[In case it needs to be said: I don't agree with every word of everything I link to. --L.]
- What Went Wrong?
- [Paul Krugman]
It’s now obvious that the stimulus was much too small; yet there’s virtually no chance of getting additional measures out of Congress. The [Obama] administration has chosen to deal with this by trying to have it both ways — condemning Republicans, rightly, for obstructionism, while at the same time claiming, falsely, that we’re still on the right track.
How did things end up this way? We’ll never know whether the administration could have passed a bigger plan; we do know that it didn’t try.
…based on public reporting [...] it looks as if top [White House] advisers convinced themselves that even in the absence of stimulus the slump would be nasty, brutish, but not too long.
…we could still fix this: a second big stimulus, plus much more aggressive Fed policy. But politically, we’re stuck…
- Control Group: Patients Take Biomedical Research into Their Own Hands
- [Scientific American]
In Cade's time [developed lithium treatment for manic patients] and the 50 years that followed patients would get their information about drugs from their doctors. But nowadays they can read the same reports their doctors do, contemporaneously. They find them online and use social networks to discuss them with other patients. This phenomenon has been called the "patient 2.0 movement," and it is changing the way doctors and scientists do their jobs.
http://e-patients.net/
http://www.patientslikeme.com/…PatientsLikeMe introduced the first "real-time, real-world, open, nonblinded, patient-driven" lithium trial. Patients taking the drug off-label were encouraged to enter their blood levels (which were measured weekly because of lithium's toxicity at high doses) and their ALS functional rating scale score (a measure of disease progression) on an online spreadsheet. Patients who weren't taking lithium served as controls. Over 12 months, 149 patients taking lithium for at least two months and 447 controls tracked their disease progression for anyone to see.
…Bedlack worries the arrival of the virtual trial will encourage more patients to experiment with alternative and off-label treatments outside of properly designed clinical trials. "There’s still no substitute for the randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial," he says. But he hopes to find a happy medium between the old ways of doing research and new Web-based ones to encourage participation and reduce some of the burden on patients.
In an effort to educate patients in the 2.0 movement about the risks of experimental and even fraudulent treatments, Bedlack created ALSUntangled—a Web-based system monitored by an international team of scientists that investigates new treatments at the request of patients. It uses social networking tools to collect and review information then publishes its findings as open-access articles in a peer-reviewed journal, Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis…
- Mass Transit Encourages Exercise And Weight Loss
- [Scientific American]
[Problematic assumption of skinny = healthy ahoy.
-L]
The Link(s): Fri, Jul 9th, 10am by Lee Salazar, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at leesalazar.com.