1. Cancer patients should read of aspirin and metformin and upon failing to be treated at Yale and seeing the grim reaper draw nigh, swallow the combination of aspirin and metformin in quantities as desired and record the results. Simple, safe, cheap and effective, this combination with a rational basis in the scientific literature.
Try it you'll like it. Dying people may make data. You will never see dope companies testing this combination or disclosing the data that it works, saves lives and costs little.
2. I will be glad to show you on You Tube that a single vaccination does of BCG reduces erythema and plaque thickness of plaque psoriasis. The effect does not seem to last long. Further data and experimentation is needed. See faustmanlab.org and pubmed.org for reasons to expect this effect.
3. MS patients may take the heat challenge. Find an MS patient, inject same with BCG, wait or observe over time and record on You Tube. To add insult to injury, heat the subject in any many desired which will usually produce an undesired effect(s). BCG will mitigate MS and you may record the data as desired on
You Tube.
Not all data need to generated in perfect form or by data doers. A little common sense and application of teachings may go a long way.
Yale and Harvard are both bum places to seek treatment for causalgia.
A careful study of the treatment of Mrs. J Edward Spike Jr. as observed by her personal physician Mark
Altshule of Harvard and found at The Lancet p106 Janl. 14, 1978 will enable almost anyone to treat a
wide(r) variety of conditions. Simply match your test subject with the description of Mrs. Spike found in The Lancet and voila, you will be able to do them some good.
4. Got ALS and want to bet that there is a previously unknown pathology in cases of ALS?
I will be glad to indentify where you will find same. The pathology may be readily obtained from a cadaver or a living human being with ALS.
Data data everywhere and not a brain in sight?
LAST
week, Johnson & Johnson announced that it was making all of its
clinical trial data available to scientists around the world. It has
hired my group, Yale University
Open Data Access Project, or YODA, to fully oversee the release of the
data. Everything in the company’s clinical research vaults, including
unpublished raw data, will be available for independent review.
This
is an extraordinary donation to society, and a reversal of the
industry’s traditional tendency to treat data as an asset that would
lose value if exposed to public scrutiny.
Today, more than half of the clinical trials
in the United States, including many sponsored by academic and
governmental institutions, are not published within two years of their
completion. Often they are never published at all. The unreported
results, not surprisingly, are often those in which a drug failed to
perform better than a placebo. As a result, evidence-based medicine is,
at best, based on only some of the evidence. One of the most troubling
implications is that full information on a drug’s effects may never be
discovered or released.
Even
when studies are published, the actual data are usually not made
available. End users of research — patients, doctors and policy makers —
are implicitly told by a single group of researchers to “take our word
for it.” They are often forced to accept the report without the prospect
of other independent scientists’ reproducing the findings — a violation
of a central tenet of the scientific method.
To
be fair, the decision to share data is not easy. Companies worry that
their competitors will benefit, that lawyers will take advantage, that
incompetent scientists will misconstrue the data and come to mistaken
conclusions. Researchers feel ownership of the data and may be reluctant
to have others use it. So Johnson & Johnson, as well as companies
like GlaxoSmithKline and Medtronic
that have made more cautious moves toward transparency, deserve much
credit. The more we share data, however, the more we find that many of
these problems fail to materialize.
In
2011, YODA struck a deal with Medtronic to release all the data on one
of its products — a device that stimulates the production of bone. At
the time, questions had been raised about the device’s safety, including
whether it caused cancer,
and about the conflicts of interests of some of the company’s
researchers. Medtronic made the unusual decision to respond to the
debate by releasing the device’s data for independent review. We
commissioned and then published two independent reviews of the data, and
now have made them globally available.
Interestingly, the reviews produced somewhat conflicting results. One found that the device was no better than a bone graft
and might be associated with a slight increase in cancer, while the
other found that the device was effective and the cancer risk
inconclusive. To us these differences reinforce the value of open
science: now the data are out there for further study.
This
program doesn’t mean that just anyone can gain access to the data
without disclosing how they intend to use it. We require those who want
the data to submit a proposal and identify their research team, funding
and any conflicts of interest. They have to complete a short course on
responsible conduct and sign an agreement that restricts them to their
proposed research question. Most important, they must agree to share
whatever they find. And we exclude applicants who seek data for
commercial or legal purposes. Our intent is not to be tough gatekeepers,
but to ensure that the data are used in a transparent way and
contribute to overall scientific knowledge.
There
are many benefits to this kind of sharing. It honors the contributions
of the subjects and scientists who participated in the research. It is
proof that an organization, whether it is part of industry or academia,
wants to play a role as a good global citizen. It demonstrates that the
organization has nothing to hide. And it enables scientists to use the
data to learn new ways to help patients. Such an approach can even teach
a company like Johnson & Johnson something it didn’t know about its
own products.
For the good of society, this is a breakthrough that should be replicated throughout the research world.
Harlan M. Krumholz is a professor of cardiology and public health at the Yale School of Medicine.
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