surgery. But if the scientific method means anything, it is capable of proving that certain interventions are not accomplishing what they claim.
Science cannot determine truth, which is a person, Jesus Christ, in whom all things cohere. But it can demonstrate the uselessness of many of our interventions.
Posted by Robert Maddox at 09:07 AM | Comments (0)
bad knees
The AHRQ has reviewed therapies for osteoarthritis of the knee, including OTC glucosamine and chondroitin, injected hyaluronan, and various arthroscopy techniques. None has been proven to help. (Hyaluronan does improve pain scores and function scores temporarily but there is no evidence that this effect lasts.)
What should be done to the purveyors of the millions of these procedures and pills?
Posted by Robert Maddox at 09:02 AM | Comments (0)