Tom Sullivan, blogging over at Policy and Medicine, recently noticed another flurry of activity in the long running debate about conflicts of interest. His post is titled Coordinated Ad Hominem Attacks on Physician-Industry Relationships in Guideline Development: The Next Frontier?He opens, saying, "Recently, we saw concerted attacks on clinical guidelines committees, but interestingly, not on the science coming out of them. Instead, the attacks were focused on whether the writers ...
Robert Donnell, MD
The growth of integrative medicine in academic institutions
The Atlantic published an article about the growth of quackademic medicine in our teaching institutions and it's celebratory more than critical. It profiles the integrative medicine clinic of Dr. Brian Berman. That's right, this Dr. Berman. I blogged about him four years ago and it seems his clinic at the University of Maryland is still going strong. Stronger, apparently.The article, like integrative medicine itself, is a mixture of quackery ...
A postmortem on the patient safety movement
Are patients better off than they were ten years ago?Just over a decade ago the Institute of Medicine (IOM) released its celebrated report on patient safety, To Err is Human. Many credit that report, which was released with great fanfare, with launching the patient safety movement. So it's appropriate to assess the movement's impact eleven years later. How did we do?On November 25 the New England Journal of Medicine published ...
