Posted by SLS on July 27, 2006, at 9:48:32
In reply to Re: couldn't have said it better myself, posted by ttee on July 27, 2006, at 6:36:59
> > Two people can recieve the same data, and come to entirely different conclusions.
That's why we have the science of statistics.
> Not when the two people are both getting paid big bucks from a drug/medical device company.
Statistics is supposed to help standardize the presentation of data. How we interpret the significance of this presentation is subjective and becomes opinion.
As for VNS, I don't think there has been much global motivation to fund studies to investigate it. That leaves Cyberonics. What do you do when no one wants to investigate a possibly effective treatment? That's quite a quandary. Fortunately, there has been some interest within academic circles. There have been studies conducted at Medical University of South Carolina, Harvard, and Columbia Presbyterian. You can review their research on Medline. The NIMH has funded some work, but not much. We need much more money allocated to this division of the NIH to investigate mental illness. They are given only 1 billion dollars for all mental illnesses combined.
The results for VNS are weak. At most, only about 30 percent of the patients treated respond after a 12 week acute phase clinical trial. One recent 10 week trial showed only a 17 percent response rate. This was still higher than sham, though. However, interestingly and significantly, with continued treatment, more respond after a year. One must take into consideration the desperate treatment-resistence of this patient population.
"Those unnamed individuals "are precisely the sorts of experts the field relies on to help evaluate highly disputed data," Carey writes, adding that, although the "device begged for some more public analysis," the only researchers with the ability to evaluate the effectiveness of the implant "were ... on the company's payroll.""
How can we be sure the unnamed individuals were on the company's payroll? Where's the data?
I'd like to see the link to this thing.
- Scott
poster:SLS
thread:662854
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20060724/msgs/671056.html