Aside from its use to rule out potential physical causes of a patient’s condition, for example a brain tumor, neuroimaging is not used in the process of psychiatric diagnosis.
Developing technologies for personalized medicine may be misused to popularize the idea that one can infer a person’s genetic makeup from observer-defined or self-reported assignment to a race or ethnic group.
Some commentators say comparative trials of FDA-approved drugs are overburdened by current Common Rule regulations and that researchers should not be required to obtain explicit consent for participation in the most innocuous of these trials.
There is evidence that children who are unaware of their life-threatening diagnoses do not experience any less distress and anxiety than those who are told, and in some cases they may actually experience more.
Anne Drapkin Lyerly, MD, MA and Ruth R. Faden, PhD, MPH
Participation in a research study—in which there are rigorous standards and close monitoring—may be a safer context for the use of medications in pregnancy than the clinical setting, where the evidence base is lacking.
The picture that emerges from study of physician economic behavior is mixed, but from the intensity of responses by some professional societies to Medicare's coding modifier proposal, it appears that economic incentives matter a lot to many of their members.
This process of developing EBM-based guidelines and applying them to clinical care highlights the tension between generating unbiased knowledge based on statistical aggregation and the application of this information to individual patients.