The amount of clinical research taking place is excessive.[1] Out of the 6 million articles published in a year, half are never cited and a good percentage of the cited articles are self-cited.[2] Would medicine be just as effective, and not as expensive, if clinical research was replaced with quality improvement?[3] Somewhat cynically, this could be called trial and error based on doctors’ coffee room chat.
Read MoreScience prides itself on its scientific explanations. A good scientific explanation does not vary, but still accounts for what it purports to account for.[1]
New research published in JAMA Oncology has found a lack of racial and ethnic diversity in clinical trials for cancer drugs.
The study—conducted by researchers from UBC, the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, and Baylor University in Texas—raises concerns about the effectiveness of cancer drugs in some patients, especially since genetic differences may affect how well a patient responds to a drug.
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Medical evidence has a credibility problem that is rooted in the fundamental problems with statistics. This problem is manifest in the inability to reproduce evidence on repeated randomized clinical trials (RCTs). Theoretically, an RCT is the way to answer questions about which treatments are useful, but practically, an RCT is too expensive to conduct with enough patients to get answers to such questions.
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Permanent lung damage caused by chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) starts much earlier than previously thought, even before patients are showing symptoms.
These are the findings of a study published in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine. The discovery, led by Dr Tillie-Louise Hackett, associate professor in the University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Medicine, will dramatically change how patients are treated for COPD, the leading cause of hospital admissions in BC and Canada.
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