medicine
FDA using weak clinical studies to approve cardiac implants
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is responsible for approving drugs for medical uses, and the agency has developed a set of expectations for using results from randomized clinical studies to determine (with varying degrees of success) whether a drug is safe and effective. But advances in materials science and miniaturization have led to an explosion in the use of medical implants, which do everything from acting as a replacement for balky knees to restarting arrhythmic hearts. Two new evaluations of the clinical studies used during the implant approval process suggests that the approval process for implants isn’t nearly as rigorous as it might be.
Continue reading »Who needs science? Lawmakers mull cell phone warnings
According to an Associated Press report , a state legislator from Maine has introduced a bill that would attach a warning label to cell phones. The proposed warnings would feature bold red text warning of the danger of brain cancer, and feature an image of a small brain. There’s one small problem with all of this: there’s little evidence that cell phones increase the risk of brain cancer.
Continue reading »Computerized medicine: good for quality, but not costs
Electronic medical records and the general digitization of medical data and practices are promoted as a way to slow the rapidly inflating costs in the US healthcare system. The push for expanded medical IT has come from the top, with President Obama extolling its virtues and his administration making funding for EMR deployments part of its stimulus package. But many have pointed out that simply throwing computers at a problem isn’t a solution unless the software and practices are also in place to allow the medical community to leverage the technology efficiently.
Continue reading »Teacher Claims Fingerprinting Is ‘Mark of the Beast’
A 22-year veteran kindergarten teacher in the Texas Bible Belt could lose her job for refusing, on religious grounds, to give fingerprints under a state law requiring them. The evangelical Christian, Pam McLaurin, is fighting a looming suspension, claiming that fingerprinting amounts to the “ Mark of the Beast ,” and hence is a violation of her First Amendment right to practice her religion . Her case is similar to a lawsuit by a group of Michigan farmers , some of them Amish, challenging rules requiring the tagging of livestock with RFID chips, saying the devices are also the devil’s mark.
Continue reading »Anonymized genetic research data still carries privacy risks
Up until recently, looking for the changes in DNA that contribute to human genetic diseases was a laborious process that involved tracking the changes through the generations of individual families. The completion of the human genome has changed all of that, allowing researchers to check for hundreds of thousands of individual DNA changes in large populations, and to identify those changes that are associated with specific genetic diseases—as the number of people genotyped grows, data sharing might be able to increase the statistical power of these experiments. But researchers are now cautioning that sharing the data might allow someone to learn about the people who contribute DNA samples to these studies.
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