I’m not a scientist. I’m merely a dull-witted heart attack survivor who three years ago started asking questions about the fistful of cardiac drugs I now have to take each day. But I did spend 20 years of my life living with a scientist, which meant countless scintillating breakfast table conversations on topics like zinc and copper sediment in the Fraser River estuary. One thing I did learn from such scintillation is that there’s research – and then there’s research.
Or, as New York Times journalist Andrew C. Revkin, author of Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast, reminds us:
“For every PhD, there is an equal and opposite PhD!”
This may help to explain why we can read in breathlessly urgent news headlines that coffee causes cancer, yet the very next week we’ll read that coffee, in fact, prevents cancer. . Continue reading
In case you believe that the medicine you’re taking has been adequately tested on real live patients before being legally approved, you might want to consider new research published this month in The New England Journal of Medicine
In New Delhi, 49 babies died at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (a public hospital renowned for providing low-cost treatment to the poor) while they were taking part in pharmaceutical clinical trials over a 30-month period. These babies had been given a variety of new drugs being studied to treat conditions like