Covid-19 — A Reminder to Reason
Perspective from The New England Journal of Medicine — Covid-19 — A Reminder to Reason More
The data-free zone of Covid-19 complicates medical, family decision-making
Covid-19 makes it difficult to practice evidence-based medicine and just as hard to make decisions about the small questions that dictate day-to-day life. More
Moderna’s claim of favorable results in its vaccine trial is an example of ‘publication by press release’
Without the underlying data, promising vaccines and treatments are impossible to evaluate. More
A Misinformation Pandemic – Health In All Matters Podcast
Misinformation about the pandemic is like COVID-19 itself: highly contagious, destructive, and with no known treatment or vaccine. More
Slow down your giddyup on Gilead news
Gilead Sciences Inc’s shares surged 16% in after hours trading on Thursday following a media report detailing encouraging partial data from trials of the U.S. company’s experimental drug remdesivir in severe COVID-19 patients. More
Opinion: A patient’s role in developing new drug treatments
On March 19, the president said he “slashed red tape to develop vaccines” and “eliminated outdated rules and bureaucracies” for drug approvals. He announced that chloroquinine is a possible medication to combat the coronavirus. The Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, just approved it for limited use. More
FDA Approves Drugs Faster Than Ever But Relies On Weaker Evidence, Researchers Find
The Food and Drug Administration has gotten faster at approving new prescription drugs over the past four decades, but the evidence it relies on in making those decisions is getting weaker, according to new research... More
Aducanumab isn’t the simple solution to the complicated Alzheimer’s crisis
This year’s Clinical Trials on Alzheimer’s Disease meeting began in mid-December with a bang and ended a few days later with hallway conversations laced with worry. The topic, in both cases, was aducanumab, an experimental drug for treating people with Alzheimer’s disease. More
From assisted hatching to embryo glue, most IVF ‘add-ons’ rest on shaky science, studies find
In the 40 years since the world’s first “test tube baby,” fertility clinics have cooked up nearly three dozen such “add-ons,” or supplementary procedures. Like immune therapy for supposed genetic incompatibility, they’re not essential to IVF. Instead, clinics offer procedures such as “assisted hatching” and “embryo glue” and “uterine artery vasodilation” as purportedly science-based options that increase the chance of having a baby. Except there is little to no evidence that the vast majority of IVF add-ons do any such thing, conclude four papers published on Tuesday in Fertility and Sterility, the journal of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. More